The Lincoln Deception

from the Library of Congress in Washington DC you good afternoon and welcome my name is Barbara Moreland I'm with the humanities and Social Sciences division here at the Library of Congress and we are most happy to have David Stewart with us today this talk today follows I don't know how many over how many years that the division has sponsored and it's one way that we help to share the work that researchers do here but it also is important for us to be reminded those of us who work here that this place really is about the researchers we have wonderful collections here at the Library of Congress and they are available to almost anyone who wants to come here you do need to be 16 years of age to get your reader card however you don't need to have other types of credentials that say that you are working on a PhD or that you have a multi-million dollar contract or the publishing company none of that's necessary just a curious mind and when you come here when researchers come here and use these collections then they are made available to a wider public so that's why for us it's very much about the researchers and those who come and use the collections we appreciate them and then again to you for coming to share in this event today I would like to say thank you Abbie yochelson of the reference staff in the main reading room in humanities and Social Sciences Division will provide our introduction I think for some of you here mr. Stewart David Oh Stewart is a familiar face he gave a talk Emily Howie my colleague arranged a book talk back in 2009 when his book impeached the trial of President Andrew Johnson the fight for Lincoln's legacy was published he also has appeared at the 2012 National Book Festival and you can catch that cyber cast he was speaking then about his book American Emperor aaron burr's challenged to Jefferson's America or you might have seen him on c-span book TV CNN hardball and a variety of other television programs I somehow still couldn't put the face together with the name until I saw his picture on a book jacket and then it was like oh yeah that guy he's in the main reading room all the time doing research and I suspect colleagues in the manuscript division elsewhere around the library would say the same thing oh he's always here mr. Stewart practiced law for many years including arguments before the Supreme Court and an impeachment trial in the Senate and then he began to write history coming around here a lot to do the research his first book was the summer of 1787 the men who invented the Constitution that came out in 2007 and was a Washington Post bestseller and won the Washington writing award in that year his books on Andrew Johnson and Aaron Burr followed like year after year and - the same kind of acclaim he was awarded the prestigious Cincinnati history ply's by the Society of the Cincinnati in 2013 and anyone who's a historian or vaguely interested in history will recognize the importance of that Society but you start to get reviews that say things like a skilled historian and a splendid storyteller or Stewart's graceful style and storytelling ability make for a good read and someone who gets reviews that one after another says what a good storyteller he is should clearly turn to historical fiction and writing novels making use of that storytelling speaking about his non-fiction works mr. Stewart said I write about episodes in our history that I need to make sense of episodes that are not well understood and also are centrally important to America's development as a nation it doesn't get much more centrally important to our nation's development than Lincoln's assassination that is a critical moment in our history in the Lincoln deception its 1900 so decades after the actual assassination and a whole lot of the people the key people are dead he mixes fictional characters and real-life people and introduces a rather unlikely buddy pair who are very very effective as I was reading and I was casting the movie in my mind of who would play this buddy pair and the book explores whether there was a deeper unrevealed conspiracy behind the well-known John Wilkes Booth conspiracy and just in case mr. Stewart didn't have enough to do producing these acclaimed books year after year he also is the founder and president of the Washington Independent Review of Books it's an online book review site but truly it's a community of writers who are brought together here in Washington and contribute to that site I thought Barbara was gonna mention but she didn't this is being filmed and so there'll be a question-and-answer session afterwards so if you decide to ask a question please be aware that you could be captured for posterity on our cyber cast also if you have any phones go ahead and turn those off - thank you very much took my notes a short talk thank you all for coming out and it's a great privilege to be here I am a huge fan of the library and I know many of the librarians by sight more than by name and I like to think of myself as a power user and I thought yesterday was a pretty good cap capsule capsule I came and I hung out for a few minutes in my little hidey-hole over in the adams building and then went to the manuscript room which of course you have to really look for these days and they had all their readers being used the microphone readers so they had to take me up to the newspaper room to do that and then I ended up in