Circa1865

Following Lincoln’s assassination at Ford’s Theater in April 1865, Secretary of War Edwin Stanton ordered all roads from the city closed except the road south to Port Tobacco, the route Booth would most likely use for his escape. It was not until four hours after the shooting that Stanton released any official news to the newspapers, and without identifying the assassin.

Bernhard Thuersam, www.Circa1865.org

Removing Mr. Lincoln

“None can doubt today that Lincoln was removed to prevent the reconciliation of North and South and the consolidation of the Union. Though the wound did seem later to heal, the events of today show it still to be raw, so that the conspirators’ aims of 1865 cannot yet be said, in 1950, to have failed. Time has yet to show this result, with all others.

Lincoln’s killer, John Wilkes Booth, escaped for awhile. The circumstances of Lincoln’s murder speak for themselves. The door of the box was unlocked, but on the inner side of it someone had placed a wooden bar and a mortice, so that Booth could ensure that none entered it after himself! At the door should have been Lincoln’s armed bodyguard . . . recently enlisted, called John F. Parker. Only his empty chair was there and no word survives in the records to say why he was not in it! Three years later he was . . . charged with dereliction, dismissed, and at that point vanishes from history!

The motive today seems as clear as the organization behind it remained, and remains, obscure. It was to remove Mr. Lincoln because he was an obstacle to the destruction of the South. To the collapsing South, he was the destroyer; to the North, he was the enemy of further destruction.

Today’s traveler may perceive a great flaw in the array of memorials erected to Lincoln in his country. Suggestively, they commemorate him as the slayer of slavery, first and foremost. It is the continuation of a falsehood; that was not his primary aim, as he was against violent demagogic actions, preferring judicial gradualness, and had at heart only the unity of the Union.

Thus his memory is misused today in the further pursuit of ulterior schemes; the false issue, the falsity of which he saw, is raised in his name and his words and monuments are presented [in the same manner].

Among high persons of that time the eye of today’s curiosity falls chiefly on Edwin Stanton. As Secretary of War in a country at war he was almost supremely powerful. All communications were under his personal censorship. All acts tending to deflect Booth’s pursuit, or after Booth’s death to obscure the trail, seem traceable to him and the Leftists around him.

Within a few hours of the murder he wrote to the American minister in London of “evidence obtained” to show that the murder was “deliberately planned and set on foot by rebels, under pretense of avenging the South.” Just so did Goering claim to have proof that the communists fired the Reichstag, while it still burned.”

(Far and Wide, Douglas Reed, CPA Books, 1951, excerpts, pp. 48-53)