The Lincoln Deception

by David O. Stewart

  Fraser had never traveled with a Negro before. At the Wheeling station, waiting in the honey sunshine of an early June morning, Cook grumbled about riding on the Baltimore & Ohio. During the war, he complained, Confederate sympathizers ran the B&O, and they still did. When Fraser replied that no other railroad went where they were going, Cook glared at him.

  They were headed for Brunswick, Maryland, in the southwestern corner of that state. From Brunswick, they would have to get to Burkittsville and the home of the writer George Alfred Townsend, who was expecting them.

  Cook had hurled himself into solving the Lincoln conspiracy with the confidence that comes when a man is good at most things he tries. Fraser had never been with someone who could be so contrary, always ready for an argument. From the start, Cook insisted that Fraser was missing important parts of the puzzle.

  “So, Mr. Bingham thought the Confederates did it,” Cook said early on, over Fraser’s kitchen table. “So that’s what you want to prove, to prove Mr. Bingham was right all along, right?”

  “I just want the truth,” Fraser said.

  “Sure, sure,” Cook said impatiently. “Mr. Bingham’s truth. But the problem with that truth is that he was relying on liars, right?”

  “Just because they were lying, that doesn’t mean Mr. Bingham was wrong.” Fraser cringed inwardly at his own words.

  “Actually, I agree with that,” Cook said, “especially since one of those witnesses wasn’t ever shown to be a liar. He didn’t ever take it back.”

  “Was that . . . Finnegan?”

  “No, no, named Finegas, Henry Finegas. He said some Confederates up in Canada said—this was, like, in early 1865—they said that with luck Lincoln wouldn’t be around any longer, and that Booth was bossing the job.”

  “Who was Finegas?”

  “Got no idea. But Mr. Bingham put him on the stand.” Cook got a far-off look and pulled his lips in tight. “What if . . . what if whoever killed Lincoln arranged for those other liars to turn up? That way, when they tell the true story, then get caught in their lies, they throw mud all over the explanation that was the right one. Throws everyone off the trail. D’you think about that?”

  No, Fraser hadn’t thought about that. It might explain Mr. Bingham’s unshakeable belief in his own correctness. But maybe not. “If you’re right,” Fraser said, “then the people who recruited Booth and Mrs. Surratt and Lewis Paine also framed them so they would get hanged or sent to prison as traitors and assassins.”

  “Exactly,” Cook said. “If there were other men arranged for Lincoln to get killed, then they needed those folks to get hanged and hanged fast, same as they’d want Booth out of the way. That takes away the risk that anything tracks back to them. And it wasn’t any trick getting those folks convicted. They’d just helped kill Father Abraham. They’d’ve hung if old Bingham recited nursery rhymes at the trial.”

  “So, you think it was more than just Booth?”

  “Had to be. Remember that thing you said from Sherlock Holmes, that you eliminate the impossible and see what’s left? It’s impossible that Booth did this all by himself. What’s left is that someone helped him, maybe even got him to do it in the first place.”

  Was that what Mrs. Surratt did with Mr. Bingham, spilled secrets that might lead back to the men behind the assassination? Fraser couldn’t be sure. This was all guessing. He didn’t mind guessing. Medical diagnosis was often guessing, but that was guessing he was used to, and you found out pretty soon whether your guess was right. Patients got better or they didn’t. This kind of guessing was different. Fraser didn’t know how to test the ideas he and Cook were talking about. How could they evaluate their guesses? Who knew enough to tell them they were right or wrong? And if there was someone who knew, why would he talk to Fraser and Cook about it?

  Fraser’s mind had kept cycling back to the writer, Townsend. It seemed like that man, too, was obsessed with the Lincoln conspiracy. He wrote about it over and over, once in a novel. Could it be that Townsend didn’t accept the lone-madman theory that he himself had peddled? When Mr. Bingham died, Townsend sent a long condolence letter, so Fraser knew the writer felt something toward Mr. Bingham. Perhaps, out of loyalty to Mr. Bingham, Townsend would hear them out; maybe he could help them deduce Mr. Bingham’s secret.

