The Erasure of Aspasia

As I’m sure is the case with many of you listeners, my head has been spinning, my faith in humanity plummeting, and my existential dread rising like bile in my throat over the last month or so since Trump took office and started his deplorable shock and awe campaign. I feel compelled to comment on this, even though I was not planning to address current politics directly so soon this year. I like to have a buffer between episodes with explicitly political commentary in the podcast, so that not every episode ends up a political diatribe, since I often get negative feedback when I do get political and it causes me to question whether I should broach such topics at all, even though it has been a focus of my content from the very beginning, and even though my official podcast description makes clear that I use history to gain insight into modern political culture, and even though I have actually officially categorized the podcast under politics. Now, though, I honestly don’t really care if I turn off some listeners. Any listeners that might bristle at my comparison of Trumpism to fascism and then try to rationalize when Elon Musk overtly Sieg Heils at Trump’s inauguration and Steve Bannon follows suit with his own stiff-arm salute at CPAC, are just lost to reason, and I don’t care to take their objections seriously anymore. They truly are obeying the “final, most essential command” of the authoritarian, as given by the Party in Orwell’s 1984, “to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears.” But the theme and purpose of this show is the examination of history that has been distorted, misrepresented and mythologized, and not every political issue relates to a specific historical topic that fits the show’s theme, or at least apt historical analogies do not always come to my mind. Therefore, I often don’t address political issues in a very timely manner. Nor does my timing always work out the way I’d like it to. No one is more disappointed than me in the podcast’s shortcomings in that regard. For example, considering Trump’s current assault on all efforts to address systemic racism through initiatives designed to encourage diversity, equity and inclusion, I thought it would be important to devote some topics to Black American historical figures for Black History Month. I haven’t typically devoted February topics to celebrating Black history, again because strong topics fitting the show’s theme haven’t always occurred to me at the right time, and I wanted to start this year—I even had some topics in mind. It seems especially important since, despite still proclaiming February Black History Month as presidents always do, Trump’s anti-DEI executive orders have had a chilling effect on its celebration, even leading the Department of Defense to forbid the observance of any “identity months.” However, I also wanted to cover my recent topic about Lincoln in February, to coincide with Lincoln’s birthday. So instead, I started my Lincoln topic in January, and the series just ended up ballooning and becoming four parts that took up all of February as well. I still hope to revisit the Black history topics I had in mind in the future, whether in February or not, but now, as we enter March, I think it important to observe Women’s History Month, since women’s rights are under such clear assault by the right. Even between his respective terms in office, Trump’s appointments to the Supreme Court and right-wing judicial activism have resulted in women losing long-settled reproductive rights and body autonomy when Roe v. Wade was overturned, and there are indications that the right are coming for the morning-after pill next, and maybe even birth control access generally. More than that, Trump has revoked protections against sexual misconduct in schools and in the workplace, unsurprising considering the long history of such allegations against the president himself. Following the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 playbook like an instruction manual even though he distanced himself from it during his campaign, Trump has been clear that he won’t work to better ensure equal pay for women or to improve maternity leave and paid family leave laws, and that generally he thinks pregnancy is more of an inconvenience for employers. Some Christian Nationalists associated with his administration have even advocated for rolling back women’s right to vote in favor of a “household vote,” which just means male-only voting. House Republicans actually passed a bill requiring that voters have a birth certificate or passport matching their name, which seems designed to disenfranchise the estimated 69 million married women who took their husband’s name and have no passport. Clearly when he envisions making America great again, he conceives it as a regression to a time when women’s rights and roles were circumscribed, when they were subordinate in the workplace and at home. Even as I am finalizing this episode on March 6th, Trump just signed a proclamation declaring March Women's History Month, something every president has done since 1995. But when Trump signed it, saying "Women, we love you," it drew criticism, because he is clearly only paying lip service to women’s rights in the midst of and despite his ongoing war on women. In fact, even as he signed it, he and those around him managed to take the focus off of women and put it on him. He had one of his female lawyers, Lindsey Halligan, hand him this proclamation, saying it was in honor of the women in America, sure, but more specifically, the women in his administration, and "in honor of everything you've done for women." Trump smugly responded, asserting he's done a lot for women, and framing the accomplishments of women everywhere as valuable insofar they do it "for us." But that is just exactly the issue with the erasure of women, that they have, historically only been seen as relevant inasmuch as they serve men. So for my first episode of March, I want to tell the story of one woman, far back in antiquity, who was also treated as a second-class citizen, who was sexualized and seen as troublesome for her influence in politics, and who was almost erased from history, but whose memory nevertheless persisted, and who today is remembered also as a brilliant rhetorician and teacher—a pillar of Greek philosophy. As feminist historian Rebecca Solnit writes, “Some women get erased a little at a time, some all at once. Some reappear.”

Historical erasure is a concept that perfectly encapsulates the Historical Blindness theme. In some sense, erasure can be a natural part of the building of cultural identity, the process by which some people and events fade in the collective memory while others are remembered and celebrated or scorned. This is not to say that power structures aren’t involved in this natural winnowing of the past—they are—but sometimes this erasure is even more insidious: the distortion of history to serve one’s ideology, the purposeful misrepresentation of history, the invention of pseudohistory, the outright denial and negation of history. These are all forms of erasure, and it is the ideal goal of the historian to expose such falsehood, to fill in gaps, to recover forgotten history and therefore reclaim that which has been systematically erased from historical memory. And part of that requires us to expose the power structures that result in this erasure, for it is inevitably marginalized and disadvantaged groups that disproportionately suffer erasure, whose historical erasure is actually a principal feature of their marginalization. Thus we see that historical and cultural erasure is a prominent feature of genocide, as can be seen with colonial attempts to expunge indigenous peoples, Nazi attempts to wipe out Jews, not just from existence but even from memory. And the historical erasure of women stands even more prominent, spanning all cultures and all history. The contributions and accomplishments of a great many women in every culture, every region, every time period, have gone unrecorded, have been minimized or ignored, or as is most common, are attributed to men instead. A brief list should illustrate the point: nuclear particles, the double-helix of DNA, dark matter, microbial genetics, nuclear fission, pulsars, brain receptors, and computer algorithms were all momentous scientific discoveries or developments made in modern times by women that were wrongfully attributed to men. But as ubiquitous as this erasure is, it is even more pronounced the further back in time we look, when surviving records are rare because of the rarity of literacy, and women more often left no record of themselves, for those who wrote what records we have were men who thought them less worthy of remembrance. This is an erasure of the history of half of humankind that should be mourned. As we look at antiquity and ancient Greece, the only reason we are able to talk about Aspasia and reclaim her memory to whatever degree may be possible from the 5th century BCE is because more of a biographical tradition exists about her than any other woman, with perhaps the exception of the 6th-century poet Sappho, and no women of the ancient world would again have her life spared such erasure until Cleapatra in the first century BCE. Just three women whose lives were preserved in any substantial way by history over the course of 500 years, and as we will see, even then only sketchily and dubiously, with conflicting reports that make of her either a scheming prostitute or respected philosopher. 

A 1920s depiction of Sappho, one of the only other women whose biographical traditions survived ancient Greece. Patrons on Patreon can hear an exclusive episode all about her.

