The Lincoln Legends - Part Two: A Conspiracy, Simple or Grand

Unlike some other famous presidential assassinations, there is generally no doubt of the identity of Abraham Lincoln’s assassin. He was seen by an entire theater full of witnesses in his leap to the stage, and he was a very famous actor from a family full of famous actors. Both his father and his brothers were famed tragedians, travelling stage actors who performed Shakespeare, and Booth was famous enough to be recognizable. His motivation for the murder of Lincoln is also apparent and typically unquestioned. While others in his family, such as his brother Edwin, supported the Union cause and refused to perform in the South, John was vocal in his opposition to the abolitionist cause and his support of the Confederacy. He felt so strongly about it, in fact, that he became more and more active in political agitation. When he heard that the notorious abolitionist John Brown was being executed, he donned a militia uniform and snuck in to watch him hang and to help repel any potential rescue attempt. After the abolitionist Lincoln’s election to the presidency, which was viewed as a provocation by many southerners as well as northern supporters of the southern cause, called Copperheads, he wrote a long speech defending the institution of slavery, though he never found a good occasion for delivering it. In 1861, when Southern states seceded from the Union, John Wilkes Booth was putting on a stage production in Albany, New York, and his public remarks about the heroism of Confederates drew the ire of locals, who called his statements “treasonable” and suggested he ought to be banned from the stage for them. So much for “canceling” being a new phenomenon. Free speech has always been accompanied by the risk of blowback when you make asinine or repugnant public statements. Booth had apparently promised his mother that he would not enlist as a soldier, but more and more he felt that he had to take some definite and critical action in support of the Confederate cause—which was very clearly just the cause of slavery and white supremacy, that being what Booth wanted so desperately to fight for. He wrote to his mother, “I have begun to deem myself a coward and to despise my own existence,” and when, in 1864, the Confederacy was fighting a losing war and Lincoln’s re-election seemed a foregone conclusion, he finally decided to take action. At first, he plotted to abduct the President from his cottage at Soldier’s Home to put him into the hands of Confederate generals, who Booth imagined could then hold him hostage to force the North to recognize Confederate statehood and sovereignty and bring the war to an end. He began stalking Lincoln, attending his second inauguration and lying in wait for him near Soldier’s Home, on the stretch of road where someone had once taken a shot at the President. He never had good opportunity to kidnap Lincoln, as he had planned, but after standing on the White House lawn and listening to the President talk about granting voting rights to emancipated Black citizens and the very next day hearing about the surrender at Appomattox, he finally resolved to murder Lincoln. Recounting these facts about John Wilkes Booth’s path to becoming an assassin like this makes him sound like he very well could have been a lone gunman. That, however, is certainly not the case. Though all anyone saw in Ford’s Theatre was Booth firing his weapon at Lincoln, leaping to the stage, and limping away, the truth is that he was a part of a larger conspiracy. When he concocted his plan to kidnap Lincoln, he enlisted the help of two like-minded friends, Michael O’Laughlen and Samuel Arnold, and they met and discussed the plot with a growing network of Confederate sympathizers. When the kidnapping plot never came off and his initial accomplices lost confidence in the undertaking, others took their place. One, David Herold, a pharmacist’s assistant in Maryland, was with Booth in Washington when he resolved to kill Lincoln, was there when Booth rode his horse back into Maryland after the deed was done, accompanied Booth on his two-week flight from authorities, and was with him in the Virginia tobacco barn where troops finally caught up to the assassin. Herold surrendered, but Booth did not and was shot in the neck. We know the extent of the conspiracy to kill Lincoln because, except for Booth, those involved were arrested and witnesses testified to their activities before a military tribunal. But immediately after Lincoln’s assassination, and throughout the prosecution of these conspirators, and during all the 16 decades that have passed since his death, many have wondered whether there may have been others involved, just how big the conspiracy might have been, and who might have gotten away without justice being served. As is often the case in my examination and refutation of conspiracy theories, it’s not about whether or not people conspire. Obviously they do. Rather, it’s about how feasible a massive conspiracy might be.

I have more than once had conspiracy-minded listeners and even friends of mine challenge me on my view of conspiracist thought. Typically their most emphasized rebuttal is that conspiracies do happen, and yes, of course they do. No conspiracy skeptic would reasonably claim that no one has ever conspired before. I have had a friend point to the Gulf of Tonkin incident, in which the NSA provided distorted intelligence reports to fabricate an attack that did not occur in order to influence policymakers. It was an incident in the lead-up to the Vietnam War very similar to the false claims of WMDs that served as a pretext for the 2003 invasion of Iraq. Surely more than one NSA official was party to the skewing of intelligence about the Gulf of Tonkin incident, and though we might view this more as disinformation or propaganda, or just the everyday business of the intelligence community, I can see this as a clear example of a real conspiracy. The thing is, it was not a massive conspiracy involving untold numbers of people. The press who repeated the false information and the policymakers who acted on it were not clearly in on it. And eventually it was exposed with clear and definite proof. Within only a couple years, whistleblowers came forward suggesting the attack did not occur and false information had been provided to Congress. Within forty years, investigative journalists had cast enough doubt on the incident that the NSA finally declassified a report that revealed once and for all what they’d done. So to my mind, incidents like these just provide further evidence that only small scale conspiracies are feasibly realistic, because there will always be a whistleblower, and real conspiracies of any scale are inevitably exposed. And that is certainly the case, it seems, with the conspiracy to murder Abraham Lincoln. In the weeks following Lincoln’s murder, the conspiracy to kill him was exposed through urgent investigation, and it was revealed to be a small-scale conspiracy of disaffected Northern Copperheads, some of whom were acting as Confederate agents. Other than the pharmacist’s assistant, David Herold, there was a Prussian carriage repairman, George Atzerodt, and a deserter from the Confederate infantry, Lewis Powell, who had fallen in with some Confederate spies in the North. One such Confederate, John Surrat, had come into John Wilkes Booth’s orbit while he was making the rounds among Confederate sympathizers in the North, talking about kidnapping the president. After Booth had convinced his original accomplices, Arnold and O’Laughlen, to lie in wait for Lincoln on the road to Soldier’s Home and their quarry never appeared, those conspirators lost interest in the plot, but Booth remained determined. The Confederate spy John Surrat then introduced Booth to the others, to Herold, Powell, and Atzerodt. They became his new co-conspirators, and they met in the boarding house run by John Surrat’s mother, Mary Surrat. This was when Booth’s plan transformed from kidnapping Lincoln and delivering him to the South into an assassination plot. Nor was killing Lincoln their sole objective. They intended to strike a decisive blow against the Union by murdering not only Lincoln, but also those who might replace him, to cut the head off the federal government by assassinating the top three officials in its Executive Branch.

A depiction of the attempt on the life of William Seward, Secretary of State.

On the same day that Booth killed Lincoln, George Atzerodt was tasked with murdering the Vice President, Andrew Johnson, and both David Herold and Lewis Powell set out to kill Secretary of State William Seward. If the intention was to eliminate the next two men in the presidential line of succession, an error had been made, for at the time, third in line was not the Secretary of State, but rather the head of the Senate, which would have meant that a little-known Connecticut senator named Lafayette Foster would have been installed as acting president if both the President and Vice-President had been killed. It may be that Booth and his co-conspirators believed Seward would eventually have been appointed the new president by special election, or it might very well be that they didn’t know that much about government or hadn’t given it that much thought, just wanting to take out Lincoln and his two chiefest lieutenants. As it turned out, however, no attempt would even be made on Vice-President Johnson’s life. George Atzerodt, the Prussian repairman assigned to do the deed, rented a room above Johnson’s at the Kirkwood House hotel. In his room were a loaded pistol and a bowie knife. He went down to the bar to gather his courage with a few drinks, but in the end, he just left the hotel without trying anything. In contrast, David Herold and Lewis Powell did not shrink from their grisly task. They rode to William Seward’s home, where the Secretary of State was in bed recovering from a carriage accident nine days earlier. Herold stayed outside to hold the horses, while Powell, wearing a false mustache, went to the door and claimed to be carrying medicine that he had to deliver in person. Inside, on the stairs, he was stopped by the secretary’s son, and he pulled his pistol. When it misfired, Powell simply clubbed him with it and ran into the secretary’s room. Pushing Seward’s daughter aside, he leapt on the bed and stabbed the secretary five times with a bowie knife in the face and neck. A guard in the room threw Powell off the bed, and a struggle ensued, Powell holding the guard and another of the secretary’s sons at bay with his knife and eventually fleeing the house. At first, it appeared that Seward was dead, but then he became responsive. A jaw splint he wore because of his injuries in the carriage accident seemed to have deflected some of Powell’s strikes with the knife, saving the secretary’s life. Outside, Powell found that Herold had fled when he’d heard screams inside the house, leaving Powell’s horse behind. Powell, however, did not know his way around Washington. What happened to Powell over the next few days is somewhat uncertain. Some sources have it that his horse gave out on him, or that it threw him, and that he hid in a cemetery for days. He abandoned his overcoat, the false mustache in its pocket, because it was bloody and might help identify him, and he had lost his hat back at the scene of the crime, so he looked very suspicious, hatless in his shirtsleeves. He tore a sleeve from his undershirt to wear as a makeshift stocking cap and stole a pickaxe from a farm to disguise himself as a menial laborer. Eventually, on April 17th, days after the attacks on Lincoln and Seward, he made his way to Mary Surratt’s boarding house, only to find federal soldiers there, taking Mary into custody. Powell tried to claim he was an innocent laborer, but they arrested him as well. 

What led the federal troops to Surratt’s boarding house? The fact is that police had taken an interest in Surratt and her boarding house within only a few hours of the attacks, though we don’t know for certain why that is. We know that it took them almost no time at all to identify John Wilkes Booth. The owner of Ford’s Theatre knew the famous actor well, as did the theater’s propmaster, and one stagehand, and even the actor who’d been on stage when Booth leapt down from the Presidential box. It is entirely possible that authorities already had some idea that the Surratt house was a meeting place for Confederate sympathizers, since one of the lodgers there, Louis Weichmann, a longtime friend of Mary’s son John Surratt, was a clerk for the War Department and would go on to testify as to the goings on within the house. But even if Weichmann had not already tipped off authorities about the house, the fact is that investigators seem to have linked Booth to John Surratt within an hour of the assassination. Apparently, Surratt had a police file, in which Booth was listed as a known associate. This would explain why it was police and not federal agents who showed up to question Mary Surratt the night of the assassination, asking where her son and John Wilkes Booth might be. She lied to police, saying John Surratt had been out of the country for weeks. Two days later, having received further witness reports from neighbors and other lodgers at the house, it was federal soldiers who returned there to arrest Mary and whoever else might know something, including Powell, who chose the worst imaginable moment to return. Within a few more days, George Atzerodt, who had been hiding at his cousin’s house, was also apprehended. Then on April 26th, after 12 days on the run, Herold surrendered at the farm in Virginia where Booth was killed. Only John Surratt would escape capture at the time, fleeing to Canada and thereafter hiding in England and Italy until finally, on his way to hide in Egypt, he was caught. But unlike his other co-conspirators, John Surratt would receive a more traditional criminal court trial. His mother Mary, as well as Herold, Powell, Atzerodt, Booth’s early conspirators O’Laughlen and Arnold, a doctor named Samuel Mudd who had introduced Booth to John Surratt and a Ford’s Theatre stagehand named Edmund Spangler who had agreed to hold Booth’s horse during the assassination, were all tried by military tribunal. The reason for such a tribunal was that martial law was in effect in Washington, and the assassination had very early on been viewed as an act of war perpetrated by enemy combatants within the context of the Civil War. This decision was extremely controversial, and remains so. This is especially relevant today, since President Trump has more than once indicated that he wants to use military tribunals to try U.S. citizens, even calling for “televised military tribunals” to prosecute his political opponents, and one of his abominable Supreme Court appointments, Brett Kavanaugh, is known to have defended the lawfulness of military tribunals in Guantanamo Bay by citing the precedent of the Lincoln assassination trial’s military commission. There was no trial by jury for these defendants. Only a simple majority of the tribunal was needed to deliver a guilty verdict, and only two thirds for a death sentence. Every single defendant was convicted. Powell, Herold, Atzerodt, and Mary Surratt were all sentenced to hang for their parts in the conspiracy, despite the fact that only Powell had taken part in an attack. Certainly the rest of them were complicit in the conspiracy, the massive amount of witness testimony proved as much, but Atzerodt had actually had a change of heart, or at least a failure of courage. Perhaps most controversial was the hanging of Mary Surratt, who was the first woman ever executed in America. The evidence against her was circumstantial, mostly about her having been present when the conspirators were in her house and having engaged in private conversation with them. One witness claimed she had procured weapons for the conspirators, but the credibility of every witness was impugned by others. Powell wrote a statement claiming Mary was innocent, while Atzerodt implicated her as a major conspirator. In the end, calls for clemency were ignored and she was executed. Her son John, on the other hand, could not be tried by military tribunal because such a trial was declared unconstitutional the following year. He received a criminal trial by the Supreme Court of the District of Columbia, what is today the district court. Only a charge of murder could still be pursued because of the statute of limitations, and he denied involvement in the assassination plot. After two months and the endlessly conflicting testimony of 170 witnesses, Surratt could not be definitely placed in Washington during the assassination or proven beyond any doubt in the minds of all the jurors to have been a party to the plot. Eight jurors found him guilty, but four did not. Had it been a military tribunal, this would have been sufficient to issue his death warrant, but as it was a criminal trial, it concluded in a hung jury.

A depiction of the military trial of the conspirators.

In my recent patron exclusive, about the claims relating to Lincoln’s love life, I mentioned that the widowed Mary Todd, in her grief, came to believe Vice President Andrew Johnson, who had then become President Johnson, was behind the assassination in some way. Johnson was a Southerner, from Tennessee, and not a member of Lincoln’s party. He can hardly be said to have been a Confederate sympathizer, though. When Southern states seceded from the Union, their representatives resigned from Congress, but when Tennessee seceded, Johnson remained, and he was appointed the Military Governor of the state once Union forces reclaimed it. Lincoln chose him as Vice President in his 1864 campaign in order to appeal to Southerners and send a message of unity ahead of the impending restoration of seceded states to the Union. Indeed, Johnson wanted Confederate states to be restored swiftly, and he wanted to see most ex-rebels pardoned. These sentiments were shared by Lincoln, whose reconstruction plans included amnesty. So it was not so much Johnson’s politics that convinced Mary Todd Lincoln he was behind the assassination. Rather, it was a perceived personal slight and a baseless conspiracy theory that was then circulating. In a letter to a friend, Mary Todd complained that “No one ever heard of Johnson, regretting, my sainted husband's death, he never wrote me a line of condolence and behaved in the most brutal way.” So it seems she felt he was not supportive enough or effusive enough in his sympathies. But add to this the fact that a pamphlet, which she mentions in the same letter, was then being circulated, making claims about Johnson’s involvement in the conspiracy. The two main pieces of evidence Mary mentions in her letter, both of which seem likely suggested by the contents of the pamphlet she’d read, are that someone close to President Johnson had committed suicide, and that John Wilkes Booth had left Johnson a calling card on the day of the assassination. Both of these are true, but neither are very suspicious. Preston King, who had helped Johnson win the nomination, had committed suicide, jumping off a ferryboat into the New York Harbor with a sack full of bullets tied round his neck. There is no evidence whatsoever that it was related in any way to the assassination plot, and indeed, those who knew him were unsurprised, as he had struggled with mental health in the past. As one who knew him wrote, “In conversation with friends, after the annoyances of the day were over, he would get tranquilized and see that his troubles were imaginary rather than real; that his nervous system had given way, and that repose and proper treatment would restore him. But all this would be upset by the next day’s experience.” This sounds like textbook depression or the mood swings of someone struggling with bipolar disorder. But Mary dismissed this, claiming with no proof that, “having knowledge of this transaction,” meaning Johnson’s supposed involvement in the plot, Preston King, “naturally good hearted —he could not live. Talk of insanity, it was not so.” It is somewhat ironic that she so insistently dismissed King’s potential mental health issues in favor of a paranoid conspiracy theory since Mary Todd herself would eventually be institutionalized after attempting suicide. 

