Did William Coggeshall Save Lincoln's Life?

[John Fazio]

(09-16-2016 05:06 AM)RJNorton Wrote:  John, I am afraid we'll have to agree to disagree on Coggeshall. I agree with Eva - this incident would be in Lamon's book if it really occurred. I checked Judd's notes - nothing. Also, nothing from Pinkerton.

Coggeshall is not mentioned a single time in Lincoln Day By Day. He is not in The Collected Works of Abraham Lincoln. Regarding meeting with Cabinet members, he is not mentioned in Welles' diary.

I am sorry - I just do not believe Coggeshall's stories about being Lincoln's bodyguard. Koch's book says, “Coggeshall declined the post (head of Secret Service of Government) but agreed to continue to work in the Secret Service. He would commute among Washington, Columbus, and Springfield, Ohio, on secret assignments for Lincoln for what Mary Coggeshall later called three full and busy years."

There was not even a Secret Service under Lincoln – that came later after the assassination.

Offhand, I cannot think of a single Lincoln scholar who includes accounts of a friendship/relationship/meetings/ between Lincoln and Coggeshall in his/her book. There is not a single mention of Coggeshall in Hay's dairy or letters.

Certainly if Coggeshall were really a bodyguard to Lincoln it would be in Lamon's book. It's not. I also checked Fred Hatch's Protecting President Lincoln: The Security Effort, the Thwarted Plots and the Disaster at Ford's Theatre and cannot find any mention of Coggeshall.

IMO all of this was created. There is simply no evidence for any of it IMO.

Roger:

You have made a strong case, I grant, but not, in my opinion, a convincing one.

If we accept Mary's account re the secrecy asked for by Coggeshall, there is no reason to suppose the incident would have been mentioned in Lamon's or Judd's writings, nor in Hay's or Nicolay's either, for that matter, nor in any of the other works you mention. Mary's account gains plausibility from the fact that nothing was said about the incident for 47 years.

Consider Whitman's observation that "The real war will never get in the books...Its interior history will never be written--its...minutia of deeds and passions will never even be suggested...Think how much, and of importance, will be--how much, civic and military, has already been buried in the grave, in eternal darkness." In this connection, consider, for example, the almost total silence in the literature about Charles Forbes, who would be a footnote in history, at most, but for the role he played in the assassination. Likewise, Silas T. Cobb. We could go on endlessly with such minor figures. In my opinion, Coggeshall was one of these--a relatively minor figure, a functionary whom Lincoln took a liking to, but whom no one else paid much attention to, not when there were titans all around to dominate conversation, attract notice and find their way into the history books because of their prominence. Further, the fact that he spent so much time in Columbus and Springfield, Ohio, on assignments for Lincoln, goes a long way toward telling us why he was largely an unknown in Washington.

As for his absence from Welles's diary, the likelihood is that he didn't attend too many cabinet meetings, wasn't regarded as a titan by and among titans and therefore didn't get much attention. Attendance at just a few meetings would have been enough for Mary to mention it, but not for Welles, who had more important people and things to think and write about. Freda Koch records that in the trove of writings that she was heir to were "...the Colonel's observations of cabinet members and Civil War generals, made in his diary while attending Lincoln cabinet meetings...vivid descriptions of the religious, the humorous, the human sides of Lincoln's character..." Shall we assume that she too is lying? Or that the writings are all fabrications of Coggeshall himself? So now we have Mary, William and Freda all lying, for no apparent purpose. Do you believe that? I don't.

It will not do to use the claim that Coggeshall was Lincoln's bodyguard to invest him with an importance that is otherwise unwarranted by the facts. Remember that he was only informally designated as such and then only for part of one year--1861.

There most certainly was a Secret Service during Lincoln's term (do you suppose the Federal government could carry on a war without an intelligence service?), but it was not known as the Secret Service then, but the National Detective Police--Lafayette C. Baker's fiefdom, which became the U.S. Secret Service shortly after the war. Baker wrote about it at great length in his 1867 book History of the United States Secret Service", which I found a fascinating read, if not always accurate or believable.

In my judgment, the issue is one about which reasonable minds can differ, but I believe the preponderance of the evidence favors authenticity.

John