Very little can be known for certain about Aspasia of Miletus. Most of what is known or assumed to be true about her was written hundreds of years later by philosopher and historian Plutarch in his Parallel Lives, a series of biographies. But more specifically, Plutarch’s comments on the life of Aspasia were contained within his biography of Pericles, the famed Greek general and politician during the Golden Age of Athens, with whom Aspasia was sexually or romantically or matrimonially involved, and whose illegitimate son she is said to have borne. So the most coherent account of her life was written centuries later, by a man who was actually only writing about her insofar as she was associated with another man, a very famous man, in fact, about whom much had already been written, including by his contemporaries, like Thucydides, who called him the “first citizen of Athens.” In fact the period during which he ruled Athens as its Archon, forging an Athenian empire of the confederate states of the Delian League and leading it in multiple wars against Sparta and its Peloponnesian League, has even been called “The Age of Pericles.” Meanwhile, the only contemporary writing about Aspasia came in the form of defamatory comedies, which we will look at shortly. Indeed, it is because of the claims about Aspasia’s power over Pericles, because of the claim that Pericles only took Athens to war on her behalf, that Plutarch even deigns to discuss her, saying, “this may be a fitting place to raise the query what great art or power this woman had, that she managed as she pleased the foremost men of the state, and afforded the philosophers occasion to discuss her in exalted terms and at great length.” Plutarch seems torn between more than one competing tradition regarding Aspasia, presenting her as a political mastermind and revered philosopher and also as a brothel keeper and sex worker. I am not here to suggest that a woman could not have been all these things, but as we will see, these conceptions of her do seem to have been derived from differing views of her and were, at least then, seen as contradictory characteristics. Even Plutarch’s brief discussion of her can’t seem to decide if Pericles was drawn to her intelligence or was attracted for more carnal reasons, saying first that she “was held in high favour by Pericles because of her rare political wisdom,” but then asserting that “the affection which Pericles had for Aspasia seems to have been rather of an amatory sort.” Again, it could have been both, but the original Greek, which has the word translated as “rather” nearer the beginning of the sentence, and in alternative translation seems to suggest an erotic attraction, can be understood as suggesting that rather than an intellectual admiration, Pericles’s love for her could be better described as sexual. However, any such assertion, as we will see, cannot be supported. 

According to Plutarch, it “is generally agreed” that Aspasia was a foreigner to Athens, Milesian by birth, and the daughter of one Axiochus. This made her, by Pericles’s own laws on Athenian citizenship, a metic, or resident alien in Athens, denied the benefits and protection of a full citizen, including the ability to marry a citizen. This means that some early accounts of Aspasia that style her as Pericles’s wife are inaccurate, as she could at best have been considered his pallake, or concubine, a fact further attested by the tradition that the son she bore Pericles, called Pericles the Younger, was a nothos, or illegitimate child. Some historians, like Peter Bicknell, and my principal source, Madeleine Henry, in her book Prisoner of History, consider these details about her life at least mostly established by the discovery of a gravestone or stele in Piraeus, an Athenian port city known to have been a place where metic families settled after immigrating to Athens. This stone actually commemorates a man named Aspasios, but its inscription names a forebear called Axiochus, and mentions his children, one of whom was named Aspasia. It also identifies Axiochus as the son of Alcibiades—not the famous Alcibiades, the Athenian statesman of the later fifth century, but his grandfather, an elder Alcibiades who had been ostracized and exiled, probably to Miletus. Since this noble family can be traced to Miletus, where the elder Alcibiades seems to have had children with a Milesian woman, and since the names Axiochus and Aspasia, which would be mentioned by Plutarch centuries later,  appear here within the same family even though they were rare names, not known to have been in use at all in the region before the next century, it has been concluded that this proves Aspasia was an aristocratic metic woman from Miletus, born sometime after 470 BCE, who arrived in Athens sometime after Alcibiades’s exile ended, circa 450 BCE. It should be noted that even this is uncertain, though. The Axiochus and Aspasia mentioned on the monument aren’t even thought to be the same ones Plutarch names. Instead, it is thought that Alcibiades married the daughter of a Milesian man named Axiochus, and the Aspasia in question, who would go on to make such waves in Athens, was his wife’s sister. The names Axiochus and Aspasia thereby became family names, as Alcibiades named one of his sons Aspasios, the masculine form of his sister-in-law’s name, and his other son he named Axiochus after his father-in-law, and by him would be given a grand-daughter that would be named Aspasia as well. It’s all very convoluted, and the fact that Aspasia’s parentage and origins can only be pieced together through detective work, based on the funerary monument of a male relative, which doesn’t even mention her by name, just goes to show how nearly entire her erasure was. 

Bust of Pericles, circa 430 BCE.

With some corroboration of the claims that Aspasia was a metic, or resident foreigner in Athens, it is possible to ascertain some truths about her life, the obstacles she had to overcome, and the nature of her relationship with Pericles. Pericles’s law on citizenship, which was passed around 450 BCE, denied full citizenship rights anyone whose parents were not both Athenian. The law was passed in response to an influx of immigrants in the wake of the Persian Wars. The word metic meant, literally, “home-changer.” Denying citizenship to these immigrants meant that they had all the responsibilities of citizenship, including mandatory military service and taxation, with none of the benefits. They could not own property, were not eligible to accept certain state benefits, such as work opportunities and emergency rations, and were barred from serving in juries and the assembly—essentially refused the right to vote. They did not enjoy the same protections under Athenian law: they were subject to additional and more onerous taxes than citizens; they could be tortured; they could be enslaved; and the murder of a metic did not carry consequences as severe as did the murder of a citizen. If Aspasia did indeed arrive in Athens with her family at around the time scholars think she may have, for the reasons already discussed, it means that this law was brand new and the subordinate status that it forced on her and others in her family may not have been expected. However, unlike many other metics, who were former slaves and impoverished artisans, Aspasia seems to have come with a well-off family, so wealth may have shielded her from some struggles. For example, metics coming to Athens had to be sponsored by a citizen, otherwise all their belongings could be taken from them and they could be sold into slavery. If indeed she was the sister-in-law of the elder Alcibiades, who was returning to Athens a citizen after his exile, then this draconian aspect of the law would not have affected her. However, we must also remember that she was a woman, and thus doubly marginalized, made a second-class citizen on both counts. Even if she were not a metic, she would have been unable to participate in politics or own property as a woman. As has been the case in so many cultures throughout history, women in ancient Athens were expected to devote themselves solely to men. Under the kyrieía, or guardianship, of male relatives during their youth, they were the property of men, and once their marriage was arranged, they became the property of their husbands. However, as a metic, Aspasia was also denied the right to marry a citizen, which further limited her opportunities. 

