Lincoln in the Telegraph Office on April 14, 1865

[wpbinzel]

(09-14-2016 05:12 AM)Anita Wrote:  I first read Bill's article in the Surratt Courier and recently saw the discussion here. Bill, thanks for an informative well researched article. I did some searching to try and corroborate the Bates story and only found more reasons to doubt its credibility.

Thanks, Anita. I (like most of you) have numerous books on my shelves that contain Bates' version of events. So much so that it never occurred to me to question the veracity of it. After all, it had been out in the public domain for more than 100 years and, as Anita points out, Bates seems otherwise to be a credible source. Consequently, I did not set out to "debunk" Bates' version, but rather to try to corroborate and explain it. The first thing that I noticed is that all of the sources that I reviewed that use Bates' version ultimately led back to Bates himself. And, when I looked closely at Bates' details, the story seemed very tenuous at best. I could not find support for the details in his version of events in any other source. While I looked at sources beyond those cited in the article (it seemed to me that a long and extensive list of sources to prove the negative would be tedious reading), there are hundreds (probably thousands) of other sources that I have not seen. If there is credible support for Bates' story, I certainly will stand corrected and long live the legend! In the meantime, I am very appreciative that Anita and others have taken the time to do some research on this topic as well.

Isn't it amazing that after 150+ years and millions (billions?) of written words, we are still scratching our heads and trying to determine what really happened?