The Life, Crime, and Capture of John Wilkes BoothTownsend, George Alfred
History
The Life, Crime, and Capture of John Wilkes Booth
Townsend, George Alfred
Assassins -- United States -- Biography; Booth, John Wilkes, 1838-1865; Lincoln, Abraham, 1809-1865 -- Assassination
He visited the provinces once certainly, and three times it is believed,
stopping in Montreal at St. Lawrence Hall, and banking four hundred and
fifty-five dollars odd at the Ontario bank. This was his own money. I
have myself seen his bank-book with the single entry of this amount. It
was found in the room of Atzerott, at Kirkwood's Hotel. From this visit,
whatever encouragement Booth received, he continued in systematic
correspondence with one or more of those agents down to the commission
of his crime. I dare not say how far each of these agents was
implicated. My personal conviction is that they were neither loth to the
murder nor astonished when it had been done. They had money with
discretion from the confederacy, though acting at discretion and outside
of responsibility, and always, at every wild adventure, they instructed
their dupes that each man took his life in his hand on every incursion
into the north. So Beale took his, raiding on the great lakes. So
Kennedy took his, on a midnight bonfire-tramp into the metropolis. So
took the St. Albans raiders their lives in their palms, dashing into a
peaceful town. And if these agents entertained Wilkes Booth's suggestion
at all they plainly told him that he carried his life in his dagger's
edge, and could expect from them neither aid nor exculpation.
Some one or all of these agents furnished Booth with a murderer. The
fellow Wood or Payne, who stabbed Mr. Seward and was caught at Mrs.
Surratt's house in Washington. He was one of three Kentucky brothers,
all outlaws, and had himself, it is believed, accompanied one of his
brothers, who is known to have been at St. Albans on the day of the
bank-delivery. This Payne, besides being positively identified as the
assassin of the Sewards, had no friends nor haunts in Washington. He was
simply a dispatched murderer, and after the night of the crime, struck
northward of the frontier, instead of southward in the company of Booth.
The proof, of this will follow in the course of the article.
While I assert that the Canadian agents knew Booth and patted his back,
calling him, like Macbeth, the "prince of cut-throats," I am equally
certain that Booth's project was unknown in Richmond. No word, nor
written line, no clue of any sort has been found attaching Booth to the
confederate authorities. The most that can be urged to meet preposterous
claims of this sort is, that out of the rebellion grew the murder; which
is like attributing the measles to the creation of man. But McDonald and
his party had money at discretion, and under their control the vilest
fellows on the continent. Their personal influence over those errant
ones amounted to omnipotence. Most of the latter were young and sanguine
people, like Beale and Booth; their plots were made up at St.
Catharine's, Toronto, and Montreal, and they have maintained since the
war began, rebel mail routes between Canada and Richmond, leading
directly passed Washington.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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