As already mentioned, Aspasia’s relationship with Pericles has sometimes been characterized as a marriage, though according to Pericles’s own law, it could only have been a de facto marriage, with Aspasia only his pallake, his mistress or concubine. Pallakia was a common practice and was even institutionalized in a way similar to marriage. Some historians have suggested that pallakia was even quasi-marital for metics, because metic women were also under the guardianship of their male relatives, whose main obligation was to arrange an advantageous marriage for them, and for many, especially those like Aspasia from an aristocratic family, that may have meant arranging concubinage to a wealthy citizen rather than marriage to another metic, especially if it were to Pericles, the most powerful man in Athens. There is some evidence of pallakia being entered into as a contract, with protections for the woman, making it essentially a marriage in all but name. However, since the citizenship law was so new when Aspasia became involved with Pericles, it is less likely that such an arrangement may have been made. Still, it may have been that she chose the role of concubine instead of wife because it granted her the protection of this powerful citizen but allowed her more freedom, since more domestic duties may have been expected of a wife. As one speech attributed to an Athenian politician explains, “Mistresses [sometimes translated as “prostitutes”] we keep for the sake of pleasure, concubines for the daily care of our persons [sometimes translated as “the body’s daily needs”], but wives to bear us legitimate children and to be faithful guardians of our households.” Therefore being Pericles’s pallake may have meant that she was spared the daily duties of a wife and rather given the opportunity to develop her mind, which would accord well with the tradition that she was extremely intelligent and became an influential philosopher. Further supporting this notion that Pericles may have not only offered her protected status as his concubine but also nurtured her, in a sort of evolved and mutually supportive relationship, is the tradition that Pericles loved her “exceedingly,” as Plutarch put it. And there is support for this claim as well. Around the same time he took up with Aspasia, he divorced his wife, the mother of his two legitimate sons, and gave her in marriage to another man. This contributes to the notion that Aspasia was his de facto wife, whether or not his own law allowed a legal marriage with her. Then there is the fact that he remained with Aspasia for the rest of his life, and the further fact that, before his death, he amended his citizenship law so that Pericles the Younger, his illegitimate son with Aspasia, could become his legal heir. Alternative reasons exist for this amendment, such as that his two legitimate sons had died in a plague and many other citizens had likewise lost their legitimate heirs in the plague and the Peloponnesian War. There is also the fact that Aspasia entered a relationship with another politician immediately after Pericles’s death, but the details of this arrangement are unclear, to the point that some historians doubt it happened. The fact is that, the only contemporary sources about their relationship, the sources Plutarch relied on, were political comedies satirizing her and Pericles, many of these details are entirely dubious. 

Frontispiece to a 1656 printing of Lives of the Noble Grecians & Romans by Plutarch.

It appears that the bulk of Plutarch’s account of Aspasia is derived from fifth century comedies, the only contemporary sources that speak of her, of which only a handful make mention of her. As an exception, Plutarch makes special mention of a supposed trial, in which one Hermippus prosecuted Aspasia for “impiety,” a trial in which Pericles himself was said to have “shed copious tears” in her defense. Certainly, if true, this would be further evidence of Pericles’s great love for her, but scholars now believe that this trial was a fiction. Hermippus was a comic poet, and it is well-established that comic plays sometimes adopted the language of courts and were even thought of as a kind of trial in which the audience acts as a jury, such that talking about a comic poet “prosecuting” major public figures more than likely meant that Hermippus simply put the two of them on blast in one of his plays. The specific allegations of this supposed trial, that Aspasia was acquiring prostitutes for Pericles’s pleasure, also wouldn’t appear to have been an actual crime, since prostitution was legal. Moreover, the accusations of politicians being pimps and whoremongers, or of being profligate and licentious, were common allegations in political satires of the era, and sometimes may not even have been literal. Just as today, when likening politicians to prostitutes may not mean that they literally are prostitutes, in the comedies of fifth-century Athens, just as we cannot presume that a “prosecution” was a literal court trial, we cannot presume that accusations of prostitution were about literal sex work. And this is the sole evidence of Aspasia’s alleged sex work. The comic playwright Aristophanes would be the one to really emphasize Aspasia as a prostitute, and he was known for using prostitutes as symbols of corruption and of death and destruction. Think of the biblical Whore of Babylon for an example of how sex workers have always been used as metaphors for the criticism of corrupted nations and leaders. As a more pertinent example, the poet Cratinus, in calling Aspasia a “dog-eyed concubine,” is thought to have been likening her to Pandora, the first woman, thought to have been a curse upon mankind, who had been given the power of speech only to deceive, and who it was said had the mind of a disloyal dog. Clearly such comparisons make it plain that her depiction in plays were slanderous and not to be taken literally. And there are logical reasons to doubt any claims that she was a prostitute. While it is true that many prostitutes were metic women, since they often had few other options to pursue in life, and while it is also true that prostitutes sometimes became the concubines of their former patrons, making it possible that Aspasia had been a prostitute before taking up with Pericles, it is hard to reconcile with the fact that she seems to have come from a wealthy family. Moreover, the fact that her son was recognized legally as the son of Pericles makes it impossible that she was a prostitute during their relationship, since the paternity of any prostitute’s child could not be proven. So any and all claims of Aspasia’s being a prostitute must be viewed skeptically, as potentially just another way that the real Aspasia was systematically erased from public memory. 

Aspasia seems to have been so lampooned in political comedy because of her perceived influence over Pericles and his decisions, and it would seem that this fact supports the tradition that she was highly intelligent and that Pericles did respect her intellect. Much of the political comedy that defamed her and resorted to the potentially metaphorical accusation of her being a prostitute portrayed her power as being purely sexual. They did this by comparing her to mythological female figures who were known for manipulating and sexually dominating men. The playwrights Cratinus and Eupolis explicitly compare Aspasia to Omphale, the mistress of mythical hero Heracles, sometimes better known by the Romanized name Hercules. According to the story, Heracles was forced to be the slave of Omphale for a year, so the implication here was that Pericles was the slave of Aspasia, and perhaps that he had lost his manhood to her, as later depictions of this myth have Heracles dressed in women’s clothing and forced by Omphale to do “women’s work.” Another common comparison was to Helen of Troy, with the implication that, because of Aspasia’s great beauty and Pericles’s obsession with her, he had, like Paris before him, started a war. The war in question was either the Samian War, an Athenian military intervention in a conflict between Samos and Aspasia’s birthplace, Miletus, or the Peloponnesian War, more specifically, that the Megarian decree that imposed economic sanctions on the Spartan ally Megara and led to the war was because of her. Aristophanes is very explicit in blaming this on Aspasia’s influence, claiming that some Athenians abducted a prostitute from Megara, and in retaliation some Megarians kidnapped two of Aspasia’s own prostitutes. This is actually the origin of claims that Aspasia was not only a prostitute but also a brothel-keeper or madame. Scholars are divided over whether the Megarian Decree had purely economic motivations, whether it was in response to the Megarians cultivating some sacred land on Athenian borders, or whether Pericles meant it as a deliberate provocation of Sparta, but none take seriously this passage in Aristophanes’s play, which is thought most likely to be a joke. Nevertheless, this idea that Aspasia had enough power over Pericles to force him to declare war led to the further claim, repeated by Plutarch, that Pericles went to war against Samos on her behalf, even though the most obvious reasons were that Athens had forced Miletus to disarm itself after it had risen in rebellion against them, so it would look bad if they then let Samos move in and capture the city. But whatever the practical reasons, it seems to have been simpler and more popular to blame these geopolitical affairs on the woman behind the man. By Plutarch’s time, he was making still more comparisons, claiming without any clear reference to sources, that Aspasia had modeled herself on an Ionian courtesan named Thargelia who was said to have dominated Persian politics through her beauty, grace, and wits, and also by providing consorts for the Persian king. It is clear that Plutarch, writing more than 500 years after the fact, had accepted the claims made in Greek comedy, perhaps jokingly and metaphorically, of Aspasia’s prostitution, brothel-keeping, and sexual domination and manipulation of Pericles. But there was another tradition about Aspasia, one Plutarch mentions but does not emphasize. 

A 19th century painting depicting Aspasia teaching Socrates rhetoric.

