We had little time in our last Chronicle to absorb the implications of Booth's successful escape and the village it took to kill a president. It is time to reflect upon the seemingly irreconcilable juxtapositions implied by the assassination.
To be clear, John Wilkes Booth, Lincoln's killer, escaped capture. The fairy tale told about Garret's Farm and barn was a deception to take the public's attention from the murder and to let it die a deserved death. The man killed at the farm was John Boyd. The body was disposed with the swiftest dispatch by men who were completely under Edwin Stanton's control, many of whom owed their careers and prominence to him. Many private and public persons expressed doubts about the identification of the corpse, but the very powerful Stanton and the Radical Republicans could easily ignore the screamers.
Thanks to Dr Arnold's research, we know that a military convoy was stationed outside the Navy Yard bridge which facilitated Booth's escape. Initial vectors of search were misdirected to the north and any which way but south. However, all of a sudden, a 25 man mounted infantry unit miraculously found "Booth", killed him, and moved on with the rest of the cover-up.
In Arnold's telling, the Garrett sons, Booth, and Stanton and his army were accomplices in the assassination of Lincoln. Booth, who was an intelligence officer in the Confederacy, implicates the Southern leadership although we have to take care where to assign the responsibility in that government - most notably Judah Benjamin who was a Rothschild agent.
It may seem odd that both Union and Confederate forces would be allied in the removal of Lincoln from office. On the one hand, Lincoln had spoken clearly about restoring the Confederate states to full statehood with alacrity. As such he would have been the South's best friend in contrast to the Radical Republicans who were hellbent on imposing a draconian brutal revenge from which the former Confederate states would never recover.
So why would the Confederates take the chance of removing Lincoln? Johnson had not made many pro South speeches or noises, and though from Tennessee himself, seemed much more aligned with the Radicals. I suspect that private assurances were made by Johnson to the Confederates that he would continue Lincoln's policies, thus assuring the Confederates that they could exact revenge for Lincoln's brutalities and not lose any of his lenient policies.
On the other hand, Stanton was a power mad psychopath who saw himself as the rightful president if not Caesar. He was the point man for the plutocratic industrialists who had put Lincoln into office to destroy the South because of its advocacy of low tariffs which were inimical to the protectionist policies they favored. Stanton was the operational director of the assassination. Northern powers saw him as the man to eliminate Lincoln's conciliatory policies. With Lincoln gone, they could continue to plunder and rape the South.
The man in the middle was the duplicitous Andrew Johnson who played both sides against the middle. Some historians have argued that Johnson had nothing to do with the assassination because of the hostility he endured from Stanton and Congress which was firmly under the control of radicals. But I dismiss this idea as bit too idealistic.
Johnson and Booth knew each other quite well and had a close relationship going back several years when the actor was in Tennessee. Booth's visit to Johnson at his his hotel indicates the closeness and was doubtless a signal regarding the assassination. Johnson was the only man who had contacts with Booth and could act as his handler, namely to launch the operation against Lincoln. As an insider in Lincoln's administration, he had contact with Seward and would be able to act as the liaison between Union and Confederate operatives.
Johnson's master plan was to remove Lincoln which assuaged the Confederates, and gratified Stanton and the plutocrats. Once the evidence of the murder was buried, and innocent men and women were murdered to serve as patsies and Oswald would later say, Johnson could consolidate power, and push Stanton aside, an action which nearly cost him the presidency.
Yet Johnson prevailed, rid himself of Stanton, and followed as much of Lincoln's policies as he could, though he was clearly stymied by the very powerful Radical Republicans. Congress overrode Johnson's vetoes with the ease of a hot knife through butter.
One of Stanton's cronies, the once all powerful Lafayette Baker, revealed the tryst in a poem he wrote in the margins of an obscure British military journal. The encrypted message was decoded in the late 1950s or early 1960s which disclosed that a couple of dozen very powerful private and public persons were behind the assassination. Most telling was his exposure of Booth, Stanton, and Johnson as co-conspirators.
When Baker revealed the Booth diary two years after the assassination trials, Stanton took revenge by poisoning the former chief security officer, a fact also discovered in the 1960s.
Stanton himself, we believe, was murdered under the guise of suicide, a topic we have covered in an earlier Chronicle.
Lincoln's assassination was not the work of a lone nut. Removing a head of state is never so easy. There are way too many moving parts which have to be lubed and managed, and Lincoln's case was no different.
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