Depiction of John Wilkes Booth Assassinating President Lincoln
Recorded history tells us that John Wilkes Booth assassinated President Lincoln but your about to read some of the unknown conspiracies surrounding this historic event.
Conspiracy #1 :
Vice-President Andrew Johnson arranged for the assassination
Several members of Congress and Mary Todd Lincoln herself were certain that Vice-President Johnson knew of the conspiracy and did nothing to stop it. It is known that seven hours before he assassinated the President, John Wilkes Booth stopped by the Kirkwood House to see Johnson. When he was informed that neither Johnson nor his private secretary were presently in the hotel, Booth left a note that read, “Don’t wish to disturb you. Are you at home?”
Johnson, born in Raleigh, North Carolina, in 1808, had been elected governor of Tennessee in 1853, the U.S. Senate in 1856, was the only Southern senator who had refused to join the Confederacy. However, Johnson made it clear that he
was supporting the Union and not the abolition of slavery. No one who had heard one of Johnson’s rants questioned his belief that slaves should be kept in subordination. When Lincoln issued his Emancipation Proclamation on September 22, 1862, Johnson managed to wring a promise from the President that while the proclamation would apply to all the slaves held by those states in rebellion, Tennessee would be exempt.
Lincoln’s first choice for his running mate in the 1864 election had been radical Republican Hannibal Hamlin, then he asked war hero General Benjamin Butler to join him on the slate. However, the consensus in the Republican Party held that Johnson would demonstrate that the Southern states were still part of the Union.
Lincoln had had little to do with his Vice-President after Johnson disgraced himself on Inauguration Day by being drunk when he made his speech to Congress. Slurring his words and making numerous inappropriate comments, Johnson had been helped to his seat by Hannibal Hamlin. With the memory of this embarrassment clearly in mind, Mary Todd Lincoln felt certain that the “miserable inebriate Johnson” had something to do with her husband’s death.
Johnson was cleared of any involvement in Lincoln’s death by a special Congressional Assassination Committee had been formed specifically to investigate him. Regardless of the Committees’ declaration of Johnson’s innocence, many Americans regarded him with suspicion for decades to come.
Conspiracy #2 :
Lincoln was assassinated as the result of a Confederate Plot
In the winter of 1864, Union Army Brigadier General Hugh Judson Kilpatrick conceived a plan to raid Richmond, Virginia, the capital of the Confederacy, and free more than 1,500 Union officers and 10,000 enlisted men. Abraham Lincoln personally endorsed the raid because the pressure he received daily from people protesting the Confederate treatment of the Union soldiers in the swampy prison camp.
On February 28, 1864, Kilpatrick led 3,600 Cavalry troopers across the Rapidan River, riding south Richmond. The following day, 21- year-old Colonel Ulric Dahlgren, who had lost his right leg at Gettysburg, took 460 men to the west to cross the James River, heading south to Richmond’s lightly defended southern portals. Kilpatrick would engage the main force of Confederates while Dahlgren freed the prisoners. After the raid failed Colonel Ulric Dahlgren was killed in a Confederate ambush while retreating.
The story of the ill-fated campaign wouldn’t rate more than a footnote in the annals of the Civil War if what has come to be known as the Dahlgren Papers had not been retrieved from the young colonel’s inside coat pocket. Captain Edward Halbach skimmed over the orders outlining the details of the failed raid–then he became appalled and could hardly believe his senses when he read that the actual objective of the raid was to burn Richmond to the ground and to kill President Jeff Davis and his entire cabinet.
Halbach immediately brought the incendiary papers to General Robert E. Lee, who had them photocopied and sent to Major General George Meade, the Union commander. Although the Civil War was bloody and ghastly in its scope, there had always been some gallantry and honor employed. To plan a raid to murder the President of the Confederacy and every member of his cabinet was beyond outrageous.
In this conspiracy theory of Lincoln’s assassination, Booth becomes a rebel agent working under orders of Judah Benjamin, the Confederate Secretary of State, in plots first to bomb the White House [which failed when Thomas F. Harney, explosive expert, was captured on April 10th], then to assassinate Lincoln, which succeeded on April 14, 1865.
Conspiracy #3 :
The Rothschilds and International Bankers arranged Lincoln’s death
In this conspiracy scenario, John Wilkes Booth was the “hit man,” the “hired gun” for the powerful British bankers, the Rothschilds. According to this assassination theory, the Rothschilds had offered loans to the Lincoln administration at very high interest, assuming that the Union had no choice other than to accept their outrageous terms.
The frugal and resourceful frontiersman spirit in Lincoln caused him to refuse the Rothschilds’ offer and to acquire the necessary funds elsewhere. Although his refusal only stung their sense of pride and greed, the true reason for their planning his assassination was their knowledge that after the war Lincoln’s policies indicated a mild Reconstruction of the South that would encourage a resumption of agriculture rather than industry. Additional post-war policies destroyed the Rothschilds’ commodity speculations. With Lincoln out of the way, the Rothschilds planned to exploit the weaknesses of the United States and take over its economy.
Conspiracy #4 :
Lincoln was assassinated by the Jesuits
In 1856 in Urbana, Illinois, Lincoln defended Charles Chiniquy, a rebellious priest, against charges of slander brought by the friends of Bishop O’Regan of Chicago, with whom Chiniquy had a strong disagreement. Lincoln brought about a compromise settlement that the priest interpreted as a major victory over the Roman Catholic Church.
As time passed, Chiniquy feared that the Jesuits, the soldiers of Jesus, resented Lincoln for this triumph over the church and might one day attempt to even the score. In 1886, Chiniquy wrote Fifty Years in the Church of Rome in which he revealed that Jefferson Davis had offered a million dollars to anyone who would kill Lincoln.
According to Chiniquy, he visited Lincoln in the White House on numerous occasions and tried to warn of the Catholic Church’s antagonism toward him. Later, Chiniquy learned that the Jesuits trained John Wilkes Booth to become their tool of assassination. In 1906, Chiniquy swore that President Abraham Lincoln had been assassinated by the Jesuits of Rome.
In 1897, Thomas M. Harris, a member of the 1865 military commission, wrote Rome’s Responsibility for the Assassination of Abraham Lincoln.
The accusations against the Catholic Church for the murder of our most beloved President have not dissipated with time. In 1963, Emmett McLoughlin’s An Inquiry into the Assassination of Abraham Lincoln claims that Pope Pious IX may have been the instigator of the plot to kill Lincoln. McLoughlin writes, “On one side were dictatorship, slavery, secession, monarchy, European imperialism, Jesuit chicanery, and a Church-dominated assault on the Monroe Doctrine, all of which found spiritual leadership in the one person: Pope Pius IX. On the other side were freedom, emancipation, Freemasonry, democracy, Latin American struggle against foreign domination, all embodied in the one person: Abraham Lincoln.”
Original Sources :
http://www.rense.com/general80/slin.htm
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Assassination_of_Abraham_Lincoln