  In May, the women of Harrison County fell into an uncharacteristically fallow period, while the rest of the populace enjoyed a spate of health. Fraser resolved to seize the moment to visit Townsend over the Memorial Day holiday. It would take most of a day to get there and another to get back, so he planned to be away for up to five days. Dr. Marcotte in Steubenville would take emergency cases while he was away. When Fraser mentioned the trip to Cook, there was no way to stop the ex-ballplayer from coming along. “You need me to figure this thing out,” Cook had said. Fraser tended to agree, but he hadn’t anticipated what it was like to travel with a Negro, especially one like Cook.

  “You know what we’ve been missing?” Cook demanded, oblivious to the other passengers. Fraser said no in a soft voice. He hoped his example would lead Cook to speak quietly. It didn’t. “We’ve been missing that whole business about shooting Booth.”

  Fraser raised an eyebrow.

  “Didn’t it strike you funny,” Cook said, “Booth goes and gets himself killed before anyone can ask him a single question? And that sergeant who shot him—what’s his name, Hartford?”

  “Boston. Boston Corbett.”

  “Yeah, right. Wasn’t any officer told him to go and shoot Booth. Wasn’t any order to shoot. I’m telling you, Booth’s standing in a barn that’s on fire, soldiers all around. Man ain’t going nowhere except maybe straight to hell or out of that barn with his hands up. No need to shoot. But old Boston, he just up and plugs him, does it on his own.” Cook shook his head. “I tell you what, it don’t add up.”

  “Actually,” Fraser said, “that’s always bothered me. That silenced Booth forever. Nothing he left behind revealed very much.”

  “If someone arranged for him to get shot, they surely could clean up whatever Booth left behind. What happened to that Sergeant Boston? Was he some glory-seeker, trying to do something he could cash in on?”

  “Never did cash in on it. Actually, he went crazy. Mr. Bingham had a newspaper story about him years later, living in a cave out in Kansas or somewhere. Don’t know what’s happened with him since.”

  “Send a crazy man to kill an assassin. That’s smart. Who’s gonna believe anything the crazy man says?” Cook paused. “Another thing. Did you notice how bad that woman’s lawyers were, the ones for Mrs. Surratt?” Fraser shook his head. “Well, they were. I know about that. The lawyers defending the men who went to jail—you know, the one holding Booth’s horse and those boys from Baltimore—those lawyers were all right. They mostly made sense, you know, said things that helped their case. And the lawyers defending the ones who really did it, like Paine and the German guy who chickened out, what could they’ve done, anyway? Some cases can’t nobody win.

  “But those ones representing that woman, every time they stood up, they made her case worse. Didn’t sit right with me. Maybe she did it and she’s nothing but pure evil, but when you’re sitting in a courtroom accused of a crime, you need help. Made me wonder whether they were paid to lose.”

  Cook had grown increasingly animated. In a low voice, Fraser said, “Speed, this is a public place here. These things, even if they happened a long time ago, they’re still sensitive. Keep it down, okay?”

  Cook’s face registered disdain, but he answered in a lower tone, “Another thing, I’m wondering why it couldn’t be someone in the North be behind killing Lincoln. Didn’t have to be the Confederates. Plenty of crackers and nigger-haters around Ohio, all through the North.”

  “Quiet?”

  “All right, all right,” Cook said in a hoarse whisper that wasn’t much softer. “But you know there’s lots in Indiana, New York. Shoot, you know that Sons of Liberty group, those Northern men wanted the So
uth to win? One of them came right from Cadiz. My daddy used to talk about it. Made him mad.”

  Fraser had heard enough. “There’s no basis for that theory. Look at all those connections that Booth and the Surratts have with Confederates, but none with the Sons of Liberty or with Northern Copperheads.”

  “Have you looked?”

  Fraser shooed the idea away. “There’s nothing about it in anything I read. Nothing to it. Nothing at all.”

  “Men used to think the Sun moved around the Earth.”

  Fraser didn’t answer. His silence accomplished what his answers had not. Cook stopped talking.