The only thing Plutarch says of Aspasia’s reputation as a philosopher is that Plato mentioned Aspasia “had the reputation of associating with many Athenians as a teacher of rhetoric,” though he is quick to suggest that this may have been “written in a sportive vein,” a caveat he failed to provide when sharing the obviously defamatory and probably metaphorical claims of satirists who called her a whore. This is, however, entirely true. The work of Plato’s that depicts Aspasia as a master rhetorician does so with ironic and satirical purpose, and this is because some 4th century Socratic dialogues were still defaming some of the same historical figures as fifth century comedy, still making them the butts of their jokes and the focal points of their criticism. This genre of philosophical prose writing centered on the wisdom of Socrates, as depicted in conversations he had with various individuals, which displayed his Socratic method of asking rhetorical questions in order to lead his interlocutors to conclusions. Aspasia herself was never a character in them, that we know of, but more than one was named after her. To illustrate her continued negative portrayal in Socratica, Antisthenes, himself an illegitimate son and contemporary of Aspasia’s son, Pericles the Younger, wrote a dialogue named after her. It is lost now, but it appears to be the origin of the story that Pericles wept copiously in her defense, and also of the story that Pericles was always publicly embracing Aspasia, and that this was the origin of her name, which meant “Miss Embrace.” Certainly these were meant to be criticisms of Aspasia’s sexual dominance of Pericles, as Antisthenes was known to be always attacking Pericles and his family. Unlike Antisthenes, who seemed rather stuck in the past when it came to defaming Aspasia, Plato did so with far more nuance. Like others, he had Socrates talk about Aspasia like an honored rhetorician who teaches rhetoric to others, and portrays her skill and intellect as well known, for it is presented as well-established that she taught rhetoric to Pericles, who was the most influential man in politics. The dialogue in question is called Menexenus, in which the title character approaches Socrates because he desperately needs an epitaphios, or funeral lamentation, to honor the Athenian war dead on short notice, and Socrates says he has just the speech for him, given to him recently by Aspasia. By the date in which the scene is set, both Aspasia and Socrates would likely have been dead, so like the comedies of the previous century, it cannot and should not be taken as historically accurate, and it is abundantly apparent that Plato’s purpose is not to honor Aspasia. It is with great irony that, when asked for a speech to honor male Athenian citizens, Socrates gives Menexenus the words of a woman who was denied citizenship. The dialogue is considered a parody of the genre of the epitaphio, which often sought to define what it meant to be Athenian based on autochthony, or the fact of being indigenous, a nativist idea that was mocked by Antisthenes by saying snails and locusts too must have been citizens, since many had been born on Attic soil. The fact that Plato attributes a speech about birthright citizenship and manly courage to a female non-citizen, would seem to undermine its message. But there is more going on here. Socrates suggests that speakers are interchangeable, that what matters is the words, and he suggests that it was Aspasia, the writer of these words that so impress Menexenus, who taught the great Pericles to speak, as well as many others. Add to that the fact that Plato seems to include a great deal of sexual innuendo in the language, the known fact that she was sexually involved with Pericles, and the insinuation, as some scholars interpret the dialogue, is that Aspasia must have been sexually involved with all the men she taught, and that through the influence of her sexuality, she was putting words in the mouths of many great speakers and politicians. Taken this way, even Plato’s work partakes of the same tradition of depicting Aspasia as a Machiavellian sex worker. But there are some aspects of Plato’s dialogue that highlight the alternative biographical tradition then emerging: he very clearly presents Aspasia as a masterful orator and rhetorician, as a teacher of many prominent Athenians, and as a mentor to Socrates himself, one of the greatest philosophers of all time. Moreover, the fact that Menexenus responds knowingly to Socrates’s statements about Aspasia make it clear that these aspects of her life were actually well-known and widely accepted. 

It seems that the first philosopher to portray Aspasia in an entirely positive light was Aeschines, a contemporary of Plato. In his Socratic dialogue, also called Aspasia and perhaps meant as a direct response to Antisthenes’s negative dialogue of the same name, Socrates is approached by an affluent man named Callias and is asked to recommend a teacher who can instruct his son. Socrates recommends Aspasia and then goes on to give reasons why Aspasia is an excellent teacher. The dialogue is now lost, except for fragments, but through references to it, it has been credibly reconstructed. It seems that Socrates started by giving historical examples of women who were brilliant and made excellent teachers of men: one being Rhodogune, the Amazonian queen of Persia, and the other was Thargelia, the Ionian courtesan previously mentioned. This reference may be the source for Plutarch’s claim that Aspasia modeled herself after Thargelia, but that is not what Aeschines seems to have claimed, and in fact he may have been suggesting that Aspasia made for a happy medium between the two, one a warrior queen and the other, who wielded influence over kings through sex. Some have tried to interpret this dialogue as further depicting Aspasia as a prostitute, suggesting that in asking for a teacher for his son, Callias was actually asking for a woman to teach him sexual techniques, but this interpretation doesn’t conform to the rest of the dialogue as we know it. First, it is set during a time when Aspasia would have been an old woman, making it seem far less likely that she would be recommended as a sex tutor for a young man. And Aeschines does not seem to have represented Aspasia as leveraging her beauty and sexual appeal at all. Rather, she was presented by Socrates not as the consort of Pericles, but as his educator, and he her best student. Moreover, it is revealed that Aspasia was a teacher of many Athenian women as well, and respectable Athenian women at that, making it very unlikely that she would have been engaged in prostitution or brothel-keeping at all. Rather, the dialogue makes it sound as if Aspasia ran a sort of academy for women, educating them in politics, rhetoric, and philosophy, something that was frowned on if not outright prohibited. Some scholars have suggested that this may have been the origin of the defamatory claims that she ran a brothel, for it was easier to dismiss educated women as whores and discredit the place of their learning as a whorehouse than it was to acknowledge that they were just as capable of thinking as men. 

Marie Bouliard's 1794 portrait of Aspasia, incorporating more than one view of her.

As the dialogue went on, Aspasia is described as giving specific marital advice to one Xenophon and his wife, and the format that this advice takes is the Socratic method, asking the couple rhetorical questions intended to lead them to a realization about their expectations in the relationship. This explicit example of Aspasia’s intellect and discernment is proof that Callias wasn’t seeking erotic tutelage for his son, for why would Socrates recommend Aspasia for that purpose on the basis of her ability to give sound advice and demonstrate sound reasoning? Since Socrates acknowledges her as his own teacher, it also suggests that the Socratic method should be named after her instead: the Aspasian method. And the very fact that the person in the example, Xenophon, was himself a real person and a philosopher who would go on in numerous works to espouse the great wisdom of Aspasia, especially in giving advice about relationships and household management, seems to lend credence to the idea that Aeschines was indeed portraying her in an accurate light. Nevertheless, by the time Plutarch wrote about her, hundreds of years later, it is apparent that of these two competing traditions, of Aspasia as a sage or a whore, the latter had won out. And over the centuries since, the two traditions would continue to vie for dominance. In the Middle Ages and early modern periods, she was portrayed variously as Pericles’s sexpot concubine or as a teacher and philosopher, furthering this false dichotomy. And rarely were the two views of her reconciled, rarely was it ever suggested that she might have been both a genius and sexually empowered. Only one eighteenth-century portrait of her illustrates these typically conflicting conceptions of Aspasia united, portraying as a great beauty, one breast bared, but rather than looking out at the viewer of the portrait, she is gazing into a hand-held mirror. This may be taken to represent vanity, but it can alternatively be viewed as showing her focus on self-actualization. And in the same painting, in her other hand, she holds a scroll, clearly symbolic of learning. Of all the portrayals of her, this may be the most balanced, even if it may still be entirely inaccurate. During the same century as this portrait was painted, in 1777, a marble herm was discovered, a sculpted head and torso on a pillar, that is believed to be a Roman copy of Aspasia’s funeral stele. This monument now stands in the Vatican, and because it is believed to be a copy of a sculpture made of her during her lifetime, it lays claim to being the most accurate portrayal of Aspasia. She appears expressionless, serene, and solemn, clearly beautiful but noble of bearing and not sexualized. Of course, we don’t know for certain if it is an accurate representation of her, since her original fifth-century funerary stele is lost. So the sculpture stands, like all the depictions of Aspasia in her contradictory biographical traditions, as a construct, a symbol or placeholder for a woman whose real character we cannot truly know, since she has been erased from history, leaving only these exaggerated echoes and reflections. 