Princeton photographs as well as the law libraries so I was in four of the rooms so I think I feel good about that this book is a departure for me and it was a hoot it was a lot of fun to do it did grow out of research for my second book on the impeachment trial of Andrew Johnson and it is very much a work of fiction but I tried to apply the rule of historical fiction which i think is very important which is you don't mess with what we know it's tough enough on readers sorting fact from fiction so if you want to write historical fiction you have an obligation to go find out what we do know those of us who write history and I'm honored to see Adam Goodheart a great history writer here today know that most of history is silence most of what's out there that happened we don't know so there's plenty of room to make up stuff and the things we do know which are really usually just things that are written down or somebody thought to write down or made a picture of we need to take care about and I love the adage that I apply for that which is you can make up a lot but Lincoln has to be tall and so I tried to follow that rule here see if I can make this not too painful oh this is disappointing there we go soon I this story starts with this fellow John Bingham he was a Republican congressman from eastern Ohio town of Cadiz he was strongly anti-slavery a real leading figure in the House of Representatives of his time he was leader in the impeachment effort which is why I was researching him it was also the author of the 14th amendment the first section of which which guarantees us due process of law and equal protection laws really the second constitution and we have a lot to be thankful to John Bingham about but there's another major role he played in history which was he was the lead trial prosecutor of the booth co-conspirators were tried in the summer of 1865 when he tried that case glad the trial lasted about two months his theory was that Jefferson Davis had ordered and was the mastermind behind the prosecution behind the assassination that theory was somewhat undermined he relied on he produced several witnesses who testified that they heard Confederate officers talked about how booth was going to be in charge of the getting rid of Lincoln and that they saw documents that indicated this and it all led back to Jefferson Davis unfortunately a few months after the trial two of these witnesses were revealed to be sort of chronic and lifelong perjurers one of whom was sort of almost of legendary quality his name was Stanford Conover or Charles Dunham it went by a bunch of different names was a serious flim-flam artist and so this theory which you know at the end of the war pretty much everybody assumed the South had arranged to have Lincoln assassinated the theory started to fall into disrepute when I was researching the impeachment book I came upon a very obscure biography of Bingham there's a new one out just this year but before that the last one was about 40 years ago I got at the main reading room he brought it out it was printed in sort of photo offset type I think there are people here old enough to remember that um it couldn't have had a circulation of more than a few hundred I'm quite sure I was the only person to read that book for several decades and it was done by a scholar out in Ohio who god bless him sourced everything he found and he has one paragraph in that book that stuck in my head and he tells the story of John Bingham on his deathbed and on his deathbed Bingham described the conversation he had during the trial with Mary Surratt I'll talk more about Mary Surratt she was one of the booth co-conspirators who's the first woman ever executed by the United States government and Bingham said and this is in 1900 he's 85 years old he said mrs. Surratt told me a terrible secret and I told only one of the person was Secretary of War Edwin Stanton Lincoln's Rock during the Civil War and Stanton and I agreed that no one could be told that if the secret got out it would destroy the Republic so Stanton took the secret to his grave and now the secret dies with me whereupon he died without ever revealing the secret now this stuck in my head for a couple of years what was the secret I was there more the conspiracy than the generally accepted view at this point in our history you know we're still working on Kennedy conspiracy theories but the Lincoln conspiracy theories have somewhat died out and this notion that booth was the the lone mastermind is really the dominant narrative we get and then of course there were the practical questions how do I reinvestigate this case 150 years later or even if I have the story pick up in 1900 when Bingham finally reveals that there is a secret he doesn't tell what it is how do you reinvestigate it in 1935 years later so given my predilection for history that's where I turn to start it trying to think through some of these problems I knew I couldn't write a nonfiction book so I was thinking about a fiction book and I wanted to think about assassinations of course there's a Lincoln assassination we've had three others James Garfield I almost always get right up to the edge of saying John Garfield but that's a different guy William McKinley in 1901 and then of course Kennedy and we are just emerging from the tunnel of Kennedy anniversary events let's look at the assassins who were involved this is Charles Bhutto who killed Garfield land