Unwanted Facts: Facts that Most Books on the Lincoln Assassination Ignore

[mikegriffith1]

Here are more facts that most books on the Lincoln assassination ignore or minimize:

* In Stanton’s day, the prosecutors at a military trial were supposed to introduce all evidence in a case, even evidence that helped the defense. However, Joseph Holt and John Bingham, the prosecutors at the military trial of the accused Booth conspirators, failed to enter Booth’s diary into evidence at the trial. The diary would have substantially damaged the prosecution’s case and helped the defense’s case, especially regarding Mary Surratt. Historians Benjamin Thomas and Harold Hyman, who greatly admired Stanton and spared no reasonable effort to defend him:

Throughout the trial the government tried to minimize the fact that Booth had concocted two separate plots against Lincoln. The first was to kidnap the President, and it was not until the very day of the assassination that Booth had resolved to kill him. This fact was made evident in the diary that had been taken from Booth’s body and subsequently turned over to Stanton. Strangely enough, this diary, which would have shown that Arnold, O’Laughlin, and both Surratts, though participants in the abduction plot, were ignorant of Booth’s design to murder, was never introduced in evidence by either side. In this the prosecution was remiss in its duty to present all the facts. (Stanton: The Life and Times of Lincoln’s Secretary of War, New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1962, p. 428)

As I said, Thomas and Hyman tried to defend Stanton whenever remotely possible. Although they acknowledged that the prosecution had a duty to present all the evidence and should have presented the diary, they also criticized the defense for not introducing the diary into evidence! They noted that before the conspiracy trial began, two newspapers printed a story claiming that a diary had been found on Booth’s body, and they incorrectly assumed that the defense lawyers were aware of this story and that therefore they should have demanded the diary be entered into evidence. However, there is no evidence the defense lawyers knew the government had Booth’s diary. The judges on the military commission did not even know the government had the diary.

Civil War scholar William Marvel:

The assassination, and Stanton’s part in the aftermath, kept resurfacing that spring and summer of 1867. . . . In its impeachment investigation the Judiciary Committee had learned of the existence of the diary taken from the body of John Wilkes Booth, and [Congressman Benjamin] Butler accused Bingham [one of the military commission’s prosecutors] of having deliberately withheld it from evidence in the trial of the conspirators. Noting that the first eighteen pages of the diary were missing, Butler suggested that they would have proven Booth’s original plan of kidnapping the president, which might have saved Mary Surratt from the gallows. He implied that someone in the government had cut those pages out. . . .

Within a week after Butler’s last barb, the Judiciary Committee called Stanton to the stand in an effort to track the whereabouts of the diary from the moment it left Booth’s pocket. His testimony conflicted with that of the men who brought him Booth’s effects, and that inconsistency evidently raised some eyebrows. . . .

That [Stanton’s testimony] suggested Stanton had kept the diary long enough to remove incriminating content, and his contradictory testimony helped fuel speculation that he might have been involved in the assassination. Revelations from the committee’s investigation came much slower to the president than to Stanton, and more than a month passed before Johnson learned of the discrepancy in Stanton’s story, but on May 9 Johnson directed him to produce a certified copy of the contents of Booth’s diary, along with everything he knew about its capture and possession by the War Department. . . .

The impeachment committee inquired no further into that yawning gap in the testimony, perhaps because the only suspicion it raised about the mutilated diary implicated their friend Stanton, rather than Johnson or someone who might have acted in his behalf. (Lincoln’s Autocrat: The Life of Edwin Stanton, University of North Carolina Press, 2015, pp. 422-423)

John Cottrell, an award-winning journalist and author of several best-selling books on historical subjects in the 1950s and 1960s:

Booth’s diary, indicating that kidnapping and not murder was the original intent of the conspirators, was the most astounding omission in the evidence presented at the conspiracy trial. For two years the diary was locked up in the War Office archives and might have remained there if [Lafayette] Baker had not recalled its existence in his History of the United States Secret Service, published in 1867. . . .

Another bombshell was dropped when Baker stated under oath that the diary had been mutilated since it had been taken from Booth’s body. He claimed that eighteen pages had been cut out, pages dated prior to the time of Lincoln’s death, and he recalled having seen a pencil sketch of a house on one page—now missing. . . . When Baker was recalled, he further embarrassed the War Secretary by revealing that some of his detectives had made copies of the diary, but they had been ordered to hand them over to Stanton. (Anatomy of an Assassination: The Murder of Abraham Lincoln, New York: Funk & Wagnalls, 1966, pp. 198-199)

* The War Department’s elaborate Confederate conspiracy theory was based on phony evidence. This theory held that Confederate president Jefferson Davis and other top Confederate leaders ordered Lincoln’s death and arranged for Booth and his gang to kill Lincoln. This theory has been so thoroughly debunked that even most scholars in our day reject it. Thomas and Hyman:

