The Lincoln Legends - Part Three: Puppet Masters and Masterminds
His name was Mudd, Dr. Samuel Mudd, and of the eight defendants in the military trial of co-conspirators in Lincoln’s assassination, he was one of only three who was sentenced to life in prison rather than execution, on the charges of conspiracy to murder the President and also of aiding and abetting John Wilkes Booth. Yet in the late 1990s, a bill was introduced to Congress called the Samuel Mudd Relief Act, proposing to exonerate the doctor. Another effort at the same time to put the doctor on a commemorative stamp demonstrates how memory of the man has changed in the intervening years. Certainly John Wilkes Booth and David Herold came to Dr. Samuel Mudd in Maryland after the assassination of Lincoln, and certainly Mudd treated Booth’s broken leg and allowed the two to stay with him for a couple days. But as Mudd became something of a cause célèbre during the next century, it was argued that he had only held firm to his Hippocratic Oath, that as a physician, he’d had no choice but to treat Booth as a patient. These efforts to rehabilitate his character were convincing to many, including Presidents Jimmy Carter and Ronald Reagan, who wrote letters to Mudd’s grandson in support of the efforts to exonerate him. A myth developed, repeated in one of Nic Cage’s National Treasure films, that the phrase “his name is mud” came from the terrible defamation that Dr. Mudd suffered, though this is untrue, as the phrase was in use more than a decade before Samuel Mudd was even born. Also untrue, or at least debatable, are the various claims of Mudd’s innocence and lack of involvement in the conspiracy to kill the President. When the military officer tracking Booth in the aftermath of the assassination first came around the Mudd home, the doctor claimed he didn’t know the man he’d treated, but when the same investigator returned days later to search Mudd’s house and found Booth’s boot with his name written inside it, Mudd said he hadn’t noticed the name in it. When shown a picture of Booth, Mudd insisted he didn’t recognize the man. Yet at his trial, numerous witnesses testified that not only had he met Booth five months earlier in Maryland, under the pretext that Booth was interested in buying Mudd’s farm or that Mudd had helped him buy a horse, or both, but also that Mudd had visited Washington and introduced Booth to the Surratts there. George Atzerodt’s lost confession even implicates Mudd in the scrapped Lincoln kidnapping plot, saying Booth had sent supplies to Mudd’s house, as it was intended to be a stop on their route after they had abducted the President. Other witnesses testified to Mudd’s devotion to the Confederate cause and to remarks he had made suggesting he would have liked to see Lincoln dead. Mudd was a slaveholder, from a family that owned many slaves, and his former slaves even testified to the terrible abuse they suffered under him. This was arguably irrelevant, but it certainly painted a picture of his poor character. Mudd’s defense team dutifully called other witnesses who would suggest the prosecution’s witnesses were lying about Mudd in hopes of claiming reward money, but afterward, when Mudd was convicted and being transported to prison, his guard later claimed that Mudd confessed to not only having met Booth before, but also to having met with the conspirators in Washington and to having recognized Booth when he came seeking medical attention after the assassination. Just after taking office as the new President—and this should resonate with Americans today—Andrew Johnson granted a blanket “universal amnesty and pardon” to those who participated “in the late rebellion,” and then in an eleventh hour pardon at the end of his term in office, he also pardoned Mudd and the other convicted conspirators who had not been executed. After serving just 4 years, during which time he became the official doctor of his prison, Mudd returned home, resumed his medical practice, and even became active in local politics. Though historians have continued to resist this revision of his character, the efforts of his family and others have largely been successful in causing Dr. Samuel Mudd to enjoy a rehabilitation of character in the public imagination. And yet, this hasn’t stopped him from being injected into more than one conspiracy theory regarding the Lincoln assassination. He is identified as a Confederate agent, a key contact linking Surratt and Booth to a Grand Confederate Conspiracy, but more than that, he was also a Catholic, so he is also raised as evidence that the Roman Catholic Church was behind the President’s murder. As we often see with conspiracy theories, eventually, all the usual suspects catch the blame.