The other piece of “evidence” that Mary refers to in her letter was John Wilkes Booth’s calling card, left for Andrew Johnson at Kirkwood House on the day of Lincoln’s assassination. “Why as 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 and they, knew their man.” This card, like King’s suicide, was also real, and also was not that hard to explain. Booth himself went to the Kirkwood House hotel hours before murdering Lincoln, apparently to check up on Atzerodt. Not finding Atzerodt at the hotel and realizing that he had abandoned his task, Booth left the calling card for Johnson, which said simply, “Don’t wish to disturb you Are you at home? J. Wilkes Booth.” Historians differ on what Booth’s intentions were in leaving the card. Some suggest he may have been hoping to lure Johnson out in order to do the deed himself, while others suggest he was intentionally hoping to falsely implicate the Vice-President. Certain writers bent on suggesting Johnson did know Booth have pointed to a statement made by Johnson’s private secretary about having met Booth the year before the assassination at a theater in Nashville, Tennessee, to suggest the Vice-President had met him too. Sometimes they’ll even repeat unconfirmed rumors about Johnson and Booth having taken a pair of sisters as mistresses in Nashville, though these rumors only appeared during Johnson’s impeachment in dubious press attacks on him. The fact is that anyone could have left a calling card for the Vice-President at the hotel, where it was well known he lived, and Booth’s leaving the card does not prove an acquaintance, as Mary suspected. He may have just  been trying to ascertain whether the plot could still be carried through. In leaving his name with no introduction, he may have presumed the Vice-President would know him by name due to his fame as a stage actor. He certainly does not seem to have been much concerned about hiding his identity as the assassin. He wore no disguise when he committed the murder, and the way he addressed the audience when he jumped on stage indicates he wanted to be known as the killer. Indeed, he seems to have believed he would be lauded as a hero. “Our country owed all her troubles to him,” he wrote in his final diary entry, “and God simply made me the instrument of his punishment. I struck for my country and that alone. A country that groaned beneath this tyranny, and prayed for this end, and yet now behold the cold hands they extend to me.” With no intention of hiding his identity, the calling card he left for Johnson may very well have been a purposeful gesture. Maybe he wanted the Vice President to afterward know that he had been close to killing him as well. Most historians are convinced that Johnson was a target of the conspiracy himself, but if we believe George Atzerodt, who claimed the weapons in his room at Kirkwood were Herold’s, not his, that he knew nothing of a murder plot and that he was only at the hotel “to try and get papers to Richmond from Mr. Johnson,” that still does not prove any prior connection between the Vice President and the conspirators. To be sure, Atzerodt was probably trying to save his own skin with this story, and the plot itself doesn’t really make sense if he is to be believed (why kill Seward and not the VP?), but even if we were to accept this version of events, there remains no evidence of Johnson’s collusion in the plot. 

Booth’s calling card left at Kirkwood House for Andrew Johnson.

Nevertheless, Mary Todd seemed to be reaching for reasons to suspect Andrew Johnson’s involvement. For example, she wrote “Why is not Davis brought to trial?” concluding, “As sure as you and I live, Johnson, had some hand, In all this.” Here she is suggesting that not prosecuting Jefferson Davis, the former president of the Confederacy, for her husband’s murder meant Andrew Johnson was in on it, but Johnson can hardly be claimed to have gone easy on the South. He was dogged and merciless in his prosecution of the conspirators, denying clemency even to Mary Surratt. While some remember him today as a Southerner who was lenient toward rebels, in truth he was known for wanting to punish traitors, whether because he felt they deserved it or because Confederates considered him a traitor. “[T]reason is nothing but treason,” he once wrote, and while he did indeed want clemency for rank and file rebels, the everyday citizens of the South, as he said himself, “I want the leaders of the rebellion punished, and just penalties meted out to their treason. Treason must be made odious and traitors must be punished and impoverished.” In fact, according to one anonymous source, the night Lincoln was killed, he was heard pacing the floor and saying “they shall suffer for this” over and over. He is remembered today for leniency mostly because, when he rose to the presidency, he adopted Lincoln’s more lenient positions, which, along with his inability to compromise and his continual efforts to block protections for former slaves, actually led to his being impeached—the first president ever to be impeached. There are plenty of reasons to dislike Andrew Johnson, foremost of which being his inherent racism and consistent opposition to the establishment of equal rights before the law, but claims that he was secretly a Confederate or was protecting Confederates are just not accurate. The fact is that only ten days after the assassination, before Booth was ever even caught, Andrew Johnson signed a proclamation that asserted Jefferson Davis and other prominent Confederates had “incited, concerted and procured” the “atrocious murder” of Abraham Lincoln. And in the course of the military commission to try the assassination conspirators, he hoped that prosecutors might establish some connection between Davis and the plot, which never really happened. Davis was imprisoned and indicted for treason, but public opinion had turned against the trial of civilians by military tribunals. This meant that Davis would receive a jury trial, would not be tried for murder, and had a strong chance of convincing a jury that Southern secession had not been illegal. In the end, Johnson felt he had no choice but to release the Confederate president after only two years’ imprisonment. This only turned the Radical Republicans and others further against him, and in the year before his impeachment, an Assassination Committee was even formed to discern whether Johnson had been involved in the plot. They found nothing. Despite what Mary Todd and the Radicals thought, if Johnson had had his druthers, Davis would have swung. 

This speculation about Davis’s culpability in Lincoln’s death reveals another major conspiracy theory that appeared almost instantly when Lincoln was murdered. It was widely assumed that Confederate leaders had sponsored Lincoln’s assassination. Essentially this is the notion that the murder was a grand Confederate conspiracy, rather than a simple conspiracy among Confederate sympathizers. It is entirely understandable why this would be the public’s first thought in the midst of a war, when the rebels were finally defeated and saw no clear path to victory. One Union soldier described reaction to the news by saying, “We all became angry and hated the South worse than ever. Thought all the leaders should be condemned to death.” Much as today, when violence erupts and dominant political rhetoric is blamed, so too, in 1865, many newspapers blamed “the rebel press in the North and South,” suggesting “[t]hat press has, in the most devilish manner, urged men to the commission of this very deed.” When it was learned, very early on, that John Surratt was involved with John Wilkes Booth, the connection to the Confederacy seemed proven. Surratt was a Confederate agent in the North. Surely he had influenced Booth or even given him the idea. Certainly he had provided material help. However, as the weight of all subsequent testimony demonstrated, Surratt was little more than a courier, and he was no mastermind. The kidnapping plot had been Booth’s plan, and the murder plot, by all accounts, was a sudden and impromptu plan resolved upon again by Booth. As the conspiracy came into focus, during its exposure, Surratt was seen to be an encouraging presence and a right hand man. He found accomplices for Booth, and he also appears to have procured weapons and conveyances, but he never participated in the acts themselves. Nevertheless, at Johnson’s behest, the head of the tribunal, Judge Advocate General Joseph Holt, worked hard to prove some connection between Jefferson Davis and the conspirators. The best evidence came from three witnesses. James Merritt, who had been living among Southerners who had fled to Canada, claimed Southerners talked freely about the plot there. Richard Montgomery, a Union spy, claimed to have been told about the plot by his contacts. And Sandford Conover, a newspaper correspondent and self-promoter claimed he was close friends with all the Southern leaders and that they were all in on it. After their testimony, affidavits and letters poured in, suggesting all three of the men were liars and in several cases proving that their testimonies were false. Nevertheless, after the treason trial, when JAG Holt was still searching for more damning evidence on which to try Jefferson Davis, Conover convinced him that he could provide it. When Holt took the bait and gave Conover the money he requested, Conover provided the statements of numerous witnesses that he had interviewed himself. As pressure mounted to finally put Davis on trial, resulting in Congress turning against President Johnson, Holt sent a staff member to cross-examine these witnesses of Conover’s. While questioning one of them, he came clean, said that the whole testimony had been fabricated by Conover, that Conover had given him a false name and coached him on the story he was to tell. After that, with further investigation, it came out that all eight of Conover’s witnesses were frauds, and the case for a grand Confederate conspiracy fell apart, leading inevitably to Jefferson Davis’s release. 

An 1867 illustration from Harper’s Weekly of Jefferson Davis’s trial in Richmond, VA, shortly before a “nolle prosequi” entry was made, indicating the prosecutor’s decision not to prosecute.

Despite the previous evidence for a grand Confederate plot relying only on dubious hearsay and claims that turned out to be entirely fabricated, the theory has refused to go away. One later piece of evidence that tends to support the Confederate Grand Conspiracy narrative is that Booth’s escape route took him through Maryland and Virginia along the very same path that Confederate spies used for the smuggling of goods and people. This has been taken by proponents of the Grand Conspiracy as proof that he was in the employ of the Confederate Secret Service. However, that Booth was in contact with Confederate spies has never been in doubt. His collaboration with John Surratt was established even before the assassination, and as John Surratt was a courier for the Confederacy, he would have known of this route. The only thing that Booth’s use of this escape route shows is that Surratt likely helped him plan his escape. It’s only more evidence of Surratt’s involvement in the plot, not evidence that knowledge of it went to the top of the Confederate government. Another piece of evidence, which only resurfaced in 1977, after being lost for more than a 100 years, is the confession of George Atzerodt, the same document wherein he claimed to only be at Kirkwood to get papers from Johnson. In it, Atzerodt claims, “Booth said he had met a party in N. York who would get the Prest. certain. They were going to mine the end of the pres. House, near the War Dept. They knew an entrance to accomplish it through.” This part of the confession has since been connected to another incident, in which a Confederate deserter, saying he had served in the “torpedo bureau,” described as a war department aimed at demolishing riverboats and powder magazines with explosives, informed the Union that someone from his bureau had been sent on a secret mission that he understood was directed at Abraham Lincoln. That is the extent of it. Historians have since speculated that a certain member of this torpedo bureau, Thomas Harney, who was taken captive with a cavalry unit about 15 miles from the White House the day after the surrender at Appomattox, was the agent in question, tasked with blowing up the White House with the heads of state in it. However, this cavalry unit was not carrying the explosive that would have been needed, and in fact could not have carried the amount of gunpowder that would have been required to do the job. Nevertheless, Lincoln assassination researchers have, through rampant speculation, transformed these three things—Atzerodt’s claim, the deserter’s warning, and the capture of an engineer—into a foiled bombing plot that we don’t know for certain was being planned. Not satisfied with only this, they further suggest a specific motivation, pointing to the Dahlgren affair, in which, after a failed Union attack on Richmond, a document was reportedly found on Colonel Ulric Dahlgren’s body that suggested Lincoln himself had ordered Jefferson Davis’s assassination. There continues to be debate over whether this document was authentic or a forgery, but regardless, it has long been thought that it may have encouraged Booth in his efforts to kidnap and later to murder Lincoln, turnabout being fair play, and all that. According to the scenario that proponents of a Grand Confederate Conspiracy have dreamed up, after the Dahlgren Affair, Jefferson Davis and the Confederate Secretary of State Judah Benjamin, personally ordered the bombing of the White House. They point to the fact that Benjamin burned his papers before fleeing to England after the war as somehow being proof of his involvement in this particular plot, when he actually had countless reasons to burn his papers, knowing he might be prosecuted for his involvement in the rebellion. As their narrative goes, Booth was well aware of this bombing plot, as Atzerodt’s confession suggests, because he was working closely with the Confederate government, and when the bombing was foiled, he was then tasked with murdering the president, explaining why he only resolved to do so a couple of days before committing the act. It should be apparent, though, that this narrative lacks evidence and is hard to credit in several ways. First, even if the bombing plot were real, Booth possibly hearing about it from the disaffected Northern Copperheads and Confederate agents he had surrounded himself with does not mean he was in any way involved with it. In fact, since it would have been underway simultaneous to his efforts to kidnap the President, it just seems like further evidence that his plans were his own, not ordered by the Confederate government, even if his Confederate friends helped him acquire the supplies he needed to carry it out. And the idea that Booth resolved on killing Lincoln because the bombing was foiled and that his plan changed specifically based on orders he received from the heads of the Confederate government is a virtual impossibility. Jefferson Davis and Judah Benjamin and the rest of the Confederate cabinet had been on the run since Richmond was taken. Even if they had personally arranged a bombing plot before leaving, or from their temporary seat of government for the next week, in Danville, Virginia, after Lee’s surrender at Appomattox, they had to flee again, south to Greensboro, North Carolina, Union troops hot on their heels. During the days when this theory supposes they were receiving letters from the North and sending new orders to their agents, the refugee government was actually hiding in a boxcar. This lack of convincing evidence, I think, might not have even held up in a military tribunal, let alone a criminal trial. Certainly Booth had found Confederate sympathizers and even Confederate agents to recruit as his accomplices, and he certainly benefited from connections and networks already established by the Confederate Secret Service, but a grand conspiracy going all the way to the top has simply never been proven. And this is not to suggest that the Confederacy was some chivalrous government engaged in a war of high ideals that would never stoop to such tactics. On the contrary, it is known that the clandestine operatives of the Confederacy engaged in murder, sabotage, what we would today call terror, and even biological warfare, as allegedly Confederate agents also schemed to spread yellow fever in the North and to infect Lincoln in particular by circulating contaminated clothing. Rather, what is not proven with any satisfaction is a grand conspiracy, in which the heads of the Confederate government directly ordered the assassination of Lincoln. But what we find as we examine the conspiracy theories surrounding the Lincoln assassination is what we find with conspiracy theories in general. When it comes to evidentiary standards, conspiracists have double standards. They will reject a preponderance of evidence if it disagrees with their theories, in favor of evidence that is neither clear nor convincing. And as we will further see, in the rest of this series, these are not even the most unconvincing conspiracy theories surrounding the assassination of Abraham Lincoln. 

Further Reading

Hanchett, William. The Lincoln Murder Conspiracies. University of Illinois Press, 1986.

Knox, Sanka. “WIDOW OF LINCOLN WROTE OF MURDER.” The New York Times, 14 April 1972, https://www.nytimes.com/1972/04/14/archives/widow-of-lincoln-wrote-of-murder-tied-johnson-to-conspiracy-in.html.

“On Exhibit: John Wilkes Booth’s Calling Card.” National Archives, 12 Nov. 2014, https://prologue.blogs.archives.gov/2014/11/12/on-exhibit-john-wilkes-booths-calling-card/.

The Lincoln Legends - Part One: Larger Than Life

The United States of America has been in existence less than 250 years. That may seem like a very long time, but consider that this is only 10 generations, that we can trace back through only 10 forebears to find an ancestor who was contemporary with the nation’s founding, and it becomes clearer how very young this country is. Think about your parents, your grandparents, your great-grandparents, and you’re already a third of the way to conceiving the length of ten generations. Though the U.S. is older than many another modern nation in the Americas, in the grand scheme of history, and in comparison to countries elsewhere in the world, it’s still quite young. Nevertheless, during the course of these 250 years we have accumulated much history and much mythology, immortalizing more than one American leader in the public imagination. This process of eternalizing the country’s most powerful and influential persons is nowhere more clearly symbolized than in the memorial at Mount Rushmore, where the likenesses of four perennially popular presidents have been carved into stone: George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Teddy Roosevelt, and Abraham Lincoln. If we can judge by the Presidential Historians Survey conducted by C-Span four times in the last 25 years, these remain the most popular, or rather the most highly ranked former chief executives based on leadership characteristics. The exception would be Jefferson, who consistently ranks seventh in the survey, replaced by Teddy’s fifth cousin, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, who has ranked third in the last three surveys, just under George Washington. In all four surveys, presidential historians agree that Abraham Lincoln is number one, ranking highest in such categories as Administrative Skills, Economic Management, Moral Authority, Crisis Management, the Pursuit of Equal Justice, and Vision. Some of these are no-brainers, as Lincoln is the man who rose to the challenge of preserving the Union in the face of Civil War and freeing the enslaved, setting in motion the long struggle for racial justice and equality that continues today. But more than these accomplishments, he is admired today as a peacemaker, as a gracious and empathetic politician, who reached across the aisle in assembling his cabinet, as described by Doris Kerns Goodwin in her classic book Team of Rivals. He is also held up as a genius of oratory and as an exemplar of the American Dream because of his humble origins. Despite rustic beginnings, born into a poor family on the American frontier, lacking formal education, Abe Lincoln taught himself, became a lawyer, an enthralling public speaker, and reached the highest office in the land through sheer bootstrappery. Then, of course, his tragic murder, which traumatized the country, led to his being viewed as a martyr, and martyrs tend to develop a halo of legend around them. One perfect example of this mythologizing of Lincoln relates to his humble birthplace. To be sure, he had been born in a humble log cabin in rural Kentucky. Lincoln himself confirmed as much. However, during the decades after his death, around 15 different sites were claimed to be the birthplace farm. The National Park Service only ever accepted one of these locations as genuine, and on it there stood a log cabin that was said to be the actual cabin in which Lincoln had come into the world. A temple was built to house this national landmark, and tourists visited it in droves over the years. Ten years after the Lincoln Farm Association was incorporated and work on this National Historical Park was begun, the Lincoln Logs were invented by architect Frank Lloyd Wright’s son, becoming a hit children’s toy. Lincoln was now synonymous with log cabins, and the authenticity of the cabin in Kentucky would not be questioned for nearly thirty years, when finally a historian questioned the provenance of the log cabin in an academic article. As it turns out, while the farmland may indeed have been the birthplace of Abe Lincoln, when it was purchased, there was no cabin there. The speculator who bought the land moved a cabin from a nearby property onto it, believing that it was the former Lincoln log cabin and had been previously moved off the land. Even if that were the case, though, in the wake of Lincoln’s assassination, this speculator disassembled the cabin and took it on a promotional tour around the country, reassembling it in various exhibitions, and between stops, it was disassembled again and again and stored with another exhibit, the supposed log cabin birthplace of Jefferson Davis. The fact is that the logs seem to have been hopelessly mixed up and interchanged before the Lincoln cabin was finally reassembled in the temple built to house it. In 2004, a dendrochronologist finally put the controversy to rest, confirming that the oldest tree used in the cabin dated only back to 1848, making them about forty years younger than Abraham Lincoln. Today, the temple still stands and draws visitors to Hodgenville, Kentucky, but the Park Service now calls it a “Symbolic Birth Cabin.” This itself is symbolic of our memory of Abraham Lincoln, remembered today as the greatest of American Presidents, but also misremembered and surrounded by myths and frauds. Unsurprisingly, as we will find, most of those myths surround his assassination and the conspiracy to kill him. The Secretary of War Edwin Stanton is said to have stated at Lincoln’s death, “Now he belongs to the ages,” but as we have seen over and over, the ages often change how we remember things, regardless of what really happened.

