Killing Lincoln: The Real Story

[Gene C]

I agree with you about Ray Neff, most of what I know about the collection is what they have on line. Some of it is quite funny.
Sometimes I will agree with him, but I'm being sarcastic when I do.

[Steven Hager]

PS, what valuable advice are you talking about?

Eva wants me to stop accusing Stanton and Gene wants me to go read the Neff collection, the biggest rabbit hole. When Cummings' book appeared and you discussed it, nobody realized it had forensic evidence linking Stanton, Wade and Stevens to the plot?

I guess the advice you suggest is along the lines of "withdraw your book from publication"?

The official story is a lie carefully scripted and religiously protected to preserve the illusion there was no bigger conspiracy in Lincoln's death. Because I post my research on a blog (often with links to the primary documents at the Library of Congress) in order to solicit response prior to publication, does not give you the right to dismiss my entire output, a position somewhat close to Nazi book burning on the scales of respect for an independent press.

Yes, you have the "historical" record, a fiction created through the usual carrot and stick bullies and bribes. But then I have that withering cross-examination by Representative Rogers that exposed the many perjuries and bribes employed to engineer the verdict, which actually negates most of the "evidence" you bring to bear to support the official story. So it's a he-said, she-said stand-off as far as who has the best cards to play.

---

And thanks be to the Internet, and blogs, and writing blogs that link to primary sources online IS THE BEST WAY to share information globally, and there are many bloggers I trust more than the Washington Post for unbiased information. The approach of creating a upper elite priesthood to control information while dismissing all new creative ideas is already doomed and already fading. My advice to you is start a blog, start linking your stories to primary documents found for free online. Almost everything in this case can be tracked down online and the files at the Library of Congress are massive. Start with the War Department Report on the Sons of Liberty aka The Knights of the Golden Circle. That's where I began my investigation. It's an official top-secret War Department report and incredibly revealing.

[L Verge]

Well, well, we agree on two things: Ray Neff's material is extremely spurious (and that's putting it mildly), and some blogs are more trustworthy than the Washington Post. But that's about it.

As for the rest of your thoughts, I have dealt with too many of the greats in this field (both living and dead) to put stock in your ideas and your rather egotistical manner (IMO) of telling your audience that no one in the universe knows the material the way you do. There are so many out there who have gone the proper route, conducted the necessary research in a scholarly manner, and done a great service to writing about and documenting the evidence that has come from all levels, that I cannot honestly contribute to discussions with you that seem to serve no purpose other than to encourage sales of your book. I know you are trying your best to get people curious enough - or angry enough - to buy your publication just to try and prove you wrong. It ain't happening here!

As an aside, I am 71-years-old and of the generation that created "hippies," radical, anti-government protests, and the expanded world of marijuana and assorted drug use. I just happened to have outgrown that culture... But, I will admit to not trusting certain people on Capitol Hill today.

[Steven Hager]

I appreciate the shift in tone L, and my incredible off-putting arrogance has been with me since 1966, around the time I lost faith in Christianity. I'm reminded of a comment made by Stevens: "I'm trying my best to conceal it."

The title was merely a promotional ploy to counter the wildly successful Bill O'Reilly book. I don't consider myself anything close to an expert, but I do give a fresh examination of the available evidence from a professional journalist well-versed in deep politics of a different era; my years studying the JFK assassination was immensely useful in navigating the mindfields of this case. It's incredibly difficult to self-publish and sell more than a few hundred copies. Having a good promotional strategy is key and for better or worse, I'm clinging to O'Reilly's coat-tails and would surely love a debate with him on this subject.

[L Verge]

1. I didn't realize that I had shifted my tone. I'll have to be careful of that because I don't want to give the impression that I am agreeing with your statements.

2. In 1966, I was teaching 8th and 9th graders - some of whom you remind me of in your desire to be noticed and the ability to state beliefs on essays and term papers without anything concrete to back them up. There's a term for that, but I shall be a lady.

