Breaking a leg

[Rhatkinson]

(02-18-2013 02:09 PM)L Verge Wrote:  Why would Wood even be asked to testify to the broken leg? It seems like an inconsequential thing that had nothing to do with what the military tribunal was interested in.

I still say that Booth wrote the sequence of events in his diary in the exact order in which they happened, and he places the broken leg immediately after shooting Lincoln. I also contend that, in the confusion of the first five minutes after the bullet was fired, no one would be noticing a limp from a minor fracture of a minor bone.

And finally, none of you horsemen have answered my question of a few days ago as to whether or not the reported injury to the mare's front quarter would cause her to pitch forward or roll to the left, or do both. In the latter case, could an expert rider like Booth extract his leg before having the horse roll on him?

P.S. I'm happy to learn that Mike is at least alluding to there being mention of the break at Ford's Theatre. I think one of the most frustrating things to me about the reaction to American Brutus (and Mike must feel this way also) is that everyone seems to focus only on that broken leg theory and not on all of the extreme details and worthwhile information that is in that encyclopedic work.

Laurie, that is an excellent point. American Brutus is indeed a wonderful book, even though I have a couple of disagreements with Kauffman concerning Dr. Mudd's role (how anyone could honestly claim that he was innocent of knowing who Booth was on 4/14 is beyond me) and the broken leg causation.

Dave's information that Kauffman said there were "allusions" to the Ford's break before the discovery of Booth's diary is most interesting. There certainly is nothing in "American Brutus" or on Mike's site now that mentions anything except that the "only" evidence of a Ford's break is Booth's diary. Dave also makes an interesting point that perhaps Wood was just assuming the Ford's break based on these "allusions" to his stumble.

Perhaps that is so, but it is hard to argue on one hand that there was not one witness who claimed that Booth appeared injured at Fords and then also argue that the "seeds" of the few people who saw Booth stumble were so prevalent to indicate he broke his leg during the stumble that Wood was CERTAIN of it in his report. How could that be is no one who said he stumbled thought he appeared to be injured? Those two ideas do not add up to me.

I still maintain that Swann or someone in his family overheard Booth saying to Cox or someone else that he broke his leg at Fords, but that they were afraid of angering Cox any more than they already had by disputing his claim that Booth and Herold went inside his home. Think about it for a second: it was bad enough for a free black to contradict a powerful white neighbor on a fact of allowing two "unknown" strangers into his home, but it was a decidedly different thing to also say that Cox was told by the "stranger" that he had broken his leg at Ford's jumping from the Presidential box. That could have gotten Cox hung, and so Swann (or his family) probably recanted, and Wood knew their new "horse fall" story was baloney (thus his tone of frustration/certainty when mentioning the horse fall vs Ford's break theories.)