Beyond the conspiracy theories about Vice President Johnson and the claims of a Grand Confederate Conspiracy, which I explored in the previous installment of this series, one other grand conspiracy theory surrounding the assassination of Lincoln gained currency in the immediate aftermath of his murder. Arising from resentment of Irish and German immigration in the 1850s and manifesting as a cresting wave of anti-Catholic sentiment, only a decade earlier, the Know-Nothing Party had become influential in American politics by fearmongering over supposed Catholic plots to undermine American democracy. This anti-immigrant and anti-Catholic sentiment persisted after the decline of that nativist party, in part, because Irish Catholics in America largely opposed Union efforts in the Civil War and refused to “unite with the abolitionists.” This was somewhat surprising, given the position of honor among American abolitionists held by Daniel O’Connell, the leader of the Roman Catholic Irish Nationalists in Ireland, since he was such a staunch supporter of the abolitionist cause in America. However, the Irish Nationalist press in America was not so strong an opponent of slavery, nor did they unreservedly support the preservation of the union. Added to this was the impression that the Roman Catholic Church had sided with the Confederacy, resulting from a letter that Pope Pius IX had written to Jefferson Davis, in response to an initial letter from Davis. In his reply, the Pope called Davis “illustrious and honorable President,” and spoke admirably of the Confederacy’s desire for peace, expressing hope that others in America would likewise work for peace. The letter was certainly respectful and flattering, but it must also be remembered that it was laboriously translated by others, which process may have resulted in more flowery speech, and according to Jefferson Davis’s own ambassador, the Pope was moved solely by something Davis had written about wanting peace, and was expressing his own desire that peace be achieved. It is not a fair characterization to suggest the letter was an official recognition of Confederate sovereignty or a move in support of slavery, which the Catholic Church and numerous previous popes had long opposed. But of course, that didn’t stop it from seeming back then like the Catholic Church had chosen sides, and considering the long history of Catholic intrigue in the courts of the Old World, of Catholic influence through kings and queens of Europe, and the many conspiracy theories of Catholic plots to seize control of Protestant nations, it is not surprising that many would suggest Lincoln’s murder was a Romish conspiracy. After all, assassination, it was long claimed, was a recognized tool of the Jesuits in extending and securing Catholic influence. For more on the massive conspiracy theories surrounding the Jesuits, see my 2-part series on the topic, The Rise and Fall of the Society of Jesus. In 19th century America, when many would blame the Catholic Church for just about anything, it was perhaps inevitable that the assassination of Lincoln would be turned into yet another popish plot, especially when it turned out that some of the conspirators were themselves Catholic.
Dr. Samuel Mudd
Very early on in the process of the assassination trials, one newspaperman reported that every single one of the conspirators was a Catholic. This was absolutely untrue. David Herold, for example, had been Episcopalian, and Lewis Powell’s father was a Baptist minister. As for the actual assassin, we only know that John Wilkes Booth had attended a Quaker school and an Episcopal military academy. We have no proof of his connection to or sympathy toward the Catholic Church, and in fact, since he was previously associated with the Know-Nothing Party, we have clear proof that he probably had a low opinion of Catholics. But Dr. Samuel Mudd, it seems, was Catholic, as were the Surratts. Indeed, it seems that up until just a few years before the assassination, John Surratt had been at seminary. And after the assassination, while hiding in Canada, he stayed with a Catholic priest who had granted him sanctuary. Thereafter, he traveled to Italy, or more specifically, the Papal States, where for a time he served as a soldier in the infantry battalion sworn to protect the territories under the Pope’s sovereign rule. Certainly these facts exacerbated the Catholic conspiracy theory, not only then but also today, as some still like to trot this theory out. However, the practice of Catholic churches offering sanctuary to fugitive criminals is long and storied, and it has never meant that the church approved of or sponsored their crimes. As for Surratt’s time in the Papal States, he was there under an assumed name, and when someone recognized him, papal authorities had him arrested and put in prison. He afterward escaped and would eventually be caught fleeing to Egypt, but no one tries to claim the Egyptian government was behind the assassination. Beyond Mudd and the Surratts, all further accusations of crypto-Catholicism among the conspirators tended to be a reach. For example, there is no sense of George Atzerodt holding any religious belief, but he was a German immigrant, so of course, in the eyes of many Americans, his Catholicism was presumed. David Herold had come from an Episcopalian family, but since he had attended Georgetown College, a Jesuit university, ipso facto, he must be a Jesuit agent.
