from Douglas Reed's
Far and Wide, 1951 (his books can be downloaded here:
http://www.douglasreed.co.uk/)
Chapter Five
OF MURDER AND MOTIVE
... This mystery has four chief parts: the man, the moment, the murderers and the motive.
The man, like the victims of other comparable crimes, was a unifier and reconciler. He fought the South to preserve the Union, not to abolish slavery: 'My paramount object is not to save or destroy slavery ... If all earthly powers were given me I should not know what to do with the existing institution' (of slavery). Though he unwillingly issued the slave-freeing Proclamation he never departed in conviction from the original, declared aim of the war: 'It is not for any purpose ... of interfering with the rights or established institutions of the Secession States but to preserve the Union with all the dignity, equality and rights of the several States unimpaired.' He intended to defeat only the claimed right to secede;[1] then to restore the Union and leave the legal institution of slavery to be gradually modified into abolition by judicial courts.
In that policy the Leftist Republicans around him saw the danger of the conservative Democrats returning to power. They introduced the false issue of slavery into the war to perpetuate the Republican Party in power by taking the vote from the Southern States and the Southern whites and giving it to the negroes, of whom not one in a hundred could then read. (Similarly the aims of the Second World War, when it was half run, were changed from the liberation of countries overrun and the restoration of parliamentary governments to 'the defeat of Fascism', which meant their re- surrender to Soviet Communism.)
Lincoln's Republican Party contained the mass of Leftists, who were near to dominating it. Lincoln knew that they raised the bogus issue to inflame passions and prolong the war; his own Secretary of War, Edwin Stanton (who with Thaddeus Stevens headed this group), said so: 'The great aim of the war is to abolish slavery. To end the war before the nation is ready for that would be a failure. The war must be prolonged and conducted so as to achieve that.' (The Second World War was similarly prolonged, through wasteful detours, to achieve 'the defeat of Fascism', but not the original aim.) Lincoln was an obstacle to the forces of destruction in his own party.
Such was the man. The moment of his murder was that at which he was about to fulfil his policy of reconciliation and accomplish the declared aim of the war. Two days before Lee at last surrendered and Washington was lit up. At the very moment Lincoln's emissary, General Sherman, was negotiating with the Southern leaders a truce following Lincoln's constant line: no confiscation or political disablement, recognition of the Southern States governments if they took the oath to the Constitution, reunion, conciliation. (That was as if President Roosevelt, at Yalta, had upheld the war aims originally understood by the Western peoples, instead of surrendering half of Europe to a regime resembling that endured by the South after Lincoln's death.) At Lincoln's last cabinet meeting, on the day he was killed, he said he was glad Congress was adjourned; the extremists in it would not he able to hinder the work of reviving State governments in orderly fashion. 'There must be no bloody work', he would have no part in hangings or killings; the task was 'to extinguish resentments'.
At that moment the man was killed. In the choice of time and victim the crime startlingly resembles four others, which also struck down unifiers and conciliators just when they seemed likely to impede the process of universal revolutionary destruction. Alexander II of Russia emancipated twenty million serfs in 1861 and pursued his work of reconciliation until he was murdered in 1881; of that crime Soviet Communism and Political Zionism were born. In 1913 the Archduke was killed at Serajevo; he had the reputation of a unifier and conciliator who might have saved the Austro-Hungarian Empire from war and disintegration, had he lived. In 1934 Alexander of Yugoslavia was killed at Marseilles; he was a unifier who could not have been turned from his throne by an ally, as his little-known eighteen-year-old son Peter was in effect in 1945 by Mr. Churchill, and a Communist dictator set in his place. In 1948 Count Bernadotte was murdered as he completed a plan of truce and pacification in Palestine.
Each of these events changed the course of history for the worse. Together with the wars and annexations to which they led and the revolutionary movements which profited by them, they produced the state of affairs with which the Western world finds itself faced at this mid-century. In each case the men marked for death were ones who stood for reconciliation, unity, orderly judicial reforms and 'the extinguishing of resentments', as Lincoln said. In each instance (save that of Count Bernadotte, where no pretence of justice was done), nondescript individuals were publicly presented as the culprits. On each occasion a powerful organization obviously stood behind those puppets and each time all was done to prevent its exposure.
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' aim of 1865 cannot yet be said, in 1950, to have failed. Time has yet to show this result, with all others.
