It is commonly rumored that Edwin Stanton, Secretary of War from 1862 to 1868, engineered the assassination of President Abraham Lincoln in 1865 and then covered up his involvement. One Otto Eisenschiml (1880 - 1963), an industrial chemist turned amateur historian, is responsible for this. In his 1937 book Why was Lincoln Murdered? he listed a number of circumstances he considered suspicious and pointing to Stanton's involvement. But these circumstances only look suspicious if you ignore plausible explanations, which Eisenschiml did. The circumstances against Stanton are written below, with an accompanying explanation.
In an 1865 deposition, after the assassination, one Daniel H. L. Gleason said that before the assassination he had been acquainted with an individual who knew of a group with suspicious intentions, but when the group broke up there seemed to be no need for reporting. This disbanded group turned out to have been involved in an earlier unsuccessful kidnapping plot against Lincoln, which later partially reassembled for the assassination. In a 1911 memoir, to excuse himself. Gleason claimed that he had reported this group before the assassination. The record shows that he did not, but from the this the myth of the prior warning was born.
It was to try to dissuade Lincoln from going to the theater that Stanton told Lincoln that Eckert would be busy, and advised others and himself not to go. Stanton disapproved of Lincoln's going out in public because of the ongoing threats against Lincoln's life, dating back to 1860. Lincoln many times during the war resisted Stanton's attempts to restrain him, and would go out anyway. Eckert couldn't have done any more than Major Rathbone (who did end up going along) did to protect Lincoln, as Eckert would have been seated beside Lincoln as Rathbone was, and not behind Lincoln.
Parker's assignment was only to escort Lincoln to and from the theater, not to stand sentry outside the presidential box. He did what he was supposed to do. And even if he had stood sentry there, the charming actor Booth could have talked his way past. Booth was not suspected before the assassination of any murderous intent. The presidential box was not sealed off to visitors and Lincoln was know to like individuals in the theater trade, which Booth was.
Stanton couldn't have cut that one road, which led to southern Maryland, because there were no telegraphic facilities at that road for Stanton to send a message to. Only by horseback could a message to close the road be delivered, and Booth had a head start.
Only one line was cut, a commercial on to Baltimore, and that was due to a short circuit in its main batteries!
The witnesses from the theater said the assassin looked like Booth, but none would make a positive identification. Stanton didn't want a pursuit of a wrong suspect, so depositions were taken from different eyewitnesses for three hours to form an airtight consensus of who the assassin was.
Booth, armed and defiant, was killed in a spontaneous act by a vengeful soldier. There is no evidence that Stanton ordered Booth to be killed.
The eight accused Booth co-conspirators were not immediately killed to silence them, but were taken alive. All were questioned many times by many people during their arrest, jailing, and trial. At the beginning of the trial hoods were initially placed over the accuseds' heads, but the hoods were permanently removed during the trial when the summer's heat began. All were represented by counsel during their trial. They were tried by a military commission because at the date of the assassination there were still some Confederate hold-outs at large, and it looked like a warlike act. Perjured testimony was used against the accused, to link them to an alleged plot by high Confederate officials, but there is no evidence that Stanton knew at the time that it was perjury. Of the eight on trial,only four were hanged, and the hanged were permitted to talk with visitors before their executions. The four imprisoned were sent to the remote Florida Keys for captivity only to prevent escape, and they had ample opportunity to talk to other people during their transport and incarceration. Three survivors were eventually released, and had no big stories to tell. Obviously,there was no attempt to keep the accused from talking!
Booth's "diary" was actually a date book for writing notes to other people and to himself. As such, he sometimes tore out pages for this purpose, and sometimes jotted down his thoughts to himself on the remaining pages. The missing pages had already been removed by Booth himself at the time of the book's capture by government forces.
It is only in hindsight, by selectively looking at details, that it looks like a conspiracy by Stanton. There are plausible explanations for all the details. We do things, as Stanton did, in the performance of our duties without realizing that others may scrutinize us. Worrying about scrutiny will only immobilize us when it seems things have to be done, and then others will criticize us for not acting! We do whatever seems right at the time, and emotionally charged and harried times may influence us to do things that others, calmer and less hurried, may question. If someone investigates with a pre-formed notion in mind (Is there anything suspicious about the assassination?!), one can find bits of words, pieces of circumstance, notions of "it could be," that if magnified out of context and asked about in a leading manner, point to the desired conclusions. Prosaic and ordinary explanations have to be considered, too!
I close with a quote: "Lincoln would not have enjoyed the extravagant and pseudoreligious praise being offered in his name by so many Americans. But one suspects that if he could learn of the slush written about the suggested involvement of his secretary of war in his own death he would simply become angry." (Hanchett, p. 248.).
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