“Yesterday, the Secretary of War, without instructions of any kind, committed to Colonel Lafayette C. Baker, of the Secret Service, the stark corpse of J. Wilkes Booth. The Secret Service never fulfilled its volition more secretively. ‘What have you done with the body?’ said I to Baker. ‘That is known,’ he answered, ‘to only one man living beside myself. It is gone. I will not tell you where. The only man who knows is sworn to silence. Never till the great trumpeter comes shall the grave of Booth be discovered.’ And this is true. Last night, the 27th of April, a small rowboat received the carcass of the murderer; two men were in it, they carried the body off into the darkness, and out of that darkness it will never return.” Gossip and rumour have played fast and loose with the life and death of Booth, and statements and evidence have been plentiful disputing the fact that Booth was the man killed in the Garrett barn. Plausible theories have been advanced as to his escape, due to the secrecy imposed by Colonel Baker in the interment of the body. The corpse really was interred beneath the floor of one of the cells in the penitentiary in the Arsenal grounds, and not committed to the river, as some believed. Later, the Booth family were permitted to remove the body to their own burial plot in Maryland. Doubtless, to the end of time in American history, the question of Booth’s death, like that of the fate of the Dauphin of France, will inspire tales of romance and adventure for the pen of the imaginative writer. However, he was proved dead to the satisfaction of those empowered to apprehend him, and to the satisfaction of those most vitally interested in the punishment of the murderer, and all further search for Booth was abandoned. Robert Todd Lincoln, eldest son of the President, who was on General Grant’s staff at the time of the tragedy, gave a statement in his eighty-second year to the effect that he had never doubted that Booth met his death in the Garrett barn; that the evidence produced at the time was sufficiently conclusive, and that the numerous stories of the escape of the assassin were merely fabrications created for sensation. From the diary of Booth, discovered on his body after his death, the whole scheme of the actor was disclosed. The repeated failure of a plan to kidnap the President while he was driving or walking about the city, and take him by force to Richmond and keep him there as a hostage for the release of a large group of Confederate prisoners, was the reason that brought Booth finally to the point of planning assassination. This diary was not produced at the trial of the conspirators, nor did it receive publication in the newspapers until President Johnson ordered a certified copy of it sent to him two years later. Then, on Wednesday, May 22, 1867, the _National Republican_ printed a certified copy of it together with the facts connected with its capture. TO THE PRESIDENT