Did William Coggeshall Save Lincoln's Life?

[John Fazio]

To all contributors:

A hard act to follow, but I'll try.

What kind of man was Coggeshall, based on the evidence we have? He is described as a journalist who worked for several newspapers, an author who wrote and published at least 8 books. He was the Ohio State Librarian for about 6 years. He was on both Governor Dennison's and Governor Cox's staffs. He owned a newspaper for about 3 years and edited and published the Daily Ohio State Journal in 1865. He was assigned to do Secret Service work in Virginia and in Columbus and Springfield, Ohio. Lincoln thought enough of him to ask him to accompany him to Washington on his journey there in 1861. Later, in May, 1866, Johnson thought enough of him to appoint him to the position of U.S. Minister to Ecuador, which appointment was approved by Congress. William Dennison, Jacob D. Cox, Salmon P. Chase and Senator John Sherman supported his appointment. Coggeshall was obviously a man of some substance, competence and character. He would not otherwise have compiled such a record. More specifically, he would not have compiled such a record had he been a man given to pomposity, braggadocio and/or mendacity, always the marks of an amateur. I mention all this as a way of showing that it is most improbable that such a man would have fabricated the story about his possibly having saved Lincoln's life in Harrisburg (or Baltimore).

Further, if we accept it as fact that Coggeshall did not fabricate the story, then in order for the story to be false, it follows that it was invented by Coggeshall's wife, Mary, in her 1908 writing. We do not know anything about Mary, so anything is possible. But I submit that it is most improbable that a widow, in her old age, would write to her daughter, Prockie, and totally fabricate an event that occurred 47 years earlier and that involved her deceased husband and Prockie's deceased father. The letter, incidentally, may be read in its entirety , and in its original longhand, on pages 39 to 49 of Freda Koch's book.

So, to this point, I submit that it is most improbable that Coggeshall himself or Mary invented the story. But there is still one other possibility that needs to be addressed, and it is that the author of the book, Freda Postle Koch, made the whole thing up, even to forging the longhand letter on pages 39-49 of her book; that Coggeshall never told such a story and that Mary never wrote about it. I submit that the possibility of that being true is so remote that we may safely dismiss it out of hand, because virtually no one would write and self-publish a biography of a man based entirely on hot air, not when there is so much corroborating evidence of the short life of William T. Coggeshall, when the biography contains Mary's letter in longhand and when the author includes numerous references to the subject's writings (see pages 55 to 98 of the book).

So now we have it as most improbable that Coggeshall himself invented the story or that his widow invented it in a letter to her daughter 47 years later, and all but certain that a descendant did not invent it in 1985 in a biography based, she said, on "papers...folders...booklets...," including Mary's letter and Coggeshall's books and diaries. I submit that with these "most improbables" and near certainty, we have no choice but to conclude that at least the core of the story is true. Details as to the nature of the explosive device, whether or not Coggeshall shoved Lincoln onto a platform, and even the city in which the incident occurred, are just the kinds of minutia that almost always lose their cohesion in tellings and re-tellings of historic events and for that reason should not trouble us unduly. (It is probable that no two accounts of an historic event are identical in every detail, especially when we include antecedents and results, and the more tellings there are of an event, the more inconsistency there will be.) Likewise with difficulties associated with the absence of accounts of the incident in other writings and the near absence of references to Coggeshall himself in the writings of others, at least in such writings as have survived. I have already said that the first is likely explained by Coggeshall's request for secrecy and Lincoln's acceptance of it and the latter by the fact that Coggeshall was frequently away from Washington and not a major player anyway. He was in Columbus when he received word of Lincoln's assassination.

A final comment is worth making. In Lincoln Memorial, Coggeshall wrote: "The President-elect, with a confidential friend, took a special train from Harrisburg to Philadelphia, and early on the morning of the 23rd of February, reached Washington". In Freda Koch's copy of the article, which appeared in the Ohio State Journal, Columbus, Ohio, 1865, the initials "W.T.C." are written in Coggeshall's handwriting in the margin, beside the words "with a confidential friend", thus indicating that Coggeshall was that friend, unless we prefer to conclude that he was merely piling on a little schmaltz to add credibility to his fabricated story or that Freda was piling on the schmaltz. That is not my preference.

One can get a better handle on this issue by reading just the Introduction and pages 1-98 of the book. Further, as of January, 2009, the author's husband was alive, in his 90's and living in Redington Shores, Florida.

John