Through the years, as more and more people have tried to make the Catholic conspiracy work, it has been claimed that John Wilkes Booth, known former member of the anti-Catholic Know-Nothing Party, had converted to Catholicism. Some have claimed he was a member of a shadowy Confederate secret society, the Knights of the Golden Circle, which is possible, considering his association with Know-Nothingism, which itself was built from the ground up by nativist secret societies like the Order of the Star Spangled Banner. Their whole motto, “I know nothing,” which inspired their popular name, was a reference to the secret organizations from which they sprang. However, these writers attempt to portray Booth’s membership in the Knights as an established fact, when it is pure speculation, and some have also tried to claim the Knights of the Golden Circle was a devout Catholic secret society, when an 1861 New York Times article explicitly states that they were anti-Catholic in the extreme, with intentions to conquer Mexico and then exclude all Catholics from the priesthood and from holding public office. This, of course, lines up much better with John Wilkes Booth’s Know-Nothing past, but tends to work against any grand Catholic conspiracy claims. And finally, in order to claim that Booth was secretly a Catholic, much attention is given to the articles on his person when he was killed, which apparently included an Agnus Dei medal. Some writers have even tried to claim that this medal likely had been sent to him by Pope Pius IX himself, but the reality is it was a common medal, kept as a charm. His having it does not prove his conversion. After all, he had been in cahoots with the Catholic John Surratt, who may have given it to him as a gift, for good luck. There is no sense that Booth was any fonder of this medal than he was of the silver horseshoe pendant also found on him, kept likely as a good luck charm. Also found on him was his diary. Conspiracists who want to think him a Jesuit assassin have picked it apart, focusing on one quote that says “God simply made me the instrument of his punishment” to suggest this is exactly what Jesuit assassins believed. Yet they ignore the part that says “I struck for my country and that alone.” The simple fact is that Booth’s diary stands as the strongest evidence that Booth himself concocted the whole scheme, and that the conspiracy only involved a handful of his associates.
Pope Pius IX
The Grand Catholic conspiracy theory of Lincoln’s assassination really took hold in the 1880s, about 20 years after Lincoln’s death, thanks to a book called Fifty Years in the Church of Rome, written by an ex-Catholic priest from Illinois named Charles Chiniquy. According to the book, when Chiniquy began to have disagreements with his bishop in the 1850s, the Church took revenge by having someone sue Chiniquy, accusing him of immorality, and Chiniquy engaged Abe Lincoln as legal representation in the suit. With Lincoln as his lawyer, he prevailed, but Chiniquy believed that Lincoln had signed his own death warrant by humiliating the church in public, even claiming that he saw murder in the eyes of Jesuits who were present in court that day. Chiniquy claims to have stayed in contact with Lincoln after that, and years later, after leaving Catholicism, says he visited him in the White House a few times. Chiniquy states that he first went to see the President because he could already tell the Catholics wanted him dead. According to him, the American press was controlled by the Church, and when newspapers falsely claimed that Lincoln had formerly been a Catholic and had left the church, this was the same as telegraphing to their readers that the President was an apostate and should be killed. According to Chiniquy’s telling of their conversations, Lincoln himself expressed anti-Catholic sentiments and confided in Chiniquy that he believed the Vatican had caused the Civil War. Beyond