Shaw gosh the anarchist who killed McKinley and of course Lee Harvey Oswald familiar to a lot of us and it's useful to take sort of take them in for a second these are people who were leaving a pretty light footprint in the sands of time in their lives on not successful people and they sort of frame what we expect from an assassin that it will be sort of a lone wolf a loser somebody with a grudge and that's what we have sort of in our synapses is the expected picture of an assassin well let's contrast it with John Wilkes Booth there's an immediate distinction between the two booth is a lot better looking but there's a more important distinction he was far from nobody booth was the sign of the most prominent theatrical family in the country his father Junius booth had been a great star of the stage traveled all across the country his brother Edwin Booth and his other brother Junius were also renowned actors his brother Edwin more than John Wilkes and John Wilkes took his turn on the stage he was known more for his athleticism than for his brilliant reading of Shakespeare but he was a headliner who performed all across the country indeed he probably couldn't have walked down a street in a major city in the United States in 1865 without having somebody recognize him so this is very different image this is a celebrity assassin before turning from booth I always have to show this image which I love booth actually did not perform on the stage for the 11 months before the assassination except for one performance in November of 1864 which he did as a benefit in New York with his brothers and they did Shakespeare's Julius Caesar and to show how life does not imitate art on in this performance booth portrayed the loyal one Mark Antony and his brothers played the assassins Brutus and Cassius but it and I point out booth is on the far leg on Wilkes Booth is on the far left he shaved his mustache for the role now there were eight co-conspirators with booth this is an image I love to show from Harper's Weekly because it reflects a bit the national obsession that we had with Mary Surratt you'll note that she is the central figure in the conspiracy here in booth is relegated to sort of a an orbiting position about her not particularly accurate historically but it does reflect the sort of public fascination with having a female who was engaged in an assassination conspiracy and she's a very interesting character she was a educated woman she had attended a secondary school in Alexandria Virginia married a man named John Surratt in Southern Maryland southern Prince George's County he began as a farmer but they ended up opening this tavern at a crossroads it was called surrattsville because the post office was located there and that was the postal address I figured why not give his name to the postal address since the assassination they changed the name of the town to Clinton thinking surrattsville was a little incendiary and not foreseeing that Clinton would become a controversial name of its own the her husband became a drunkard sort of in went into decline Mary really took over the businesses and it was a business thing you think of it a bit like a roadside Inn and convenience store they had tavern Inn they also had a Smith smithy they had a carriage shop for repairing your carriage they in 1862 the husband dies and Mary takes over the business for real and at that point the family is very much dedicated to the Confederate cause now this is not unusual in Southern Maryland it was a very much Confederate leaning area culturally socially economically it was tobacco country heavy slave owning country and this was the of her neighbors the older son Isaac was a volunteer in the Confederate Army fought in Texas and the younger son John Harrison Surratt jr. became a spy and a courier this is John Surratt jr. he's a bit of a dandy nice-looking young fellow and he was known to favor fine clothes keep that in your mind and we'll be circling back to that at a very early age eighteen and nineteen he became a Confederate courier was a gifted one the real daredevil he was he hid his messages in his Boonton is in loose boards and the buggies that he was driving he was contemptuous of the detectives who were sent to stop him they stopped him and couldn't find the messages often and he made rather a name for himself the Confederates from Richmond liked to send their messages through Southern Maryland across the Potomac River into Southern Maryland where they had a very simple system for getting them to their agents in the rest of the country because so many of the postmasters were Confederate leaning they'd just get them delivered to the postmasters and the postmasters would put him in the mail and the US Postal Service would then deliver these secret messages they in late 1864 John Surratt sets up well he is part of a terribly important meeting with John Wilkes Booth in Washington which is the beginning of the conspiracy and the meeting is set up by a neighbor of his a fella named Samuel Mudd dr. Mudd somewhat notorious as well he will end up standing trial with the other conspirators and dr. Mudd was engaged with the Confederate Secret Service to some extent as many of the people were in that part of the area and put that part of the state and he put them together for a meeting booth and Surratt hit it off famously and big and scheming now at just about that time the Surratt family picks up from