I. Lincoln's Odd Dream
Quote:"I arrived at the East Room, which I entered. There I met with a sickening surprise. Before me was a catafalque, on which rested a corpse wrapped in funeral vestiments. Around it were stationed soldiers who were acting as guards; and there was a throng of people, some gazing mournfully upon the corpse, whose face was covered, others weeping pitifully. ‘Who is dead in the White House?’ I demanded of one of the soldiers. ‘The President.’ was his answer; ‘he was killed by an assassin!’"
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Mary Todd said the story was “horrid” and wished she had never asked to hear about the dream. Lamon said that, as Lincoln spoke, he was pale, “grave and gloomy.” But, when the President awoke on the morning of April 14, 1865 he had slept quite well. He had no concerns regarding reconstruction and no bad dreams. Instead, he had a dream that he had frequently had on the eve of good news. He had the same dream prior to Union victories at Antietan, Gettysburg and Vicksburg. So, when he awoke from the dream in which he was on a ship moving quickly toward a distant shore, he surmised that the day must be filled with good news. After all, it was Good Friday. However, I wonder if he recalled that “Good Friday” gained the moniker because it was the date that commemorates the death of Jesus of Nazareth.
[At Ford's theatre...] The presidential party had but one body guard. John Frederick Parker was assigned to guard the door. He was there when the president arrived around 9PM but he disappeared following the intermission. It is thought that he joined some other men in the saloon and then found a seat to see the play. Incredibly, Lincoln’s missing body guard remained on the security staff after the events at Ford’s Theatre.
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It is said that [Booth] shouted out, “Sic Semprer Tyrannus” which means “death to tyrants” in Latin. ... Booth had been a famous actor, well known across the nation.
The dream is curious. Maybe it suggests a paranormal premonition, or else maybe Lincoln had information on the real plot?
Notice here the story of his guard Parker disappearing for no reason. Coincidence?
Also, note the words spoken by Booth. They were from the play Julius Caesar, in which Booth had played Brutus. The theme with Brutus is that he was an associate of Caesar who turned into a traitor. Maybe something similar happened with Booth who spoke those lines for a reason, or else with the plot itself?
Quote:Booth stepped close to Lincoln and fired a single shot from a small Derringer pistol into the president's head. Rathbone jumped up and struggled briefly with Booth, who slashed him with a knife and then jumped dramatically from the box to the stage... Instead of fleeing, Booth, ever the limelight-seeking actor, could not resist a grandstand play. As the audience erupted in panic, he raised the bloody knife and shouted: Sic Semper Tyrannis! ( Thus shall it be for tyrants! )
This scene is interesting because the holding of the knife brings to mind the scene in Shakespeare's Caesar. To perform the killing during a play suggests a possible propaganda attempt.
II. A few theories
Quote:
His Vice President Took Him Out
For the 1864 election, Lincoln replaced Vice President Hannibal Hamlin with Johnson, seeking to attract southern support - and as the theory goes, this gave Johnson the opportunity to contract the killing out to Booth. In fact, the day of the shooting, Booth first went to see Johnson at the Vice President's house. He wasn't home, so Booth left him a calling card.
... the theory did have one high-profile proponent: Mary Todd Lincoln. The President's widow reportedly detested Johnson, seeing him as a repugnant drunk. She wrote to a friend in 1868 revealing that she believed Johnson was involved in the killing: "...that, that miserable inebriate Johnson, had cognizance of my husband's death - Why, was that card of Booth's, found in his box, some acquaintance certainly existed - I have been deeply impressed, with the harrowing thought, that he, had an understanding with the conspirators & they knew their man... As sure, as you & I live, Johnson, had some hand, in all this..."
Lincoln's Own Secretary of War
the idea that Stanton was the head of a massive coup that drew in a number of senators, representatives, and powerful bankers.
Confederate Secretary of State Judah Benjamin Ordered the Killing
Judah Benjamin has been linked to the assassination of President Lincoln through conspirator (and Confederate agent) John Surratt. In his guise as Secretary of State, Benjamin supervised the Confederate Secret Service, and was confirmed to have met with Surratt in Richmond two weeks before the killing. He also funded other operations Surratt might have been involved with.