these supposed encounters with Lincoln, Chiniquy merely parroted previous claims, pointing to the Pope’s letter to Jefferson Davis and falsely reporting that the conspirators were all Roman Catholic, “without a single exception.” The only further “evidence” he provided was the unsubstantiated claim that priests at a monastery in Minnesota were overheard making remarks that suggested they had some advanced knowledge of the assassination. What a loose-lipped conspiracy that would be, to spread word of their plans to every priest in the country. It was only a small passage in Chiniquy’s lengthy memoir, but it certainly was influential. Every few years after that, some anti-Catholic writer brought up the same talking points and repeated Chiniquy’s claims. In the 1920s, when the Ku Klux Klan spearheaded a resurgence of anti-Catholicism, the claim was resurrected in the book The Suppressed Truth about the Assassination of Abraham Lincoln. Then during the presidential campaign of John F. Kennedy, a Catholic candidate, lo and behold, articles began to appear again about how Catholics had murdered the most beloved of U.S. presidents. Only when our first Catholic president, JFK, was himself assassinated did this baseless conspiracy theory finally lose steam, though even now it can be found touted in some corners of the Internet.
To once and for all put the Catholic conspiracy of Lincoln’s assassination to rest, it must be pointed out that the claims were adequately refuted a long time ago. In 1891, two former secretaries and biographers of Lincoln, when asked about the theory, answered, “It seemed to us so entirely groundless as not to merit any attention.” Then in 1922, when the theory was seeing a resurgence, Lincoln’s son Robert Todd was interviewed on the subject and said emphatically, “I do not know of any literature in which my father is quoted as attacking Catholics and the Catholic Church.” And indeed, when Lincoln’s collected writings were published in the 1950s, not a single anti-Catholic sentiment could be discerned, nor was there ever any mention of his meetings with Chiniquy. And the final word on Chiniquy came in 1976, in historian Joseph George Jr.’s article about him for the Journal of the Illinois State Historical Society, demonstrating convincingly that Chiniquy lied throughout his memoir. First, the trial at which Chiniquy met Lincoln was one in which Chiniquy was being sued for slander, not immorality, because he had accused a land speculator of some underhanded business activities during a church service. It had no connection to the Catholic Church at all, and Lincoln did not humiliate the plaintiff but rather negotiated a compromise agreement acceptable to both parties involved. Moreover, there is absolutely no record of Chiniquy’s continued friendship with Lincoln after this case, and indeed, two letters exist in which Chiniquy wrote to Lincoln first thanking him for his legal services and then requesting that Lincoln apportion funds for his school, and neither give any sense that the two were on close terms or had previously spent time together discussing sensitive matters. In fact, the first note, sent shortly after one of their supposed long conversations, only mentions their association 7 years earlier during the slander trial. Moreover, those who did know Lincoln agreed that he was circumspect when it came to discussing his religious beliefs. The idea that he would have revealed so much to Chiniquy, whom he barely knew, was, according to Lincoln’s own campaign manager, “absurd,” but that the claim would be made was perhaps not surprising. After all, when asked about the Catholic conspiracy theory, his son may have said it best, that, “Of course, in the years his name has been a peg on which to hang many things.” And within fifteen years of this statement, the most weighty and overstuffed conspiracy theory about his father’s assassination would be hung on that same narrow peg.