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It must be acknowledged here that I don’t intend to discuss all the myths and legends and other supposed misconceptions surrounding Abraham Lincoln. For example, I don’t intend to examine the historical research Lincoln’s sexuality in any detail. In brief, some biographers have suggested that Lincoln was attracted to men and that he had a secret relationship with his longtime friend, Joshua Fry Speed, as well as one of his bodyguards. These ideas are based on speculations about his relationship with Mary Todd Lincoln, a few details about sleeping arrangements when Lincoln shared a bed with these men. The only direct evidence for it, a diary supposedly kept by Speed, is widely deemed to be a hoax. Likewise, I will not expend much effort looking into the rumors of Lincoln’s alleged romantic relationship with Ann Rutledge, which likewise was promoted by a writer who claimed to have discovered a diary that was forged. I may discuss these claims further in a patron exclusive, but for now, they serve only as further examples of how our memory of Lincoln changes through the ages, evolving with our greater understanding but also becoming muddied by misinformation. This has long been the case. The story of Lincoln’s romance with Ann Rutledge appeared just after Lincoln’s assassination, spread by Lincoln’s law partner, who may have promoted it specifically to hurt Mary Todd, whom he disliked. Many of the myths surrounding Lincoln’s personal life in fact have their origin in slanders made against him. Another is the notion that Lincoln was an illegitimate son, that his mother, Nancy Hanks, actually bore the child of one Abraham Enlow, in North Carolina five years earlier than Lincoln himself believed he had been born, and that Thomas Lincoln only took his mother in and raised Abe as his own. These claims of Lincoln having been a bastard first arose in mudslinging attacks when he was nominated for president. Some claimed he was an illegitimate son of other famous politicians, like John C. Calhoun or Henry Clay, but the most believable was the claim about Enlow, which gained currency decades after Lincoln’s assassination through oral traditions in North Carolina, which is a very academic way of saying gossip. However, the very existence of Abe’s older sister, who would be his younger sister if the rumors were true, and the records of Thomas Lincoln’s whereabouts during the time when he would have had to have been in North Carolina marrying a pregnant girl, and the fact than many other women named Nancy Hanks, different women from Abe Lincoln’s mother, have been found to have been living in North Carolina back in 1804-05, all goes to prove that this was little more than defamation. Stories like these feel inconsequential and too uncertain to pin down, but they do show how uncertainty has grown around Lincoln’s life in the years since his death.

A depiction of the Lincoln birthplace cabin, courtesy Library of Congress.

Myths surrounded not only Lincoln’s personal life, but also his inner life, his thoughts and feelings and views on important matters, and these too persist today. So for example, in recent times, a myth has surfaced that Lincoln actually owned slaves. While it is true that he inherited slaves from Mary Todd’s family, who happened to be the biggest slaveholders in Kentucky, and an affidavit was recently published indicating that he sold them instead of emancipating them, the reality is more complicated and doesn’t warrant a recasting of Lincoln as some sort of crypto-slaveholder. It is absolutely true that Lincoln made a lot of statements about the social distinction that slave ownership conveyed, saying once that “people who don’t own slaves are nobody,” and that he long aspired to be of the slaveholding class. It is also true that he had made a career for himself representing slaveholders as an attorney, often in legal actions relating to their attempts to recover fugitive slaves. He was, however, also known to defend those who harbored fugitive slaves. It has been pointed out that, at the time, it was typical for lawyers to accept the first client who approached them to obtain their services, regardless of their personal feelings. And these attacks on Lincoln hearken back to early attacks on his policies as his star rose in the Republican Party. Lincoln had been known for a decade as an abolitionist, but in 1860, the more progressive Wendell Phillips asserted that Lincoln was just not anti-slavery enough, that if elected, he would surely dither and do nothing to abolish the institution. It is true that Lincoln was a product of his time, that he did play politics when it came to presenting himself as an abolitionist and carrying out abolitionist policies, and that, as I mentioned before in my episode about the 1619 Project, he did believe that whites could not coexist in equality with freed slaves, that the best solution may be for freed slaves to be sent elsewhere, out of the country, to create their own colony. It may be that Frederick Douglass was accurate in his estimation that Lincoln “shared the prejudices of his white fellow-countrymen.” Nevertheless, and regardless of all the political calculations that went into it, he did sign the Emancipation Proclamation, and he did write, at the time, “I never in my life, felt more certain that I was doing right than I do in signing this paper. . . . If my name ever goes into history it will be for this act, and my whole soul is in it.” The problem here is a great man, who did great things, was also just a man, with faults and flaws. Yet in remembrance of him, he is elevated and venerated like a saint, such that he is either presented as impossibly virtuous or surprisingly wicked, when really, like all of us, he was somewhere in between.

Like any saint, the story of Lincoln has been crafted by hagiographers, his life, especially his youth, mythologized. Unlike the Golden Legend of Catholic Saints, though, Lincoln’s legend took the very American form of the tall tale. Stories about Honest Abe’s integrity abound, about how he trekked miles to give a customer back the few cents he had accidentally overcharged them when he worked as a store clerk, or that, like George Washington, when asked by his schoolteacher whether he had broken the antlers of a buck’s head mounted on the classroom wall, he couldn’t tell a lie and confessed he had done so while showing off his amazing height to classmates. There is simply no evidence for the veracity of such tales, and their very fictive quality indicates their fictional nature. Perhaps the most obvious tall tale is the one that has Lincoln wrestling a bear like he was Davy Crockett or something. The fact is that he really was an accomplished wrestler in his youth. There are primary source documents that bear this out. But the closest indication we have that he ever came near a bear is a poem he wrote called “The Bear Hunt,” which maybe indicates that he himself went hunting bear during his frontier youth in Indiana. The hunt described in it, though, is conducted by riflemen on horseback, commanding teams of hunting dogs. In it, after the bear has been taken down, a mongrel hunting dog who had fallen behind suddenly appears and sets on the already dead bear: “With grinning teeth, and up-turned hair— / Brim full of spunk and wrath, / He growls, and seizes on dead bear, / And shakes for life and death.” This seems the closest Lincoln ever came to wrestling a bear, in his imaginings of a “conceited whelp,” a foolish dog that thinks himself responsible for taking the beast down. The fact is, though, that we don’t much know what kind of lad Lincoln was or what adventures he really may have had. Even if Lincoln had told such stories himself, on the campaign trail, for example, they may have been embellished or entirely made up for rhetorical effect. The bare facts we have are that, after moving from Kentucky to Indiana, his mother died. Though he appears to have preferred reading and writing to physical work, his father relied financially on his labor, and he grew strong. He took up wrestling, and another tale has it that he confronted a local band of ruffians, Clary’s Grove Boys, and earned respect in the community by besting the gang leader, but again, there is no telling how real this story might be. So removed from reality is the youth of Abraham Lincoln that some physical landmark is longed for to make it seem real, as we saw with the fake birthplace cabin. Also present at the Lincoln Birthplace memorial park is a site marked as the location of a certain tree, the “Boundary Oak,” that is revered as a “living link” to Abraham Lincoln because it is presumed he may have interacted with it in some way. Perhaps he read beneath it or climbed it, many have wondered, but the fact is that Lincoln was only 2 years old when the family moved to another cabin in nearby Knob Creek, making it quite unlikely that he had much interaction with that tree at all. Nevertheless, though the Boundary Oak is nothing by a stump now, it remains venerated, like the relic of a saint, and the same is true of other places from his life. The Boyhood Home at Knob Creek is another part of the historical park in Kentucky, and at the Soldiers’ Home Cottage, where Lincoln lived for much of his Presidency, there are similar myths. A certain copper beech tree on the grounds is called a Witness Tree because of claims that Lincoln sat and wrote beneath it, but when a core sample showed in 2002 that it was only 140 years old, this proved that it would have been little more than a sapling when Lincoln lived there.

19th century depiction of young Lincoln reading by the fire. Courtesy Library of Congress.

Perhaps the most visited sites associated with Lincoln are Ford’s Theatre, where he was shot, and Petersen House across the street, the boarding house where Lincoln was taken after the shooting, where he died. And it is here, at the violent end of his life that the most myths and misconceptions surround Lincoln, as we will see for the remainder of this series. One popular story promotes the idea that Lincoln had been having some sort of premonition of his death in the days preceding his visit to Ford’s Theatre. According to Ward Hill Lamon, Lincoln’s close friend and bodyguard, the president had confided in him, mere days before his assassination, that he’d been greatly disturbed by a dream in which he’d been walking through the White House hearing people sobbing and weeping in another room. When he found the source of the sound, he discovered people gathered around a corpse lying in state. When he asked who it was lying dead in the White House, according to Lamon, one of the soldier’s guarding the catafalque told him it was “the President; he was killed by an assassin.” It’s quite a story, but it’s one that Lamon did not tell until after the assassination, which may have colored his memory of Lincoln’s dream. Moreover, it seems Lincoln himself didn’t think the dream was premonitory, as Lamon says he further explained that "In this dream it was not me, but some other fellow, that was killed.” Nevertheless, it is easy to interpret this as some sort of precognitive event, even if Lincoln himself did not view it as such. There is, however, a far simpler explanation, one that does not require us to believe in a clairvoyant President. That is simply that Lincoln was troubled. There is much scholarship about Lincoln’s supposed melancholy, exploring the widely held idea that the president struggled with lifelong depression. When viewed in this context, his dream might be considered the result of a preoccupation with death, a common symptom of depression. His melancholy seemed to surface in the wake of the deaths of loved ones, such as his mother and sister, and later in life, two of his four sons, and might therefore be interpreted as standard grief, but he was also known to suffer bouts of gloominess in the wake of especially bloody battles in the war, such as the Second Battle of Bull Run. If Lamon is to be believed about this dream Lincoln had, the President spoke about it only a few days before his assassination, and he said that the dream had occurred 10 days earlier. That would be very early April, 1865. During the last year, General Sherman had employed his “scorched earth” tactics during his March to the Sea, one of the most destructive periods of the war. And the very month before the dream, Sherman had clashed with Confederate forces in the Battle of Bentonville, the bloodiest battle yet to have been fought in North Carolina. Therefore, it is entirely possible that Lincoln was suffering a bout of melancholy at the time because of the terrible loss of life and destruction resulting from a war that continued to drag on, and that this depression manifested psychologically as a symbolic dream about murder within the White House.

It is not exactly surprising, after all, that Lincoln would have been preoccupied by thoughts of assassination. At the time the dream occurred, he was about to undertake a risky visit to the front, to Richmond, which was then being occupied by Union soldiers. Certainly there would have been many discussions about safety precautions while he was there. After all, he was no stranger to threats on his life. Just 4 years earlier, as President-elect Abe Lincoln was headed by train for his inauguration, the Pinkerton Detective Agency, who were then investigating the destruction of railroad property along Lincoln’s whistle-stop tour, purportedly uncovered numerous assassination plots against him. In order to get Lincoln to Washington safely, they kept a low profile on their trip, canceling appearances along the way. When the reason came to light in the newspapers, the Pinkertons and their claims of assassination plots were doubted, and Lincoln himself was ridiculed, portrayed as unmanly, sneaking about in a disguise like a coward. Nevertheless, the reality of assassination threats must have been impressed on Lincoln. In fact, just a year before his death, someone seems to have taken a shot at him. Lincoln was riding home to his cottage alone one summer night when he heard a rifle shot. His horse bolted, speeding him to the cottage and causing his silk hat to fly off his head. The next day, the two guards on duty went to investigate and found Lincoln’s hat on the road with a bullet hole through it. Lincoln reportedly dismissed the incident as a hunting accident, but it is telling that, afterward, he never again rode to the cottage alone and went instead by carriage, accompanied by soldiers. Surely these facts make a troubling dream about being assassinated far less astonishing and provide a simple explanation with no need to resort to claims of supernatural prognostication. In the ensuing days, however, it seems Lincoln’s spirits finally rose. Richmond fell, his visit to the front was a success, and on his way home, General Lee surrendered at the Appomattox Court House. Just two days later, he addressed an adoring public on the White House grounds, declaring “the reinauguration of the national authority” and speaking about conferring “the elective franchise upon the colored man.” In the crowd, not far from him, was a handsome 26-year-old, a celebrity famous for his Shakespearian acting. His name was John Wilkes Booth, and it was later testified by one with whom he conspired that when Lincoln spoke about giving those citizenship rights to Black people, Booth resolved to murder the President. One claim has it that he said, in that moment, “That is the last speech he will ever make,” but this seems to be a later embellishment of Booth’s actual remarks, which included a racial slur and a verbal threat to take Lincoln’s life. The night before Lincoln’s visit to Ford’s Theatre to see the acclaimed British play Our American Cousin, the city of Washington celebrated the end of the war with fireworks. That night, as he apparently shared the next day, Lincoln had another dream, one that he did believe was premonitory. He told his staff that he had dreamed of standing alone on the forward deck of a ship as it sailed toward a mysterious shore, and he said that he had had this same dream many times just before something important occurred in the war. Therefore, he was convinced that it meant something important was again about to occur. And though my skepticism encourages me to believe that the recurring dream, which of course never predicted his death when he’d had it previously, was simply a coincidence, his interpretation of it did turn out to be prescient.

Contemporary newspaper artist’s impression of Booth’s leap to the Ford’s Theatre stage.

It was Good Friday, April 14th, 1865. After meeting with his staff, Lincoln enjoyed the spring weather in an open air carriage ride with his wife, Mary, and according to her, he was like a new man, his spirit rejuvenated. He spoke about overcoming their grief for their 11-year-old son, Willie, who had passed away a few years earlier, about trying to bridge the gulf that had opened between them and finding a way to be happy again. “I have never seen you this happy,” she wrote in a note to her husband later that day, and that evening, they decided to take in a show, arriving late to Ford’s Theatre as their production was already underway. The players stopped when it was learned that the President had arrived, and the band played “Hail to the Chief” as he took his seat in the Presidential Box with Mary and his two guests, Major Henry Rathbone and his fiancé Clara Harris. It is here, at the very scene of the murder, that the myths and misconceptions about Lincoln’s assassination really begin to accumulate. Illustrations of the event have Booth firing his pistol point blank into the back of Lincoln’s head and then leaping over the railing and onto the stage like Erroll Flynn, breaking his leg in the process, but still enough in control of himself to deliver his dramatic one-liner, “Sic Semper Tyrannis!” or “Thus always to tyrants.” In reality, Booth was some four or five feet from the president when he entered the room, and he had to fire from the entryway, for if he entered further, Major Rathbone, who sat on a sofa near the entrance, would have seen him. We know Booth did not fire from point blank range for two reasons; one is that there were no powder burns observed on Lincoln’s head, and the other is that Rathbone heard the pistol’s report just behind him. He sprang up to seize the assassin, and was stabbed in his upper arm by Booth, who had also come armed with a dagger. When the shot was fired, Lincoln was actually leaning forward over the railing, making Booth’s shot extremely lucky. In all likelihood, the assassin had been aiming for the President’s back and had missed his shot. Rather than escaping by some deft leap to the stage, Booth actually became entangled in a flag draped over the railing, his spur becoming caught in its fabric making his awkward fall somewhat farcical, resulting in the cracked fibula. When he shouted out the Latin phrase, it was not some dramatic flourish. That phrase was actually the state motto of Virginia, and he followed it up by yelling, according to some witnesses, “The South is Avenged,” or “Revenge for the South,” making his motivation exceedingly clear. Then again, some witnesses heard him say “I have done it,” or heard nothing at all, so again, the truth of the matter is obscured. Despite the awkwardness of his getaway from the Presidential box, Booth made good his escape despite his injury, jumping on a waiting horse and riding to Maryland, where his co-conspirators waited. Exactly who was involved in this conspiracy and exactly what became of Booth at the conclusion of the 12-day manhunt for him has become the subject of much speculation, myth, and conspiracy theory, as we will see in the rest of this series. 