...he fled for England. He became a celebrated lawyer in London, and never returned to the US.
http://www.ranker.com/list/lincoln-assas...rothschild
One theory goes that Lincoln was killed by opponents who did not want to see the price of cotton go down:
Quote:because of the Union blockade, the price of cotton had risen dramatically, and cotton speculators were reaping the profits. Lincoln himself, seeing the Union need for Southern cotton, had allowed the purchase of cotton in exchange for greenbacks and meat. ... Bankers, financiers, businessmen, cotton speculators, and profiteers all benefited from the cotton trade, but they feared the good times would end as the war was drawing down. The center for the illicit activity was the Demill & Co. at 178 1/2 Water Street in New York. Even Lafayette Baker [who investigated the assasination ]and some Confederates may have had ties to this address.
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At the conspiracy trial following Lincoln's assassination, Samuel Chester, a friend of Booth's, testified Booth told him "there were from fifty to one hundred persons engaged in the conspiracy."
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the cotton speculators feared an end to their big profits. Cotton traders saw the price of $1.41 per pound in November 1864 fall to $.85 by February and below $.40 by early April. Disaffection grew
http://rogerjnorton.com/Lincoln74.html
Sure, I see how the war drove cotton prices up. But it's strange to think that killing Lincoln was going to keep them high, since Lee had already surrendered by the time of the assassination.
Another focuses on banking:
Quote:A third conspiracy theory blames powerful international bankers, with Booth simply being the hired gun. This theory believes that Lincoln had been offered large sums of money in the form of loans, to offset the costs of conducting the war. Lincoln supposedly turned to other sources, alienating the bankers. He further turned them against him with his generous Reconstruction plans which would have allowed the South to resume an agricultural way of life. The bankers, the theory says, preferred a harder policy toward the South which would have produced higher prices on several commodities, bringing the bankers huge profits. Subscribers to this theory believe the bankers saw Lincoln as a threat to their speculative ways, and needed him out of the picture.
http://www.angelfire.com/my/abrahamlinco...iracy.html
Other theories could involve A. Pike and the masons, while another theory involves a group called the Knights of the Golden Circle.
III. Was Lafayette Baker who investigated the assassination poisoned by someone in the War Department?
Quote:... from September 12, 1862 to November 7, 1863, Baker took charge of the Union Intelligence Service from the Scottish-American detective Allan Pinkerton....
Baker was recalled to Washington after the assassination of President Lincoln in 1865. Within two days of his arrival in Washington, Baker's agents in Maryland had made four arrests and had the names of two more conspirators, including the actual presidential assassin John Wilkes Booth.
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Baker owed his appointment largely to Secretary of War Edwin M. Stanton, but suspected the secretary of corruption and was eventually demoted for tapping his telegraph lines and packed off to New York.
The following year, Baker was sacked from his position as government spymaster. President Johnson accused him of spying on him, a charge Baker admitted in his book which he published in response. He also announced that he had had Booth's diary in his possession which was being suppressed by the Department of War and Secretary Stanton. When the diary was eventually produced, Baker claimed that eighteen vital pages were missing. It was suggested by Otto Eisenschiml in his book, "Why Was Lincoln Murdered?," that these would implicate Stanton in the assassination. ...
On July 3, 1868, Baker retired to home complaining of soreness from a gun wound during a hunting trip. He had been out drinking with Wally Pollack, his brother-in-law, and came home feeling sick, passing away later that night, reportedly from meningitis.
As it was scarcely eighteen months after his explosive allegations, Lincoln conspiracists have suggested he was killed by the War Department to silence him. [7] Using an atomic absorption spectrophotometer to analyze several hairs from Baker's head, Ray A. Neff, a professor at Indiana State University, determined that Baker 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. The Lincoln Conspiracy by Balsiger and Sellier in 1977 cites a diary Baker's wife kept which chronicled several dates Pollack brought Baker beer; they correspond to the gradually elevated levels of toxin in the Baker hair samples Neff studied. Wally worked for the War Department, though whether he acted on orders or alone has yet to be determined.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lafayette_C._Baker
Quote:
Baker once unearthed widespread corruption within the Treasury Department. While there was undoubted criminal activity, some felt that the only reason it came to light was because Baker didn't get a cut.