3. You're not doing a good job of concealing your arrogance -- my citation for that is your second paragraph above.

4. Mr. O'Reilly's book may have been "wildly successful" as far as sending him to the bank laughing all the way, but it was royally panned by those in the know who appreciate historical accuracy (or at least well-documented opinions).

4. Debate with O'Reilly? Don't hold your breath.

[Steven Hager]

But we did agree, don't you remember, we agreed on Neff? And we also agreed on O'Reilly. And we also agreed on the value of Cumming's I think, not sure on that one.

How quickly our alliance faded like a snow devil in a winter storm.

Meanwhile, I will forge on....in the interest of truth, justice and the American way.

---

We also agreed some blogs are more reliable than the Washington Post. There was real ground for consensus making there.

[Gene C]

Steven, I thought with your interest in Stanton being involved in the conspiracy, and your interest in the New York crowd, you might find somthing that interest you in that regard in the Neff Guttridge collection since you seem to have that in common with Ray Neff. For that reason alone you might not be so quick to write him off, even if you disagree with him on other issues. His writings and research is a little more recent than Roscoe and Eisenschiml.

Are you familiar with a writer/researcher named Rick Stelnik?

[L Verge]

(12-11-2014 02:22 PM)Steven Hager Wrote:  But we did agree, don't you remember, we agreed on Neff? And we also agreed on O'Reilly. And we also agreed on the value of Cumming's I think, not sure on that one.

How quickly our alliance faded like a snow devil in a winter storm.

Meanwhile, I will forge on....in the interest of truth, justice and the American way.

---

We also agreed some blogs are more reliable than the Washington Post. There was real ground for consensus making there.

Wasn't it President Washington who urged that we not form foreign alliances? Your thoughts and my thoughts are obviously "foreign" to each other.

We do seem to think alike as far as our opinions of the Washington Post...

I would encourage you to forge on in your research by taking advantage of more than ten months of study. You definitely remind me of the Energizer Bunny who is going to keep on going -- and marching to the beat of your own drum in an attempt to sell books.

That's your privilege, but please don't try to hoodwink the public by resorting to incomplete research, innuendos, and spurious theories. The history world deserves much better.

---

For those of you who may not have known about Charles Dunham/Sandford Conover, I'm posting a review of the book Devil's Game by Carman Cumming to give you an idea of what the man was like:

Carman Cumming. Devil's Game: The Civil War Intrigues of Charles A. Dunham. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2004. xiii + 305 pp. $35.00 (cloth), ISBN 978-0-252-02890-8.

Reviewed by Sheila Culbert (Dartmouth College)
Published on H-CivWar (January, 2005)
A Civil War Spy and His Post-War Intrigues

Charles Dunham was one of the more unpleasant characters during the American Civil War. Carman Cumming, in his book Devil's Game: The Civil War Intrigues of Charles A. Dunham, describes Dunham as an "astonishingly clever and prolific fraud," and as an "enormously inventive, imaginative, daring scoundrel" (pp. 8-9). He was without a doubt a fraud, although the use of terms such as clever, inventive, imaginative, and scoundrel suggest more romance and derring-do than is probably warranted. Dunham was a man with few scruples who invariably acted in his own interest no matter whose life he endangered or ruined. Cumming's book provides the first attempt to fully flesh out this man who played a minor, but important, role in the war and a much more important function in the immediate post-war period.

Cumming explores Dunham's civil war career from his early attempts at spying to the role that he played following the war in the trials of Lincoln's assassins. During the war, Dunham assumed numerous identities including that of "Colonel" James Watson Wallace, "Colonel" George Margrave, and, his most famous, Sandford Conover. He traveled from the Union to Virginia on several occasions as well as to Vermont and Canada making contact with officials on both the Union and Confederate sides as he collected information on troop movements and strategic plans. At one point he suggested to Lincoln a ploy to capture Jefferson Davis. Still later in the war he wrote articles for the New York Tribune, Herald, and World newspapers. Cumming provides much new information on Confederate efforts in Canada and Dunning's involvement in them.

