April 14, 1865: Did Radical Republicans Assassinate Abraham Lincoln?

Crying "Sic Semper Tyrannis!" ("Thus Always to Tyrants!"), the eminent tragedian J. Wilkes Booth shot and mortally wounded U.S. President Abraham Lincoln on the evening of Friday 14 April 1865, as Lincoln and his wife were attending the play "Our American Cousin" at Ford's Theatre in Washington, D.C.

Many books and films have been based on the tragic event. 

In 1977, David W. Balsiger and Charles E. Sellier, Jr., published The Lincoln Conspiracy, a book that explored "secrets kept hidden for 100 years" and "shocking new evidence" revealing why President Lincoln was killed. 

Using missing pages from a coded diary kept by John Wilkes Booth, Balsiger and Sellier traced a high-level conspiracy to the doorsteps of Secretary of War Edwin M. Stanton, Union spymaster Lafayette C. Baker, and some Radical Republican allies who wanted Lincoln dead because he stood in the way of their harsh and greedy plans for Reconstruction in the South.

The Booth Diary, which is now on display at Ford's Theatre, first fell into the hands of Lafayette C. Baker.  When Baker was dismissed by Stanton in 1866, he published a tell-all book in which he stated that he had at one time obtained the assassin's diary, which he then gave to Stanton, who never produced the diary at the conspiracy trial. 

President Andrew Johnson tried to have Secretary of War Stanton removed from office.  Instead, Johnson suddenly found himself impeached by Stanton's Radical Republican friends.  In the course of impeachment proceedings before the House Judiciary Committee in February 1867, Johnson demanded that the War Department produce Booth's diary, and upon inspection Lafayette Baker told the Judiciary committee that 18 pages were missing.  He suggested that the missing pages would implicate Stanton in the assassination of Lincoln.

Above: An image of spymaster Lafayette C. Baker from Wikimedia Commons.  Baker obtained the diary of assassin John Wilkes Booth.  When he later reported that 18 pages were missing, he was poisoned with arsenic.

Only 18 months after his revelation to the Judiciary Committee, Baker was dead.  Officially he died of a sudden onset of meningitis. But Wikipedia tells us that "Using an atomic absorption spectrophotometer to analyze several hairs from Baker's head, Ray A. Neff, a professor at Indiana State University, determined the man was killed by arsenic poisoning rather than meningitis. Baker had been unwittingly consuming the poison for months, mixed into imported beer provided by his wife's brother Wally Pollack."

Wally Pollack worked for the War Department.  In other words, Edwin Stanton was his boss. 

Johnson managed to stay in office by only one vote. Stanton resigned and returned to the practice of law. He died in 1869.

Conspiracy theories surrounding the Lincoln assassination continued to pop up during the next one hundred years.  In 1922-23, the FBI investigated claims that Booth had not committed suicide, but had survived and lived for many years after the assassination.  They also analyzed Booth's diary in 1977 for any secret writing or invisible inks. The FBI file on Booth may be found here.

To this day, there are many people who still defend Edwin Stanton.  See for example "The Vindication of Edwin Stanton," an article by "The Association for Rational Thought."

Some of the more modern conspiracy theories center on a secret society called the Knights of the Golden Circle, a theme that director Jon Turteltaub took up in his 2007 film National Treasure 2: The Book of Secrets.  The opening of the film gives a very dramatic representation of the Lincoln assassination. The film then flashes forward to a modern day research conference, where the film's hero, historian Ben Gates (played by Nicholas Cage) discovers to his surprise that he is the great-great grandson of one of the Knights, Thomas Gates, who is accused of being the architect of the assassination.  To clear his family name, Ben obtains the missing pages from Booth's diary and finds there some clues to a hidden treasure.

Above: Mary Surratt. Right: Surratt's boarding house, ca. 1890 (from the Matthew Brady Collection).

More recently, director Robert Redford's movie The Conspirator (released on April 15, 2011) tells the little-known Civil War story of Mary Surratt, a southern woman who ran a boarding house where Booth and his fellow conspirators met.

Surratt was accused of participating in the conspiracy to kill Lincoln, convicted, and hanged on July 7, 1865. Many consider her to be the first woman ever executed by the United States federal government, and some believe that she was railroaded  in what amounts to an act of judicial murder by an extremely prejudiced military tribunal. 

The military tribunal that convicted and hanged Surratt and her co-conspirators was, not surprisingly, under the direct control of Secretary of War Edwin M. Stanton (played by Kevin Kline), the man whom many now believe to be the true mastermind of the Lincoln assassination.

Redford's film places its focus on the troubled relationship between Mary Surratt (played by Robin Wright Penn) and her court-appointed attorney Frederick Aiken (played James McEvoy). While the jury is still out on the guilt of Mrs. Surratt, almost all modern historians would agree with the subtitle of Redford's film: 

"One Bullet Killed the President.  But Not One Man."