Identification of Booth's body

[mikegriffith1]

(10-09-2018 11:28 AM)RJNorton Wrote:  

(10-09-2018 10:47 AM)Warren Wrote:  I'm confused. If it wasn't Booth who was shot in the barn, then who was it?

Warren, one theory is that it was actually a man named James W. Boyd who was killed at Garrett's. The late Dr. William Hanchett deals with and debunks this theory in The Lincoln Murder Conspiracies.

I hope this link works:

CLICK HERE.

I do not think that Hanchett debunks the idea that it was James W. Boyd. I find his treatment just as lacking as I do his dismissal of the Baker cipher notes.

The Garretts said the man in the barn called himself Boyd. The other man who was inside the barn told Lt. Doherty that the man's name was Boyd. When Herold was first interviewed by Bingham, he said the man in the barn's name was Boyd.

The Garretts also insisted that the man in the barn was dressed in gray. Supporting the Garretts' account, two soldiers who were there when the man in the barn was shot stated in 1922 that the man was wearing a Confederate uniform.

Dr. Robert Arnold makes an additional point on this matter: Booth would have had no reason to go to the Garrett home:

Quote:Why would Booth agree to stay at the Garretts' farm? He was only three miles from the Rappahannock and still in a great deal of danger. It was only 8:00 PM. He could have easily made it to Bowling Green, which would have great expedited his escape. It would seem foolish to forego a chance for no good reason. The answer is that the man at the Garretts' was not John Wilkes Booth but James Boyd. Booth and Herold left Port Royal with Jett, Bainbridge, and Ruggles, but when they passed the Trappe House, there were only four of them. At some point, Booth was hidden in a safe house, somewhere between the Rappahannock and the Trappe House. Since the ladies of the Trappe House witnessed the transfer of the horses from the Union soldiers to Mosby's men, it was probably close to the Trappe House. (The Conspiracy Between John Wilkes Booth and the Union Army to Assassinate Abraham Lincoln, Louisville: Windsaloft Publishing, 2016, p. 188).

(10-09-2018 11:28 AM)RJNorton Wrote:  Also, On p. 17 of the Surratt Society publication entitled "The Body in the Barn," Lincoln assassination expert Mr. James O. Hall states that Boyd was murdered in his hometown, Jackson, Tennessee, on January 1, 1866.

Leonard Guttridge:

Quote:Claiming that the Confederate Captain James W. Boyd's middle name was Waters, as Steers-Chaconas do, may to the reader seem a very small error. But this one has special significance. Most of the confusion springs from garbled family records. There was neither space nor necessity in Dark Union for the story of more than one James W. Boyd. It can be summarized here. First, James William Boyd of the 6th Tennessee Infantry, Confederate States Army, in February 1865 as a prisoner of war cut a deal with Secretary Stanton for permission to go home to Jackson, Tennessee, to take care of his seven motherless children. Steers-Chaconas are remiss in failing to mention that not only did Boyd refer to Caroline Boyd as deceased in his February 14, 1865 appeal to Stanton for a private interview, in December 1864, writing to William P. Wood, chief of the Old Capitol Prison, he makes clear that his wife had died. The proof is easily found in War Department records at the National Archives. Within twenty-four hours of his request for a personal interview with Stanton, Boyd was released. There his official record ends.

The other James W. Boyd? His middle name was Waters and he was born in Ireland in 1807. He became sheriff of McNairy County, Tennessee, in the 1830s. He fought a two-hours bare-knuckles fight in a horse pasture outside Purdy with a Joel Rowark whom he had wrongfully arrested for horse-stealing and the Rowarks swore vengeance. Their chance came during the Civil War when Boyd, accompanied by two Chickasaw Indians named Ollie and Ossie Feather, rode with the Union colonel, Fielding Hurst, and acquired a reputation for killing and torturing Confederate prisoners of war.

A rebel military posse ambushed Boyd near Sweet Lips Creek and hanged his Indians. Boyd escaped. On January 1, 1866, he was at the Jackson railroad depot awaiting the train for Nashville where he expected to sign on as a deputy federal marshal. There Joel Rowark's son killed him with a shotgun. Self-defense, the local sheriff decided and rewarded Billy with $500.

Certain “assassination experts” hoped that discovery of Captain James W. Boyd's grave in Tennessee would bolster their claim that he couldn't have been the man killed at Richard H. Garrett's farm in Virginia eight months earlier. They reportedly searched, and found nothing. We searched and, led by a descendant of Colonel Fielding Hurst, found James W. Boyd's grave, the stone half sunken but plainly bearing his name. And the date 1807-1866. This obviously was not Captain Boyd's grave, who was born in 1822. Moreover, nearby we saw and photographed stones that marked where the Feather brothers were buried, side by side.

What set the “experts” on a course of error? Robert Cartmell, a local farmer who periodically entered Jackson and picked up items of gossip, kept a journal. He learned of the shooting at the railroad depot but identified the victim as James W. Boyd, “who was a Lieut. in 6th Regmt of Tennessee Vol.” A Nashville newspaper reference to the shooting of James W. Boyd in Jackson on New Year's Day names his killer Rowark, but gives the victim no military title.

According to Steers-Chaconas, Dark Union dates Caroline Boyd's death as January 5, 1866. It does nothing of the sort. This shouldn't be overlooked because the sources Steers-Chaconas rely upon give that date for the death of James Waters Boyd's wife, not the Confederate captain's. ("In Defense of Dark Union," https://historynewsnetwork.org/article/3873)

I am not unalterably wed to the idea that the man in the barn was Boyd, but I think there are some decent indications that he might have been. Any poor unfortunate soul could have been chosen to play the role. When Lafayette Baker's cousin, Lt. Luther Baker, took off with the body for several hours, he had ample time to change the clothes, create a scar on the back of the neck by burning an area of skin (if the person didn't already have a scar there), put an ink tattoo on a hand, etc., etc. (however, given the questionable evidence that anyone actually saw a tattoo on the body at the autopsy on the Montauk, I'm not sure this was done).