It Didn't Happen the Way You Think (by Robert Lockwood Mills)

[mikegriffith1]

(12-16-2018 11:51 AM)RJNorton Wrote:  

(12-16-2018 10:33 AM)mikegriffith1 Wrote:  Mills mentions facts that I have not seen discussed in any other book.

Do you feel John Mathews' letter never existed?

I take it you mean the letter that John Mathews belatedly claimed that Booth gave him to deliver to the National Intelligencer.

Well, let me ask you some of the questions that occur to me about this issue:

* Do you believe that Booth would have entrusted such a letter—his statement to the nation to explain and justify his deed—to a man he had recently declared to be “a coward,” “very much frightened,” and “not fit to live”?

* Do you believe that Booth would have given Mathews this letter during a chance meeting on Pennsylvania Avenue, while Booth was “coming down the avenue,” in broad daylight and in front of who-knows-how-many witnesses, as Mathews claimed? Does that ring true to you?

* Do you find it believable that Mathews testified at the 1867 Johnson impeachment hearing that he could remember the last paragraph and the signature block of the alleged three-page letter?

* Do you find it believable that in 1881 Mathews claimed that with a journalist’s help he was able to “reconstruct from memory” the contents of the letter, whereas he told the Johnson impeachment committee that he could only remember the last paragraph and the signature block?

* Do you not view as very problematic Mathews’ claims (1) that two years after the fact, he remembered the last paragraph and the signature block of the letter, and (2) that 14 years after the fact, he was able to “reconstruct from memory” the entire letter with the help of a journalist, given the fact that Mathews told the Johnson impeachment committee that he only read the letter twice and that he was quite nervous while he was reading it?

* Do you find it odd that Mathews’ 1881 reconstructed-from-memory version of the alleged letter is virtually identical to the letter that Booth left with his sister in the fall of 1864, and that that letter had been widely published by then? (See, for example, Right or Wrong, God Judge Me, p. 151).

* Do you believe Mathews’ story about meeting David Herold on a street the afternoon of the assassination/a week before the assassination? (Mathews’ wording is unclear about when the meeting supposedly occurred. He told this story to explain why he remembered that the name “Herold” was in the signature block of the letter. See his testimony here: https://books.google.com/books?id=FWdHAQ...q&f=true.)

Again, these are just some of the questions that have occurred to me about this alleged letter. John Chandler Griffin raises some good questions about it as well (Lincoln’s Execution, pp. 242-244).