Dunham was an adept liar, and consequently the modern historian has a great deal of difficulty discerning what in his life was true and what sources are reliable. His writings, while often compelling in the amount of detail they provided on southern life and the Confederacy, were ultimately, according to Cumming, "thoroughly unreliable" (p. 80), and he himself was "a model of cynical exploitation" (p. 123). Notoriously slippery, Dunham worked hard to cover his tracks and to mislead his associates as well as his later biographers. Cumming nonetheless manages to unravel many of Dunham's different identities and effectively demonstrates the part he played in producing northern propaganda about the situation in the south. He explores Dunham's exploits with a thoroughness and persistence that is admirable.

Unfortunately, for all Cumming's hard work, much remains mysterious including Dunham's true allegiance to either the Confederacy or the Union and his personal motivations for his actions. While Cumming makes some informed guesses on these issues--he suggests that he worked for the Union--he does so only occasionally, choosing instead to lay out in intricate and sometimes confusing detail all of Dunham's various dealings. The uninitiated reader needs to pay careful attention in order to wade through the morass of Dunham's intrigues.

It is in his postwar activities that Dunham's life takes on a broader significance for historians. At the end of the war, Joseph Holt, Judge Advocate of the United States and head of the Bureau of Military Justice, used Dunham as his star witness against George Atzerodt, Mary Surratt, and the others accused in the Lincoln assassination conspiracy, which resulted in the executions of four of them. Dunham also provided critical testimony in the ultimately unsuccessful attempt to link Jefferson Davis to the assassination. When Dunham's own perjury came to light, he was tried and ultimately convicted in a trial that Cumming aptly describes as edging into "an Alice-in-Wonderland world" (p. 204). Dunham's activities did not, however, end with his conviction. In an attempt to win his freedom, Dunham first attempted to implicate President Andrew Johnson in the conspiracy and when that failed turned against Holt and Secretary of War Edwin Stanton to suggest that they had deliberately encouraged false testimony for their own political ends.

If it were not for his role at the end of the war, Dunham could be dismissed as a minor player who, for all his madcap schemes, had little impact on the overall direction of the war. The most interesting questions involving Dunham surround the assassin trials, and Holt and Stanton's willingness to use him in their quest to avenge Lincoln's death and to implicate Jefferson Davis in the conspiracy, even after they knew Dunham had fabricated much of his testimony. The events following Lincoln's assassination, including the resulting trials, demonstrate all of the passions, rivalries, and stakes at play within the federal government at that critical juncture in time. Cumming sets out in great detail the day-by-day progression of the trials, including Dunham's own, in fascinating detail. But the reader is left always wanting more and is frustrated at the impossibility of really understanding this man and the motivations for his actions. For a broader view of the Lincoln's trials that provides an impressive complement to Cumming's book, readers should also consult Elizabeth Leonard's recent work Lincoln's Avengers: Justice, Revenge and Reunion after the Civil War (2004).

If the forest sometimes gets lost amid the trees, Devil's Game nonetheless provides new insights on spying during the war and is a useful addition to the literature on the complex political maneuverings in Washington at the end of the war.

If there is additional discussion of this review, you may access it through the list discussion logs at: http://h-net.msu.edu/cgi-bin/logbrowse.pl.

Citation: Sheila Culbert. Review of Cumming, Carman, Devil's Game: The Civil War Intrigues of Charles A. Dunham. H-CivWar, H-Net Reviews. January, 2005.
URL: http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=10166

Copyright © 2005 by H-Net, all rights reserved. H-Net permits the redistribution and reprinting of this work for nonprofit, educational purposes, with full and accurate attribution to the author, web location, date of publication, originating list, and H-Net: Humanities & Social Sciences Online. For any other proposed use, contact the Reviews editorial staff at hbooks@mail.h-net.msu.edu.

Also take note of the recommended book, Lincoln's Avengers by Dr. Elizabeth Leonard, who is also the biographer of Joseph Holt (and an excellent CW historian who has spoken several times for the Surratt conference).

