Identification of Booth's body

[mikegriffith1]

(01-30-2019 07:58 PM)Steve Wrote:  This will be the third time that I've asked you to respond to my earlier post about Boyd. Yet you keep bringing him up as being the person killed in Garrett's barn but yet each time you keep avoiding/not responding to my replies. I'm reprinting my earlier post below to refresh your memory and make it easier to find:

(12-29-2018 03:44 PM)mikegriffith1 Wrote:  Three, Boyd was 41, which would explain why Dr. May said the body on the Montauk looked "much older" than Booth looked the last time he'd seen him, which was just over a year earlier. When Rollins was shown a picture of Booth less than 48 hours before the barn shooting, he had no problem recognizing the picture as Booth, and the only difference he noted between the picture and how Booth looked when he saw him was that Booth had no mustache when he saw him. Rollins didn't say anything like "and, oh yeah, when I saw him, Booth looked a lot older than he does in the picture."

Mike, do you believe/assert that the "Boyd" killed at Garrett's farm the James W. Boyd of the 6th Tennessee, who was released after taking the oath of allegiance and giving a promise to spy for the Union? If not, where does this "41" age that you assert for "Boyd" come from and who are you claiming he was? Specifically which Confederate soldier(s) named "James Boyd" could've been the person killed at Garrett's Farm, if it wasn't the Boyd of the 6th Tennessee?

If you can't find such a Confederate soldier named James Boyd that could've been killed at Garrett's farm:

(a) Wouldn't that be a strong indication that the person was lying and using an alias, say I dunno… like Booth?

(b) Where does that "41" year age you give "Boyd (which matches the age of James W. Boyd of the 6th Tennessee) come from?

Getting back to Rob's point about proving a point by documented evidence... here is the letter James W. Boyd, of the 6th Tennessee, wrote on February 14, 1865 where he offers to spy for the Union if he can be released as a paroled POW. He says that he wants to spy in order to earn money to help support his 7 children who have been dependent on charity following his wife's death and to get revenge for being court-martialed twice:

The letter comes from the National Archives, Record Group 94, Microfilm M797, Roll 135. From the Baker case files of the Turner-Baker papers, original case file no. 718B.

Most importantly for the purposes of this discussion, he volunteered to spy in western Tennessee and parts of Kentucky west of the Tennessee river. He even uses his knowledge of that area and its people as a selling point on why that would make him a good spy. Boyd was released the next day, so he should've been nowhere near Maryland in April 1865 if he was specifically released to help provide for his now motherless children and spy for the Union in Tennessee.

Here's a newspaper account of James W. Boyd's 01 Jan. 1866 murder from page 2 of the 10 Jan. 1866 edition of the Memphis Daily Avalanche, first published in the West Tennessee Whig of Jackson, Tennessee

Note, this is the year following the death of the man called "Boyd" at Garrett's farm. The article doesn't mention Boyd's 6th Tennessee military service, but fortunately another source does, the diary of a local man named Robert H. Cartmell. In the last paragraph of the first page below continuing onto the top of the second page, Cartmell says the James W. Boyd killed on 01 January 1866 in Tennessee was indeed the James W. Boyd of the 6th Tennessee. That would make it impossible for him to have been the man called "Boyd" who was killed at Garrett's farm the prior year:

Link to the full Robert H. Cartmell diary collection:

http://teva.contentdm.oclc.org/cdm/landi...5138coll39

I hope this provides enough documented evidence that the man killed at Garrett's barn could not possibly be the James W. Boyd of the 6th Tennessee (ignoring all the evidence that it was Booth and just focusing on the documentary evidence from Boyd's life). Hopefully, it meets the standard of documentary evidence put forward by Rob to prove an argument and will be a useful instruction on how to craft an historical argument using evidence and logic.

Sigh. . . . I am reminded of Harry Truman's quip in response to Thomas Dewey: "It's not what you don't know that bothers me, it's what you know for sure that just ain't so."

You're talking about the wrong James Boyd. Apparently you haven't read any of the articles I've linked/referenced on this issue. Guttridge has addressed this error:

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.(http://hnn.us/articles/3873.html)