Identification of Booth's body

[mikegriffith1]

I took the time to read Seaton Munroe’s entire account, i.e., his 1896 article “Recollections of the Lincoln Assassination” in the April 1896 edition of the North American Review. I will say three things about it right off the bat:

* Historians who have quoted Munroe to support the traditional version have been extremely selective in quoting him. They usually do not allow the reader to know that Munroe was a tall teller of tales and that much of his testimony contradicts the traditional version on key points.

* Munroe was the Forrest Gump of the Lincoln assassination. This guy was just about everywhere.

* If this were a trial, the prosecution would try to keep Munroe on the other side of the planet and off anyone’s witness list. Munroe was very careless and sloppy with facts. Some of the errors in his article are astounding, such as his statement that the autopsy and identification were done on the Saugus, that Barnes and Woodward first examined the body on April 28, that Dr. May testified to the Holt-Bingham-Baker inquest on the ship before he ever saw the body. This was not some hastily composed note or scribbling in the margins of a book or magazine. This was an article that Munroe had ample time to write.

When apologists for the traditional story quote Munroe, they usually quote him saying “I was soon gazing at the remains, which needed no long inspection to enable me to recognize them,” and then they skip to his statement that he was confident that the body was Booth. In fact, this is how he has been quoted in this thread. Here are the two sentences that Munroe wrote right after he said he did not need long inspection to recognize the remains:

Quote:The handsome countenance was unmarred by the agony of his lingering death, which I was soon to hear described. There were missing the moustache and the curling lock upon his forehead, which during the flight had been removed at the house of Dr. Mudd. (p. 431)

Sound familiar? It should. Dr. G. L. Porter plagiarized this statement almost verbatim for his 1911 article. I quoted Dr. Porter’s statement in a recent reply. Here it is again:

Quote:Booth’s handsome countenance was unmarred by the agony of his lingering death. His moustache and the long lock of hair which had hung down his forehead Booth cut off at the house of Dr. Mudd, where he had stopped in his flight. ("How Booth's Body Was Hidden," The Columbian, 1911, p. 68, available at https://ia800208.us.archive.org/8/items/...0port.pdf)

So now we have two witnesses who say that the body’s face was unmarred and that it had no mustache. Furthermore, presumably, if the face had had a noticeable amount of hair on the chin, one or both of them would have mentioned it.

Equally problematic is Munroe’s account of what he supposedly heard Charles Dawson tell the inquest about the JWB initials. Munroe claimed that after he testified, he was allowed to remain in the room to hear the other witnesses’ testimony! Wow, he must have been a special guy! Anyway, here is Munroe’s version of what Dawson told Holt, Bingham, and Baker about the initials:

Quote:The examination of the next witness was more interesting in detail, being that of Dawson, a clerk in the National Hotel, who it appeared had known Booth for some years. When asked whether the man had possessed any physical peculiarity by which he could recognize the remains, he replied in the affirmative. He had often seen on Booth’s right hand, at the junction of the thumb and forefinger, the initials, “J. W. B.” in India ink. This mark had sometimes come under his notice when the actor was writing his name on the hotel register, and he had more than once made the remark: “Booth, what a fool you were to disfigure that pretty white hand in such a way.” (p. 432, emphasis added)

“Booth’s right hand” and at the junction of the thumb and the forefinger?! The space between the thumb and the forefinger is nowhere near the wrist or the forearm, and it’s not really on the “back” of the hand but is more on side of the hand and would not be visible unless the thumb and forefinger were open.

Obviously, either Munroe was fabricating or the transcript of Dawson’s testimony was altered, because the transcript has Dawson saying that the initials were on the left wrist.

Again, folks, if the egregiously conflicting and often mutually impeaching accounts about the body’s appearance and the JWB initials were floated in a court of law, they would be torn to shreds by any competent attorney. And it is amazing how many “historians” have uncritically accepted and misleadingly quoted Munroe’s account.