Charles Chiniquy
Otto Eisenchiml was a chemist by trade, not a historian, an Austrian immigrant who was successful in America because of his advancements in such areas as envelopes with little plastic windows in them so addresses can show through. But after touring some sites of historical interest in America, like the battlefield at Little Big Horn where General Custer made his last stand, he took an interest in historical research, eventually settling on the Lincoln assassination as his area of central interest. He fancied himself a more logical and systematic thinker than typical historians, believing that his background in science and pursuing the answers to questions through the scientific method would allow him insights that traditional historians never discerned. The questions he compiled about the Lincoln assassination related to things he found suspicious, and especially things that may have resulted in history taking a different course. Included were questions about why General Ulysses Grant, who was originally supposed to accompany Lincoln to Ford’s Theatre, had changed his plans, why there was not better security at the theater, why the road headed directly south out of Washington that Booth took to escape was the only road not closed, why the bodyguard who failed to stop Booth from entering the box was never punished, why Booth was killed instead of taken alive and why the shooter was not punished. These questions led Eisenschiml to the man he asserted was the mastermind of the assassination, Secretary of War Edwin Stanton, the very man credited with saying at Lincoln’s death that he “belongs to the ages.” By Eisenschiml’s reasoning, Grant could only have been ordered not to attend the theatre by Stanton, his superior, and he found anecdotes in later memoirs that suggested Lincoln even came to Stanton after Grant declined to attend and asked for a certain other trusted War Department officer to accompany him, and Stanton refused again to provide the accompaniment. He found that it was Stanton who declined to punish the police guard whose negligence had allowed Booth to enter the presidential box, and that it was Stanton who gave orders for the blocking of every possible escape route from the city except the most obvious southward route that Booth had taken. He even found records that indicated a mysterious telegraph outage had occurred that very evening, perhaps as another wrench thrown into the efforts to capture the assassin? He discovered a claim from another soldier who was tracking Booth that the War Department had sent him on a less promising lead so that Stanton could send more trusted individuals to capture Booth, suggesting that Booth’s murder had actually been to silence him, lest he give up Stanton as a co-conspirator. And finally, he suggested that the surviving conspirators had mostly been sentenced to death in order to silence them, while those sentenced to prison had been hooded and manacled, essentially gagged and bound, and thus prevented from speaking or writing during their trial, and afterward had been shipped off to a suspiciously remote island prison in order to continually prevent them from revealing the real mastermind of Lincoln’s murder.
When laid out in this manner, the Eisenschiml Thesis, as it is usually called, seems quite astonishing and convincing. Why might Stanton have wanted Lincoln dead? Well, he was a Radical Republican, ally of those who thought Lincoln too moderate and lenient in his Reconstruction plans for the South. And if Eisenschiml is to be believed, he was also power hungry and had his eye on the top job himself. However, a more sober evaluation of the Eisenschiml Thesis reveals that it only hangs together through misrepresentations of the historical record. For example, accounts of the night in question make it clear that Grant refused to attend the play with Lincoln because he wanted to convince Lincoln not to go, since it was risky to make such a public appearance. Likewise, Stanton tried to convince Lincoln not to go to Ford’s Theatre, where his appearance had been announced in the papers, and that is why Stanton refused to send others with Lincoln, and why his security detail was light. Lincoln, who consistently disregarded threats to his own safety, insisted on going because he believed the public would be disappointed if neither he nor Grant appeared. Indeed, the guard who was accused of abandoning his post was charged with neglect of duty but was cleared. We don’t know what defense he gave, but one likely explanation suggested by historians is that Lincoln himself dismissed the guard to enjoy the play. As for the road south that Booth had taken being the only road not ordered blocked by Stanton, this was because there was no telegraph station on that road to which Stanton could wire these orders. Indeed, the whole mystery scenario of the telegraph outage was embellished by Eisenschiml, as it had only been a partial outage, and the War Department’s telegraphs were never affected. Eisenschiml’s claims about one searcher who was hot on the track of Booth being diverted so Stanton’s own men could intercept him, as well as his claims about who really killed Booth and why, all rely on the claims of soldiers whose accounts vary widely. As my