Drawing of Booth Body

[Gene C]

Getting back to my comments about the book Dark Union in post #49

I forgot to mention that in Chapter 19, Neff tells us about the difficulty with those at Seward's house who give conflicting descriptions and change their testimony in describing the physical appearance and description of Lewis Paine (Payne) According to Neff, some describe his appearance as remarkably similar to Augustus Seward and hints that there may have been two assassins and Augustus may actually be the one who attacked his father, and that Augustus may have had some mental problems.

Ray Neff would also have us believe that in Booth's escape after shooting Lincoln, he connects up not with David Herold but Edwin Hynson. Hynson is supposed to bear a resemblance to Herold and rents a horse from the same stable and on the same day as Herold.
Unfortunately Neff's last reference to Hynson that I could find is in chapter 21, page 174 at Port Royal. I never could find out what happens to Hynson. Here Neff switches topics and we find an Indian scout named Whippet Nalgai working with the NDP. He finds Booth's diary and several other items belonging to Booth including six pictures of women and $2100 in Union currency. All of which is taken to Washington and turned over to the war department and Stanton.
That is a few days before the capture of Booth/Boyd at Garrett's barn.

In chapter 22 we are informed that William Boyd has reinjured his leg and is now somewhat lame and with some help has turned up at Garrett's farm. Boyd is killed, very little detail here of the event. Neff goes into some detail about Boyd's body and personal effects being brought back to Washington. Neff informs us 13 people were permitted to view the body and "they identified it as Booth's body, chiefly from it's 'general appearance" (page 179-180) Neff goes into some discussion regarding this questionable identification.

There is more in these chapters, but is overly filled with unbelievable comments, as is the entire book. That's part of the problem. There is too much, to many incidences that Neff gives us that just contradict the historical record. A few and it might possibly be believable, but Neff recounts to many examples of deception, fraud, lying, and misinformation throughout this entire time. It is simply unbelievable that all these events were all swept under the rug or suppressed by the government and remained that way for over 100 years. The entire book is like that. Confused by all of this? Neff's book is confusing. And I have not even mentioned Neff's primary source of information is the Potter Papers. The Potter Papers are typed transcripts of diary, letters and other documents, with no originals documents pertaining to these claims. The evidence for an Andrew Potter who worked for the National Detective Police is at best very weak. Part of the Ray Neff papers are on line, I have read many of them. The entire collection of documents and other references Ray Neff gives have been examined by people on this forum and other historians. The general conclusion is the documents are not credible.

The Ray Neff Collection has been mentioned before. Here is the web link to some of those papers. I found the last item on the list, "Diary of John Henry Stevenson alias of Michael O'Laughlin an interesting example of the items in the online collection. http://library.indstate.edu/rbsc/neff/neff-idx.html

Conclusion - Referring to Ray Neff's book Dark Union is not a satisfactory reference to prove your point regarding Booth's escape and the miss-identification of Booth's body.

For anyone who has personally examined the Ray Neff papers, I would appreciate your comments and clarification if I have mistakenly misrepresented or misunderstood something.