The culprits displayed to the populace were the usual group of obscure individuals, who clearly could not have carried out the deed unaided. Lincoln's killer, the actor John Wilkes Booth, escaped for a while. A benchful of generals promptly executed one Lewis Paine,[2] a youth called David Herold who accompanied Booth in his flight, a mysterious German, George Atzerodt, and a woman boarding-housekeeper, Mrs. Suratt.
Pending trial, the prisoners were kept in solitary cells, with empty cells on either side, and made to wear thick padded hoods, with small holes for nose and mouth, over head and shoulders. The only plausible explanation is that communication with any other person whatsoever was to be prevented. These four, and four men sent to a remote island, all knew Booth and his associates. Men who helped him escape, but did not know him before, were not even charged.
That looks as if the capital offence was to be in possession of information about Booth's movements and acquaintances in Washington. For that the State prosecutor seems to have demanded death and the four men sent to an island only escaped it because the generals shied at wholesale hangings without evidence of complicity. Studying this aspect of the matter, I recalled van der Lubbe, the vagrant found in the burning Reichstag. I believe he was kept drugged during his trial and until his beheading; he alone could have said who put him in the Reichstag. The demeanour of Rudolf Hess, at the Nuremberg Trial, was similar to that of van der Lubbe; none but he could publicly explain the wartime mission on which he was sent to England.
The circuмstances of Lincoln's murder speak for themselves. Booth fired the shot into his neck as he watched the play. 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, a Washington policeman, 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 !
This collapse of protective vigilance was a feature of the Serajevo, Marseilles and Jerusalem murders. President Lincoln's danger was well known. That very afternoon he asked his Secretary of War if Stanton's stalwart aide, a Major Eckert, could accompany him to the theatre for his protection. Stanton refused and Eckert, asked by the President himself, also declined (on the next day Stanton telegraphed to General Sherman that he too was in danger 'and I beseech you to be more heedful than Mr. Lincoln was of such knowledge').
The missing bodyguard, Parker, was appointed less than a fortnight before the murder, during Lincoln's absence from Washington, so that the usual presidential confirmation of his appointment was never obtained. In three years service serious complaints of 'neglect of duty' were several times made against him and in April 1864 he was dismissed. In December 1864 he was reinstated and in April 1865, immediately before the deed, allotted to the President's personal protection ! After the murder he was again charged with 'neglect of duty'; the trial was secret, the complaint was dismissed and the records of the hearing have vanished from the files. Three years later he was once again charged with dereliction, dismissed, and at that point vanishes from history !
Thus Booth walked into an unguarded box, shot the President, jumped on to the stage, ran through unguarded wings to the back door, jumped on a waiting horse and rode away. He caught his spurred boot on some bunting as he jumped, fell awkwardly and broke a small bone in his leg.
This alone seems to have prevented him from getting clean away. He rode across the Anacostia bridge and along the well-known route to Virginia which the Southerners, throughout the war, used for spies and communications with the North. Behind him galloping cavalrymen were sent to scour the country, north and west, which he obviously would avoid. This one southward route, which a flying Southerner would clearly take, was left open long enough for him to escape. His unforeseeable injury prevented that; unable to go on the actor went into hiding.
If his escape was desired, this naturally threw up a new problem. After a few days his whereabouts became known and the chase was converging on him when the military Provost Marshal, who led it, was suddenly recalled to Washington and the pursuit entrusted to the head of the secret service, one Colonel Lafayette C. Baker. He was given 'twenty-six cavalrymen' commanded by 'a reliable and discreet commissioned officer', Lieutenant Doherty. This officer, however, was placed under the orders of two of Colonel Baker's detectives, his cousin, ex-Lieutenant Luther B. Baker, and an ex-Colonel Conger, who 'by courtesy was conceded the command'. Whose courtesy is not recorded, though Lieutenant Doherty's chagrin is. This force eventually surrounded the barn where Booth lay hidden, with strict orders to take him alive. Of the twenty-nine men none could clearly say later who fired the shot which killed him. Baker thought Conger did; Conger denied it.
Clearly Booth would have escaped but for his damaged foot. With his death none remained who could tell the whole truth; those who knew most were quickly hanged or exiled.
Thus the man, the moment, and the apparent murderers. The motive today seems as clear as the organization behind it remained, and remains, obscure. It was to remove Lincoln because he was an obstacle to the destruction of the South. The student from afar, who finds Lincoln honoured equally with Washington, on deeper study learns how lonely he was when he died. To the collapsing South he was the destroyer; to the North he was the enemy of further destruction. Today's traveller may perceive a great flaw in the array of memorials erected to Lincoln in his country. Suggestively, they commemorate his [ed: him ?] as the slayer of slavery, first and foremost. It is the continuation of a falsehood; that was not his primary aim, he was against violent demagogic actions, preferred 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 as its also.