The first doctor to examine Lincoln had him laid on the ground and searched him for wounds. When he found the bullet wound in the back of Lincoln’s head, he pushed his finger in, searching for a bullet he might remove. He felt none. After being resuscitated and stabilized, Lincoln was carried out of the theater and into the street, where the owner of the lodging house across the road offered a room. It was a very small room, 9 by 17 feet, with a typical spool bed, wooden framed with spool-shaped spindles and railing for the foot and headboards, and it was far too small for Lincoln, whom they had to lay across it diagonally. Two other doctors stuck their fingers in his head wound that night, likely worsening his condition, though this was common practice at the time. By morning, Abraham Lincoln, 16th President of the United States, died in this bed that was too small for him, larger than life to the very end. During the night, his wife Mary and his oldest son Robert came to his bedside, and so too did several cabinet members and other officials, though few could be admitted into the room at the same time, it being so small. Afterward, Currier & Ives and several other printmakers began to sell lithographs of the scene of Lincoln’s deathbed, based on descriptions of those who had been to see him in Petersen House. These lithographs became hot sellers, such that they became a common feature of many American homes. And here we find an apt example of the mythmaking process. At first, the engravings made of the scene were relatively accurate, They might have portrayed the deathbed at the center of the room rather than pushed against a wall as was the case in reality, but this can be forgiven as a necessity of artistic composition. Strangely, though, as more and more such portraits were created, the scene changed. Lincoln’s youngest son Tad was added, though he had never been there, and when Mary Todd Lincoln became unpopular because she was too grief-stricken to attend state funerals or vacate the White House, she was removed from the scene even though she had been by her husband’s side. It was common to picture several officials surrounding the bed, even when they could not have fit into the room at the same time, and each portrait featured a different and growing assemblage, removing one figure when it was deemed more important to include another, such as Vice President Andrew Johnson, who had not previously been pictured but who would be pictured after ascending to the Presidency. The number of people in the room grew until it was absolutely absurd—one later print featured 47 men crammed into the room—such that the small room at Petersen House came to be called the “rubber room” for how much it would have had to stretch to accommodate everyone.

A good example of the “rubber room” portrayals of Lincoln’s deathbed in Petersen House, with 26 historical figures present with the dying president.

Many know the words spoken at Lincoln’s bedside as he took his last breaths, or at least, we think we do. It has been immortalized in countless history books that Edwin Stanton, the Secretary of War, wept as he said them: “Now he belongs to the ages.” Interestingly, however, some historians have begun to question this, suggesting that the quote has long been misreported and that Stanton actually said “Now he belongs to the angels.” There is actually a pretty strong argument for both, and we likely will never truly know which remark was uttered in the moment, but this dichotomy, between the idea of Lincoln belonging to history and of his being borne aloft by angels speaks further to the fact that he has consistently been mythologized since his death, venerated as a martyr, beatified like a saint, and even deified as a fallen god. Some of the later portraits of the scene in the rubber room at his death even began to portray angels above him, and the spirit of George Washington welcoming him to the heavens, or even to portray the godlike figures personifying Britain and America, Britannia and Columbia, visiting him at his deathbed. As we already saw, at the national park memorializing his birthplace, the symbolic cabin there is enshrined within a temple, as though pilgrims to the site are expected to worship him. And this deification of Lincoln is nowhere more apparent than at another pilgrimage site, the Lincoln Boyhood National Memorial in Indiana, especially during the 30s and 40s, when it was slowly developed and constructed. Making much of the fact that Lincoln was killed on Good Friday, the comparison to Christ was explicit there, where the entire memorial was landscaped as a huge cross. In fact, until the sixties, the whole memorial was dedicated not to Lincoln himself, but to Nancy Hanks, his mother, who was venerated there as if she were another Virgin Mary. And between his mother’s grave and the replica of his boyhood cabin, the designers installed the Trail of Twelve Stones like the stations of the cross, each supposedly a stone taken from a place that represents an important location in Lincoln’s life—one from the White House, one from Gettysburg, etc. And it is not just these birthplace and boyhood memorials that engage in Lincoln worship. Even the most famous of his memorials, in Washington, D.C., is designed as a classical temple, within which his gargantuan statue, enthroned like a god, proves that he remains larger than life even in death.  

Further Reading

Gopnik, Adam. “Angels and Ages.” The New Yorker, 21 May 2007. www.newyorker.com/magazine/2007/05/28/angels-and-ages.

Johnson, Kevin Orlin. “The Preacher Who Stole Lincoln’s Past–By the Carload.” Abbeville Institute, 7 March 2022, www.abbevilleinstitute.org/the-preacher-who-stole-lincolns-past-by-the-carload/.

Nickell, Joe. "Premonition! Foreseeing What Cannot Be Seen." Skeptical Inquirer, vol. 43, no. 4, July-Aug. 2019, pp. 17+. Gale Academic OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A593430322/AONE?u=modestojc_main&sid=bookmark-AONE&xid=b71b0a30.

Sellars, Richard West. “Remembering Abraham Lincoln: History and Myth.” The George Wright Forum, vol. 11, no. 4, 1994, pp. 52–56. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/43598880.  

Steers, Edward, Jr. Lincoln Legends : Myths, Hoaxes, and Confabulations Associated with our Greatest President. The University Press of Kentucky, 2007.

The Roots of the Christmas Tree (Another Very Historically Blind Xmas!)

The podcast this holiday season was somewhat overshadowed by a few grim realities, but also by the dark and grisly subject matter that precedes this post. It is pretty difficult to transition from a series on Jack the Ripper to a festive episode. In some way, then, the podcast can be likened to Whitechapel and really all of London in December of 1888, with the awful reality of the horrific murders and the uncertainty over when the killer would strike again still hanging over the city like a pall as many attempted to make merry. There is, though, I think, one interesting connection between the story of Jack the Ripper and the topic of Christmas and its origins, and that is the figure of Charles Dickens. The great Victorian novelist died in 1870, almost 20 years before the Ripper murders, and yet he is inextricably linked to them through his depictions of the East End. In his earlier fiction, he writes about the East End, and even Whitechapel, as a genial and romantic place, the bustling and exciting setting of comedies like The Pickwick Papers. But later in his career, he depicted it as “a jungle of decaying slums housing a starved, feral people,” a squalid and crime-infested district from which, as Madeleine Murphy, author of Dickens and the Ripper Legend states, he suggested “some unknown beast will spring.” Dickens, then, by this view, anticipated the emergence of the Ripper. And he also anticipated the emergence of Christmas, or at least, its most lasting and popular iteration, which hearkens back to Victorian England, when many of the traditions and iconography that persist today began to take definite shape. Dickens is almost synonymous with Christmas. As I write these words, my wife is watching one of the many film adaptations of his classic story, A Christmas Carol, the one starring Patrick Stewart as Ebenezer Scrooge, and within the week, we will be enjoying ourselves at the Dickens Fair here in California, where they attempt to recreate Victorian London, celebrate all things Dickens, and engage in eggnog-fueled holiday revelry for a full month between Thanksgiving and Christmas. There at Dickens Fair the mythology of Dickens is on full display. In some ways, he is responsible for constructing the public conception of Victorian England. Most depictions of Victorian England in fiction and film are perhaps more Dickensian than historical. And he is further credited as the man who invented Christmas. This is no exaggeration. A film by that very name appeared in 2017, based on a book published in 2008, but the notion goes all the way back to an early Dickens scholar, F. G. Kitton, who wrote an article by that name in 1903. What Kitton remarked on, however, was not really the invention of the holiday, or any of its traditions, but rather its resurgence. It is true that the bubonic plague, the collapse of the feudal system, and the Puritan war on Christmas merriment had reduced the holiday to a more sedate and private affair than it had previously been in England, and it is further true that the enormous popularity of Dickens’s A Christmas Carol did much to popularize the holiday again in England, or as fellow novelist William Makepeace Thackeray put it, the novella “was the means of lighting up hundreds of kind fires at Christmas time; caused a wonderful outpouring of Christmas good feeling; of Christmas punch-brewing; an awful slaughter of Christmas turkeys; and roasting and basting of Christmas beef.” There is even a case to be made for Dickens being the person responsible for associating Christmas with snow, since when he wrote about the holiday, he associated it with the bitterly cold winters of his youth, when the River Thames would freeze over, which became a lot less common after the end of the Little Ice Age in the early 19th century. But this too is a dubious credit, since the holiday, even in antiquity, has always been tied to the end of the year and winter solstice, the shortest day, after which come the coldest days. Surely, then, Dickens was not the first to associate the holiday with snow and ice. Perhaps the element most associated with a Victorian and Dickensian Christmas, indeed the tradition and image most associated with the holiday today, second only, it can be argued, to Santa Claus, is the Christmas tree, and this too, it can be said, was popularized by Dickens, who wrote an essay about them in 1850, describing the Christmas tree as a “pretty German toy,” a very new tradition that was then catching on in the English speaking world, and which Dickens used as a metaphor to wax nostalgic about childhood and the lessons of life. Here we find Dickens again at the forefront of a Christmas tradition for which he can’t really be given credit. He was not the first nor even the most effective champion of this tradition, and just exactly how new it really was in the mid-19th century, and where it came from, remains one of the most complicated and debated topics related to Christmas. So join me now, around our tree, so brightly festooned with glittering ornaments and lit tapers, as I welcome you to yet another Very Historically Blind Christmas, this one all about the Christmas tree and its roots.

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I have spoken on the topic of Christmas trees and their origin before. In my very first holiday special, all the way back in 2018, talked about it in a couple of paragraphs, and it came up again last year, in my patron exclusive about the bizarre mushroom theory of Christmas, but it is a topic that proves far more complex and full of uncertainty and mystery than I managed to show in those brief mentions. As I said back then, there are a great many notions, perpetuated by social media meming, that the Christmas tree is some sort of very ancient pagan practice, and that Christians are somewhat foolish in thinking it’s not a pagan survival that they co-opted. One bible verse typically thrown in their faces is Jeremiah, Chapter 10, verse 3 and 4, “For the customs of the peoples are false: a tree from the forest is cut down..they deck it with silver and gold….” What is typically omitted or glossed over is the part that says the felled tree is “worked with an ax by the hands of an artisan,” and that in the context of the actual verse, it is talking about the carving of wooden idols plated in silver and gold and fastened to a wall with nails, not a tree hung with ornaments. It is a blatant misconstruing of the scripture to attack Christians, and that’s just bad form. Really, we don’t need to rely on falsehoods to reveal the hypocrisies of many Christians. In truth, the Christmas tree, as we today recognize it, did not really appear until the 19th century, and in a narrow way, the Dickens movie, The Man Who Invented Christmas, gets it right. In it, the actor Dan Stevens, who plays Dickens, has a decorated tree in his parlor and remarks that “The Germans call it a Tannenbaum. It's a tree for Christmas. A Christmas tree, I suppose. Now the royal family have got one, it'll be all the rage.” Now, it’s wrong to suggest that a tannenbaum is a Christmas tree, or that the song O Tannenbaum can be accurately translated as O Christmas tree, as is common in English. In truth, a tannenbaum is just a fir tree, and the subject of the 18th century song was a living evergreen, persisting through the bitter cold and remaining alive. To associate it with a tree that we cut down for decorative purposes rather misses the point, but that is exactly what happened in the 19th century, when the song was first rewritten to take on a more festive seasonal symbolism and then was translated into English as referring explicitly to a Christmas tree. The film is right, however, in ascribing a German origin to modern day Christmas trees, and in crediting the British royal family for popularizing them. The film is referring to Queen Victoria, or more specifically to her German consort, Prince Albert, who in 1840 imported some spruce trees from Bavaria to uphold his German Christmas tradition in England. It is not entirely accurate that the tradition would have spread to the Dickens home by 1843, the year he published A Christmas Carol, as the film depicts, however, because it did not really take off as a popular tradition until some years later, when the press publicized it as a yearly tradition in the royal household. In 1848, the Times and the Illustrated London News both published stories describing the royal christmas tree, along with engravings illustrating it, and by the following year, the tradition had taken hold, and the same newspapers were printing stories with recommendations on how Londoners might decorate their own trees. Hence the 1850 essay in which Dickens effused about the newfangled German Christmas tree. But as new as it may have seemed to the English public in 1848, there was, indeed, as many have claimed, a longer history to this practice.

An pretty edition of the Dickens essay on the Christmas Tree.

Even within England, the practice was not unknown. Queen Victoria herself reminisced about a Christmas season from her youth, in 1833, during which she remembered “trees hung with lights and sugar ornaments.” It may be, then, that the decoration of a tree at Christmas was only a tradition at court before Victoria and Albert popularized it, for as is frequently pointed out, there is record of an earlier British royal putting up a tree. In 1800, George III’s wife Queen Charlotte apparently put up and decorated a yew tree with wax candles and clusters of fruits and nuts to delight the children attending a holiday party in the Queen’s lodgings. This appears to have been the beginning of the trend among the upper classes in England. The fact that in previous years, Charlotte had only put up and decorated a single bough of a yew tree, as was common practice in the German duchy of Mecklenburg-Strelitz, where Charlotte was from, has led some to speculate that she was the Christmas tree “inventor,” that she was the first to innovate the decoration of a whole tree rather than just a branch. Supporting this is a description of the tradition in Mecklenburg-Strelitz as observed by the poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge in 1799: “On the evening before Christmas Day, one of the parlours is lighted up by the children, into which the parents must not go; a great yew bough is fastened on the table at a little distance from the wall, a multitude of little tapers are fixed in the bough ... and coloured paper etc. hangs and flutters from the twigs. Under this bough the children lay out the presents….” However, while in this particular duchy the tradition was the decoration of a single bough, it is clear that elsewhere in Germany, the tradition was to bring in and decorate a whole tree, in some places a yew, in others a box tree, and elsewhere a fir tree. The first mentions of these German trees extends much further back, especially around Strasbourg, on the Rhine in the Alsace region in what is eastern France today. In the middle of the 17th century, theologian Johann Konrad Dannhauer wrote about “the Christmas- or fir-tree, which people set up in their houses [and] hang with dolls and sweets,” and like many a historian and theologian since, he too was baffled by the origin of the tradition, saying, “Whence comes the custom, I know not.” By his time, it had firmly taken root, it seems, but at the very beginning of that century, in 1605, an anonymous writer had described the same tradition in the same place, “They set up fir trees in the parlours at Strasburg and hang thereon roses cut out of many-coloured paper, apples, wafers, gold-foil, sweets, etc.” And it appears that the practice of cutting down trees for Christmas was widespread even midway through the previous century, as in Upper Alsace, in 1561, a limit on the number and size of pines that people were allowed to cut down was imposed. 

According to one legend, the tradition originated some 500 kilometers from Strasbourg, in Wittenberg, on the other side of Germany. It is claimed that the German church reformer Martin Luther took a winter stroll one night and admired the stars shining through the evergreen canopy of the trees overhead. According to this tale, Luther cut down a tree and brought it home, hung lit candles in its branches to simulate what he had seen, and turned it into a sermon for his family about the Christmas star. This story just sounds totally false, and sure enough, it is entirely unsupported by any historical documentation. There is a far better case to be made that Martin Luther originated the Christkind or Christkindle traditions of a Christmas giftbringer who could be likened to the Christ child, wanting to take emphasis away from the Catholic Saint Nicholas, but this claim about the Christmas tree seems bogus. It does appear to be the case, however, that Christmas trees were largely a Protestant tradition when the custom did take root. In fact, they came to be called Lutherbaum, or Luther trees, and by the 19th century, Catholics derisively referred to Protestantism as the “Tannenbaum religion.” However, the first confirmed Christmas tree in Wittenberg, where Luther supposedly invented them, would not appear until a couple hundred years after Luther’s death in 1546. And since, about a hundred years after Luther died, the aforementioned Lutheran theologian Johann Dannhauer still had no idea where the custom had originated, it seems very unlikely that Martin Luther invented it. In fact, all signs point to Strasbourg, in the Franco-German Alsace, as the birthplace of Christmas trees. Strasbourg today boasts that it is the capitale de Noël, the Capital of Christmas, as its Christmas market was held as far back as 1570, and its annual raising and decoration of a Christmas tree in the Strasbourg Cathedral is said to have taken place as far back as 1539. Going further back, into the 15th century, the Strasbourgian town clerk Sebastian Brant attempted to forbid the cutting down of trees around the end of 1494, so widespread was the practice of bringing felled trees into the home. And in 1419, a record from a Fraternity of Baker’s Apprentices in Freiburg, just south of Strasbourg, mentions a tree inside the Hospital of the Holy Spirit that was decorated with gingerbread, wafers, tinsel, and apples. This is what we find when searching for the invention of the Christmas tree—each time we think we find its “inventor,” Queen Charlotte, Martin Luther, when we look further back we find still the Christmas tree standing and shining, the beacon of a festive winter holiday.

Queen Victoria and Prince Albert popularizing the Christmas tree.

