Did William Coggeshall Save Lincoln's Life?

[L Verge]

(10-07-2016 07:40 AM)John Fazio Wrote:  Hello Everyone:

Thank you for your messages. I have additional material.

I have already said that in 13 Desperate Days, the author (Potter) describes, not two trains adjacent to each other in Harrisburg, with Lincoln and others leaving one and boarding the other (per Coggeshall), but a single train, consisting only of one passenger car, a baggage car and the locomotive, away from the station, waiting on a siding, to which Lincoln, with others, is brought by carriage from the Jones House, where he had been dining with Governor Curtin and others. This scenario is repeated in A. K. McClure's fine book Abraham Lincoln and Men of War-Times (1892) and also in Michael J. Kline's more recent work The Baltimore Plot: The First Conspiracy to Assassinate Abraham Lincoln. There is some variation in their accounts as to who rode with Lincoln in the carriage and who rode with him on the abbreviated train from Harrisburg to Philadelphia (where he would board another train, which originated in New York, for Washington, through Baltimore), but the variation is not relevant to the issue before us, except to say that none of the three sources mentions Coggeshall as being at the dinner, in the carriage or on any of the trains.

Significantly, all three sources describe the transfer, by horse, of the passenger car of the Lincoln train in Baltimore, at 3:30-4:00 a.m., from the President Street Station to the Camden Street Station, about a mile distant. There, it would be coupled to a regularly scheduled B&O train, which would then make the final run into Washington. Again, no parallel trains with Lincoln and his party disembarking from one and boarding the other.

Though I still plan to review the Coggeshall Papers, at this stage I find the evidence compelling that Coggeshall's account has no basis in fact and I am therefore forced--pro tempore--to revise my previously held view that the equities favored its authenticity. This is the second such revision, re the assassination, I have had to make (the first related to the etched message in the window of Booth's hotel room in Meadville, Pennsylvania). I believe that it is most likely that the fabrication came from Coggeshall, not Mary; that she merely repeated, in 1908, what she had been told by her deceased husband some 40 years previously. I cannot believe that she would have desecrated his memory by attributing to him something he had never said. I apologize to anyone I may had led astray. Stay tuned.

John

John - I thank you for being willing to change opinions, at least for the present. It reminds me of the good old days of gentlemanly behavior in the history field. Keep us abreast of anything else that you find on Coggeshall, please.