The Mammoth Book of Conspiracies

is the Jack Ruby of the Lincoln murder—is a case in point. Why did he not let Booth surrender? Was it because Booth might implicate someone high up the chain of the plot? Corbett was a religious lunatic, who had castrated himself to help his concentration on higher things, and was later locked up in an asylum. From which he then escaped and vanished without trace. Good going for a mad man, no?

If John Wilkes Booth and Boston Corbett were pawns in the assassination of Lincoln, there is no shortage of contenders for the title of the “Arch-Conspirator”, the cabal or the individual who masterminded the deed:

• In the febrile days after Lincoln’s death, Northern politicians loudly blamed Jefferson Davis, the President of the Confederacy for the murder. Even accounting for Northern prejudice against the South, this theory has legs. Although General Robert E. Lee had recently surrendered the main Confederate army at Appomattox Courthouse, Davis was unwilling to haul up the white flag. Killing Lincoln was a means of keeping the Civil War going.

Booth did have incriminating connections to the Southern top table around Davis. Ideologically Booth was a die-hard “Rebel” of the Davis stripe. More: Booth was almost certainly a Confederate spy. Six months before the assassination Booth travelled to Montreal in Canada, where he conferred with Jacob Thompson, chief of the Confederacy’s secret service. Booth also made an unexplained deposit of $20,000 into his bank account on his return. And what better cover for a spy than the itinerant profession of thespianism?

• On the other hand, the First Lady, Mary Todd Lincoln, pointed the finger of blame at someone inside the Lincoln camp—at no less than Andrew Johnson, the Vice President. Her evidence? Aside from being a Southerner—admittedly almost enough in itself to guarantee guilt in the paranoid aftermath of Abe’s death—he did know Booth socially. Booth had even called on Johnson on the afternoon of the assassination and left his card.

Yet the VeePee does not quite fit the frame as Mister Big, for one overwhelming reason: he was on the list of figures to be killed by the conspiracy on that April night. Luckily for Johnson, George Atzerodt, slated for the homicide, developed cold feet and went on a drinking bender instead. Why did Booth call on Johnson in the afternoon of that bloody Good Friday? Probably to determine his whereabouts so he could be butchered.

• In Otto Eisenschiml’s 1937 book Why Lincoln Was Murdered, another of the president’s men is outed as the master of the conspiracy. Secretary of War Edwin Stanton certainly had a motive, because he was wholly opposed to Lincoln’s soft, liberal Reconstruction policies for the South. Also Stanton, curiously, refused Lincoln’s request that Stanton’s Atlas-like aide, Major Eckert, accompany the party to the Ford Theater. Instead Abe got a buffoon as a bodyguard, who was in the pub at the fateful moment. Rather than taking a bullet for the president, John Parker was taking a shot of rye.

Another circumstantial piece of evidence against Stanton is Booth’s memo book, which the Secretary of War stashed away in his safe; when the memo book was later made public, at least eighteen pages were found to be missing. Chief of the National Detective Police, Lafayette C. Baker, testified that the journal had been complete when his men handed it over to Stanton…

• But then Baker himself is under suspicion. Three years after the assassination, the venal cop wrote what appears to be a rhyming confession: “In New Rome there walked three men, a Judas, a Brutus, and a spy. Each planned that he should be the kink [sic] when Abraham should die… As the fallen man lay dying, Judas came and paid respects to one he hated, and when at last he saw him die, he said ‘Now the ages have him, and the nation now have I.’”

Stanton is obviously Judas, but who Baker meant by Brutus is uncertain. Possibly it was Ward H. Lamon, Lincoln’s buddy and US marshal for Washington DC, who just happened to be elsewhere on the evening in question. As to the identity of the spy, Baker answered that himself: “But lest one is left to wonder what has happened to the spy, I can safely tell you this, it was I. Lafayette C. Baker 2–5-68.”

Shortly after composing his cryptogram, the previously healthy 44-year-old Baker died. His wife believed he was poisoned by government agents.

Of course, there is always someone who sees Jewish bankers behind every evil deed, and sure enough the Rothschilds have been nominated as the hands that steered Booth. Their reason? Because Lincoln had issued “greenbacks”, government notes to fund the war, thus robbing the Rothschilds of easy high-interest shekels. Equally, no conspiracy is complete without putting a secret society in its sights, and as soon as Lincoln’s heart stopped beating at 7.22 on the morning after he was shot, rumours began to circulate that the Knights of the Golden Circle, a circle of pro-South Northern Democrats, were up to their elegant necks in the deed. And there is always the super-ambitious alternative history in which plural plotters come together for one epoch shaping moment; in The Lincoln Conspiracy, David Balsiger and Charles E. Sellier Jr propose a heady, swirling scenario whereby Secretary of War Stanton linked up with Confederate spymaster Jacob Thompson, plus Northern speculators who wanted to keep the money-making war going and good ol’ Maryland boys who wanted to keep Negroes in their place, viz. down on the slave plantation. Just in case you thought that Booth was treated a little harshly for his part in delivering a bullet to Lincoln’s brain, he did not die staggering from a bullet in a blazing barn. No, no, no. In this left field conspiracy scenario, the body in the barn belonged to a James William Boyd, a Confederate fugitive, who unfortunately for him looked like Booth, the latter having been smuggled by Stanton out of the country. Some said to California, England and India. Yes, exotic India, not humdrum Indiana.

Like the controversy over the assassination of John F. Kennedy, that over the assassination of Lincoln shows no sign of slowing up. Unfortunately, the death of Lincoln is now so far in the past that any new evidence is unlikely to be unearthed. The truth lies buried with the bodies of the main actors in the drama.

Further Reading

David Balsiger and Charles E Sellier, The Lincoln Conspiracy, 1977

Otto Eisenschiml, Why Lincoln was Murdered, 1937

Theodore Roscoe, The Web of Conspiracy: The Complete Story of the Men Who Murdered Abraham Lincoln, 1960

LUSITANIA

On 7 May 1915 the British passenger liner Lusitania, under the command of Captain Turner, was sunk by a U-boat off the south coast of Ireland.

The loss of life was terrible. Since the ship was lying on its side, the starboard lifeboats could not be used, and 1,201 people died. Of these, 128 were citizens of neutral America.

Firing at a passenger liner was outside the accepted rules of war, and anti-German riots occurred in many countries. The President of the USA, Woodrow Wilson, wrote to the German government demanding “reparation so far as reparation is possible”. At the fourth time of writing, the Germans caved in, accepted responsibility and agreed to stop the sinking of passenger ships.

In the short term, German capitulation to Wilson’s demands was enough to prevent the USA entering the war on the Allied side. However, anti-German sentiment had been so effectively stoked by the sinking, that when Germany resumed unrestricted submarine warfare in 1917 it was inevitable that the US would side with Britain, France and Russia.

Over time, military historians have come to suspect that the sinking was a set-up in which the Germans were deliberately encouraged by the British to sink the liner in the expectation that the negative publicity would lure the Americans onto the British side.

The suspicions were brought together in 1972 by Colin Simpson in The Lusitania. As Simpson detailed, the British failed to provide the Lusitania with any form of escort, although the Germans had placed advertisements in the newspapers of New York (from where Lusitania sailed) warning “that any travellers sailing in the war zone on ships of Great Britain or her allies do so at their own risk”. More, the Lusitania appeared to make no effort to avoid a U-boat attack although it was travelling through a zone where U-boats lurked. No less than