Now we’ve traced the Christmas tree back to the tail end of the Middle Ages, to Alsace in the Rhineland, then a part of the Holy Roman Empire, and the earliest of descriptions we can find, in Freiburg, has them decorated with bright red ornaments, such as apples, and other edible ornaments, including wafers. One idea for the medieval origin of the Christmas tree has to do with various legends surrounding trees and plants miraculously blossoming around Christmastime. According to one 1430 account, an apple tree in Nuremberg “bore apple blossoms the size of a thumb on the night of Christ’s birth,” causing citizens to keep vigil around it. This lone incident could not have been the origin of Christmas trees, since we have already seen the tradition in earlier reports, but this one corresponds generally to many traditions about miraculous blooming in midwinter, most of them having to do with plants that, strangely, bloomed or bore fruit in this unusual season, most of which are now largely associated with Christmas, like holly, mistletoe, the poinsettia, also called the Christmas Star, and the hellebore, or Christmas Rose. Indeed, there is a story out of the Middle Ages of the miraculous blooming of actual red roses associated with Christmas. It is said that St. Francis of Assisi discovered a rosebush miraculously in bloom in the snow at Christmastime. There are different versions of this legend, which helps to demonstrate its mythological character. In one, Francis is leaving a convent in San Damiano and tells the sorrowful nuns there that they will see him when the roses bloom again, whereupon they see the miracle of the winter roses. Another version has it that he laid down on the thorns of a barren rosebush one night in order to feel the pain that Christ felt, and in the following days the roses bloomed. The simple fact, though, is that a miracle having to do with roses was quite common in hagiography. Often it was the transformation of other things into roses, but in the case of Saint Elizabeth of Hungary and Our Lady of Guadalupe, the appearance of fresh roses in winter became an established motif. While there is little evidence to support that these legends evolved into a tradition of cutting down evergreen trees and adorning with red ornaments to represent a miraculous blooming, there is some clear sign that these miraculous blooming traditions contributed to other Christmas customs, such as bringing cuttings from certain trees, including hazel, linden, cherry, plum, and apple trees, into the warmth of the home and placing them in water so they would bloom unseasonably around Christmas. These not being evergreens, though, it would seem an entirely separate tradition from Christmas greenery and Christmas trees, with perhaps the crossover being the common Christmas tree decoration of paper flowers that we later see. 

While these miracle blooms of apple blossoms gets us closer to the trees hung with apples, it is another theory on the origin of the Christmas tree tradition that takes us all the way there, one which I and most scholars find the most convincing. In the Middle Ages, in Germany and elsewhere in the Holy Roman Empire of Central and Western Europe, there was a predecessor to the nativity play we usually associate with Christmas time. These were called Paradise Plays, or Genesis Plays, and they reenacted the events of Adam and Eve’s original sin and banishment from Eden. During the height of the scribal system, when many could not read and books were a luxury possession of the church, read and copied by monks, and of royals tutored in Latin, such mystery plays were a common vehicle by which to teach the public about major scriptural narratives and doctrinal points. These plays in particular, depicting the Biblical Creation myth, Satan’s temptation of Eve, and the Fall of Man, may seem like an odd play to stage on Christmas Eve, but it must be remembered that December 24th was the Feast of Adam and Eve. In focusing on the story of original sin just before Christmas Day, Christians of the Middle Ages were reminded of why Christ was born, about the need for redemption that he fulfilled. So though it may seem an entirely unrelated story, it was not viewed as such. This much can be clearly discerned in medieval art, in which the Christ child is commonly seen accepting an apple from Mary. As you might imagine, these Paradise Plays had reason to depict an apple laden tree in the garden, the fruit of which Adam and Eve were forbidden to eat. The problem was, apple trees were bare, their fruit having been harvested already. Nor would it have been practical to cut down a healthy, fruit-bearing tree to serve as a prop. This being wintertime, it was therefore common to cut down a fir tree for these productions and adorn them with apples. According to the current best guess of scholars, Germans kept this tradition past the Middle Ages, bringing these Paradise trees into their homes, adorning them not just with apples, but with eucharist wafers to further represent Christ’s atonement for Original Sin. Parallel to this tradition was one that arose out of the Ore Mountains in Western Germany of having a so-called Christmas pyramid, or wooden carousel of shelves lit with candles and decorated with Christian scenes, like the Nativity. Originally, this was called a Lichtergestelle or “light-stand,” and was meant to brighten spirits during dark and cold months. It was adorned with evergreen cuttings to further raise spirits. As near as most scholars can discern, then, somewhere in the murky Middle Ages, in the homes of common Germanic folk in the Holy Roman Empire, the custom of raising a Paradise tree and of making a Christmas pyramid merged, and the Christmas tree was born, lit with candles to ward off the dark, decorated gaily with bright and colorful baubles—something like apples or miraculous winter blooms—and with edible treats to raise spirits—something more tasty than the eucharist wafers of old—and eventually the origin of the tradition was forgotten. 

A depiction of Martin Luther celebrating with a Christmas tree.

             Or at least, this is current scholarly consensus, lacking definitive evidence of the custom’s step by step evolution but making perfect sense chronologically, geographically, and culturally. So that’s the end of it, right? Not quite. Many are the claims that the origin of the Christmas tree stretches much further back, deriving from ancient pagan customs, and therefore serving as an example of pagan survival within Christianity. I am open to such theories, as I have indicated in previous episodes on Christmas, but I am also very critical of them when they lack evidence and logic, as was the case, for example, in the mushroom theory of Christmas, which attributes everything Christmasy to the practices of Siberian shamans and their use of psychotropic mushrooms. So let’s look at these theories. The most widespread is that the Christmas tree is some sort of Scandinavian tradition derived from pagan Norse belief. At first blush, there is some weight to this in that Scandinavian peoples are Germanic, and there was cultural and ethnic migration, such that traditions could have been transplanted from Northern Europe to Central and Western Europe. Relatively early evidence of Christmas trees does extend northward from Germany, as well. In Latvia, for example, a merchant guild’s records indicate the appearance of a Christmas tree as early as 1510. This is indeed early, but not as early as other records I’ve discussed, making their claim that it was the first Christmas tree relatively easy to refute. North of there and 70 years earlier, other records suggested a decorated Christmas tree was put up for a dance. Some of these records are questionable, however, as the brief descriptions don’t indicate whether it was an evergreen tree with foliage or more of a stripped tree decorated as in maypole traditions. Looking at the actual pagan beliefs of the Norse, it is clear that, after their conversion to Christianity, their festive winter solstice traditions, yule, have made a big impact on Christmas traditions, and several of them are indeed comparable to the Christmas tree custom. First, decoration with greenery was central to yuletide celebration, and several of the specific plants sacred to the Norse have since become deeply associated with Christmas, including holly, ivy, and mistletoe. Indeed, one of the central ceremonies of yuletide related to the cutting down of a tree and bringing it into the home. But it wasn’t an evergreen, and they didn’t put it up and decorate it. It was likely a birch or oak, and they stripped it, treated its wood, and burned it slowly over the twelve days of yuletide. More than that, the Yule log custom did not noticeably change to become some other tradition, for it remained a tradition of warming the home with a single slow-burning log, although elsewhere in Europe it came to be called a Christ log or Christmas log. 

A depiction of the Tree of Life that indicates its similarity to Christmas trees.

Perhaps the most tempting connection to make between yule and the Christmas tree is the idea of sacred or holy trees and that the Norse worshipped them. The most prominent tree in their belief system is the World Tree, Yggdrasil, the meeting place of the gods, its roots and canopy uniting the heavens and the Earth. But why is Yggdrasil correlated with Christmas trees according to this theory? It’s never depicted as a fir tree, but more as an ash, and it’s not decorated. It cannot just be because they are both trees. By that logic, any mythological tree could be claimed to be the inspiration of the Christmas tree. Is it logical to claim that the sacred cypress that was said to have grown from a branch Zoroaster carried back from Paradise was the inspiration for the Christmas tree? Or that the Christmas tree was meant to represent the oracular Oak of Dodona from Greek myth? No, and the claim of Yggdrasil being its inspiration is equally untenable. But the myth of Yggdrasil may have spawned the common worship of numerous real trees by other Germanic pagans, such as the Irminsul, sacred to the Saxons, the tree at Uppsala in Sweden, and Donar’s Oak, also called Thor’s Oak and the Oak of Jove, worshipped by the pagan predecessors of the Hessians. All of these were destroyed by Christian missionaries, making it an odd claim that they would have incorporated tree worship into their own religion when they went to great lengths to stamp out the practice. But one account, that of Donar’s Oak, as told by proponents of the pagan survival view of Christmas trees, claims that St. Boniface cut down the pagan oak tree and in its place a young fir tree miraculously sprouted, converting all the pagans to Christianity. The implication, of course, is that Christmas trees originated as a remembrance of this miracle. First of all, all of these claims really rely on the notion that Christmas trees are worshipped, which an uptight iconoclast might make but which I find unconvincing. Second, even if this miracle story were true, which it obviously isn’t, being just another exaggerated tale about a saint told by a hagiographer, it doesn’t really explain why this symbol would afterward be cut down, brought home, and decorated. And third, if we actually check the source, the hagiographical Life of St. Boniface, written by an 8th century bishop named Willibald, it is not even true. According to the source, when Boniface notched the tree, struggling to actually fell such a massive tree, it suddenly “burst into four parts” and fell. There is no mention of a young fir tree sprouting in its place. It afterward says “four trunks of huge size, equal in length, were seen,” but whether this refers to new trees is not clear, as it seems to only be describing the four parts into which the original oak had burst. Regardless, after the incident, they didn’t start worshipping what was left; they used the wood, it says, to build a new structure, an oratory dedicated to St. Peter from which Christianity could be preached. So we find that the only feasible evidence for the idea that pagan Germanic tree worship transformed into a Christmas tree tradition is a completely embellished and revised version of an already dubious hagiography, a genre of literature known for its fantastical invention and lack of reliability as historical source material.

If the idea that Christmas trees originated in yule traditions is unsupported and lacking any strong evidence, this does not bode well for all the other theories of Christmas trees as pagan survivals, which are even weaker. Some claim it can be traced to Egypt in 3000 BCE, when palm branches were brought into the home to honor Isis, mother of Horus, who like Christ was said to have been born on the solstice. Yet no thought is given to how the tradition might have migrated to Europe or why it reappeared without precedent there thousands of years later. Also I saw claims that Druids decorated oak trees with golden apples and candles to honor Odin, but Druids did not worship Scandinavian deities. Some have attempted to draw comparisons between their pantheons, but to say they honored Odin or Woden as I saw repeated time and again is just patently false. Also, I saw no evidence for the claims about the decoration of trees by druids. It certainly wasn’t mentioned in the earliest writings about Druids by Julius Caesar. In Pliny the Elder, their religious ceremony surrounding an oak is described, which involved the veneration of mistletoe, which is at least a bit Christmasy, but nothing about golden apples and candles. So until I can find real support for this, and please send it if you have it, I have to consider it a frequently repeated myth. Myths like this about the pagan origin of Christian traditions get made up one time by unscrupulous writers and then live on, repeated in perpetuity as if they are fact. This is the case with many misconceptions about the origin of Easter iconography and traditions, which originated in the poorly researched purposely misinformative book The Two Babylons by Alexander Hislop, written as an attack on Catholicism, which I spoke about in an old episode. Well, as it turns out, Hislop contributed to the Christmas tree confusion as well. Based on an illustration of a coin depicting a snake wrapped around what looks like a tree stump, Hislop spins a fanciful story about King Nimrod’s wife deifying her dead husband. According to him, she said a young tree grew in place of a dead stump, symbolizing her husband’s rebirth, and that Nimrod came back to life every year on his birthday, which happened to be December 25th, and would leave gifts beneath that tree. This, it was claimed, was the origin of both the Yule log and the Christmas tree. No citations or sources are cited for this claim. Only the image of the coin with a snake around a stump, or maybe it is a ruined pillar? The coin also pictures a palm tree and a sea shell and reads “Tyriorum,” indicating some connection to Tyre, but no provenance or context whatsoever is provided. The illustration is labeled only “The Yule Log,” and a source is given: “MAURICE'S Indian Antiquities, vol. vi. p. 368.” This is Thomas Maurice’s Indian Antiquities, or Dissertations on Hindostan, published 1812, and the coin does not appear in it. It is quite apparent that Hislop, as he did in so many other claims, was just making stuff up. Yet in the 1980s, a pioneer of televangelism, Herbert Armstrong, founder of the Worldwide Church of God, promoted this misinformation in a booklet called “The Plain Truth about Christmas,” and now you can find it parroted on social media, along with a lot of other nonsense made up by Hislop, such as that Easter is really about the Mesopotamian goddess Ishtar, and you see it popping up on every major liturgical holiday. The reality of the survival of pagan traditions in modern Christianity is far more nuanced. Are there elements of paganism in the Christmas tree tradition? Insofar as the traditions of decorating one’s home with greenery is a custom with long pre-Christian roots, sure, but at a certain point, it’s impossible to differentiate what was pagan custom and what was simply a human habit. Some promoters of pagan survivalism in Christmas tradition will claim that singing is a pagan custom, and feasting, and bells, and lighting candles and fires, when in reality, people just sing and feast when celebrating, and since the invention of bells, it is common to ring them. Winter solstice is the longest night of the year, after all, marking the start of the coldest season. Can we really call the lighting of candles and the kindling of fires in the hearth a pagan tradition, when it is also just a way to stave off the dark and the cold? There is mystery and cultural heritage behind the Christmas tree tradition, but that doesn’t mean that we can trace it back through endless iterations to the furthest antiquity. 

A depiction of St. Boniface chopping down Donar’s Oak.

Further Reading

Barnes, Alison. “The First Christmas Tree.” History Today, vol. 56, no. 12, Nov. 2006, https://www.historytoday.com/archive/history-matters/first-christmas-tree. 

Barth, Edna. Holly, Reindeer, and Colored Lights: the Story of Christmas Symbols. Seabury Press, 1971. 

Brunner, Bernd, and Benjamin A. Smith. Inventing the Christmas Tree. Yale University Press, 2012. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctt5vkr9c. 

Tille, Alexander. Yule and Christmas: Their Place in the Germanic Year. David Nutt, 1899. 

Jack the Ripper - Part Two: Ripperology

During the height of Jack the Ripper’s murders, from September to November 1888, the police and news agencies received thousands of letters regarding the case. Those most well known, of course, were those signed with the name Jack the Ripper, and others purporting to be from the killer himself, such as the “From Hell” letter, but those were just the tip of the mail pile. The majority were from Londoners who had become obsessed with the case. While at first, women in Whitechapel and elsewhere were terrified to go out of doors at all, unless they were in a group, eventually, talk of Jack became so common that women tended to joke that they would be “the next for Jack” when they were going out at night. Whitechapel had become a tinderbox, ready to erupt in vigilante violence at any moment. On one occasion, when a policeman pursued a local ne’er-do-well on foot, someone shouted that it was the Ripper, and the next thing you know, a mob joined the pursuit, shouting to lynch the man, who was actually only wanted for throwing a brick at a policeman. And it wasn’t just the residents of the East End that thought of little else but the Ripper. Letters came in from all over, many suggesting ways that the police might be able to catch the murderer. Some insisted the police should dress as women, while other proposed elaborate safeguards be worn by potential victims, like ring mail shirts and steel plates around the throat, or even rudimentary tazing devices designed to deliver electric shocks to those who grasped someone’s neck. Every suspicious piece of bathroom graffiti was reported, and even the visions that were had in dreams and the messages received in seances were dutifully forwarded to the authorities, many pointing the finger at actual people and overwhelming the police with a glut of suspects and useless leads. Some speculated that he must be diseased, perhaps a syphilitic, and that his affliction had caused him to lose the use of his manhood, thus prompting him to take out his frustrated and perverted sexual desires in a destructive way. Suddenly everyone was an alienist and a detective. One woman insisted that the crimes had been perpetrated by an escaped ape who ripped the victims and then made his escape by bounding over walls and returning to his cage. Clearly she had taken the notion from a popular story by Edgar Allan Poe, “The Murders in the Rue Morgue,” in which a detective deduces that a pair of murders was committed by an orangutan. Many were the East End poor who believed the murderer, who many had become convinced was a doctor, must be some rich and morally bankrupt West Ender coming to the slums to prey upon the disadvantaged, while many wealthy residents elsewhere believed it could only a debauched resident of the East End could sink to performing such terrible crimes. Likewise, it was claimed, over and over, that an Englishman could never do such things. When it wasn’t a Jew being blamed, some letters suggested it must have been some other foreigner. The superstitions of Chinese and Malays, some letters claimed, might lead them to remove organs for their folk medicine. Likewise it was said the Hill tribes of Northeast India made use of the generative organs in their rites, and other Indian tribes used poison needles to induce instant death, which could explain the quickness with which Jack was able to overcome his victims. Some even suggested that Jack might be one of the Thuggee highway killers of India, claiming his murders were actually cult sacrifices to Kali, which as I have discussed at length was itself a total myth about the bands of stranglers called Thugs. So voracious was the appetite for theories and claims about the identity of Jack the Ripper that some even made a career from cooking them up, even back then. One such was the grandstanding psychiatrist L. Forbes Winslow, who claimed in an interview published in newspapers that he had evidence proving the identity of the Ripper and that if the police would but lend him six constables, he could catch the killer. When a Chief Inspector actually showed up to question him, though, Winslow suggested the newspaper had misquoted him and said he never intended to suggest he knew the killer’s identity. It turns out Winslow’s only leads, about an escaped lunatic and a lodger who talked to himself and said disparaging things about prostitutes, were both thoroughly investigated by police and found to lack any merit. But L. Forbes Winslow continued to agitate the public in regards to his theories on the Ripper case, claiming for years afterward that it was actually his activism that had forced the Ripper to cease his murders and leave Britain. His persistent injection of himself into the narrative actually led police to consider him as a suspect at one point. And he serves as a very good analogy for many other researchers and writers who through the years have named their own suspects, based on frequently dubious evidence, in order to sell books and make a name for themselves as not only an expert—a Ripperologist—but as the person who finally solved the Ripper murders.