Marble portrait herm identified by an inscription as Aspasia, possibly copied from her grave.

Until next time, remember, there is a difference between being unknown or forgotten by history and being purposely marginalized and erased. For most women throughout history, including for Aspasia, their memory was never preserved unless it was in relation to a man. So consider this. We know Aspasia had a son with Pericles, but she may have had numerous daughters we simply don’t know of, and would never know of, unless a man decided to inscribe their names on his own gravestone. 

Further Reading

Bicknell, Peter J. “AXIOCHOS ALKIBIADOU, ASPASIA AND ASPASIOS.” L’Antiquité Classique, vol. 51, 1982, pp. 240–50. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/41652643. 

Henry, Madeleine. Prisoner of History: Aspasia of Miletus and Her Biographical Tradition. Oxford University Press, 1995.

MacDonald, Brian R. “The Megarian Decree.” Historia: Zeitschrift Für Alte Geschichte, vol. 32, no. 4, 1983, pp. 385–410. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/4435862. 

Wohl, Victoria. “Comedy and Athenian Law.” The Cambridge Companion to Greek Comedy, edited by Martin Revermann, Cambridge University Press, 2014, pp. 322–335. Cambridge Core, www.cambridge.org/core/books/abs/cambridge-companion-to-greek-comedy/comedy-and-athenian-law/40DE6B891BECD393E3DBE361010CB331. 

Wolkow, B. M. “The Mind of a Bitch: Pandora’s Motive and Intent in the Erga.” Hermes, vol. 135, no. 3, 2007, pp. 247–62. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/40379125.

The Lincoln Legends - Part Four: Smoke and Fire

At the end of April 1865, with the manhunt for John Wilkes Booth in full swing, soldiers and detectives roaming across Maryland and Virginia with photographs of Booth and his accomplice Herold asking for any information, some reliable intelligence was received that the two men had recently crossed the Potomac and could be found in Virginia. A cavalry force was mustered and embarked by steamer. Upon arrival, one officer in their party, a Colonel Conger, went door to door, pretending himself to be a Confederate and making inquiries. Another officer with the unit, Lieutenant Baker, spoke with one villager who recognized Booth and Herold by their photographs, though he said that, when he had seen them, Booth had shaved his distinctive mustache. He said that the two men had crossed the Potomac by ferry with Confederate horsemen the day previous. With this villager as their guide, they made their way to the same crossing, whereupon they encountered some of those same Confederate horsemen, who fled at the sight of the cavalry. After running them down and taking them into custody, the horsemen led them to another member of their party, Willie Jett, whom the investigator’s found in a hotel bed, awakening him and interrogating him. Jett admitted to having led Booth and Herold to a farm in Port Royal owned by one Richard Garrett. Upon arriving, they found Garrett uncooperative, saying the men had gone and that he never helped them, but when they began to threaten the farmer, his son, Jack, a boy of fifteen, told the soldiers that the fugitives were in the tobacco barn. It seems the boy had become suspicious of the men who had come to stay with his family when, the day before, after hearing news of a cavalry unit in town, Booth and Herold had hidden themselves in the woods. Now the boy led the soldiers to the barn, and the soldiers surrounded it. Lieutenant Baker told the boy to go in and ask for the men’s weapons, which he did, but the poorly conceived ruse failed. “Damn you! You have betrayed me,” they heard Booth say. The Garrett boy tried to leave, saying that the fugitives were going to kill him, but the soldiers blocked the door, insisting they wouldn’t let him out unless he brought their arms with him. The Garrett boy protested that they wouldn’t surrender the weapons. Eventually, the men let the Garrett boy leave the barn and announced that they would set it on fire. Booth shouted, “[T]hat is damned hard, to burn an innocent man’s barn. I’m lame. Give me a chance. Draw up your men before the door and I’ll come out and fight the whole command.” When, predictably, the soldiers didn’t take him up on the offer to let him come out shooting, David Herold announced that he wanted to surrender. He was taken into custody, and the barn was set on fire. The soldiers would later testify to having some view into the interior of the barn, through slats and though the cracked open door, identifying the injured Booth as he limped around making futile attempts to put out the fire they’d started. And here is where some enduring myths related to the Lincoln assassination are born, moving further from the thoroughly mythologized President himself to focus on the man who had taken his life. A shot rang out, striking Booth in the neck. There was disagreement among the men over who had shot him. Some claimed he had shot himself, and this myth persisted because of some initial, mistaken statements by the soldiers. A later claim would appear that, in some poetic sort of synchronicity, Booth had been shot in the very same way as Lincoln, in the back of his head, that their mortal wounds were identical. This was certainly a popular claim for newspapers to repeat, for obvious reasons, but it was entirely untrue. He had been shot in the neck, and the bullet had entered his spine. He was removed from the barn and taken to the porch of the Garrett farm, where he spoke, asking who had betrayed him, requesting that his mother be told that he died for his country, begging that the soldiers kill him, and remarking that he could no longer feel his limbs, calling them “useless.” It was eventually determined that the shot had been taken by one Boston Corbett, who admitted to being the shooter, saying, “Providence directed me.” After Corbett was identified as the shooter, he became a notorious figure himself, with newspapers asserting that he was a maniac or fanatic. He had been a milliner, or hatmaker, before the war and had long been exposed to mercury, which was known to cause psychiatric problems, thus the phrase “mad as a hatter” and the famous Alice in Wonderland character, the Mad Hatter. But while it is true that Corbett had for a time been a fiery street preacher and was said to have castrated himself with a pair of scissors to ward off sexual temptation, and it is equally true that later in life, he was committed to an asylum for brandishing a firearm and threatening some Kansas politicians in Topeka, the fact of the matter is that Corbett was reputedly a steadfast, loyal, and even heroic soldier. The only issue his superiors ever took with him was that he sometimes censured them for profanity. And one of his commanding officers would later take issue with a biographer of Lincoln describing Corbett as “a soldier of a gloomy and fanatical disposition,” protesting that “My recollection of him…is the very opposite to this. I have never known a person so cheerful and heroic under circumstances of intense suffering and great provocation. His example has been a source of inspiration to me through all the years since last we parted.” So it seems that some mythologizing of Corbett was transpiring as well. Corbett did not claim merely that God had told him to fire his shot. He further explained that, as he had a line of sight on Booth within the barn and could see the assassin getting to his feet and readying his rifle, he believed the fugitive was preparing to start a gunfight, which of course Booth had openly said he wanted to do. So he took the shot, and even though it was against orders, he was spared a court-martial because, as Edwin Stanton put it: “The rebel is dead; the patriot lives— has saved us continued excitement, delay, and expense. The patriot is released.” Later in life, Corbett capitalized on his fame as “Lincoln’s Avenger,” touring and giving lectures, always armed with a pistol because unreconstructed rebels sometimes threatened his life. This justified paranoia and his continued work in millinery may have contributed to his further mental decline in later years. After he was finally institutionalized, he escaped the asylum and disappeared. But as is the case with the famous, sightings began to crop up, here and there. In both Oklahoma and Texas, two different men claimed to be him but were imprisoned as impostors. No one knows what happened to the real Boston Corbett. On the other hand, we all know what happened to John Wilkes Booth, but that did not stop similar myths and rumors about his survival after that fateful night at the Garrett farm. In this series on the Lincoln Legends, or the myths surrounding Abraham Lincoln and his assassination, I have tried to demonstrate that, despite the many conspiracy theories about his murder, there is no good reason to credit any of them. And likewise, just because there are a lot of reports about Booth’s survival, so many that a subculture of alternative scholarship has developed around researching the possibility, that does not mean there is anything to it, contradicting the old adage that, as in the Garrett’s barn, where there is smoke, there must be fire.