[Gene C]

Steven, you mentioned a blog back in post #34 & #38, but I can't find where you might have mentioned the address.
Do you care to share it with us?

[Eva Elisabeth]

Gene, please go here and scroll down: https://www.smashwords.com/profile/view/stevenhager420

[Thomas Thorne]

The idea of Lincoln being killed by members of his cabinet is dependent on a historical fate that few Americans could have foreseen in 1865. Who could believe that AL would come to be venerated by Americans of different political persuasions for different reasons.? Nationalists idolized the Savior of the Union. African Americans worshiped the memory of the Great Emancipator. Southerners of unabashed Confederate sympathies such as D W Griffith idolized the Man of Mercy.

David Donald in his famous article "Getting right with Lincoln" showed to what degree future American political movements would go to claim Lincoln as their own by citing the Lincoln-Lenin Day banquets held by US Communists who suppressed the memory of A Lincoln,railroad attorney.

The idea of Lincoln being killed by members of his own party is impossible to believe if you have reservations about Lincoln being not only a "Man of Mercy" but one who was eager to betray the cause he led in giving the defeated South such a soft peace, that all Unionists had fought for would be lost.

This doesn't square with the man who led the Union thru 4 years of hard war and who never expressed distress over the ravages of Sheridan and Sherman.

I know people will bring up Lincoln's idea of executive reconstruction,the Wade Davis manifesto and Charles Sumner's silly ingratiating remarks to Andrew Johnson after the latter's accession to the presidency as proof of Republicans seething with bloodlust who if they didn't kill Lincoln, would have impeached him the next day.

How do we square this myth with the fact that in 1864 Abraham Lincoln became the first sitting President since 1840 to be nominated by his party at the next election.

The events of Lincoln's last cabinet meeting of 4/14/65, the day he was shot are often forgotten, which is itself proof of the absence of bitter feelings that are required for political elites to resort to violence against each other. Lincoln had granted permission for the Virginia Legislature to assemble in the hope they would remove Virginia troops from Confederate service. He changed his mind when confronted with opposition among the cabinet. Stanton withdrew his proposal that Virginia and North Carolina have the same officer be the military governor for both when his colleagues insisted that each state should have its own military governor.

People do not kill each other over such trivialities. We have no record that day of Stanton assaulting Lincoln by throwing a butter roll at him.
Tom

[Steven Hager]

My wordpress blog is easy to find, its title is Stevenhager420.

I don't know why Cumming has difficulty figuring Dunham's real employer, when correspondence discovered in his hotel room clearly indicates he was working for the War Department as a dirty tricks specialist, and no one disputes his role at the trial of bribing and bullying witnesses.

All this effort to whitewash the Radical Republicans as kind and gentle folk who never could have plotted against Lincoln sure seems like misplaced energy to me.

I fear Gene's recommendations cannot be trusted. He sends me off to Neff, a rabbit hole of immense construction and now he wants me to read a book praised by former NSA officials as the real story? Obviously, this forum is dominated by those who want to hold the line on the official story, which is sad in my opinion because the machinations and crimes committed to create that official story are obvious even to anyone who watches Robert Redford's The Conspirator.

It seems no one here has a single word regarding the spooks in Booth's conspiracy who weren't brought before the tribunal (and there were many), as well as nothing regarding the frequent mention of the "New York crowd" by Atzerodt when he was first interrogated.

Sorry to have disturbed you all, perhaps I will start my own Lincoln forum, one that does not attack honest researchers and send them down rabbit holes to nowhere.

[RJNorton]

(12-12-2014 05:54 AM)Steven Hager Wrote:  Sorry to have disturbed you all, perhaps I will start my own Lincoln forum, one that does not attack honest researchers and send them down rabbit holes to nowhere.

I am sorry you feel this way, Steve. I have the highest respect for every single one of the folks who has responded to you. Some of them I have known for almost 20 years. I get emotional and sad when I see the words you have for them.

Still, we wish you well in your future endeavors.

Goodbye and good luck, Steve.