Eventually, LaFayette Baker had a disagreement with his boss, Secretary Stanton, and was demoted to a lower investigative position. Some believe the disagreement stemmed from Stanton's belief that Baker was tapping the telegraph lines leading to Stanton's office.
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In 1866, President Johnson removed LaFayette Baker from office, because he was spying on the White House. Baker soon published a book in which he admitted to spying on the President, but claimed he was doing so under orders from Secretary Stanton.
The most interesting thing to come from his book, however, was the fact that his men had taken a diary (which Baker had then given to Secretary Stanton) from the body of John Wilkes Booth. Somehow, this diary was not part of the evidence presented during the trials of Booth's supposed fellow conspirators. Since there was some concern about the validity of those trials, especially the execution of Mary Surratt, the possible suppression of evidence in the case was a big deal. The War Department soon produced the diary which did not seem to contain anything too important, but Baker claimed that pages had been removed from the diary since he had handed it over.
In 1868, LaFayette Baker died. The official cause of death was meningitis. ... In the 1960s, Professor Ray Neff, from Indiana State University, performed tests on Baker's remains, and claimed that his actual cause of death was arsenic poisoning.
This claim, combined with Baker's assertion that pages had been removed from the Booth diary, lead many to believe that Secretary Stanton was trying to cover up some involvement in Lincoln's assassination.
http://www.americancivilwarstory.com/laf...baker.html
One question I would raise here is whether Neff's testing for poisoning was reliable or could be confirmed.
Another article suggests that Baker's investigation into the assassination was able to quickly uncover its details for reasons that have not been explained well enough:
Quote: Before Lincoln had been shot, Baker embarrassingly admitted later, he and Stanton had no knowledge of the conspiracy. Yet, within two days, all of the conspirators were in custody. Somehow, Baker knew exactly where he could find the alcoholic George A. Atzerodt whose nerve had failed him when it came time to kill Vice President Andrew Johnson. Somehow, he knew that Seward's would-be assassin, Lewis Paine, could be found in the Washington, D.C., boarding house of Mary Surratt, hiding under a bed in a third-floor room.
Somehow, the illustrious Colonel Baker knew to arrest Edward Spangler, the carpenter at Ford's Theater who had made a portable barrier for Booth so he could successfully bar the inside of the door that led to Lincoln's box once the assassin had entered this restricted but unguarded hallway. Somehow, Baker's keen but unexplained perceptions deduced that Spangler had also drilled a hole in the door leading to Lincoln's box so Booth, while standing in the outer hallway could peer into it unmolested and know when the President was most vulnerable.
The very man who was responsible for protecting the life of the President had, twenty-four hours before the assassination, no idea of the identities of the conspirators. But then suddenly, inexplicably, almost magically, Lafayette Baker possessed all the answers within forty-eight hours, including the exact obscure escape route taken by John Wilkes Booth and David Herold.
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[Later] Baker's star faded as did his sanity, or so it appeared. He barricaded himself inside his home and told his few friends that a secret cabal was intent on murdering him. In 1868, Baker was found dead. It was concluded that he was either poisoned to death or had committed suicide. He had left cryptic notes that pointed to a high-level conspiracy to murder Lincoln —one going far beyond that involving John Wilkes Booth.
http://www.civilwarsignals.org/pages/spy...baker.html
The above article talks a lot more about curiosities involving Baker and the assassination.
IV. If Stanton was involved, why would he wish for Lincoln's death?
This is something that is difficult for me to explain. One claim has been that Stanton was a "radical republican" and abolitionist and wanted Lincoln to punish the South more. But Lincoln had already made the Emancipation Proclamation, and his successor, Andrew Johnson, was rather moderate in dealings with the South.