Holt relied chiefly on three witnesses to link Davis and other Confederate leaders to the murder plot. They were Sanford Conover, Richard Montgomery, and Dr. James B. Merritt, all of whom claimed to have had intimate contact with Confederate agents in Canada. For “prudential reasons” the commission went into secret session for their testimony, but Benn Pitman, the chief court reporter, allowed part of Conover’s testimony to reach the press. It created such a stir that the government felt obliged to corroborate it by releasing the testimony of the others. Counterevidence brought forward impugned the witnesses’ veracity, and they soon became enmeshed in a web of falsehood. ((Stanton: The Life and Times of Lincoln’s Secretary of War, p. 425)

Walter Stahr, a Civil War and Revolutionary War scholar and a graduate of Harvard Law School:

Stanton was also involved in framing the charges against the defendants [at the conspiracy trial]. On May 2 he sent a note to Holt, saying that Johnson wanted that same morning “a list of persons late in Canada and Richmond against whom there is evidence of complicity” in the murder of Lincoln and the attempted murder of Seward. Holt provided a list, which Stanton turned into a proclamation issued that same day by Johnson, declaring that there was “evidence” in the War Department files that the murder of Lincoln and attempted murder of Seward were “incited, concerted, and procured by and between Jefferson Davis, Jacob Thompson, Clement Clay, and three other named Confederate leaders. . . .

Newspapers were skeptical about the claim that Davis and other rebel leaders were parties to the plot to assassinate Lincoln. The New York Times said that it was “extremely desirable that the charges which have been so solemnly made against Jefferson Davis, Jacob Thompson & Co., in the President’s proclamation, should be fully borne out on the trial.” But the Times cautioned Stanton and Holt to avoid “anything like exaggeration” in their case against Davis and his colleagues. The Cincinnati Inquirer doubted that Davis was involved in the assassination: “We do not believe that Mr. Davis is, in any sense, an assassin of the late Chief Magistrate. We do not think that such was the character of the man. The charge, as it stands, looks to us like an excuse for offering a reward for one whose destruction is predetermined.” Soon the papers were printing statements by Thompson and other Southern leaders, declaring that they had no role whatsoever in the assassination. . . .

Public opinion was starting to shift on the Davis question, in part because Stanton and Holt had not yet shown a connection between Booth and Davis. Yes, there was evidence that Booth had a Confederate cipher in his trunk, and that Booth had met with Confederate agents in Canada. But this was not proof that Davis and other senior Confederates approved or supported Booth’s plan to kill Lincoln. The Columbian Register in New Haven, Connecticut, commented in late May that the evidence that Davis had any role in the Lincoln assassination was “of so flimsy a character that no court in the world except Mr. Stanton’s packed commission would give it a moment’s consideration”. . . .

Stanton wanted his department to assemble the evidence against Davis and try him before a military commission. He was especially keen to tie Davis to Lincoln’s assassination. But he failed, perhaps because (as most but not all scholars today believe) the Confederate leaders had nothing to do with the assassination, or perhaps because the War Department investigation was inadequate (Stanton: Lincoln’s War Secretary, New York: Simon & Schuster, 2017, pp. 439-440, 445-446, 454-455)

Stanton assigned Francis Lieber to go through Confederate records obtained from Richmond to find evidence of Confederate complicity in Lincoln’s assassination. Lieber and his clerks spent months going through boxes of Confederate files, but found no evidence of Confederate involvement in the Lincoln murder plot. In addition, Lafayette Baker and his army of perjury hunters scoured the country for evidence that would implicate Confederate leaders (and, by the way, Andrew Johnson!), but to no avail. The small amount of “evidence” that Baker “found” was so pathetic and doubtful that virtually all historians have long viewed it as worthless and fraudulent. This is important to keep in mind because Stanton used his phony Confederate conspiracy theory as his excuse for insisting on a military commission to try the accused conspirators.

Historian Joseph George:

In his effort to convince the judges of Davis’s culpability at the trial of the alleged conspirators, Holt was willing to introduce testimony that he had every reason to believe was perjured. This was patently true regarding the testimony of one Robert Purdy and what became known as the Lon Letter, one of three strange letters introduced by the government at the conspiracy trial as evidence that the assassination was the result of premeditated plot involving Confederate leaders. . . .

Although the prosecutor's investigators had determined that the letter was a fake, Holt used it in court as "evidence against every other party to this conspiracy" to murder Lincoln. (“Subornation of Perjury at the Lincoln Conspiracy Trial?”, Civil War History, Kent State University Press, 38:3, September 1992, pp. 232, 235)