John Fazio Interviewed

[John Fazio]

(04-30-2020 02:56 PM)RJNorton Wrote:  I checked, and here is the reference Dave found in Katy of Catoctin (which is actually a novel):

"Little Herold was to guide Payne to Mr. Seward's door, and then show him, by an upper bridge over the Eastern Branch, the road to meet Booth at Surratt's."

Apparently that is the earliest reference, and many subsequent authors took it as fact.

Mike Kauffman has a different version of Herold/Powell at Seward's than any other author I've seen. In American Brutus, Mr. Kauffman writes: (pp.224-225)

"Lewis Powell and David Herold had already gone to Lafayette Park. The Park superintendent always called out the time as he locked the gate, and as soon as that happened, Powell would approach the Sewards' house. He would knock on the door, and then tell the servant he had medicine to give the secretary. It seemed an excellent plan, but at the last minute a complication arose: one of Seward's doctors was still in the house. Now Powell had to either come up with a new cover story or delay his attack. Since nothing came to mind, he sent Herold galloping away to tell the others to hold off."

I am curious if anyone knows Mike Kauffman's source for this as I've never come across this version in any other book.

Roger:

Dave deserves credit for even finding the reference, but that fact aside, it seems to me that it is weak. It is made 23 years after the fact. It is made in a work of fiction, not non-fiction. There is, apparently, no reference to its source. It seems to me that we need either an original source or something close to one to establish, to a reasonable degree of certainty, whether or not Herold accompanied Powell on the fateful night. As I have said, the arguments against the conclusion that he did, and in favor of the conclusion that he was elsewhere, appear to me to overwhelm the unsubstantiated ipse dixit statements that he accompanied Powell and then bolted when he heard a scream from the house or when things got too hot for him for some other reason. It is worth adding, however, that even if one wanted to accept Mike's scenario, Herold wasn't there. That much of his scenario squares with my own.

John

As for Mike Kauffman's account, three things: 1) He gives no source for it; 2) To my knowledge, it does not appear anywhere else; 3) How would Powell have determined that there was still a doctor in the house unless he first made an attempt to enter the house (and maybe not even then), but none of the accounts of what happened that night at the Seward residence mentions a prior attempt by Powell to access the house. For these three reasons I must reject Mike's account. Please see pp.85-91 of my book for persuasive arguments as to what Herold did that night.

John