It sounds like Stanton was sincerely sad about Lincoln's death:
Quote:The most powerful man in Lincoln's cabinet, Secretary of War Edwin Stanton, who had sobbed uncontrollably by the bedside of the dead president, authorized barbaric treatment of those he considered guilty, even before they were charged, and months before verdicts came down from a specially constituted military commission.
http://www.usnews.com/opinion/articles/2...-vengeance
On the other hand, the treatment of the prisoners and the military tribunal's usage instead of a civil court has suggested to some critics that Stanton was trying to control the verdict and the information about what really happened. This is because a military trial would be under Stanton's control as Secretary of War.
Another webpage suggests that Stanton was mentally ill and therefore would do something like this:
Quote:The man didn't actually come across as being perfectly sane. ... In 1841, when his young daughter died, he became so grieved, he had her coffin dug up and placed in his bedroom where he kept it for two years.
http://trrcobb.blogspot.com/2013/03/edwi...ncoln.html
Alex McMullen in an article called Historical Methods tries to debunk a theory by a researcher named Eisenschiml that Stanton was involved. This part of McMullen's essay seems to actually tend to support Eisenschiml's theory, because it does mean that "Grant was following orders" by Stanton not to go to the theatre:
Quote:(([A secretary of Stanton] was interviewed 42 years after the event, so it is questionable how well [this secretary] actually recollected this event. Second, the author had twisted what the secretary, named David Bates, really said. The facts reveal that Stanton knew about a potential threat to the president, and feared for the President’s safety. He wanted to dissuade Lincoln from going by having Grant cancel. Grant was just following orders. ))
https://conspiracysleuths.wordpress.com/...cy-theory/
If Stanton knew of a threat to Lincoln, why hasn't this been discussed more widely?
Why weren't more steps taken to protect Lincoln that night if a threat was known by Stanton?
This part also tends to support the theory by Eisenschiml:
Quote:((Stanton was upset by this, and was set on trying to dissuade him from going by giving him Parker and not Eckert for protection... So while it appears at first glance that Stanton made a few curious decisions, there are reasonable explanations for them. ))
https://conspiracysleuths.wordpress.com/...cy-theory/
If you suspect a threat to the president and want to dissuade him from going, denying him a good body guard and replacing him with a negligent one is not "reasonable". Imagine if Obama wanted to visit Panama and the Services didn't want him to for safety reasons. Is it reasonable at all to think that they would pick the worst, most irreputable agents to protect him? No.
On the other hand, McMullen claims that Stanton had warned Lincoln from going to Ford's Theatre. And if that's true, it suggests that Stanton did want to avoid Lincoln's death.
Some more facts:
Quote:Stanton and Lincoln also socialized, they occupied adjoining cottages at the Soldiers' Home on the outskirts of Washington. Stanton and his children interacted with the president here. When Stanton was told by Surgeon General Barnes that "He (Lincoln) cannot recover", he sat by Lincoln's bed and burst into "loud, convulsive sobs." After Lincoln's death, Robert Todd Lincoln spoke of how kind Stanton had been to the Lincoln family.
~fstroupe
Stanton sent Ward Lamon, Lincoln's body guard, down to Richmond to "supervise" that city's occupation. Lamon wasn't a bureaucrat. He wondered why he was being ordered by Stanton to go.
~ ClintJohnson
http://www.americancivilwarforum.com/sta...12016.html
One website claims as a motive
Quote:the removal of Abraham Lincoln's restraining influence at a time when Congress was not in session
had cleared the way for a military dictatorship headed by
Secretary of War Stanton.
http://www.beyondweird.com/conspiracies/riddle_p.html
Stanton died at 55 in 1869, officially of asthma, 5 days after appointment to the Supreme Court.
So in conclusion, one can see how Stanton could be connected to a conspieacy to kill Lincoln or cover it up, but it still leaves me with uncertainty what his motives would be. I don't see close personal connections here between him and special interest groups with motives to take out Lincoln, although it doesn't mean they don't exist.