surrattsville and moves to Washington they moved to this townhouse which is was owned by the Surratt family and it's still standing it is now an Asian fusion restaurant rock and roll and it's on 8th Street between 6th and 7th I I desperately wanted to have my book party there but I could never find anybody I could negotiate with in my language it the exterior of the building is really quite as it was then obviously the interior has been changed a good deal to accommodate a restaurant and a dim sum table but that became the physical and emotional center of the conspiracy against Abraham Lincoln booth and John Surratt developed a plan to kidnap Abraham Lincoln whisked him down to Richmond and hold him for ransom what they would get in return for Lincoln is never entirely clear that predominant story is that they want to get a lot of the Confederate prisoners of war released so then we'll have new influx of soldiers who can carry on the battle there's some suggestion occasionally that they might even you know get a victorious piece out of such a bargain so Surratt began recruiting people to help with this louis powell and i clerked for lewis powell at the Supreme Court so I really hate that this man's name was Louis pals so he went by the name Lewis Paine so that's how I refer to him he was a Confederate veteran a large man very powerful you can tell that the photographer sort of fell in love with him there's a whole series of pictures of him taken after he was captured and they really could be a layout for GQ they're quite remarkable he was recruited for the muscle Lincoln was a large powerful man to subdue Lincoln was not going to be so easy George Atzerodt whose photographs were not a candidate for GQ was a German immigrant and a Waterman he handled boats on the Potomac and he was to pilot the boat across the river with the president in it David Herold was a sort of outdoorsman in Southern Maryland a guy who knew all the hidden highways and byways and he was going to help them evade capture and pursuit and they all became a ways of the Surratt house in the months before the assassination couple might have stayed there for a night or two they didn't actually move in but they often came by for meetings and conversations or to see Surratt and interestingly enough John Wilkes Booth became quite a habituate of the Surratt house and on numerous occasions he came simply to see Mary now booth was a dashing twenty six-year-old matinee idol and Mary was a 42 year old lady with two grown three grown children who was invariably referred to in the press as stout we do not know what their relationship was could have been anything to be honest but we do know that he valued her company she was an intelligent woman and he spent hours with her it's sort of an interesting piece of the story she doesn't look that heavy in this picture so I'm always a little puzzled by that they put the that team together with a couple of booths old school friends men from baltimore samuel arnold and michael o'laughlen and the goal was to waylay lincoln on his way to a formants this had developed in mid March of 1865 Lincoln was supposed to go to a performance for injured soldiers at Campbell Hospital I this is an image of Campbell Hospital at the time I was really quite stunned when I discovered that Campbell Hospital which I mean it sounds like Lincoln is going off into the boondocks is at the current location of Florida Avenue between fifth and seventh streets so the the woods were not far from downtown Washington in those days he they they staked out a deserted part of the road on the way there which as near as I can tell not much more than a mile from the Surratt house and waited for him Lincoln changed his plans he did not go and in his stead Chief Justice salmon P chase went to the performance the conspirators seem to have concluded that nobody would ransom anything for salmon P chase so they let him go by they then retired to the Surratt house with guns and knives falling out of their pockets and angrily had a variety of recriminations with each other and then went off between that point which is March 17th and a month later which when the assassination happens which is April 14th the plan evolves and we don't have a good handle on how it evolved we do know of course that Booth did lay in wait for Lincoln or break into his booth at the Ford's Theater and shoot him deliver a mortal blow what's often forgotten though here we is that there was an assassin who was waiting for Andrew Johnson the new vice president Johnson had only been vice president for five weeks we didn't have a vice presidential residence at the time did not for another hundred years thereafter so Johnson who had just a I from Tennessee was staying at the Kirkwood House Hotel I at Sarat who was the water man had been converted into the assassin he went to the Kirkwood house had an attack of nerves stepped into the bar to fortify his nerve knocked back a couple of shots and which had the effect of only enhancing his nerves and he took off and he was ultimately arrested either in Germantown or Gaithersburg I have trouble telling them apart my wife is on the Montgomery County Council and she'd have my head for being confused about that so there was no attack on Johnson although it was intended William Henry Seward Secretary of State was in a terrible condition on April 14th he had been in a carriage accident about ten days before