Lest it be presumed that the police were so useless they had to rely on outlandish theories suggested by letter writers, it should be emphasized that the police did have their own suspects. In fact, they had several, all along. After the Leather Apron/John Pizer debacle, they of course had to tread more lightly and keep their suspicions closer to the vest, but from the research of Ripperologists, we have come to better understand who the police were actually looking into. For example, one early suspect was Jacob Isenschmid. He was Swiss, and thus a foreigner. He was a butcher, and thus possessed of enough anatomical knowledge to fit the profile. He was known to have violently attacked several women in Whitechapel, resulting in his being committed and diagnosed with psychiatric disorders. Just days after the Annie Chapman murder, two doctors suggested him as a suspect to police, and when questioned, his own wife also thought him capable of the acts, reporting that he was always out of the house with no explanation and carrying large knives when he didn’t need to, and that he had more than once threatened to murder her. However, like some previous suspects, Isenschmid was in the hospital when the Stride and Eddowes double murder occurred, which eliminated him as a suspect. While the police were derided in the press as ineffective, and a commissioner was even driven to resign in disgrace, the fact of the matter is that they simply did not have irrefutable evidence or any strong leads. More than one victim had been seen with a man shortly before their murders, and while some of these witness descriptions seemed to line up, others did not at all. Some had Jack wearing a long coat, others a short cutaway coat. Some had him wearing a deer stalker while others had him wearing a sailor’s cap or other headwear entirely. More importantly, since clothing can be changed, some said he had darker skin while others said his complexion was “fair,” meaning white. There was even disagreement over how many murderers they might be looking for. While most of the pathologists who had examined the corpses of the Canonical Five led the police to think one maniac was responsible, others, such as Dr. Bagster Phillips, believed that more than one killer was active, attributing the Stride and Kelly murders to some other murderer. While the handwriting on the various Dear Boss and From Hell letters were generally thought not to match, and even today to any with even an untrained eye they do not seem consistent, leading police to view most of them as hoaxes and all of them as unreliable, some, like Dr. Thomas Dutton, became convinced that they were almost all written in the same hand, and that even the Goulston Street graffito’s message had been written by the same man. Dutton’s supposed opinion on matters should be taken with salt, though, as we will later see. There was also dispute among the pathologists over the level of anatomical expertise the killer must have had. Some said he must have been an expert physician or anatomist, something that the writer of the Dear Boss letters made a point of laughing at, but others suggested that the removal of organs was not so precise, with some often only being partially removed, and the violence of the wounds pointed more to a butcher or even someone who had little to no professional knowledge or education in anatomy. There was the further possibility, then, that it may have been a resurrectionist, someone who, like Burke and Hare, hoped to earn money by killing and selling the dead to an anatomist. This wouldn’t really make a great deal of sense, though, since the bodies had been so terribly mutilated and left where they’d been killed, but a certain pathological museum associated with a medical school did reach out to the police with an explanation. They revealed that a mysterious American had come around offering 20 Pounds sterling for specimens of the human uterus. Apparently, he was publishing some anatomical document and intended to provide a uterus specimen with each copy, which meant he needed a great many. Although the museum turned him away, saying there was no way to acquire so many uteri, he kept pestering them and began making similar inquiries at other institutions. Since the Ripper frequently took that organ from his victims, this may have provided some clearer motive for the murders, but it changes little. Whoever the Ripper was, even if he profited by his bloody trophies, he was still compelled to mutilate his victims in heinous ways. And some were not missing their uterus, showing that the act could not have been purely about that. It would seem, then, that despite this lead, the police were left in the same position. Nevertheless, even with all this uncertainty, some compelling suspects did emerge.

A sensational article by L. Forbes Winslow.

Frederick George Abberline was an Inspector First-Class at Scotland Yard who, after the murder Mary Ann Nichols or Polly, the first Ripper victim, was transferred back to Whitechapel due to his knowledge of the district, having previously served in the area with the Metropolitan Police. His chief suspect in the Ripper murders was one George Chapman, also known as Ludwig Schloski, a Polish immigrant whose real name was Seweryn Kłosowski and who had settled in Whitechapel just before the murders began. During the course of Abberline’s many interviews with Whitechapel residents, he spoke with Kłosowski’s wife, who told the inspector that her husband went out at night for hours at a time, without explanation given. This of course is not proof of anything, but 15 years later, Kłosowski was convicted of murdering three women, his mistresses, and Abberline wrote to the arresting officer to congratulate him, claiming, “You've got Jack the Ripper at last!” In reality, though Kłosowski was known to beat up the women in his life, there is hardly anything to suggest he was capable of the Ripper crimes. His murders were poisonings, which is about as different as can be from the mutilations perpetrated by Jack. Nevertheless, Abberline liked him better than other suspects. He personally interrogated Joseph Barnett, the lover of Mary Jane Kelly, in the aftermath of the Miller’s Court slaying, and though some later writers like Barnett for at least Kelly’s murder if not the others, Abberline cleared him. One witness who had supposedly seen Kelly enter her room with a man who might have been the Ripper, and who would later be suspected as the Ripper himself, George Hutchinson, was likewise interviewed by Abberline, and the inspector believed his account. Perhaps Abberline was too trusting. After all, he put little stock in the theory that Montague John Druitt was the Ripper, and there is an argument to be made that Druitt was one of the prime suspects of the crimes, and certainly a favorite of later investigators, such as the Assistant Police Commissioner Sir Melville Macnaghten, who investigated the crimes a few years afterward. Indeed, Macnaghten started his investigation of the case hearing rumors about Druitt, whose family, it was said, believed him to have been the Ripper. Macnaghten, an Eton graduate, had some upper crust connections that gave him an insider advantage while investigating Druitt. However, it remains clear that Macnaghten also had some major misconceptions about Druitt. In his report, he described Druitt as a doctor, which would have fit the profile of the Ripper, but in reality Druitt had been a barrister, or lawyer. Macnaghten also called Druitt “sexually insane,” and while mental health problems did run in Druitt’s family, other researchers have suggested that Druitt may have only been gay, and that this is what led to his ostracism and melancholia. Really the only concrete reason for suspecting Druitt was that he committed suicide shortly after the last of the Canonical Five murders, after which the killing ceased, but that is not really evidence at all, and in fact, his not living in Whitechapel and records of his playing cricket in Dorset, some 130 miles from Whitechapel, the very day after the first murder, does seem to exonerate him.

Despite the fact that Macnaghten was not involved in the initial investigation and his report contains factual errors and dubious assumptions, after it came to light in 1975, it became something of a bible for Ripperologists. It is because of the Macnaghten Memoranda that the notion of the Canonical Five victims is so prominent today. In it, he discusses some of the other murders being attributed to the Ripper at the time—Martha Tabram, Alice McKenzie, and Frances Coles—and he indicates that they don’t seem related. He even insinuates that James Thomas Sadler, who had been arrested on suspicion of the latter murder but was released for lack of evidence, may have been responsible for McKenzie’s death as well as Coles’s, but was likely not the Ripper. Besides Druitt, the other two suspects Macnaghten named in his memo also still remain prime candidates for Jack, indicating how influential the memo has been in Ripperology. One of these was Russian Michael Ostrog, a petty criminal known for swindlery and theft. He had been released from prison early in 1888, the year of the Ripper murders, and was considered a known threat because a Police Gazette article suggested that he remained dangerous. Among the many lies that this con man told about his past was that he had formerly been a surgeon in the Navy, and since the police were looking for doctors that could be suspects, this falsehood came back to bite him. However, there was never any sign of violent tendencies in his record, despite Macnaghten claiming he was “detained…as a homicidal maniac,” and more recently, a Ripperologist named Philip Sugden totally exonerated him, proving that Ostrog had been jailed in France during the murders. That leaves only one more suspect named in the Macnaghten memoranda: a Polish Jew named Kosminski whom he said “became insane” and “had a great hatred of women, specially of the prostitute class, & had strong homicidal tendencies.” The name Kosminski was also written down as a potential suspect by another Chief Inspector in the margins of a memoir written by an assistant police commissioner just next to a passage that talked about a witness identifying a certain Polish Jew as being the person he had seen with a victim. However, that passage is very vague, there is no other record of such an identification, Macnaghten states explicitly that no such identification occurred, and the name Kosminski may have been written into the margins there as a guess, based on Macnaghten’s naming of the suspect. The fact is that no one really knows anything about this Kosminski because no one knows who he was. Since Macnaghten claims he was committed to an asylum in March 1889, some search was made of asylum records in later years, and one Aaron Kosminski, a Polish Jew from Whitechapel, was institutionalized around that time, but he was non-violent, a paranoid with auditory hallucinations, perhaps schizophrenic but not homicidal, as Macnaghten claimed. The same Ripperologist who tracked down the name Aaron Kosminski suggested Macnaghten had confused the name and may have actually meant another, more violent patient named David Cohen who, he claimed, was one and the same as another Whitechapel resident named Nathan Kaminski. However, his argument is pure speculation, presuming that Cohen, a tailor, and Kaminski, a bootmaker, were actually the same person, asserting without evidence that he was actually Leather Apron, and relying on an elaborate mistaken identity explanation to assert that he was a main suspect even though his name was never recorded by police as a person of interest.

A caricature of Melville Mcnaghten.

Macnaghten’s Memoranda were actually written in order to refute a theory then being promoted in London newspapers that Jack was a certain medical student named Thomas Cutbush, who a few years after the murders was declared insane after stabbing some women. Macnaghten was emphatic in denying that Cutbush was the Ripper, pointing out that Cutbush’s mental health troubles were owing to his contraction of syphilis, and making it clear that Cutbush’s crimes, which entailed stabbing two women in the buttocks, were likely inspired by some other similar attacks a couple years earlier and were nothing like the Ripper crimes. He states, “It will be noticed that the fury of the [Ripper] mutilations increased in each case, and, seemingly, the appetite only became sharpened by indulgence. It seems, then, highly improbable that the murderer would have suddenly stopped in November ’88, and been content to recommence operations by merely prodding a girl’s behind some 2 years and 4 months afterwards.” The struggle between police and the media had long been an issue. While the police had been developing their suspects through quiet house searches and interrogations, the newspapers loudly proclaimed one suspect after another. One favorite was Dr. Thomas Cream, an abortionist who had served ten years in prison in America for poisoning the husband of his mistress and afterward moved to London, where he began murdering women. Dubbed the Lambeth Poisoner, the marked difference in his method of killing should alone have eliminated him as a suspect, as should the fact that he was actually still imprisoned in America during the Ripper crimes, but a rumor that at his hanging, his final words were “I am Jack the…” before the scaffold fell and silenced him was just too juicy not to print. Later writers would make the baseless claim that Cream had a double, and that the two were both murderers, each covering for the other and providing each other alibis. It would not be the last unsupported claim about Ripper doubles. Equally sensational and cooked up to sell newspapers was the theory, put forward by one Robert Donston Stephenson that the killer was an occultist and black magician. Stephenson, a journalist, was himself interested in the “occult sciences” and took a keen interest in the murders. He would eventually write an article for the Pall Mall Gazette that named a certain doctor at London Hospital, Morgan Davies, as Jack the Ripper. The hospital was less than 200 yards from the location of the first murder, and Stephenson claimed that, while convalescing in the hospital during the murders, Dr. Davies had discussed the murders with him in suspicious detail. Rather than make Davies a suspect, however, his efforts only had the effect of making Stephenson himself a suspect. But as Stephenson had checked himself into the hospital during the murders, and as the ward in which Stephenson was housed would not allow him to leave and return, much as other suspects who were in some sort of custody at the time of the murders, Stephenson too had an airtight alibi.

Even American newspapers got in on the action when in November 1888 New York papers reported that one Dr. Francis Tumblety had been arrested for indecency and questioned in relation to the Whitechapel Murders, and had thereafter jumped bail and returned to America. Tumblety was of particular interest to American readers because more than two decades earlier, in 1865, he had been arrested on suspicion of being involved in a conspiracy to assassinate President Abraham Lincoln. He had been released after three weeks as there was no evidence to connect him to with Lincoln’s murder, but his reputation would thereafter always be tainted. And in some ways, Tumblety made good sense as a Ripper suspect. He was a doctor, he was an apparent misogynist known to express his disgust and hatred of female sex workers, and he owned a collection of uteri in jars that he said came from “every class of woman.” This last detail even suggested he might have been the American who was going around London museums offering cash for uterus specimens. However, he was a known pederast, with more interest in adolescent boys than in women, and he was less of a doctor than a quack, known for peddling cure-all elixirs. Certainly he could not have committed the Mary Jane Kelly murder, which occurred while he was in police custody, and the authorities did not seem all that interested in him as a suspect, showing little concern that he had skipped bail and fled the country. Regardless, American law enforcement and press hounded him for much of his life, and no further evidence of his being a murderer was ever uncovered. But this did not stop him from being featured as the chief suspect in books and documentaries that would appear in the 1990s. And this is typical of many Ripperologist theories. They resurrect some old suspect long exonerated, whom law enforcement at the time had little reason to believe was the killer, and dig deeper to insinuate there might have been more there. So Charles Allen Lechmere, the market porter who discovered the first victim, was transformed into a Ripper suspect because of research that, while he claimed to have only been with the body for a few minutes, the route he typically took suggested he was with her around nine minutes, as if people can’t have a poor sense of time or consider less than ten minutes to be a “few minutes.”  And cases of mistaken identity often lead Ripperologists to new suspects. Take for example, the Leather Apron debacle, which led to two different cases of mistaken identity already mentioned in part one, Pizer and Piggott. Ripperologists took this further. The name of Macnaghten’s escaped lunatic, Kosminski, led Ripperologist Martin Fido to conclude that Macnaghten had meant David Cohen, whom he imagined was actually the false name of another person named Kaminsky, and that this was the real Leather Apron. And if that weren’t convoluted enough, over the course of Fido’s research, one red herring was another Jew who had been institutionalized named Hyam Hyams, and though Fido eliminated him has a suspect, later Ripperologists latched onto him as Jack the Ripper. It is a cannibalistic process, where Ripperologists pore over the extensive literature looking for figures that haven’t been focused on recently in order to build new theories and sell books. In a way, these Ripperologists are like the Ripper themselves, stalking these dark and well-trod avenues for victims of their own.

Colorful Ripper suspect Francis Tumblety.

As the murders and the murderer faded into the past but refused to be forgotten, the field of Ripperology was born, and Ripperologists and their theories had credibility issues from the start. Mostly those who wrote about Jack the Ripper were journalists and police who had worked the investigation and wrote about their theories in later memoirs, but arguably the first Ripperologist proper was Leonard Matters, an Australian-born British politician. In his 1929 book, The Mystery of Jack the Ripper, he told a story he had supposedly learned while living in Buenos Aires about a West End surgeon whose son had visited a number of sex workers and come down with a venereal disease that caused him to deteriorate and die. This surgeon, which Matters gave the pseudonym Dr. Stanley, apparently then committed the Ripper murders to enact vengeance for his son’s fate, and after he killed Mary Jane Kelly, he fled to Argentina, where he would confess everything on his deathbed. Matters presents the story as a rumor and one he cannot confirm, using no real names, but claims that his inquiries turned up some corroborating evidence for it, such as the confession being printed in a Spanish-language newspaper. Others who have tried to investigate this story, however, have turned up nothing, and the consensus is that Matters made it up to sell his book. It was the first such book to present a novel solution and suspect, and this would end up being a common, even an expected feature of future Ripperologist works, many of which would not shrink from falsifying their theories. Take, for example, the theory that a Liverpool cotton merchant, James Maybrick, was Jack the Ripper. This individual lived and died having never been connected to the crimes. The only thing of note about his life was that his wife slowly poisoned him to death with arsenic. But about 50 years later, an unemployed Liverpudlian made headlines when he came into possession of Maybrick’s diary, in which he confessed to being Jack the Ripper. Suspicion of a hoax was immediate, since the story of how he’d come into possession of the diary kept changing. Tests of its ink did not immediately prove it a fake, but later tests for a certain preservative did indicate its ink was more modern. Moreover, skeptics pointed to factual inconsistencies in its contents proving its inauthenticity, and document experts came to believe the handwriting style was inconsistent with Victorian norms. Finally, two years later, its owner confessed to having forged it in order to make money. Nevertheless, 8 years later, in 2003, a Ripperologist still had no qualms about relying on it as evidence that Maybrick was not only the Ripper, but also the Servant Girl Annihilator, an Austin, Texas serial killer, and in 2015, yet another Ripperologist relied on this known forgery in a book claiming Maybrick’s brother was the real Ripper. So we see that Ripperologists are a parasitic kind of researcher. Rather than practicing true empiricism, building on what has been genuinely learned in previous investigations, they recycle again and again long disproven theories, tweaking them to create new suspects, casting doubt on facts and muddying the waters entirely.