principal source for this episode and the last, The Lincoln Murder Conspiracies by William Hanchett reveals, all of these claims were unreliable. The one soldier said he had been unfairly diverted because he wanted to lay claim to some share of the reward money, and the differing accounts of who might have shot Booth or who was really giving orders among the unit that tracked him down all come down to the soldiers vying for a greater share of that same reward. The idea that Booth was killed to silence him is ridiculous. His final words were dutifully reported, and the diary found on him was released to the press. Also absurd are Eisenschiml’s claims that the living conspirators had been prevented from speaking by placing them in stifling hoods and shipping them off to an island. They all had legal counsel to whom they spoke, and they all had opportunity to write statements, as evidenced by Atzerodt’s confession. The condemned were visited by clergymen and family whom they could have spoken to, and they did not wear hoods as they were taken to the gallows to hang. John Surratt certainly was not silenced with a hood at his later criminal trial, and one would think he would have revealed Stanton’s involvement just to get revenge for his mother’s execution. Those sent to the island prison were able to speak to guards and other prisoners, and a few of them, including Dr. Mudd, made it through their incarceration until pardoned. They never said a word of Stanton’s involvement for the rest of their lives. Many of Eisenschiml’s qualms—such as why Stanton didn’t send the army down that southern road that he couldn’t close, why he didn’t release Booth’s identity sooner, or why didn’t he punish this person or that person—essentially come down to hindsight being 20/20, or to Eisenschiml simply not understanding the pressure that Edwin Stanton was under. When historians rightly rejected his thesis, Eisenschiml suggested that, as a chemist, he was just more clear-eyed and unbiased than they, but in reality, his thinking was not scientific at all. He had a thesis, and he went searching only for the data that supported it.
Otto Eisenschiml’s influential book.
Today, Eisenschiml’s book is long out of print, but despite the rejection of his thesis by historians, for a time it became the common view of the Lincoln assassination thanks to numerous later writers who simply repeated his claims and in some cases built on them with additional assertions. Among all the other supposedly suspicious aspects of the assassination that I have already mentioned, a major piece of the Eisenschiml Thesis that would be further developed by later writers is the claim that the War Department had been informed about the plot to kidnap Lincoln during the weeks before the assassination, yet Stanton had done nothing about it. This is the bread and butter of conspiracy theory. Think of others, like the claim that the U.S. government had advance knowledge of the attack on Pearl Harbor or the claim that the CIA knew all too well what Lee Harvey Oswald had planned or the claim that intelligence agencies knew what Osama Bin Laden was planning for September 11th. As for this claim, while it is true that the star witness at the assassination trials, Louis Weichmann, had spoken weeks earlier to a War Department clerk about things he’d overheard at the Surratt boarding house, it has been proven that the clerk did not report their conversation until after the assassination. One early follower of the Eisenschiml Thesis, Philip Van Doren Stern, in his 1939 book The Man Who Killed Lincoln, did attempt to bolster the conspiracy theory with what seemed like new evidence, an anecdote that claimed Robert Todd Lincoln, Abe’s only surviving son, was seen burning papers in 1923 and when asked what he was burning, replied that the papers contained evidence that one of his father’s cabinet members had acted treasonably. The implication, then, was that Lincoln’s papers, which Robert Todd Lincoln had turned over to the Library of Congress on the understanding that they would not open them until 21 years after his own death, likely contained evidence of Stanton’s guilt. Much like conspiracy theorists eagerly look forward to the release of any documents relating to the JFK assassination even though inevitably nothing of value is further added to our understanding of that incident, when the Lincoln papers were released in 1947, no evidence to support the Eisenschiml Thesis was found in them. Lack of evidence does not dissuade the conspiracist, however, for in their fevered imaginations, lack of evidence can somehow stand as evidence of a cover-up. Therefore, when nothing useful to them was found in the Lincoln papers, it was simply claimed that Robert Todd Lincoln had effectively destroyed any traces of the conspiracy. Now clearly, there is plenty of reason to doubt the anecdote about Robert Todd burning evidence of treason in the first place, and if there were evidence of someone’s involvement in his father’s murder, he surely would have been motivated to make it known. But even if that story were to be believed, the fact is that he deposited his father’s papers in the Library of Congress in 1919, years before this incident in which he was supposedly caught burning evidence.