he broken his jaw dislocated his shoulder he was laying up in bed attended by his children and his male nurse Louis Powell it was pain I promise to call him broke in he he came in under false pretences claimed he was delivering medicine but then broke past the man at the door went upstairs to Seward's room had pulled out a gun and tried to shoot Seward but the gun misfired he then pulled out a long wicked knife and went to work with that he slashed Seward in the face in the arm the male nurse tried to intervene he got stabbed a couple of times the two sons made an effort one was they were both sort of pounded over the head with the gun one had a fractured skull finally Payne slunk off into the night managed not to kill anyone which was fairly remarkable Seward did ultimately recover from his wounds although his face was so damaged that he never allowed himself to be photographed from that side of the face for the rest of his life but that was the third attack and then it's often forgotten that there was a fourth intended attack General Grant had just taken Lee's surrender five days before he was supposed to go to the theater with Lincoln that night his wife prevailed upon him not to and talked him into going to the beach instead he was supposed to go up to New Jersey where their children were waiting it had been long war they had not had much family time and I think the general was happy to leave in her memoirs mrs. Grant describes three separate encounters in the 24 hours surrounding the the assassination of Lincoln during which she was quite sure that they were either being stalked or there was an attempt actually on the train to New Jersey to try to break into their compartment by men who meant to kill her husband so when you look at that this is a very different picture from the Garfield McKinley or Kennedy assassinations this is not a lone gunman this is not an attempt to kill the president this is one way to describe it might be a coup d'etat this is an attempt to decapitate the Union government um now booth was on the run for 11 days after the assassination and then was killed in a barn he was trapped in a barn they sent the barn on fire and then he was shot while he was in the barn died of his wound for the co-conspirators were hanged well I'm sorry I jumped ahead there we had this trial this is a trial before military commission a commission rather likely used in one we're using in Guantanamo there were nine military officers and this image shows also the two prosecutors and if you have a good visual memory you may notice John Bingham is the third from the right as a longtime defense lawyer there's always something terrifying about seeing the judges hang out with the prosecutors but this is something that happens the commission was used on the theory that we were still at war in the summer of 1865 in fact there were Confederate soldiers in the field until into the summer and for the conspirators Mary Surratt David Herold at Surratt and Louis Payne were hanged this is an image of their hanging it was very important to the government to get this news out that justice had been done the hanging was at Fort McNair if you go down to our ball park on it's just a couple of blocks to the west and the scaffold was actually in the back of where the tennis courts are if you want to stand at the gate and look at it for other co-conspirators were convicted of helping booth Arnold and O'Laughlin poor old altar to the O'Laughlin where the Baltimore guys pearl Edmonds Spangler he's the one I have some sympathy for he was a stagehand at Ford's Theater who held booths horse booth went in and shot the president there is no evidence of any other connection he had to this horrible event and of course dr. Mudd and dr. Mudds families had spent generations trying to clear his name without success these four people were all sentenced to life in prison they were imprisoned on fortress Jefferson and the Dry Tortugas just west of Key West and it is by all accounts a terrible place one O'Laughlin died of fever there but the other three were released after only four years in prison less than four years actually by President Johnson right before he left office I there was a tenth conspirator of course and that was John Surratt jr. he sometimes referred to as depending upon your point of view either the man who got away or the man who let his mom take the fall for him the big issue with Surratt and he was not tried at this time with the other co-conspirators was his location on the day of the assassination April 14 he claimed he was in Elmira New York this is an image of the prison camp up there there was a big Confederate a holding camp for the Confederate prisoners of war he said he was there casing the joint for a possible breakout the federal prosecutors claimed that he had come back to New York I'm sorry to Washington for the slaughter and was part of it it became what we lawyers would call a swearing contest at the trial the defense presented five witnesses that Surratt had been in Elmira they were all tailors and haberdashers I mentioned that Surratt was a bit of a clothes horse they all testified that Surratt was wearing a certain kind of style of Duke of Norfolk jacket that no one in Elmira had ever worn before or since in response the prosecution presented 13 witnesses who testified that Surratt was in Washington and they saw him there on April 14th and they also presented all