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John Wilkes Booth

HenryMakow.com – July 8, 2024

“Readers may be surprised at how much 1860s America resembled today’s America, with a Deep State behind the scenes, controlled information, suppression of civil liberties, and secret agendas.”

by James Perloff – (henrymakow.com)

Like many major historical events, the Abraham Lincoln assassination had an official story and back story. The official story is pretty well known.

On April 14, 1865, five days after Confederate General Robert E. Lee had surrendered to Ulysses S. Grant, effectively ending the Civil War, the President and his wife attended a comedy at Ford’s Theatre in Washington. At about 10:15 PM, famed actor John Wilkes Booth–a Southern sympathizer–entered the Presidential box and assassinated Lincoln with a shot to the back of the head. Booth leapt to the stage below, but caught his spur on the American flag draping the ledge, causing him to fall so awkwardly that he broke his leg. But this didn’t prevent him from yelling “The South is avenged!” to the stunned audience and escaping out the back of the theater.

Simultaneously, a Booth accomplice, Lewis Powell, attempted to stab to death William Seward, the Secretary of State, at his home. Though not expected to live, Seward survived his wounds.

Booth and another accomplice, David Herold, rode south. Though his broken leg was splinted in Maryland by Dr. Samuel Mudd, the injury significantly slowed Booth. On April 26, Union cavalry tracked the pair to a Virginia barn. Herold surrendered; Booth refused. Despite orders to bring him back alive, Booth was mortally wounded by a soldier who fired through an opening in the barn.

Afterwards, a military court tried eight alleged Booth accomplices. Four were hanged–including Mary Surratt, the first woman executed by the United States–and four sentenced to prison at hard labor.

So ends the official story in a nutshell, which is all most people know, due to media control plus removal of critical documents from government archives.

I dismantle that story in my just-released book Exploding the Official Myths of The Lincoln Assassination, thanks to digitization of handwritten 19th century documents, and with help from two intrepid predecessors–one alive, the other dead for more than 60 years. Readers may be surprised at how much 1860s America resembled today’s America, with a Deep State behind the scenes, controlled information, suppression of civil liberties, and secret agendas.

Among the questions the book asks–sometimes answering, sometimes just asking:

  • Why, on a dishonest pretext, did Secretary of War Edwin Stanton deny Abraham Lincoln the protection he requested at Ford’s Theatre?

 

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