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.”

The Lincoln Legends - Part Four: Smoke and Fire

Follow and Support Us!