More than one theory, in fact, has rested on documents that appear to be hoaxes. In 1923, a French journalist, William Le Queux wrote in his memoirs that he had seen an unfinished manuscript written by Rasputin about “Great Russian Criminals,” in which Rasputin named a certain Dr. Alexander Pedachenko, revealing that he was actually an agent of the Russian Secret Police living undercover in London, and that he had committed the Ripper atrocities for the sole purpose of creating unrest and discrediting Scotland Yard, which if it were true was definitely accomplished. However, it turns out that the source of this information, named in the manuscript, was a known liar and Russian provocateur who had only been three years old when the murders took place. As in other cases, however, the unreliability of this manuscript did not stop later Ripperologists from weaving elaborate theories around it. In 1959, historian Donald McCormick wrote his own Ripper book, claiming to have confirmed aspects of the Pedachenko story, suggesting that this Russian spy was actually a double or doppelganger for the other well-known suspect, Seweryn Kłosowski, and occasionally assumed that suspect’s identity. However, his sources were dubious, especially his principal source, the purported papers of Dr. Dutton, the aforementioned individual who claimed to have matched up the Ripper’s handwriting. In fact, the manuscript of Dutton’s book on Jack the Ripper, which was McCormick’s principal source, is now lost, if it ever existed, surviving now only in what McCormick claims to have read in it when he was supposedly allowed to examine it in 1932, and it appears, based on historical inaccuracies and anachronisms, that McCormick’s claims about it were a fiction. Indeed, much of his career was tainted by accusations of fraud and hoaxes cooked up to sell his books. And this too muddies the waters, making it hard to separate fact from fiction in the case of Jack the Ripper. For example, McCormick’s claims about Dr. Thomas Dutton affect numerous other theories. Many theories about the killer surround the handwriting of the letters signed Jack the Ripper, and the From Hell letter, for example. I can look at these letters myself and see quite plainly that they do not match, the From Hell letter being nearly illegible, the letter to the medical examiner who studied the kidney mailed with it more legible but blocky and awkward, and the two previous correspondence, the original Dear Boss letter and the Saucy Jack postcard, not matching in a very obvious way in that the cursive letters of the former mostly flow together and connect while that of the latter are mostly written as separate characters. Yet the idea of the handwriting matching largely persists because McCormick claimed Dutton had determined it did, through microphotography. He even claimed that Dutton believed the Goulston Street graffito matched and that he had photographed it as well, even though there is no evidence of such photographs ever being taken before the message was erased. And the simple fact that microphotography didn’t exist at the time seems to prove that all of these claims are totally apocryphal.

William Le Queux, originator of the Pedachenko story.

The Pedachenko story was not the only dubious Jack the Ripper theory that descended into baseless conspiracy claims, either. Many were the theories that there must have been some kind of cover-up for the murders not to have been solved. For example, there was James Kelly, who had murdered his wife in 1883 and then escaped from Broadmoor Asylum early in 1888. Police took an early interest in him as the killer but eventually eliminated him, and more than one Ripperologist claims that this could only be a cover-up, that the police were hiding the killer’s known identity for fear it made them look incompetent. This seems hard to believe, though, since they already looked incompetent, and revealing that they knew the identity of the killer might actually have made them look more competent, even if they were unable to capture him. Similarly, Thomas Cutbush, whom newspapers were suggesting was the Ripper and which theory Melville Macnaghten wrote his memo to argue against, was the nephew of a police superintendent, leading Ripperologists to again cry police cover-up. Then there is the Masonic conspiracy theory, which centered around the Goulston Street graffito, which again, we only have conflicting reports about since, despite what McCormick claims, no known photographs exist of it. It centered on the reported spelling of the word “Juwes,” which of course was odd. One claim had it that this was the Yiddish spelling, and thus it further implicated the Jewish community in Whitechapel. But that was untrue. Other claims had it that there was no language or dialect in which this was a typical spelling, and this would lead to the claim that it was actually a reference to Masonic lore, in which three apprentice masons names Jubela, Jubelo, and Jubelum murder the legendary Master Mason Hiram Abiff. To further corroborate this theory, it was pointed out that the victims’ mutilations, the cutting of the throat, the disembowelment, and even specifically the placing of the viscera over the victims’ shoulders, was exactly the same as the secret penalties of Freemasonry. In Masonic ritual initiation, one swears that if they betray the order, there will be “the penalties of having their throats cut from ear to ear” and of having their “vitals…thrown over [their] left shoulder.” Well, this sounds quite damning until you look at it more closely. First, it is a stretch to identify the word Juwes with Jubela, Jubelo, and Jubelum. A more rational explanation is that it was the French word for Jews, “Juives,” and the “I” and “v,” joined together perhaps in cursive, looked like a “w.” Second, the Masonic initiation ceremony also talks about the ripping out of tongues, which wasn’t done to the victims, and in fact, it speaks of the “left breast [being] torn open” and the “heart and vitals [being] taken from thence” to be thrown over the shoulder, so it doesn’t appear to be referring to disembowelment at all. Lastly, it just doesn’t make sense as a coherent conspiracy. This penalty was symbolic, first off, and it would not have been enacted against some random sex workers. Women weren’t allowed to be Freemasons, and thus weren’t subject to the penalty, which again, was just a ritual symbol. Freemasonry was so common and popular among men in the late 19th century that, actually, knowledge of its lore and rituals was not really “secret,” per se, and even if the killer was using some Masonic symbolism, it really only indicated that the police should be searching for a maniac who had some passing familiarity with Masonic ritual. It would not have been evidence of a Masonic conspiracy.

The theories of Ripperologists are too numerous for me to address in a single episode. Indeed, the principal supporter of the Masonic conspiracy, Stephen Knight, who has named specific Masonic conspirators who, embarrassingly, weren’t actually Freemasons, is also responsible for a far larger conspiracy theory surrounding the Ripper murders than just this Masonic theory. His “final solution” goes all the way to the top, to a royal cover-up, and implicates numerous individuals, all of whom have been named themselves in derivative Ripper theories by other Ripperologists. It's so convoluted that I won’t delve into it here, but patrons of the podcast on Patreon will hear a full exclusive about the theory. Ripperologists go to sometimes ridiculous lengths to find new and interesting suspects. For example, one claim names Oscar Wilde’s lover as the Ripper, asserting that Wilde knew it and that his classic story, The Picture of Dorian Gray, revealed the truth. Another theory had it that Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland author Lewis Carroll was the real culprit. Yet another accuses Vincent Van Gogh. And no matter how unlikely their theories might be, as we have seen with the various forgeries and hoaxes they produce, these authors will not shrink from concocting evidence for their books. Sometimes it even has the cast of legitimate science to it. For example, one suspect highlighted by the hoaxer Donald McCormick, and later folded into the conspiracy theories of Stephen Knight, was Walter Sickert, a German artist about whom I’ll be speaking in detail in the forthcoming patron exclusive. In the early 2000s, popular crime novelist Patricia Cornwell claimed that using a DNA profile supposedly taken from the Ripper letters, which again, were probably not even written by the killer, she was able to match his DNA to that of Sickert, using a profile likewise taken from one of his letters. Scholarly analysis of her claims casts doubt not only on the legitimacy of the DNA profiles she acquired and their comparison, but also on the suspect of Sickert, based on evidence that he wasn’t even in England at the time of the killings. In the end, every single suspect put forward can be either irrefutably eliminated or the case against them suffers from a distinct lack of concrete evidence, relying only on circumstance, opportunity, and rumor. So despite what many Ripperology books may claim, nothing has been solved, and this, perhaps the most famous murder mystery in history, is still as shrouded in uncertainty as ever.

Further Reading

Begg, Paul. Jack the Ripper: The Uncensored Facts. Robson Books, 1990.

Jack the Ripper. Edited by Maxim Jakubowski and Nathan Braund, Castle Books, 2005.

Odell, Robin. Ripperology: A Study of the World’s First Serial Killer and a Literary Phenomenon. The Kent State University Press, 2006.

Rumbelow, Donald. The Complete Jack the Ripper (Fully Revised and Updated). Penguin, 2004.

Sugden, Philip. The Complete History of Jack the Ripper. Carroll & Graf. 2002.

Jack the Ripper - Part One: The Canonical Five

19th-century London was no stranger to the concept of gruesome murder. As I’ve just recently been discussing, they had been reading about it for some time. From the cannibalistic highwaymen said to haunt rural roads to murderous innkeepers and the demon barber, Sweeney Todd, the stories of arch-killers filled the popular penny dreadfuls. And while these were largely fiction, there was no shortage of real violent crime either, especially in the slums of the East End. Many were the daylight robberies, the assaults, the drunken rapes committed in this seedy underbelly of a city and society transformed by the industrial revolution, and murder was a known scourge there. In 1811, a family living in tenements near the Ratcliffe Highway was entirely annihilated by an intruder. The violence of the attack was shocking. Even the children had been brutally slain. A bloody maul that appeared to be the murder weapon was found at the scene. Twelve days later, another family was likewise slaughtered, and the suspect found guilty of the murders “cheated the hangman” by taking his own life. At the time, this murder case was one of the most notorious. Seventeen years later, the case of Burke and Hare took the limelight. William Burke and William Hare were body snatchers, also called “resurrection men,” providing cadavers under the table for anatomical study. As Scottish law limited the human remains that could be used for such purposes, and graveyards had taken to securing their dead in iron cages called mortsafes, there was something of a shortage of specimens, which of course encouraged the illegal procurement of such cadavers. Burke and Hare were very much like the murderous innkeepers of penny blood stories, and indeed may have inspired such stories, as before their killing spree, they sold the body of a lodger who had died naturally to an anatomist. Thereafter, when another lodger was ill, they didn’t wait for her natural death, but rather killed her and likewise sold her remains. In all, Burke and Hare killed sixteen people, suffocating them and profiting by the sale of their corpses. Perhaps most horrific were the murders of Amelia Dyer, the so-called Ogress of Reading, a baby farmer who adopted unwanted infants for a living and strangled many of them so that she would not have to actually care for them. She is suspected of killing 400 or more babies, making her potentially the most prolific serial killer in history. As horrifying and mind-boggling as all these crimes were, there was a shared motive that could at least be comprehended. They all appear to have been committed by financially struggling individuals for the purposes of acquiring money—they were economic murders. Dyer killed babies to enable her to adopt more, each of whom she was paid to take. The financial motivation of Burke and Hare is quite clear; once they had been paid for the body of the first, each lodger came to represent a financial temptation to them, worth more dead than alive. And the Ratcliffe Highway killer, it was believed, had broken into the rooms of those families and brutally killed all of them with the intention of burglary, as the first had occurred on a pay day, and a watch was missing from the second scene. Murder itself was something Victorians could wrap their minds around, so long as there was an understandable motive. Domestic murders too existed, of course, with husbands killing wives, and wives killing husbands. Crimes of passion were not difficult to understand, nor were crimes for economic gain. It was certainly shocking when a killer took numerous victims, like the killers mentioned, but if they had done it for some clear benefit, the public could at least move on from the unfortunate incidents. The fact that such heinous acts were perpetrated for money was at least comprehensible and pointed to the societal evils of hardship and inequality being at least partially to blame, and the culprits being caught certainly helped them move on as well. Soon, however, a new sort of murderer would appear, there in the dark and dirty corners of London’s East End. This killer too would claim numerous victims, with shocking and stomach-turning violence, but what made this killer different was that there was no comprehensible motive. It was the dawning of a new era of maniac killers, and this one would be remembered forever, for he was never caught.

As I have previously argued, to understand a killer and their killings, rather than resorting to unhelpful notions about pure evil, we should instead consider the environment as a factor. Surely genetic predisposition might play a role in the development of pathologies, but nurture must be accounted for as well as nature, so we cannot truly understand the Ripper murders without some understanding of the terrible place in which they occurred: the aforementioned slums of the East End, and specifically Whitechapel. As is almost always the case, the wealthy and privileged claimed a specific quarter of the city while the poor were relegated to another, and in times of great inequality, slums like these become overcrowded, unable to contain the growing number of those who are poverty stricken. Mid- to late-19th-century London was one such time, and the slums of the East End were full to bursting. It was called “outcast London,” and it was the shame of British society. With poor sanitation and drainage systems, the streets of these slums were filthy, which brought terrible vermin problems, from rats to roaches, but to privileged Victorians, the human beings in these slums were themselves vermin. Those who worked were dock laborers, costermongers or handcart merchants, butchers struggling to find meat, and tailors who toiled in sweatshops. England’s Poor Laws, intended to help employ and house the poor, resulted in the Victorian workhouse, where children were forced into hard labor and endured terrible abuse and neglect. Family dwellings were crowded, but more crowded still were the common lodging houses, or dosshouses, in which “dossers” paid nightly for a place to sleep—typically a mattress swarming with vermin, but sometimes even just a rope to lean on for the night. Alcoholism was rampant, and when dossers took casual day work, they often spent their earnings on drink before they secured their bed for the night. With even fewer work opportunities than the men, the women in these slums often earned their drink and doss money by prostitution. At mid-century, one estimate had it that 1 in every sixteen London women was a prostitute, but those 1 in 16 were concentrated in the slums, and those with no rooms to take their patrons to, plied their trade in the streets. So few were the lampposts in these slums that, at night, many a street and alley were entirely dark, giving these women plenty of places to do their business, but this darkness, in addition to the abject poverty of the area, also encouraged rampant crime. Though police did patrol these neighborhoods, there were streets down which even police officers dared not venture unless in groups. In 1875, in an effort to address the overcrowding of East End slums, the city and its Metropolitan Board began to buy slum property and force out residents, which displacement, of course, only resulted in far worse overcrowding and homelessness in the remaining slums, like Whitechapel. In 1887, just a year before the Ripper murders, the economic hardships reached a boiling point, and a mass protest against unemployment took place at Trafalgar Square. The demonstration erupted into violence; 75 were injured and 400 arrested. It became known as Bloody Sunday. It was in this atmosphere, among fears of an uprising of the poor, criticism of the ineffectuality of the police, and disgrace over the degraded conditions of many London residents, that in the slum of Whitechapel, someone began to brutally murder and mutilate the very dosshouse prostitutes who were acknowledged to symbolize the most pressing social problems of the age.

An illustration of the violence on Bloody Sunday, a demonstration over economic conditions in London a year before the Whitechapel Murders.

The first murder attributed to the Ripper, though perhaps not actually his first victim, as we will see, was discovered my market porters on Buck’s Row on the morning of August 31st, 1888. Only one lamp illuminated this street, and it stood far off at the opposite end of the road. As it was still dark, they could not see the blood, but the policeman they fetched, with his bullseye lantern, was able to discern that the woman was not just sleeping off a drunk but dead, her throat cut twice in such a vicious manner that the wound went all the way back to her spine. The ensuing medical examination showed bruising around the jaw, perhaps from being throttled, and terrible mutilations of the abdomen and genitals. She had been disemboweled and stabbed in the vagina. Her name, it was later learned, was Mary Ann Nichols, “Polly” colloquially. She had for years been estranged from her husband and children because of her drinking. Indeed, on the day before her murder, she had earned enough money to sleep in safety three times over, but had spent it all on drink. That night, turned away for having no doss money, she remarked that she would have it soon enough, boasting about “what a jolly bonnet I’ve got now.” Her limbs were still warm when she was found. It seems the killer had left her there only a half hour before her discovery. Then, a little more than a week later, on the morning of September 8th, a second victim was discovered: Annie Chapman, called “Siffey” and “Dark Annie,” another woman who had separated from her husband and children and had for years been living in dosshouses, earning her lodgings taking on crochet work, selling flowers, and, more occasionally, sex work. A year and a half earlier, she had sadly learned that her husband passed and her children had been sent off to various institutions. Her body was found by the back doors of her lodging house, less than half a mile from the site of the previous murder, and this time the killer seemed to have taken his time. As before, Annie’s throat had been cut with a jagged, two-stroke, back-and-forth motion, nearly severing her head, but this time the murderer seemed to be playing with her viscera. He did not just cut across her belly, he removed the skin of her abdomen in flaps. He took out her small intestines and placed them over her right shoulder. He then carefully removed the uterus, with such precision that the doctor who would thereafter examine her remains concluded that her murderer must have had some anatomical expertise. The killer also removed her rings and what meager coins she carried and set them at her feet, as if to make clear that this had been no robbery. Unlike the previous murder, Annie was actually seen alive only a half hour before her body was discovered with the person who presumably murdered her. Here we have the first potential eye-witness description of Jack the Ripper: He was said to be dark or swarthy, meaning essentially not a white man, perhaps not an Englishman. He was around 40 years old, genteel in his apparel though somewhat shabby, and wearing a brown deer-stalker hat, which many today know better as the Sherlock Holmes style of hat. With this second murder, and a pattern emerging, so too did theories about the killer’s identity arise.

