Identification of Booth's body

[mikegriffith1]

(10-05-2018 03:47 PM)L Verge Wrote:  James O. Hall, Michael Kauffman, and Steven G. Miller (THE expert on the Garrett Farm Patrol and Boston Corbett) have all said - Steve in a speech at an early Surratt conference - that such an order would be stupid and detrimental to every person involved in the capture. That order pretty much tells the patrol to hold their fire, even when the fugitive is coming out with guns blasting. Therefore, such an official order has not been found by top researchers and likely was never given.

This is another example of what I see as missing the forest for the trees because of a commitment to uphold the traditional story. Now, the two men in the barn were surrounded and heavily outnumbered. It was those two men, one of them hobbled and on crutches, against an entire squad of armed soldiers. When the younger man surrendered, the odds were one one hobbled man on crutches against an entire squad. So I have a very hard time buying any excuses for not taking him alive.

Furthermore, one report states the man in the barn dropped his weapon and began walking toward the door and that at this point someone shot him.

I am new enough to the Lincoln assassination case that I would need to go back and research where I read that the orders were to take Booth alive if possible. I have always assumed as a given that that was the operational order, since one would assume that the War Department would have desperately wanted to bring Booth back for questioning before putting him on trial and hanging him--assuming, of course, that Stanton et al were acting in good faith and had honorable motives (and there is the rub).

Many, many people pointed out at the time that the obvious goal would and should have been to capture Booth alive so that authorities would have had the chance to try to get more information from him about the plot and others who might have been involved. As Senator Garrett Davis said,

Quote:I do not see why, if Booth was in the barn, he should have been shot. He could have been captured just as well alive as dead. It would have been much more satisfactory to have brought him up here alive and to have inquired of him to reveal the whole transaction. . . ." (The Congressional Globe, July 28, 1866, p. 4292)

If there was in fact not even a verbal order to bring Booth back alive, then that is all the more suspicious. If Stanton and Baker were acting honorably and were really interested in uncovering the assassination conspiracy as much as possible, they should have made it crystal clear that Booth was to be captured alive if at all possible.

(10-01-2018 06:40 PM)L Verge Wrote:  Both John Brown and Nat Turner were executed in a public setting, so there were plenty of "invited" witnesses.

Exactly my point. So why all the secrecy about Booth's body? Why the obviously flimsy, rigged "identification," where the one doctor who actually did know Booth saw the body and declared that it looked nothing like Booth and that he could not believe that it was Booth? Why didn't Baker go get the conspirators who were being held below deck and have them come up and identify the body? Why was only one autopsy photograph, and why did it disappear? Brown was buried at a public ceremony, so why wasn't Booth? Turner's head was put on display, so why couldn't Booth's body be given a public showing--or at least shown to leading members of Congress and a few prominent journalists?

(10-01-2018 06:40 PM)L Verge Wrote:  You may want to register for the 2019 Surratt conference where Dr. Edward Steers of this forum will be speaking on the Neff-Guttridge papers and claims. I met both men when they visited Surratt House years ago and later had conversations with Len Guttridge - a very nice gentleman. On one of the last phone calls we had, he told me that he was regretting getting involved with Mr. Neff.

Shortly before he died, Guttridge strongly defended his and Neff's book Dark Union:

https://historynewsnetwork.org/article/3873

And Dr. Vancil, one of the curators at the Indiana State University library, has repeatedly defended the authenticity of the Neff-Guttridge documents:

http://miketgriffith.com/files/unwanted.pdf

Finally, the Smithsonian Institution article seems to make it clear that James Wardell existed. In his book Witness to an Era: The Life and Photographs of Alexander Gardner, Mark Katz quotes what Wardell told a historian who interviewed him in 1896. And I would again point out that Wardell defended the War Department's suppression of the autopsy photograph, so he was not providing information that was intended to attack the War Department.