Boston Corbett, the man who killed the man who killed Lincoln.

The legend of John Wilkes Booth’s survival, as detailed by historians George Sands Bryan in 1940’s The Great American Myth, and more recently by C. Wyatt Evans in his The Legend of John Wilkes Booth about 20 years ago, really started in newspaper reports of his whereabouts during the manhunt for the assassin. Just two days after the deed, The New York Times reported that “Rumor has arrested Booth a dozen times already,” and certainly rumor was running wild. Newspaper reports warned authorities along the Canadian border to be on guard, for rumor had it the assassin was headed that way, while others had him headed for the Chesapeake coast, and others still suggested he had never left Washington and could be found hidden within the underground chambers beneath Ford’s Theatre. One report had it that Booth was with a unit of thirty armored cavalry men who had skirmished with federal troops in Maryland, but when the original report was tracked down, there had never been any mention of Booth’s presence at the skirmish, as that was a detail later added to embellish the story. However, newspapers at the time simply reprinted excerpted copy from other papers, a practice called “clipping,” so when a rumor was first set into print, it might be reprinted many times without question before the rumor could be put to bed. Added to this pure gossip were numerous genuine reports of Booth’s arrest that later turned out to be cases of mistaken identity. In Illinois and Maine, two different actors were taken into custody simply because of their perceived likeness to Booth. And a traveler on the Philadelphia & Reading Railroad was pursued for three days, with federal detectives telegraphing ahead from station to station trying to stop the man, simply because someone who claimed to know Booth personally mistook the passenger for the assassin. This passenger was eventually arrested and turned out just to be a drunk, and the man who had identified him had actually lied about knowing Booth in the first place. There were dozens of such cases, and often as not, they weren’t even based on likeness, as people began reporting anyone who was acting too cheerful during the nation’s mourning of Lincoln. Then there were the letters, supposedly written by the killer himself, taunting the authorities, just like Jack the Ripper. One claimed the assassin had already made his escape into Canada. Another, an encrypted message, suggested, when deciphered, that there continued to be a larger conspiracy at work: “He is safe,” it read, referring to Booth, “and Old Abe is in hell.” Then it hinted at further attempts on the lives of Generals Grant and Sherman. All of them, of course, were hoaxes. And just as phony were the reports of intelligence gathered by mediums who had learned of John Wilkes Booth’s location from spirits in their seances, or by concerned citizens in their dreams. Booth was disguised as a woman, or was wearing blackface, he was being harbored in some certain prominent citizen’s home or being hidden in a brothel closet. He was secreted away in a church, a restaurant, a train car—nearly every possible location but where he actually was, out laying in a swampy forest or cowering in a barn. By the time of the Conspiracy trial, just several days after Booth’s death, there were already claims that the man killed in the barn was not the genuine article, and by that time, a lucrative industry had arisen in the selling of pictures of the assassin. With his likeness now spread far and wide, in newspapers and portraits, and doubts about his escape lingering, the rumors of his whereabouts would never cease.

After Booth was killed at the Garrett farm, his body was sewn up in a horse blanket and carried by wagon to a steamboat landing at Belle Plains, Virginia, where it was then taken by tugboat to the Washington Navy Yard and placed aboard the USS Montauk, where the other conspirators awaited their trial. Shortly thereafter, a rumor hit the press that the body had been disposed of, coalescing around the narrative that Booth’s remains had been unceremoniously dumped into the Potomac. A vivid illustration was even made depicting two officers pushing the body over the side of their boat. This clandestine disposal of the corpse certainly bolstered the already nascent rumors, so common whenever any noteworthy or notorious person dies, that they might still be out there somewhere. Why had the government not put the corpse on display and paraded it through the streets, as they had with Lincoln’s? Why hide it away, unless to cover up the fact that they had actually failed to catch the real killer. It was the following year that the myth of Booth’s survival took its first step from simple uninformed rumors and idle conspiracy theory into what might be called urban legend today. It happened while a congressional committee deliberated on how the reward money was to be apportioned among numerous men who had a hand in the capture of the conspirators. During the proceedings, a Kentucky Senator suggested that the committee must have  proof of the assassin’s death, saying, “I have never seen myself any satisfactory evidence that Booth was killed.” Of course, there was a great deal of evidence. Before the apparent disposal of the body, the government had the corpse identified and conducted an autopsy, and this senator was satisfied enough that the proceedings continued and the reward was disbursed. But his words would eventually be seized on, out of context, by later conspiracists who have suggested that something was fishy about Booth’s death. The fact of the matter is, it does appear that the government lied to the public about Booth’s body, as in 1867, during the House Judiciary investigations that served the impeachment of President Johnson, it came out that John Wilkes Booth had not been dumped in the Potomac at all. He had been buried in a secret grave on the grounds of the Washington Arsenal, and the rumor about his burial at sea does appear to have been leaked to the press by Stanton. However, conspiracists who claim that we don’t really know why Edwin Stanton buried Booth in secret are lying. We know the precise reasons Stanton himself gave when questioned about the matter. Booth had been sewn into a bag and delivered in secret to ensure the body was not lost or stolen. His body was not made available for public viewing because Stanton had no desire for Booth to become any more a symbol to Confederates than he already was. Even during the autopsy, a woman who had identified Booth clipped a lock of his hair. Stanton didn’t want Booth becoming a saint and leaving a trail of relics behind. As for the precautions taken with the body, there was good reason to fear a mob. It had always been the plan to take Booth out to the Montauk, where the other conspirators were being held, because there had nearly been a mobbing at the Old Capitol on April 17th, when some other prisoners were mistaken for Booth and Surratt. And there was again almost a mobbing at the Arsenal when William Garrett, the farmer who had harbored Booth, and his son Jack, who had given him up, were held captive there. Indeed, under such circumstances, there was just no good reason to let the public know where they were holding Booth’s body, and very good reason to spread the word that the body was gone. After the truth came out, Booth was exhumed in 1867 and buried in the Old Penitentiary, where the executed conspirators had been put to rest, and in 1869, he was disinterred again, his remains surrendered to his family. 

Newspaper illustrations of Booth’s capture and his post-mortem aboard the Montauk.