One early theory after Polly’s murder was that there was a gang of men going around robbing prostitutes and killing those who refused to surrender their money. There was good reason to believe this. During April of that year, another sex worker had been attacked by four robbers not far from where Polly had been found, and she had been treated at the hospital for similar wounds, such as having been stabbed in her genitals. She afterward died from an infection. Then, earlier in August, another woman had been found with 39 stab wounds, and it was believed that this gang was active again, but Polly had no money to kill her over, so this theory made little sense, and the purposeful laying by of Dark Annie’s rings and coins seemed designed to signal to the public that these were not robberies. Almost immediately, among the crowds that gathered around Annie’s body, some began to suggest that a Jew must have done it and to harass Jews in the streets, and there was a sizable population of Jewish immigrants in the East End and Whitechapel specifically at the time, such that, a few years later, the Sunday Magazine called it “the Jewish colony in London.” Of course, when it was learned that a witness had seen Annie with a “dark” foreign-looking figure, that only exacerbated the rumors, and newspapers were only too happy to amplify this speculation. The East London Observer asserted “that no Englishman could have perpetrated such a horrible crime, and that it must have been done by a Jew.” The theory that Jack the Ripper was a Polish Jew continues to thrive, even today, and at the time, with press coverage like that, it threatened to throw Whitechapel further into lawlessness. But newspapers of the day didn’t much mind stirring up controversy and spreading false information. Another rumor they spread was that the handkerchief tied around Dark Annie’s neck was not her own and had been put on her by the murderer. This turned out to be false. And another rumor that made the rounds was that the murderer had left a message on a nearby wall that read, “Five; fifteen more and then I give myself up.” No such message was left, but that didn’t stop it from being repeated in newspapers as far away as San Diego that autumn. For a long while, the newspapers did not have a catchy name for this killer. When it was clear that a lone killer was stalking unfortunate victims in the slums, they called him the “Whitechapel murderer,” or for more flavor, they called him the “Whitechapel maniac” or the “Whitechapel fiend.” But early on, some ventured to call him “Leather Apron,” based on another rumor.

An 1888 newspaper illustration depicting the suspicion and paranoia that gripped London in the wake of the Whitechapel Murders.

After Polly’s death, the initial inquiries of police turned up not only the rumor about a gang robbing and stabbing prostitutes, but also the lead that a certain man who wore a leather apron had been mistreating prostitutes, to the point that he was feared and avoided. They all called him Leather Apron, since they didn’t know his name, and they said he also sometimes wore a deer-stalker hat. Like the rumored gang, this fellow was said to be demanding money from the sex workers he harassed and beating them if they failed to comply. When the body of Dark Annie was discovered, a wet leather apron was also found close to a nearby water spigot, as if it had been washed and left there. Was this the murderer’s leather apron, and had he been forced to abandon it while in the act of washing blood from it? When the eyewitness description of the man last seen with Annie mentioned a deer-stalker, it seemed they had a suspect, and one police sergeant was certain that this character, this Leather Apron, was none other than Jack Pizer, a local bootmaker who, as a Polish Jew, further fit the burgeoning profile of the killer, misguided as it may have been. Eventually they found Pizer hiding in the home of some friends because he had been named by newspapers as the Whitechapel fiend. They also found long knives that might have been the murder weapons among his belongings, knives he used in his bootmaker’s trade. However, the leather apron found at the scene was later identified as belonging to someone else who wore it while working in a nearby cellar workshop, and the owner’s mother stated that she had washed it and left it there by the water tap. Then it was discovered that Jack Pizer had alibis for both murders, having been in a lodging house during Polly’s murder and having actually been talking to a policeman while watching a fire at the docks during Annie’s murder. In the end, Pizer, who claimed that he had only been identified as Leather Apron by the police sergeant because of a personal grudge between the two, was cleared of charges and he successfully sued one newspaper for libeling him in calling him the killer.

At the same time that Pizer was arrested, though, a second suspect, William Piggot, was also arrested for his resemblance to the Leather Apron character. He had been discovered in a pub, covered in blood, with possible defensive wounds on his hands, and when questioned, his behavior was erratic. His rambling explanation of his wounds was that he had tried to help a woman who was having a fit and she’d bitten him. But it had also been discovered that he was carrying a bundle of blood-stained clothing and had recently wiped blood from his shoes. The fact that Annie Chapman’s body had been discovered at 6am less than half an hour after her death had suggested that the killer must have walked down the street in the clear light of day while covered in blood, and this led to much criticism of the police. How had they not caught this boldfaced killer? Of course, the tools of their trade at the time, which mostly consisted of catching a criminal in the act or fleeing from a scene, or relied on the testimony of informers, did not help them much with this new sort of lone skulking predator. Areas were policed on foot. With no radios for getting in contact with other officers, they relied on whistles. Crime scene investigation consisted mostly of a medical examination of the deceased’s wounds. Fingerprinting was not an accepted science, and even blood typing was not a known technique. Forensics were rudimentary. The police presence in Whitechapel would be increased, but it was not until Annie’s death that the reality of the situation really set in and investigations were taken more seriously. As for the idea that a person covered in blood walking the streets of Whitechapel should have been easy to spot, this was a notion held by those who did not understand the reality of the slums. As I explained in my recent patron exclusive about the story of Sweeney Todd, the streets of the East End slums were sometimes flooded with blood and with discarded animal corpses because of the overcrowding and the demand for cheap food, such as the pies from the Sweeney Todd story. Butchers transformed their cellars into makeshift slaughterhouses, cutting up horses and other animals, and cat’s meat men pushed handcarts full of the chopped up remains from these butchers through the streets, typically trailed by stray cats. And with the lack of sanitation and the poor drainage systems, blood and animal matter sometimes choked the gutters, such that many boots were covered in blood. And with the frequency of drunken brawls in these slums, the fact was that it just wasn’t uncommon for people to have blood on them. Nevertheless, Piggott was suspicious enough to be arrested, and his unhinged behavior while in custody led to his being locked away in an insane asylum, and it must have seemed like the police had actually caught their maniac. However, a little more than 2 weeks after the arrests of Pizer and Piggott, after the former was exonerated and while the latter remained institutionalized, two more murders occurred, on the same day, proving that Piggott was not the culprit.

Contemporary newspaper illustration depicting the discovery of the first Ripper victim

The first to be discovered was Elizabeth Stride, in a court off Berner Street, and even as that scene was being examined by a policeman, news reached him that a second body had been found, that of Catherine Eddowes in Mitre Square. Both had their throats cut in the typical Ripper manner, but Stride had not been disemboweled. Because of this, some suggest Stride was not a Ripper victim, but most researchers who study the crimes contend that the only reason for this double event was that the murderer was interrupted before he could finish his ritual and had to flee. The notion that he was driven by compulsions to see his bloody deed out to its grisly conclusion further explains why he took so many risks with Eddowes, whom he killed in a square with three entrances and nearby warehouses with night watchmen making their rounds and right across from the home of a policeman. Despite these risks, he concluded his act with Eddowes, not only cutting her throat but also eviscerating her, cutting her from rectum to ribcage and removing organs as trophies—the uterus and the left kidney this time. But there were new mutilations as well, as the killer cut of her nose, split her eyelids, and gouged triangles into her cheeks beneath her eyes, transforming her into a kind of gruesome clown. Both women were, like the other victims, what would have then been called “unfortunate women,” living in poverty, with former husbands and partners from whom they had become estranged, now subsisting by performing honest work where they could, such as cleaning, and further relying on prostitution to get by. With this escalation, it seemed that the killer was growing bolder, perhaps even throwing his crimes in the face of the public and the police who had failed to catch him. And there is some further reason to believe this, for on the night of the double murder, the killer appears to have possibly left a message behind, scrawled on a wall as he was previously rumored to have done. Less than half a mile from the Eddowes murder scene in Mitre Square, on Goulston Street, a blood-stained piece of her apron, which had been cut away, was found near a staircase, on the wall of which was written, according to varying reports, either “The Juwes are not the men that will be blamed for nothing,” or “The Juwes are the men that will not be blamed for nothing.” First, even if this graffito was discovered near a genuine piece of Eddowes’s apron, it is not certain that the two were related. For example, Eddowes herself may have removed the piece of her apron, used it as a sanitary napkin and dropped it herself. Second, the confusing double negative of the graffito raises the question of whether it was meant to defend or accuse Jews of the murders. If it was left by the murderer, then was he revealing that he was a Jew or that he wasn’t? This strange message has led some to hypothesize that the Ripper murders were an elaborate frame-up all along, meant to stoke public anger and violence against the Polish Jew immigrant community. And an anti-Semitic riot is certainly what police feared when they found the Goulston Street graffito, which is why they erased it.

There was further reason for the police to believe the Goulston Street graffito was unrelated to the case, though. That reason was that its writing did not match that of another apparent message from the killer that had been received. Days before the double murder, when some had begun to hope that the killings were done, a letter was received by the Central News Agency and forwarded to Scotland Yard only a day before the Stride and Eddowes killings. It was addressed “Dear Boss,” and it mocked the police efforts to find “me,” especially the entire Leather Apron debacle. The letter was written in red ink, and the author explained that he had saved his victims’ blood and intended to write it with that, but that it “went thick like glue,” so he had to make due with red ink. The playful tone of the letter led the news agency to believe it was a hoax, but they forwarded it to Scotland Yard because it specifically said he would clip the next victim’s ears off and send them to police. The letter writer said he “shan’t quit ripping them” because he was “down on whores,” and it was signed “Jack the Ripper.” Though news agencies thought it a hoax, they published anyway, and the name stuck, and thereafter, another correspondence was received using the name. A postcard was sent to the news agency dated the day that Stride and Eddowes were discovered, which said, among other things, “Double event this time” and mentioned the first, Stride, had “squealed a bit” so that he “[c]ouldn’t finish straight off.” This was given as an excuse for why ears were not removed and sent to the police, as previously promised. Since some of these details would not have been public knowledge that morning, it was first thought the postcard might have been genuine and might prove the veracity of the original letter as well. However, the card was postmarked the next day, when these details were publicly known, and the fact was that the handwriting of the letter and postcard didn’t even clearly match. Another letter appeared a couple weeks later, this one not signed Jack the Ripper, but only with the statement that it had been sent “From hell.” Enclosed in a box delivered with the letter was a piece of a kidney. The letter said, “I send you half the Kidne I took from one women preserved it for you tother piece I fried and ate it was very nise.” So the specter of cannibalism entered the story. A doctor afterward analyzed the kidney and determined it was human, and that it was from the left side, which corresponded to the fact that Catherine Eddowes’s left kidney was taken. However, the doctor seems to have given contradictory opinions on the kidney, and the fact that it had been preserved in spirits meant that it could have been taken from any anatomist’s lab or anatomical museum to play a gruesome prank. Indeed, after the doctor examined it, he too received a letter signed by Jack the Ripper, whose handwriting again didn’t match the others. As important as the letters may have seemed to the case, in the end, they may only be evidence of how obsessed the public had become with the murders, and of how much public opinion was turning against the police, who were more and more seen as ineffectual.

Handwriting comparison, courtesy Rumbelow.

Indeed, even the authorities themselves would have agreed that their response to the murders could have been improved. Their investigation was fragmented because it was being undertaken simultaneously by numerous divisions—the Criminal Investigation Department of the Metropolitan Police, the City of London Police, and the Central Office of Scotland Yard—and they did not coordinate or share information as they should have, which the Metropolitan Police Commissioner Sir Charles Warren himself complained about. But it was Warren who would end up being the scapegoat for the public’s ire over the continued failure to capture the murderer. Warren refused to seek money for a reward, which many thought would bring the killer to justice. His reason was that offering rewards for the capture of criminals frequently led to conspiracies to frame innocent men in order to collect the rewards. These were called Blood Money Conspiracies, and there had been famous scandals about them in London about 60 years earlier. With the police refusing to put up rewards, a group of local tradesmen formed a Vigilance Committee and began not only seeking money to put up their own reward but also petitioning for Commissioner Warren to be removed from his position. In what came to be called the War on Warren, they leveled numerous accusations of neglect against him: he had not brought the full strength of the Metropolitan police to bear in the search for the killer, he had transferred inexperienced investigators with no local knowledge to districts where they were useless, and he had never changed up old beat patrols, making it easier for the killer to predict when it would be safe to carry out his crimes. It is certainly true that there were police missteps, and that Warren was himself responsible for some of them. He was too hesitant to buy and use bloodhounds, for one. For another, he was negligent with some crime scene investigations—it was on his orders that the Goulston Street graffito was erased. Nevertheless, he was also being maligned unfairly in many respects. He was the face of the investigation, after all, for better or worse. More than a month after the double murder of Stride and Eddowes, with only conflicting witness descriptions of people seen with the victims and few suspects but no strong evidence, Sir Charles Warren finally resigned in disgrace. The very next day, the fifth and final canonical victim of Jack the Ripper was found, indoors rather than out in the streets, in the most horrific condition imaginable.

Like the previous victims, Mary Jane Kelly was a poverty-stricken woman who lived in the East End, had previously been married and had until recently been living with a man but was then making her own way, working in brothels. Unlike the other victims, she was only 25 years old, and she wasn’t staying in a lodging-house. She was not out prostituting herself to earn money for a bed in a dosshouse. She had her own place, Number 13 Miller’s Court, a 12-foot square room, formerly a parlor that had been partitioned off as a rental. This meant that Kelly had somewhere to take her clients; therefore, it also meant that, when she had her fatal assignation with Jack the Ripper, he had privacy to perform his heinous mutilations. Whereas, in the streets, it was estimated that he only took five to seven minutes ripping his victims, he spent something like two hours on Kelly, and it showed. Like the others, he cut her throat down to the vertebrae, disemboweled her, and placed her viscera around her. Whereas in the other killings he tended to set the victims’ intestines near their head, this time he spread them around, putting some at her feet, some on a bedside table, and some beneath her head like a pillow. This time he also removed her breasts, and he even cut the meat away from one thigh, denuding it like a butcher, leaving the bone visible. While in the past he had done some mutilation to his victims’ faces, there was actually nothing left of Mary Jane Kelly’s face. While twice before the murderer had taken a victim’s uterus with him, and parts of other organs were sometimes missing as well, a kidney here, a bladder there, from Mary Jane Kelly he took her heart. Some have suggested that Mary Jane Kelly may not have even been a victim of the Ripper. The differences in not only the circumstances but also the wounds inflicted are enough to suggest that it could have been a crime of passion or done for some other reason, and that it may have just been made to look like a Ripper slaying, in other words, a copycat. In 1939, one author suggested she had been murdered by an insane midwife who was performing an abortion on her, an entirely theoretical murderer he called “Jill the Ripper.” A more recent author has suggested, because of the evidence that something had been burned in the fireplace there , that the murderer had made some ritual sacrifice, which certainly would not match the Ripper’s modus operandi. Nevertheless, she is largely considered the fifth and final victim of the so-called “canonical five,” even if there is good reason to suspect that she, and perhaps Elizabeth Stride, who only had her throat cut, may be apocryphal additions to the Ripper’s kill count.

Contemporary newspaper illustration of the discovery of Kelly’s body in her Miller’s Court room.

Regardless of whether Kelly was a Ripper victim, just as there is disagreement over whether Polly was the first victim, there is further debate over whether Kelly was the last, for murders in Whitechapel would continue to occur in the aftermath. One of these was a strangling and clearly unlike the Ripper murders, but the wounds of a few others were brutal and reminiscent enough of the killings the previous fall that some continued to believe the Ripper was still active. While some have thought that the privacy Mary Jane Kelly’s room provided, and the time he took in the act of killer her, might have somehow allowed him to sate his compulsions, and that taking her heart may have somehow been symbolic of the finality of this last murder, forensic profilers typically suggest that serial murderers rarely just cease their habits, which are psychological rituals they become compelled to enact. More likely, if Kelly’s was the final murder, then the murders only ceased because the murderer had traveled elsewhere, was institutionalized or imprisoned, or had died. But just because the murders stopped did not mean that the investigation stopped as well. Scotland Yard and the police had their suspects, and in the years that followed, other suspects would emerge. As the Ripper case became the stuff of legend and literature, clever writers and independent researchers also wanted in on the action, digging up old leads and naming new suspects. Today, these enthusiasts have invented their own field of study, Ripperology, and there are numerous books published, often putting forth a new suspect, proposing some unlikely conspiracy theory, or dredging up an old suspect to make a case for why they were always the best suspect. They have titles like The True Face of Jack the Ripper, Naming Jack the Ripper, and Jack the Ripper, the Final Solution. In the second and final part of this series, I will consider the proposed culprits and endeavor to demonstrate why, no matter what these book titles claim, the identity of the Whitechapel Murderer remains unknown.

Further Reading

Begg, Paul. Jack the Ripper: The Uncensored Facts. Robson Books, 1990.

Crone, Rosalind. “From Sawney Beane to Sweeney Todd: Murder Machines in the Mid-Nineteenth Century Metropolis. Cultural and Social History, vol. 7, no. 1, 2010, pp. 59–85. Taylor & Francis Online, doi.org/10.2752/147800410X477340.

Jack the Ripper. Edited by Maxim Jakubowski and Nathan Braund, Castle Books, 2005.

Odell, Robin. Ripperology: A Study of the World’s First Serial Killer and a Literary Phenomenon. The Kent State University Press, 2006.

Rumbelow, Donald. The Complete Jack the Ripper (Fully Revised and Updated). Penguin, 2004.

Sugden, Philip. The Complete History of Jack the Ripper. Carroll & Graf. 2002.