Confederate Government Complicity in the Assassination of Abraham Lincoln - Research Proposal Example

I. Tentative The proposed for this research paper is “Confederate Government Compli in the Assassination of Abraham Lincoln.” II. Research Problem The assassination of Abraham Lincoln like many others has spawned many conspiracy theories. This is only natural considering that Lincoln was a well renowned figure and above all President of the United States1. Though some of the theories have been dismissed over the years as baseless, there are those that still intrigue historians today. Among the many questions that still hang is whether there was confederate government complicity in the assassination2. Among the authors who have substantively dealt with this issue is William Hanchet who states that like in any crime where the perpetrator is not appropriately tried or punished, there are a lot of conspiracy theories that came forth concerning the murder of Lincoln.3 Fingers have been pointed at the Vatican, the confederate Government and Lincoln’s own cabinet on the issue of the murder4. In analyzing the issues surrounding such a historical event, it is important to state what the known facts are before delving into the unknown. The assassination United States President Abraham Lincoln was carried out on the 14th of April, 1865, by John Wilkes Booth who was a renowned actor at the time. This was the first in a subsequent long list of assassinations of United States Presidents. On the fateful day, Lincoln was seated inside the presidential booth at the Ford’s Theatre in Washington watching a play Our American Cousin. With him in the box was his wife Mary who witnessed the assassination. Booth sneaked into the box and shot the president from behind. He subsequently made good his escape even though he was challenged and nearly captured by Major Henry Rathbone who was in the President’s party to the show5. The main reason that emerged for this assassination was that Booth action was part of wider plan to assassinate leaders of the Union government forces led by Lincoln, who were on the verge of winning the civil war against the Confederates. Booth was a strong believer in the Confederates’ cause and had written in his diary that something “decisive and great” had to be done to revive the dwindling fortunes of the confederates. In fact, he shouted in Latin “Sic semper tyrannis!” which was the motto of the Virginia state that meant: Thus always to tyrants. However, the entire plan that booth and his two associates Lewis Powell and George Atzerodt did not materialize after the latter two failed to assassinate Secretary of State William Seward and Vice President Andrew Johnson respectively. Powell managed to wound Seward but Atzerodt totally freaked out of the plan6. The purpose of this research is to find out to which extent if at all the Confederates were responsible for the plan to assassinate President Lincoln. The Hypothesis here is that the assassination of Lincoln was solely the work individual extremist fanatics inspired by the lost Confederate cause. Background By April 1865, the Civil War was nearing a historic crossroads. With the surrender of Lee’s badly mauled army, a rising chorus of voices from inside and outside of Confederate government called for a radical change of tactics. Members of President Jefferson Davis’ cabinet and a core group of army officers proposed a guerilla campaign, to be based in the wilds of western Virginia. Others favored a direct strike at the heart of the federal government, a bold and destabilizing gesture aimed at bringing the Union to its knees in on stroke.To that end, the Confederate government conceived a plan to kidnap Abraham Lincoln to force the Union to free Confederate prisoners of war. This scheme never came to fruition but does call into question whether, and to what extent, the Confederate administration may have been involved in Lincoln’s assassination.7 To be sure, Davis and key members of his government had conceived of, and funded, an initiative aimed at striking the Union beyond the battlefield, an initiative that today might be considered a form of terrorism. The Confederacy established an espionage department in 1864, which carried out covert operations from its base in Canada, helping plan and carry out the raid on St. Albans, Vermont.8Many claims have been made about the independent nature of the conspiracy that orchestrated the Lincoln assassination. Skeptics insist that such a conspiracy likely began as a kidnapping plot involving the Confederate secret service and prominent members of the Confederate government. But to what extent? It seems difficult to believe that a conspiracy that ended in the assassination of the president had been conceived, planned and carried out by one man completely beyond the auspices of Confederate officials. It is possible that a sophisticated plot to snatch Lincoln from Washington could have been planned without attracting attention. It should be remembered that modern-day advantages of communication and high-tech surveillance were unknown. Distance, travel and other mundane logistical details made detection difficult. As such, a disciplined, carefully conducted operation, even one mounted by a government barely 100 miles from Washington, D.C.,was capable of going undetected. It is possible that the assassination was simply an unplanned outcome of a kidnapping plot that had gone undetected. As Lincoln himself told journalist Noah Brooks in 1863, “I long ago made up my mind that if anybody wants to kill me, he will do it. If I wore a shirt of mail and kept myself surrounded by a bodyguard, it would be all the same. There are a thousand ways of getting at a man if it is desirable that he should be killed.”9 Southern sympathizers The original intent had been to kidnap Lincoln and carry him to a secure location. The conspirators acted with a specific outcome in mind: attack the Federal government at its source, free the prisoners of war and enable the Confederacy to fight on10 (Swanson and Weinberg, 9). Yet it stretches the limits of credibility to imagine that Booth and his associates could have entered into such an endeavor without support from some larger, external agency. Acting on this assumption, prosecutors in the conspirators’ trial held after the president’s murder brought forth evidence they felt proved that