sorts of railroad timetables that showed he certainly could have gotten there that was pretty unresolved to be honest but there was no dispute about his escape as soon as the news gets out as soon as there is an assassination Surratt hightails at to Canada where he's hidden by Catholic priests this Arats were a Catholic family he sneaks on to a steamboat get a false identity he's wearing a false moustache and glasses and dyed his hair he then when he gets to Britain he is again hidden by priests sneaks over to France and makes his way to Rome and in Italy he becomes a soldier for the Pope this is Surratt in his papal Zouave uniform in this time the suave uniforms which were based on North African soldiers were just all the rage we had northern and southern Slav units the French heads Wahb units the Pope had a suave unit they were just really cool uniforms with sashes and red bright colors and baggy trousers and fezzes and you know it just didn't look like anything else so people liked them a lot so he was his Wahb and he served there for a number of months until he was recognized by a fellow suave who happened to be also be from Baltimore what are the odds he then ratted him out to the American diplomats in Rome the Americans got the Slavs to arrest him Surratt had not lost his talent for evasion he slipped out of custody either by leaping 23 feet to a small ledge or simply because somebody gave him the key to the cell they're different differing accounts he slipped down in Naples where he hid in the city jail and then May befriended fellow who comes to us in history only as a British gentleman this all feels like day of the jackal 19th century version and the British gentleman buys him a ticket to Egypt and he boards a steamer to Alexandria and he is finally arrested when he arrives in Alexandria still in his wha view 'no form he is then brought back to face trial in the United States he faces trial I described the conflicting evidence about where he was he then gets a hung jury there's no verdict he's ultimately set free this is in 1867 he ends up working for a Baltimore shipping company and lives a quiet life until 1916 and dies dies in bed um so that's the history and the question for me was okay I have this story arise in 1900 so what do I find in 1900 that I can tie to these events well it turned out there was a fourth booth brother I didn't know Joseph booth he was a doctor of course he was in Baltimore and he was still around he never had been an actor there was however a booth descendant on the stage Creston Clarke was a nephew of John Wilkes Booth son of John Wilkes his sister ASA aja he the Internet's a wonderful thing I was able to find a review of a Creston Clark performance in King Lear in Denver and the critic for the Denver Post said that mr. Clarke portrayed the King as as though he were in constant apprehension that someone else was about to play the ace I'm not quite sure what that means but it I don't think it's good also around was Louis Weichmann Weichmann was did principal witness against the co-conspirators he had lived in the Surratt house he was a former schoolmate of John Surratt jr. he had become something of a lunatic on the subject of the conspiracy his life had really been he had been hounded through life by people who were angry about the fact that he gave testimony and so people who were somewhat unhinged can be very interesting characters mrs. grant was still around and this is a it was always tricky photographing mrs. grant she had a wayward eye so you'll see that the photographer has followed his instructions there so what else was going on in the world in 1900 obviously we had a presidential campaign William McKinley and Teddy Roosevelt for the Republicans this is Roosevelt's first time on a national ticket and William Jennings Bryan for the Democrats the country and it's a little spooky how things don't change much we've got a foreign war a counterinsurgency that we're fighting after the spanish-american war we took the Philippines there were Filipinos who thought that was a poor idea they went into the jungles had started a resistance movement we sent several thousand Marines to suppress them traffic was also a huge problem in Manhattan we had we had two bridges had been built over the East River Brooklyn Bridge in the Manhattan Bridge but a third bridge was needed because the tie-ups were unbelievable you couldn't believe the traffic so this is the Williamsburg Bridge going up so I felt like this yielded to me a very rich carrot cast of characters for a story they are the backdrop I made up the two central characters one of course in they're both inspired by history one is the the physician who hears the confession or the disclosure by Bingham on his deathbed I thought he would be the person to become obsessed by it so in the book his name is James Fraser and I thought he needed a partner you know Holmes and Watson and euro wolf and Archie Goodwin it's they can talk to each other they can get on each other's nerves it's just more interesting than having one person and you don't have your hero doesn't have to be a Superman he doesn't have to be both smart and athletic he can just be one and I stumbled upon this fellow who live inspired it it's not based on him I'm sorry it's not him I changed him obviously but this fellow was Moses Fleetwood Walker he came from Steubenville Ohio which is just the next town over from Cadiz and