  While the forests of western Maryland sped by his window, Fraser thought that even if Cook tended to overdo it, this idea might be right. Fraser had to think about it quietly, not while being hectored by Cook. Mrs. Surratt could hardly have revealed to Mr. Bingham that the Confederates were connected to Booth, since that’s what Mr. Bingham had been saying all along, right through the trial—that the Confederacy sent Booth to kill Lincoln. Mrs. Surratt must have told him something else, something else that would threaten the republic in early July 1865.

  And the secret was still explosive enough that in 1900, when he was dying and knew he was dying, Mr. Bingham would say only that there was a secret, not what it was. Why couldn’t it be that Northerners were behind the Lincoln assassination?

  It was getting awkward that Fraser hadn’t told Cook about Mrs. Surratt’s confession to Mr. Bingham. He never decided not to tell Cook. It just never came up, and the longer it didn’t, the harder it was going to be to tell. He needed to do it soon.

  They hired horses at the station and set off for Burkittsville, riding side by side through hilly country on a warm, glorious day. The farms they passed were small and neat, like those in eastern Ohio. Being close to Harpers Ferry prompted Cook to declaim on John Brown and his failed slave revolt in 1859. He quieted when they came upon a cemetery. Flowers lay on many graves. They dismounted and walked to the edge of a small crowd near a regal elm tree.

  They listened to the last two speakers, a politician and a minister, for the Memorial Day observance. The minister spoke of the sacrifices of the Union dead and the Confederate dead, both of whom lay buried there. The politician talked about the Spanish-American War and the new Filipino insurrection. He said American soldiers were still making sacrifices, only now overseas. When Fraser and Cook remounted, they didn’t speak.

  Townsend’s land was a revelation. A fifty-foot stone arch, topped with three smaller arches and a medieval tower, loomed over the entrance. They gawked at the structure, then strained to read the writings carved into its walls, along with dozens of names.

  “What in blue blazes is it,” Cook wondered, “out here in the middle of nowhere?”

  “Beats me,” Fraser said.

  Townsend, a vigorous gentleman of about sixty, met them in the front drive of the stone mansion. His still-dark hair, combed straight back, gave him a sleek, aggressive look. When they reached a cavernous parlor, Townsend directed his colored servant to bring beverages. Fraser settled on a chintz-covered love seat—a feminine-looking piece in a setting that favored the gigantic—while Cook chose a straight-backed chair off to the side. When the servant appeared with drinks, he seemed diffident about serving Cook. Fraser drank off half his lemonade in a single swallow. Cook attacked his toddy with equal zest.

  Townsend explained that the stone arch commemorated newspaper writers who died during the Civil War. “Most were friends of mine,” he said, beginning to light a meerschaum pipe. He spoke around deep intakes of breath as he held match to tobacco. “Everybody . . . forgets the poor . . . scribblers who saunter out . . . on the battlefield . . . armed with but pencils.” He had ignited his tobacco. “They’re there so the people know what really happened. I’m fortunate enough to be able to make this gesture, and proud to do so.”

  Townsend recalled meeting Fraser at Mr. Bingham’s final dinner. Leaning back in his large leather chair, he puffed on his pipe, and spoke to the ceiling as though from a prepared speech.

  “Bingham, as you doubtless know, was a zealot. I will never forget those great smoldering eyes of his. A zealot’s eyes. Yet behind those fiery windows into his soul resided a true amiability, which was no less genuine for being entirely surprising.”

  “In Cadiz,” Fraser broke in, “I knew him as a friend.”

  “Yes, yes, of course,” Townsend said, seeming annoyed by the interruption. “And your letter said you have some concern with how he prosecuted the Lincoln conspiracy case? If you will forgive my presumption, how could that matter to you, gentlemen?” Townsend looked directly at Cook, who made no answer.

  “I’ve been close to the Bingham family for many years,” Fraser said, “and have been assisting his daughters with his papers.”

  Townsend’s expression showed that Fraser’s remark did not answer his question.

  “I’m a newspaperman, Mr. Townsend,” Cook said suddenly, shifting on his upright chair.

  “Are you, indeed?” Townsend said. “That’s quite remarkable. For what organ of the press do you write?”

  “My own,” Cook said. “The Ohio Eagle, it’s a colored paper.”