Davis and the Confederate government were complicit in the kidnapping plot and, so, bore the guilt for Lincoln’s assassination. In his summary argument, government Judge Advocate John Bingham claimed that a paper found in Booth’s possession contained a secret cipher, used by Davis himself, to communicate with his agents11Bingham asked, “Of what use was it to (Booth) if he was not in confederation with Davis?”12 Bingham went on to conclude that “my own conviction is that Jefferson Davis is as clearly proven guilty of this conspiracy as John Wilkes Booth, by whose hand Jefferson Davis inflicted the mortal wound on Abraham Lincoln.”13 Bingham’s case also pointed to Davis’ initial response when he received word of Lincoln’s assassination. Upon reading a dispatch from Confederate Secretary of War Robert C. Breckinridge, Davis was reported to have said, “If it were to be done, it were better it were well done”14 While there have been many interpretations of this phrase, Bingham’s translation of Davis’ meaning was that, at the very least, Davis had knowledge of a plot to kidnap Lincoln and that his reaction to the news of the president’s death sounded very much as though Davis was praising the act as the best possible outcome, under the circumstances. In Come Retribution: The Confederate Secret Service and the Assassination of Lincoln, William Tidwell argues that further corroboration of the Confederate government’s involvement in the kidnapping plot and, by extension, Lincoln’s murder, was represented by an unusually heavy concentration of Confederate troops stationed along what would have served as an escape route, along which Booth and the other conspirators had planned to spirit Lincoln away to Richmond15 (Tidwell, 484). No direct evidence In spite of Bingham’s assertions (which had gained considerable currency among a Northern public enraged over the assassination), the government failed to identify evidence directly linking the Confederate high command to the assassination plot. The massive amount of paperwork reviewed by the specially appointed government commission revealed a strong sense of culpability in the development of a kidnapping scheme, but little that could be regarded as specifically incriminating, according to Francis Lieber, the committee’s archivist. “The documents proved particularly valuable as records of the operation of Confederate prisons, but they revealed nothing new about Jefferson Davis. The Committee, nevertheless, reported to Congress that there was ‘probable cause’ to link Davis indirectly to the assassination.”16 In his account of the assassination conspiracy, Roy Chamlee contends that the Confederate government did not order the assassination of Lincoln and attempted murders of William Seward and Andrew Johnson. However, he does recognize that Davis, Breckinridge, Jacob Thompson, the Confederate agent in Montreal, Canada, and other Southern leaders were probably involved in a plan to kidnap the president.“Confederate leaders indignantly denied they had anything to do with the assassination, but theydid not deny they had known of the proposed kidnapping.”17(Chamlee & Chamlee, 407).This assertion seems plausible when one considers the prevailing 19th-century attitude (particularly in the South) toward honor in warfare, a factor that should not be overlooked when analyzing motive. The notion of chivalry was certainly strong enough among the men (many of them West Point graduates) who had led a long and valiant fight against overwhelming odds to discourage them from assassination. To many of the Confederacy’s leaders, such a rash and dishonorable course of action would have been unthinkable, even in the Confederacy’s most desperate hour. Nor should John Wilkes Booth’s influence on events be overlooked. The image of Booth as a “loose cannon,” an embittered fanatic acting out of anger remains valid in assessing motive for the assassination conspiracy. When, in his second inaugural speech, Lincoln proposed citizenship for the freed slaves, Booth’s fury and outrage led him to decide that the president had to be stopped at all costs.18There is no strong evidence showing that this was anything but a personal decision, or that Booth received encouragement, advice or other direct aid in choosing this course of action. Research Method The method proposed for this research is to compare many different sources on the issue of the assassination. This will bring out the views about the involvement of the all the suspicions that insinuated the involvement of the Confederates in the murder and the views that dispelled such suspicions. The research will concentrate on books and journals. Limitations This research is limited to the fact that most of the views and observation that carried the day were those of the Union which was on the correct side of history. The views of the defeated confederate will never really be known. Bibliography Chamlee, Roy Z. Jr. Lincoln’s Assassins: A Complete Account of Their Capture, Trial and Punishment.(Jefferson, NC: McFarland and Company, 1990), 498. Hanchett, William. The Lincoln Murder Conspiracies. Urbana; University of Illinois Press, 1986. p 2. Harris, Thomas M.. Assassination of Lincoln: A History of the Great Conspiracy. (Boston: American Citizen Company, 1892), 370. Herold, David E. et al. The Trial of the Alleged Assassins and Conspirators at Washington City, D.C. (Philadelphia: T.B. Peterson and Brothers, 1865), 190. Irons, Peter H.. A People’s History of the Supreme Court.(New York: Penguin Books, 1999). Linder, Doug. Trial of the Lincoln Assassination Conspirators. 2009. Web. Martin, Iain. The Quotable American Civil War. (Guilford, CT: The Lyons Press, 2008), 240. Swanson James L. and Weinberg, Daniel. Lincoln’s Assassins: Their Trial and Execution. (New York: William Morrow, 2006), 9. Tidwell, William A.. April ’65: Confederate Covert Action in the American Civil War. (Kent, OH: Kent State University Press, 1995), 484. Tidwell, William et al. Come Retribution: The Confederate Secret Service and the Assassination of Lincoln. (Jackson, MS: University of Mississippi Press, 1988), 24. Steers, Edward. Blood on the Moon: The Assassination of Abraham Lincoln. (Lexington, KY: University of Kentucky Press, 2001), 5. Winks, Robin W.. The Civil War Years: Canada and the United States. (McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1998), 295. Read More