My Journey on Lincoln's Assassination

[L Verge]

While said with tongue in cheek, Susan, you are right on target as far as the ridiculousness of assertions that have been made here as well as by a growing number of historical speculators over the past 120 years.

I warned that I was going to dissect Dr. Arnold's book page-by-page and share my thoughts on some of his statements on this forum. Get ready for a wild and bumpy ride folks because another mystery at Surratt House may have been solved. Some of you may remember Rick Smith posting over a year ago about the James Owens statement. Owens was a former slave of Austin Adams, a farm/tavern/store/hostelry keeper in Newport, Maryland, not far from where Booth crossed the Potomac.

He gave a statement to Col. H.H. Wells on April 28, 1865, in which he told of two men on horses, one with an injured leg, riding into Newport in the company of a young white boy ABOUT TWO WEEKS BEFORE the date of Owens making the statement. In Dr. Arnold's book, the word ABOUT is forgotten, and Arnold declares that this event in Newport would have happened BEFORE the assassination even took place. Arnold then proceeds to suggest that the man with the injured leg was James W. Boyd, not Booth. Enter the future scenario of Boyd being sent into the final stages of the search as the Fake Booth.

Unfortunately, Dr. Arnold claims that Col. Wells did not save the Owens statement and that it never made it into the National Archives. In virtually the next sentence, however, he reverses himself and says that the statement miraculously survived and that it ended up in the archives at Surratt House Museum! It survived thanks to the research of James O. Hall, who made a typed transcript of the statement for his files, which were donated to Surratt House in the 1990s (before Hall's death). The copy also contained notes in Hall's handwriting to the effect that Owens needed more investigation because he sure was privy to a good deal of pertinent information about Booth's last days in Southern Maryland.

Dr, Arnold attempted to make photocopies of that piece in the James O. Hall Research Center at Surratt House and to include them as pages 276-277 in his book. And there he has a problem -- those pages are totally illegible because they printed so faintly. All that is legible is some of Hall's notes at the top of the page. (Hall's handwriting is very distinctive if anyone dealt with him frequently or has made good use of his research files.) But now, the story gets even better...

Rick Smith of this forum, my expert staff member Joan Chaconas, and I all remember that letter being in the Hall files a number of years ago. Rick used it for his own research on horse faking. About a year ago, however, he tried to find it once again, and it is missing from or filed incorrectly at the Hall Center. I have asked our research librarian to check the sign-in log between 2013 and 2016 to see if the library was visited by Dr. Arnold. By chance, did he gather up the letter containing the Owens statement with his notes by mistake? Joan actually has a copy of the letter that was sent to her by Hall originally, so the missing one from the files is not irretrievable -- it's just rather interesting that that first paper is missing and the contents used in a book, citing that it was from the Surratt House files.