fleet Walker which was the name he went by was the last black man to play in the professional baseball from between the 1880s and Jackie Robinson I had not known that when professional baseball first got started it was integrated and it took the white players a couple of decades to drive the blacks out which they finally did and fleet Walker was the last guy to be driven out he also had attended Overland college in the University of Michigan and based on his experiences it turned out he was an extremely angry fellow and you have in your collection a screed by Moses Fleetwood Walker about 65 pages long that was published in 1907 or so describing the misery of being a talented black person in America and saying that they have to go back to Africa in order to have a normal life that is the only way you could have a normal life as a black person I thought boy this would be an interesting guy to throw in with my white bread doctor from caddies so he's been changed to a fellow named speed cook but there the overall some of those key definitional points are still there so then what's the secret what's the conspiracy well there have been lots of theories first theory of course an early one was that it was Andrew Johnson who did it because who became president but Johnson it's got some flaws as a theory because actually they tried to kill Johnson the rejoinder is well they sent this weak sister to try to kill him that's a rotten who'd be afraid of that's rotten you know I think it's a whole that's just really not persuasive they did intend to kill Johnson so that puts him in the clear for me Jefferson Davis of course we put him in jail for two years waiting trial on this theory finally because the case had sort of fallen apart let him go and we've managed to forget the assumption was that he was behind it um Pope Pius the ninth there was a active theory in the 1880s that the Pope was behind it probably because the surrattsville Catholic they were the only ones who were Catholic in the whole conspiracy I'm not sure Pope Pius the 9th knew who Abraham Lincoln was on there is zero evidence so that one is not a serious one then there was Otto Eisen Chimel or Chimel Chimel that some fellow in the 1930s came up with this theory that Edwin Stanton was behind it the Secretary of War and that's why there's no evidence leading to him because he ran the investigation and he destroyed all the evidence that would have led to him it's one of those self-fulfilling theories I end up rejecting this one to be honest on simply reasonableness grounds everything I know about Stanton was that he loved Lincoln and he had you know nothing but the highest regard for him and the notion that he arranged to kill Lincoln is just ridiculous so given those theories I decided I just have to make one up and I did and it was tremendous fun as I said so much of history is is silence even when you get into an event like this you've had it two to two months trials on the subject and we still have all these questions we can't answer about it I couldn't possibly tell you what the secret was that I made up my publisher would have my head but I hope you find it at least somewhat plausible and entertaining thanks very much I'd be happy to take any questions sir the question is haven't there have been very few conspiracies as a group throughout history that's a broad statement our presidential assassinations have not generally involved conspiracies you know you Julius Caesar was pretty much a conspiracy I think the Archduke Ferdinand was a conspiracy there were conspiracies to kill Hitler that didn't work we had Berto Ricans who tried to kill Truman so I think that's a little too broad I think we probably have a mix of lone gunman and conspiracies the conspiracies tend to be more interesting to me they tend to have a bit more I don't know political or emotional heft because it's multiple people are agreeing that this must be done so but but I'd be inclined to moderate that yes ma'am well I am working on and I hope almost finished with a nonfiction treatment of James Madison and my examination of Madison is really focused on a my theme is that the essence of Madison would made him distinct from many other leading politicians and figures was his ability to work with other people he tends to recede in history he tends to not be noticed he was small he was booked as she was quiet but I think he had a gift for making partnerships which allowed him to have an amazing reach so the book is organized in five sections for five partnerships his partnerships with Alexander Hamilton Federalist Papers the ratification Constitution with Washington setting up the government the Bill of Rights with Jefferson founding political parties creating our political system thank you very much with James Monroe really the war of 1812 and of course with Dolly where they sort of defined Republican social style so it it was it's been a lot of fun and I've just sent in the manuscript with any luck I'm near the end and then I have to write the sequel to this because you discover when you write a mystery that the first response from publisher who's interested in publishing it is of course this is the first of a series and the answer is yeah so Jamie and speed will be off on a fresh adventure yes sir you're more about between writing fiction and writing nonfiction and moving from one to the other did it end up being easier than you expected harder