  Townsend’s answering grin seemed genuine. “Good for you, young man. Good for you. I don’t know the Ohio Eagle, I regret to admit, but I shall expect great things of it.” After gazing thoughtfully at the smoke rising from his pipe, he began a critical review of Mr. Bingham’s prosecution of the Lincoln conspirators. “Even a child should have known certain testimony was perjured,” he sighed. “Your friend Bingham, he was too pure a sort to bring forth false evidence intentionally, but he was, as I say, a zealot. Zealots are not terribly good at winkling out the truth. Otherwise, they couldn’t be zealots, could they?”

  After reciting other complaints about Bingham’s performance, Townsend said, “It wasn’t a good effort, not at all, not what history required—nay, deserved—of that moment in time.”

  With an effort, Fraser ignored Townsend’s aspersions against Mr. Bingham. He pressed the burning question in his mind: whether the Confederacy was behind the assassination. When Townsend rejected the idea out of hand, Fraser began to argue. “What of all the Confederate spies buzzing around Booth?” he asked. “You yourself wrote in Leslie’s Illustrated that the Surratts were spies, and so were Thomas Harbin and Augustus Howell and Mrs. Slater. And both Booth and John Surratt went to Montreal to see the Confederates scheming up there.”

  Townsend admitted every fact that Fraser threw at him, but he did not budge on the basic proposition. “There was no Confederate involvement in the plot,” Townsend proclaimed in a patronizing tone that rankled. “You will have to accept,” Townsend said with some finality, “that the conspiracy was the spawn of one talented, charismatic, very likely insane young actor who happened to be an extraordinary athlete as well.”

  With that pronouncement, their host called for his man to refill their glasses. Though the evening was upon them, he said nothing of supper.

  Exasperated but fortified with a fresh lemonade, Fraser deployed his most powerful weapon, Mr. Bingham’s deathbed description of Mrs. Surratt’s confession and how Mr. Bingham and Edwin Stanton took her secret to their graves. As he spoke, Fraser kept his eyes on Townsend, who was scraping out the bowl of his pipe. He hoped that Cook wouldn’t betray that he had never heard of this episode before.

  Townsend’s demeanor began to change. After tapping his pipe into the ashtray, he looked up sharply. “Who else knows about this?”

  “No one,” Fraser said, still not looking at Cook.

  “Now, if I were still working as a reporter,” Townsend said, nodding over at Cook, “I might pursue that question. But as I’m a poet and a novelist now, I can only respond that, yes, I now understand your interest in this subject.”

  Townsend pressed for any other hint from Bingham of what Mrs. Surratt said, but Fraser could add nothing. “All right, gentlemen,” Townsend said, grimacing with ap
parent thought, “where does this take us? What could that woman have learned in the weeks before the assassination? She ran a boarding house and regularly went to church to confess her sins. She wasn’t rushing down to Richmond or up to Montreal, like Booth or her son did. So she could only know what Booth or her son told her. Or one of the priests.”

  “Sir,” Cook said quietly, “who wanted President Lincoln dead? Who would you list?”

  Townsend shook his head. “That’s a fine question, but one with far too many answers. Rebels? Of course. The Copperhead Democrats in the North? Yes. Right there you’ve got about half the country. Crazy people? That takes you well over half.”

  Townsend began to pace in front of the massive stone fireplace at the end of the room. “Let’s think about Mr. Bingham, shall we? After Mrs. Surratt told him this secret, he did not change how he prosecuted the case or what he thought about the conspiracy, right? He just went right on saying it was Jeff Davis and the Rebs, right?”

  “So,” Fraser tried, “she must have confirmed that, right?”

  “Not so fast. Maybe she told him something completely opposite, and maybe he and Stanton decided to hide it so no one would know how wrong they had been. Nobody likes being wrong, least of all zealots.”

  “Maybe,” Fraser ventured, “she confirmed that the Confederates were behind Booth, but Stanton and Bingham decided to keep it secret so they didn’t stir up old wounds.”

  “No,” Townsend said quickly. “Those wounds weren’t old in July of 1865. They were quite fresh.”

  “They didn’t want to stir up something,” Fraser insisted. “Maybe people who would be angry to be investigated, people who could be dangerous.”