In reality, the positive identification of John Wilkes Booth’s body after it was brought aboard the Montauk was unusually thorough. While clearly the authorities did not want to make a spectacle of the remains in their custody, they very clearly wanted to ensure that they had the right man. The corpse was positively identified as Booth by more than one member of Booth’s own family, as well as by many personal acquaintances, like actor friends and the proprietors of Ford’s Theatre. A theme among the statements was how very certain they were in identifying him. “I was very familiar with his his face and distinctly recognize it,” said one Washington acquaintance, and the clerk of the hotel where Booth had been staying said, “I distinctly recognize it as the body of J. Wilkes Booth.” Dr. John May, a physician who had operated on Booth in the past, wrote in his memoir, “I was soon gazing at the remains, which needed no long inspection to enable me to recognize them.” But it wasn’t just the unmistakable appearance of the famous actor that allowed his identification. He was also identified by his tattoo. On the back of his left hand, between his forefinger and his thumb, he had his initials tattooed. This fact has caused those who want to claim a lookalike impostor was identified that day much trouble. Some have tried to claim the dead man just happened to be someone with the same initials. What striking coincidences! They were veritable doppelgangers, happened to have the same initials, AND happened to get the initials tattooed in the same place! And here I thought conspiracists didn’t believe in coincidence. But Booth was also identified by Dr. May as having the very same cicatrix scar on his neck from when May had removed an unsightly tumor there a couple years earlier. The doctor went into great detail identifying that scar. And if that weren’t enough, Booth’s dentist also identified several fillings that he had only recently put into Booth’s teeth. While dental analysis was rather new at the time for identification purposes, today it is considered a reliable form of forensic evidence. Beyond these pieces of evidence, there was his single riding boot, which matched the other one with his name in it that he had left at Dr. Mudd’s house in Maryland, and on the other foot the simple brogan Mudd had given him to wear. On that leg and foot could clearly be discerned the injuries from his leap to the stage at Ford’s Theatre, as the flesh was nearly black with contusion. While some have picked apart witness statements to try to claim that the wrong foot was injured, any such inaccuracies can be easily explained by simple witness misstatement, saying the right leg was injured because it may have been on their right when they viewed the remains. With the identification positively made “beyond all cavil,” as one present asserted, the autopsy could proceed. The bandage was taken off the leg so that the injury could be expertly examined, and then the mortal neck wound was examined. It was determined that Boston Corbett’s bullet had struck the right side of Booth’s neck, passed through two vertebrae, and then exited the left side of the neck. The medical examiners removed the damaged vertebrae as they traced the path of the bullet, and these vertebrae were kept in the Army Medical Museum as proof of Booth’s cause of death. Certain myths developed around this autopsy as well, suggesting that he had been decapitated and his entire head had been given to the museum, or that his heart had been cut from his chest, or that he had been entirely dissected. None of these were true. A few years later, in 1869, when his remains were exhumed again and given to his family, there was enough of him there for his family members to positively identify his corpse for the second time. 

The positive identification of Booth’s remains is the ultimate proof of Booth’s death, and all claims of cover-up and conspiracy surrounding Booth’s death become untenable when they require that every soldier involved, every doctor, every eyewitness and friend and family member who confirmed with certainty that Booth was dead must have for some reason been in on it. But urban legend and modern myth fly in the face of facts and are never much slowed down by them. So people continued seeing Booth everywhere, or at least claiming they did, and the newspapers who had been printing rumors of his whereabouts during the manhunt simply continued to do so after his death. In 1867, the New York Times printed a letter in which someone talked about being in Calcutta 6 months previously and overhearing one William Tolbert, a Confederate privateer whose ship had ranged South Pacific waters, saying that Booth was alive and well and that he could provide proof of this. This was nothing but absolute hearsay and rumor mongering, and indeed, since the actual existence of this sailor named Tolbert could never even be confirmed, it was also quite likely a hoax. But that year, further rumors appeared in other newspapers, often in the form of spurious letters being printed, that built on the rumor to claim Booth was plying the waters of the South Sea as a pirate. That same year, the New York World remarked on the strange phenomenon of these sightings: “like that phantom ship, the Flying Dutchman, [Booth] is from time to time, reported to have been seen in propria persona in various parts of the world; the latest story being that he is now the captain of a pirate vessel and the terror of the China seas. At intervals the press informs the public that some reliable correspondents have seen the notorious assassin in Europe. One time he has been seen playing rouge et noir at Baden Baden; another at the opera in Vienna. One positively swears that he saw him driving in the Bois de Boulogne at Paris. And another is equally confident that he beheld him visiting St. Peter's at Rome.” The rumors were so widespread that in 1875, when Boston Corbett attended a soldier’s reunion, someone said to his face that he hadn’t actually killed Booth and Booth was still out there. Much as when a moon landing denialist suggested to Buzz Aldrin’s face that the astronaut had never actually been to the moon, Boston Corbett pulled a gun on the man and threatened to shoot him over the lie. 

A marker for the Booth family plot in a Baltimore graveyard. The specific grave of John Wilkes Booth remains unmarked.

This phenomenon did not go away. During the 1870s, Booth showed up in Shanghai, when a former Confederate veteran who claimed to have been an “intimate friend” of his said he was surprised to be greeted in China by the assassin, alive and well. Apparently Booth was doing great over there; he had married and was acting again. Yet in the 1880s, it came to be believed that John Wilkes Booth had never left American shores and instead had assumed the identity of an Episcopal preacher in Richmond, Virginia, named Armstrong, a man who apparently bore a striking resemblance to the assassin. The facts that he walked with a cane and took an interest in local theatrical productions seemed to clinch it for many. And Armstrong may have enjoyed this speculation, as he seems to have done little to dissuade those who wanted to believe, but there are historical records of the man’s life and career as a clergyman going all the way back to his birth in Ireland. He simply could not have been Booth. One Booth was then exchanged for another Booth when a story appeared out of Tennessee, in the small town of Wartburg, where a stranger who had arrived in town the year after the assassination was rumored to be Booth. They said he would always avoid the topic of the President’s murder when it came up in conversation, and one time when he was ill, it was claimed that he called out the names of the conspirators, but this could be a fabrication invented to further the popular rumors about him. It was said if you greeted him using the name Booth, he would act strangely, and yeah, I bet he did. This poor fellow was the subject of town suspicion and scrutiny for almost twenty years, and nothing beyond rumors ever came of the claims. Eventually, he moved on, probably because everyone was being very weird to him. It was then the 1890s, and another Booth had cropped up, this time in Brazil, where newspapers were printing rumors about drifters there. In response, however, a woman named Christ—that’s right, Mrs. J. Christ of Wisconsin—wrote to her local newspapers to refute the Brazil claims. Booth was not in South America, she said, and she knew this because she had kept the secret of his true fate for more than thirty years. After her home in New Orleans had been taken by Union troops, she had lived aboard a Confederate schooner that sometimes ran the blockade at Wilmington, and she claims that just two months after the assassination, Booth came aboard the ship in Cuba, still limping. He traveled with them to Nassau harbor, where he took passage to England and lived the rest of his life in supposed peace and prosperity. Her only evidence, beyond her word, was a diamond ring inscribed with his initials that she claimed he gave to her. But of course, that was just a prop, and her story was full of inaccuracies, such as her anecdotes of having met Booth previously, which didn’t line up with historical records, her claim that Booth was traveling with a certain Confederate naval officer who is actually confirmed to have been elsewhere at the time, and the strange assertion she made that, since it hadn’t been Booth killed in the barn, it must have been his coconspirator, a man named Fox. You may have noticed that I haven’t mentioned a conspirator named Fox. That’s because no such man existed. The very day after her claim came out, someone from her own town by the name of Kenzie bolstered her story by claiming he had not only knew Booth well, but had been at the theatre when Lincoln was shot, and had also mustered with the soldiers who pursued Booth and had even been present at the barn where Booth was killed. The way he portrayed it, Boston Corbett was in command, had shot the man after he’d surrendered, and then claimed it was Booth when it very clearly was not. Kenzie claimed too that no reward was ever paid by the government because they knew Booth had escaped. It was all utter nonsense. There are extensive records of how the reward was divided and paid. Boston Corbett was not in command at all. The names of all cavalry men present in the unit that hunted Booth down are well documented and Kenzie was not among them. And finally, the way Kenzie told it, the capture of Booth occurred the morning after the assassination, when everyone knows Booth was on the lam for ten days before he was tracked down. Beyond these inaccuracies, which seem to show that Kenzie was making stuff up off the top of his head without even informing himself of the basic facts first, the mere idea that these two people with special but unrelated knowledge of Booth’s escape just happened to come from the same small town in Wisconsin strains credulity. What should be apparent, here, is that, in addition to baseless rumors that may have been genuinely believed by those who spread them, people were also just inventing these stories to get attention. 