than you expected were there challenges the question is that what was it like going from nonfiction to fiction and I have to disclose did I before I wrote my history books I actually tried to write novels and I did write novels and you can't buy them because they were never published so I had some experience with doing it badly and there are some obvious differences dialog you get to do dialog and it's actually a great treat people speak and they can interact and we can have jokes and it's sort of fun the big problem is where are you going I have been fooled by great novelists who like to say well I just make up my characters and they tell me what my story is if my characters know what the story is they keep it to themselves and I was able to deal with that here you know and in a history book you know where you're going you know Madison's going to die I know the end but in this case and this was a recommendation from a novelist who I cross examined on the subject I did a really detailed outline which I don't do for the history books because you know I sort of know where I'm going but it was about 80 pages and I didn't follow it slavishly you know when I was writing it you know there were times I needed to put in a new chapter they had to do something else or I had to depart and you know the parts of the outline that were really dialogue I just sort of got into it and I wrote that but it helped be frame the thing and that was was the big change and that was I will certainly use again oh you're good the question was since I invented the secret that I invent all the supporting history behind it um of course I tried to make it fit the things we know and so there are lots of factors some I haven't talked about here you know there in one oh give you a small preview there was a huge trade in or illicit trade smuggling of confederate cotton the Confederates desperately needed to sell it on the mills in new england needed they didn't have enough cotton and it was a pretty corrupt deal and it was one of the few things the General Grant and President Lincoln actually disagreed about grant thought it was insane that you would let your enemy you ever make a dime and Lincoln thought he had voters up in New England who needed to have jobs and so they we ought to let the cotton get sold and he actually issued licenses to a couple of his wife's family to handle the cotton so yeah I tried to use parts that we know to help build the story in a couple of instances I really had to make up stuff you just need that but I tried to fit it into a place where it's at least plausible Mike you know that my inspiration is really my last book was Aaron Burr and the burr Hamilton duel is the thing we always focus on the bird that's what people know and there's always this question about the duel which is Hamilton and made a public statement that you know he thought burr was a crook & a fraud and all the things he always said about Burr and then he said and I have an opinion still more despicable about that man and Burr was used to Hamilton calling him a crook and a liar but despicable meant sexually perverted and burr took offense to that he wrote him his the initial letter said highlights that term and says I need an explanation for that or you need to take it back and we don't know what he meant and gore Vidal and his novel burr which is a great book came up with the reason and he said that what Hamilton was really saying was that Burr was sleeping with his daughter and if you know the birth story burr had only one child one legitimate child his daughter at the Atocha he thought the Sun rose and set on her he was totally devoted to her and the suggestion that he was sleeping with his daughter would have made him and crazy and I thought wow that is a terrific explanation and the DA was very clear in interviews I made this up I have no evidence to base it but it makes great sense and so that was sort of my aspirational goal was to come up with something that made sense yes ma'am maybe the last question the question is after the Surratt house was raided was there physical evidence that they came up with not much there was not much written down meri got into trouble because there was testimony that on the day of the assassination she went out to the tavern and told them to dig up rifles and have them ready for two men who would come by that night and then the two booths came by that night and took the rifles well that sort of put her in the soup for the others they had really Whiteman was was the principal testimony they did not have written testimony the best analysis of this issue is in an absolutely impenetrable book by a fellow named Tidwell it's called retribution he was a former CIA case officer and he has to code of co-authors who tried to I assume help him express himself clearly and failed it is a very difficult book to read but he approached the whole conspiracy as an intelligence operation and did come up with some interesting evidence out of Confederate Secret Service files which were not available at the time or were not looked at which show the movements of I and and are very suggestive and I I was I was influenced by Ted wells work thanks very much this has been a presentation of the Library of Congress visit us at loc.gov

Channel: Library of Congress

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Id: 86_1xTBFKtU

Length: 59min 4sec (3544 seconds)

Published: Tue Mar 04 2014