In the South the news was received as a last unaccountable blow of destiny. In the North different feelings were expressed. Clerics, frequently thirsty for a vengeance claimed by God, avowed that the deed must be a divine act, albeit mysteriously performed. A Republican Congressman, Mr. George Julian, later recalled that his party met the day after the murder 'to consider a line of policy less conciliatory than that of Mr. Lincoln'; while everybody was shocked the feeling of the meeting was overwhelmingly that the accession of a new President 'would prove a Godsend to the country'.
Mr. Truslow Adams's Epic dismisses 'the conspiracy of a handful, led by a half-madman, which destroyed the one man who stood between his country and the powers of evil and plunged us all into a sea of infamy and misery'. The description of the deed and its effects is accurate, but the theory of the recurrent madman grows thin. Coincidence did not drop Gavrile Princep at the spot where he could kill the Archduke, Vlada the Chauffeur into a Marseilles street as King Alexander went by, and the deadbeat van der Lubbe into the Reichstag (I saw him and his trial and can vouch for that). Even if coincidence's arm were so long, it could not always reach to the suppression of inquiry in these cases.
This is a chapter by itself in our times, and in my opinion the most important. I remember how governments combined, at the League of Nations in 1935, to shelve the inquiry into the complicity of other governments in the murder of King Alexander. The same thing happened in the case of Count Bernadotte; the United Nations dropped the matter of its own emissary's murder as if it were a hot coal. The truth is not, as American writers put it, that 'history shrinks' from exposing these things. Politicians recurrently cover them up and conceal the continuing process. The study of Lincoln's murder did more than anything hitherto to convince me that it is a continuing process, with an enduring organization behind it. It shares identical and recognizable features with the later series of murders, which all led to the spread of the area of destruction. These cօռspιʀαcιҽs cannot he improvised; obviously the experience of generations, or centuries, lies in the choice of moment, method, line of retreat and concealment. The little folk who are trotted out after each such deed may be 'the handful', but the hand is never seen. Particularly in this matter of covering-up is Lincoln's murder of present-day significance in America. The same resolute and efficient methods are used to defeat public curiosity about Communist infiltration into government departments, the public services and high places. In America (and for that matter in England and Canada), a cat sometimes slips out of the bag, a Dr. May, a Dr. Fuchs, a Mr. Alger Hiss. But then the bag is tied more tightly than before, and the public mind forgets.
Booth was not a madman. He kept a diary and the entries he made while he lay hidden show a sane man, even though pages were apparently removed before its existence became known, two years after it was taken from his body ! He wrote among other things, 'I have almost a mind to return to Washington and in a measure clear my name, which I feel I can do' (the anonymous bullet effectively prevented his return to Washington). A Congressman asked, 'How clear himself ? By disclosing his accomplices ?' A parliamentary commission also set about to find who were the persons 'many of them holding high positions of power and authority ... who acted through inferior persons who were their tools and accomplices'. Nothing much came of that in 1865, or of similar efforts in 1950.
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 trace-able 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 pretence of avenging the South'. Just so did Goering claim to have proof that Communists fired the Reichstag, while it still burned. Stanton may have pictured himself as dictator; he nearly achieved such status in the sequel of events. He forced through Congress a Reconstruction Bill to dissolve the Southern States and degrade them to military districts, and a Tenure of Office Bill framed to deprive the new President of the constitutional power to dismiss himself, Stanton. When President Johnson did dismiss him he refused to resign and only failed by one Senator's vote to secure the President's impeachment. Andrew Johnson proved a stauncher man than the Leftists expected when he succeeded Lincoln. Among the most arresting questions of American history is, what would have ensued had Johnson's impeachment succeeded by one vote, not failed. Since President Roosevelt revived the political issues of Reconstruction days the conundrum has gained new and current interest.
Sitting at my restaurant window I pictured Booth riding away from Ford's Theatre. 'There you go,' I thought, 'Wilkes Booth, Gavrile Princep, Marinus van der Lubbe, Vlada the Chauffeur: whatever your name, your unimportant shape is clear, but the darkness around you hides your masters ...'
Topic: Assassination of Lincoln (Read 767 times)