A combination of these, of people reporting earnestly believed but groundless claims and others fabricating falsehoods for self-promotion, would result in the ultimate myth of Booth’s survival and the repopularization of the myth in the early 20th century. In 1903, a quiet Oklahoma man named David George committed suicide, and during the medical exam, a local reverend  burst in and exclaimed that it was actually John Wilkes Booth. The source of this info was the reverend’s wife, for this man, George, had apparently tried to kill himself before by taking poison and had, in expectation of death, confessed his true identity to the Reverend’s wife. Thinking this an important matter to resolve—and perhaps also seeing an opportunity—the undertaker preserved the corpse perfectly, embalming it into a veritable mummy, and then they let the press know and started allowing the public to view the body. This drew the interest of a certain lawyer of Memphis who had been busy planning on revealing his own Booth survival story. According to this attorney, Finis Bates, back when he had been practicing law in Hood County, Texas, he had represented a man named John St. Helen who, one night while gravely ill, had confessed to him that he was Booth and asked him to bring news of his death to his brother in New York. This St. Helen fellow ended up getting better, and he held Bates to their attorney-client privilege, confiding in him further by confessing everything in detail before leaving town. Bates claimed that he never believed him until years later, when he started to research the matter and ended up working on a book about it. When he read about the man David George who’d committed suicide in Oklahoma, he went to see him and declared that he was one and the same as his John St. Helen, and that he was indeed John Wilkes Booth. His book, “Escape and Suicide of John Wilkes Booth,” was published in 1907, and the story of Booth’s survival took the world by storm again. Even two decades later, it was a big story, as Harper’s Magazine published an interview with him that emphasized his credibility and fully endorsed his claims. But the truth of the matter is that his story is full of gaping holes. He never wrote anything down about St. Helen’s supposed confession at the time, but then 35 years later claimed to be able to remember it word for word. The confession raised the old conspiracy theory about Andrew Johnson, claiming that the Vice President had persuaded him to kill Lincoln. But most of the confession, it turns out, was plagiarized from an 1897 newspaper article about the assassination. The confession Bates shared also just didn’t fit the facts as the real Booth would have given them, describing his wound as being high up the shin instead of the ankle, saying it happened when he struck the edge of the stage, which he was not near, and mistakenly saying his right leg had been injured—a mistake that someone viewing the body might make but which Booth himself surely would not have. More than that, people who had known John St. Helen all thought it was humbug. He was no sophisticated theatre aficionado prone to reciting Shakespeare, as Bates depicted him, but more of a frontier ruffian, and he left Texas for Colorado, not Oklahoma. As for the embalmed body in Oklahoma, that man, David George, was not the same person. He had been a house painter and vagrant, and likewise had been no Shakespearian. Bates had come with what he claimed was a tintype portrait of John St. Helen in order to make the identification—though judging by Bates’s character, it might very well have just been one of those portraits of Booth that had been popular years before. The undertaker who embalmed and displayed the corpse said he saw no resemblance, and generally, of Bates, he had a low opinion, saying, “His book account of all this is bunk.” Nevertheless, when no one claimed David George’s body, he gave it to Finis Bates, who stored the mummy in his garage and rented it out for fairs and sideshow attractions, displaying the withered body with signs announcing: “John Wilkes Booth—Himself—Murderer of Abraham Lincoln. An Exhibition for the Correction of American History.”

The mummy of David George, claimed to be Booth.

It would have been more accurate to say that this story resulted not in the correction of history, but in its revision, redaction, or better yet, falsification. The excitement occasioned by these claims even led some individuals who had helped to identify Booth in 1865 to leap on the bandwagon and changing their stories some 40 years after the fact. Basil Moxley, who had viewed the body and expressed confidence that it was Booth, at 80 years old suddenly changed his mind and said that the body he had seen had red hair, something none of the other witnesses saw and which he himself had never mentioned noticing. And how strange it would be that Booth’s own family would overlook the red hair not once but twice, in 1865 and 1869 when they identified the body. But further conspiracist insinuation about cover-ups would continued to change minds. In the 1920s, Eisenschiml contributed by suggesting that something had been suspicious about Booth’s death. Eisenschiml did not think Booth had survived. Rather, he suspected all the cloak and dagger had been to hide the fact that Booth had been purposely killed to silence him. But later writers repurposing Eisenschiml’s conspiracy thesis did promote the myth of Booth’s survival, like the forger Ray Neff who claimed over and over to find evidence of a larger conspiracy, and the authors of the debunked 1977 book and movie The Lincoln Conspiracy, all of whom I discussed in my recent Patreon exclusive release. And even though these authors were all discredited, it lent a scholarly veneer to this topic, and in the 90s, some conspiracist researchers convinced descendants of Booth to seek a court order, hoping to exhume Booth a third time and prove the body in his grave is not his. Two Maryland courts refused their petition on the grounds that the theory of Booth’s escape was itself unconvincing. In 2010, Booth family members succeeded in getting permission to exhume the body of Booth’s brother Edwin, this time claiming they wanted to harvest DNA to refute the rumors of Booth’s survival, but they still needed DNA of John Wilkes Booth’s for comparison, which they hoped to get from Booth’s neck vertebrae, now in the possession of the National Museum of Health and Medicine. The museum declined to provide the family access, and there the matter still stands. Booth was proven beyond doubt dead long ago, but conspiracists will act like all these judges and museum directors must be in on the cover-up still, discounting entirely the idea that there just isn’t good enough reason to take these requests seriously. Conspiracists think that, if people are making a claim, there must be something to it, and anyone who says otherwise are suppressing the truth. In reality, the spread of these myths is relatively easy to explain. When one unfounded rumor or boldface lie is well-received, it encourages others to make similar competing claims. But this sense that there simply must be something to any claims so popular and widespread, this idea that where there is smoke, there must be fire, persists. It is very much the same as the many contradictory claims of Hitler’s escape, which I discussed in my episode “The Specter of Hitler’s Survival.” It becomes clear that, just as conspiracists dislike coincidence as an explanation, they also can’t abide by the notion that public hysteria might result in numerous equally false claims. But nearly all of the claims about Booth’s escape are at variance with each other and cannot be reconciled. To believe one of them is to acknowledge that all the rest are lies or mistakes. To accept the old adage of smoke and fire would be to argue that all of those rejected claims must have been kindled from the one true claim, which logically must have come first. So if someone really wants to argue that where there is smoke there must be fire, in this case, they have to favor the initial claim that Booth turned into a pirate in the South Seas. If they don’t, then they are tacitly admitting that, from the start, these claims about Booth’s survival were false, that the majority are false, that therefore even the one they favor is likely false, and the smoke billowing off of that spreading fire served only to further obscure the truth. 

*

Until next time, I’ll leave you with a quote from one of my main sources, George Bryan’s The Great American Myth, in which he described “The whole subject of Lincoln's murder” as having become embroiled “in a tangle of disorder and error, of falsehood and credulity, from which it has not yet been set free.” 

Further Reading

Bryan, George Sands. The Great American Myth. Carrick & Evans, Inc., 1940. 

Evans, C. Wyatt. The Legend of John Wilkes Booth: Myth, Memory, and a Mummy. University Press of Kansas, 2004. 

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.

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.

*

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.