Even Eisenschiml himself admitted that his theory lacked strong evidence. In his book, he states very clearly, “there is not one point in this summary that can be proven; it is all hypothesis…. In view of all facts known at this time, an indictment against Stanton cannot be sustained for lack of material evidence.” In the years after the promulgation of his thesis, then, when other writers were picking up where he’d left off and trying to lend more credibility to the claim, Eisenschiml kept his eye out for anything that might prove the theory. The best he could come up with was an obscure Southern newspaper article from 1868, written by a rabid Confederate defender of slavery and secession, that was discovered in 1948 in an old Baltimore building when a mirror fell down, revealing a hollow space in the wall, where the paper had been tucked away. The article was called “THE REAL INSTIGATORS OF THE ASSASSINATION OF LINCOLN,” and it named Edwin Stanton, along with Judge Advocate General Joseph Holt, as the prime movers of the conspiracy, promising to provide evidence in the next issue, an issue of the newspaper that has never been found. While this might seem too convenient for Eisenschiml, the fact is that this was a real newspaper, and the article really did blame Stanton for Lincoln’s murder long before Eisenschml ever dreamed up his thesis. However, it was also just an absurd piece of unsupported propaganda. In it, the very biased newspaper editor tried to suggest that Northern Radicals wanted Lincoln dead because he actually opposed emancipation. It’s said that, during his visit to Richmond, he told a Southern Supreme Court Justice who had resigned at the time of secession, “I don’t want to take your slaves from you,” and suggested the Radicals had forced him to make the Emancipation Proclamation. The idea of the article was that Lincoln was urging the South to rejoin the Union so that they could vote down the proclamation. There is no evidence at all that Lincoln really felt this way, and there is ample evidence, from his speeches and from reports of his private remarks that he did not feel this way at all. As I quoted before, he said that his “whole soul is in it,” and he also called it a “great moral victory” and “a King’s cure for all the evils.” The fact that Eisenschiml, who must have recognized the article as nonsense, held it up as proof, just shows that he was grasping at straws.
The same can be said for all the future supporters of his thesis, who never let a lack of evidence discourage them from publishing new books that simply cited Eisenschiml and Stern and others, as if the claims were already established history. In 1959, Theodore Roscoe published The Web of Conspiracy, and the title goes a long way in telling you how credible it was. In it, like Eisenschiml before him, he sees any misstep or questionable decision made by authorities as a calculated effort at covering-up Stanton’s involvement. If Hanlon’s Razor tells us that we should never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity, then perhaps in conspiracist thought, we need a new razor: never attribute to conspiracy that which can be adequately explained by incompetence. Roscoe further suggested, as have other followers of the Eisenschiml Thesis, that the War Department papers on the topic of the assassination were kept secret, in order to cover up the truth, when the fact is, even if they had to make some specific requests and jump through some hoops, numerous authors before him and after him, including Eisenschiml, have been allowed access to the documents. A further razor, then, may be that one should never attribute to conspiracy that which can adequately be explained by bureaucracy. And finally, most unforgivably, Roscoe also suggested that Mary Todd Lincoln must have been in on the plot because her signature appears on a paper designating which officer would stand guard for them at Ford’s Theatre. It was an order written by someone else that she merely signed, likely without much thought, but it was enough for Roscoe to speculate that her financial troubles later in life must have been the result of someone blackmailing her about her involvement with the murder of her own husband. As we have already discussed, there is no sensible reason to suspect that the police guard that night was a conspirator, or that those who assigned him the duty were conspirators, or that those who chose not to punish him afterward were conspirators. So another razor to cut through this bullshit must be that one should never attribute to conspiracy that which can be adequately explained by happenstance.
