Booth's Denial of Foreknowledge of the Attack on Seward

[mikegriffith1]

Of course, another serious problem with the "decapitation" theory is that with Stanton left alive, the government would have been anything but decapitated, as shown by the fact that Stanton became the de facto president in the immediate aftermath of Lincoln's death. Even weeks later, Stanton was still practically running the executive branch. Only gradually did Andrew Johnson begin to assert his authority, and when he finally challenged Stanton and demanded his resignation, Stanton refused to resign and the Radicals began planning their effort to remove Johnson from office.

Stanton was loathed in the South and among Northern Democrats, and even among some conservative Republicans. Confederate leaders were well aware of the Northern Democrats' complaint that Stanton repeatedly pressured Lincoln into making bad decisions on the choice of generals and on the conduct of the war. This was an issue in the 1864 election. Democrats blamed Lincoln for succumbing to Stanton's pressure to take actions that sabotaged McClellan's Peninsula Campaign (such as withholding an entire corps from McClellan's army after he had begun to engage the Confederates at Yorktown and forcing him to put part of his army on the other side of the Chickahominy River, which invited Lee's first attack in the Seven Days Battles). Democrats also accused Stanton of withholding supplies from McClellan's army after Antietam and of pressuring Lincoln into removing McClellan from command for no valid reason after Antietam.

Another reason that Southerners and Northern Democrats intensely disliked Stanton was his egregious violation of the civil rights of war opponents and war critics through such men as Lafayette Baker.

Fortunately, I had spent years studying the Civil War before I became interested in the Lincoln assassination. So when I read the military commission's claims about an alleged Confederate conspiracy, I knew they made no sense. As I've said before, and as others have noted, any genuine Confederate conspiracy would not have targeted Lincoln and Seward but would have targeted Stanton, Stevens, and Wade, for starters.

I presume everyone is aware that most historians--not just a majority, but most--reject the Confederate conspiracy theory. Even George Alfred Townsend, an ardent Unionist and long-time student of the Lincoln case, acknowledged that there was not a shred of credible evidence to support the claim that Confederate leaders were behind Lincoln's assassination.

Defenders of the official version have accepted the neo-Radical myth that Lincoln and the Radicals were not far apart on Reconstruction by the time Lincoln was killed. "Therefore," they say, "the Radicals had no reason to want Lincoln dead." The definitive refutation of this demonstrably false tale about Lincoln's plan for Reconstruction is William C. Harris's landmark and high acclaimed book With Charity for All: Lincoln and the Restoration of the Union (University of Kentucky Press, 1997). Harris methodically debunks what little evidence neo-Radical historians have presented to support their claim, and he presents persuasive evidence that Lincoln's Reconstruction terms were far different from those of the Radicals.