The Eisenschiml Thesis survived into the 1970s, spurred by other supposed discoveries and further publications proposing similar or slightly variant scenarios. Eventually, though, the whole edifice of this conspiracy theory collapsed under the weight of its own suppositions when it came to rely more and more on outright hoaxes. If you’d like to hear that story, support me on Patreon, as the next patron exclusive will be all about the Eisenschiml Thesis’s twilight years, the the weird cipher texts and forged documents that would later be trotted out as evidence for a theory that is today viewed as a strange digression of historiography. This would not be the last unusual detour that Lincoln assassination conspiracy theory would take, however. Most are well aware that the hallmark of any major conspiracy theory is that it will eventually get blamed on a secret society. As we’ve already seen, the Lincoln assassination was linked by some to the shadowy secret society the Knights of the Golden Circle, as well as to the Jesuits, who were viewed as the model upon which the Illuminati were founded. But the Lincoln assassination has also been linked to the Freemasons, who were sometimes viewed as an opposing force to the Jesuits and the Catholic Church. Some have claimed that the Freemasons were the real puppet masters of the Civil War, pointing to Bleeding Kansas, an episode of violence in support of slavery that led to the Civil War, in which Freemasons were involved. But there were Masons in every state, on every side. They used to give signs to each other in battle, hoping to turn the rifles of their Brothers Fellowcraft away from them. We also know about Freemasons opposing slavery and protecting fugitive slaves, such as the Prince Hall Masons, an order of Black Freemasons. Masons just weren’t the monolith that this theory would require them to be. Others who like this theory focus on the influential Masonic figure Albert Pike, who was a Confederate General and would later be involved with the founding of the Ku Klux Klan. However, Pike was just a brigadier general, and there is evidence that he did not get along with his superior officers. This just shows that authority in Masonry did not translate to influence over politics. Moreover, while Lincoln was not a Freemason, he made plenty of statements indicating that, in his own words, he had “great respect for the institution.” It therefore certainly doesn’t seem that Lincoln thought they were his enemy. If secret societies and Freemasons in particular are a hallmark of popular conspiracy claims, so too are the Rothschilds, the famously wealthy banking dynasty, and lo and behold, they too have been blamed for Lincoln’s assassination. The conspiracy theory seems to have appeared in the 70s, once the Eisenschiml Thesis was declining, and it claims either or both that Lincoln refusing high interest loans to fund the war had made him an enemy and/or that his protectionist policies and his intentions for a lenient Reconstruction were viewed as a threat to Rothschild business plans. Unsurprisingly, none of these claims are based on evidence, and whenever the Rothschilds or international bankers crop up in a conspiracy theory, it is always code for that other hallmark of conspiracist thought: anti-Semitism. Even Freemasonry is frequently lumped together by anti-Semitic conspiracists as part of the same Judeo-Bolshevik plot. Just ask Hitler. So it’s unsurprising that in the 1980s and ‘90s, the Holocaust-denying followers of anti-Semitic conspiracy theorist and political firebrand Lyndon Larouche argued that the Jewish immigrant association B’nai B’rith was somehow responsible for Lincoln’s assassination, again with no evidence and despite extensive evidence that the Jewish community viewed Lincoln as a friend and ally. This is the way with baseless conspiracism, though. One chemist-turned-researcher might assemble an ingenious supertheory by misconstruing primary sources to say what he wanted them to say about his pet suspect, but eventually it will all come back to the usual bogeymen, the secret societies, the Jews. Honestly, if it wasn’t so tragically predictable and evil, it would be comical.
Until next time, remember, as the most insidious works of Holocaust denial demonstrate, even the most detail-oriented and academic seeming works, like Otto Eisenschiml’s, can be entirely misleading and false.
George, Joseph. “The Lincoln Writings of Charles P. T. Chiniquy.” Journal of the Illinois State Historical Society (1908-1984), vol. 69, no. 1, 1976, pp. 17–25. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/40191689. Accessed 28 Jan. 2025.
Hanchett, William. The Lincoln Murder Conspiracies. University of Illinois Press, 1986.
