Was the Lincoln Assassination an Act of Revenge?
ECW welcomes guest author Ralph Lindeman
The assassination of Abraham Lincoln in April 1865 gave rise to a story that captivated conspiracy theorists for decades following the Civil War. In brief, the story held that John Wilkes Booth was motivated to kill Lincoln, at least in part, because of Lincoln’s refusal to commute the death sentence given to a Confederate agent named John Yates Beall, who had been involved in several Confederate plots against the North.
Promoters of the conspiracy theory claimed that Booth and Beall were longtime friends, having been at the University of Virginia at the same time and sharing a strong belief in the Confederate cause. After Beall was convicted as a spy and sentenced to death, Booth was also said to have appealed directly to Lincoln, with Booth “pleading on bended knee” for Lincoln to spare Beall’s life. A few accounts also told of Beall and Booth being cousins, while other versions said Booth was engaged to Beall’s sister.
Beall, who had studied law at the University of Virginia, was a young Virginian who came from a wealthy plantation-owning family. Shortly after enlisting in the Confederate army, he was severely wounded in battle. Rather than sitting out the rest of the war at his family’s plantation, he continued to serve the Confederacy in other ways.
In 1863, he spent time as a privateer on Chesapeake Bay attacking Union shipping. Relocating to Canada in 1864, he joined other Confederates who had gathered in Montreal. There, he began planning attacks in northern states, including an unsuccessful raid aimed at freeing 3,000 Confederate prisoners held in a Union Army prison camp located on Johnson’s Island on Lake Erie near Sandusky, Ohio.
In December 1864, Beall was captured near Buffalo, New York following an unsuccessful attempt to hijack a train transporting Confederate officers from the Johnson’s Island prison camp to other prisons in eastern states. He was tried by a military commission and sentenced to death. In February 1865, Beall was hanged at Fort Lafayette in New York City.
Immediately following Lincoln’s assassination, suspicions were pervasive in the North about Confederates in Canada being involved in the plot. In May 1865, President Andrew Johnson issued a proclamation offering a reward for the capture and arrest of several high Confederate officials known to be in Canada.[1] A flood of letters also poured into the office of Secretary of War Edwin Stanton from people claiming to have overheard discussions among conspirators in Canada about plans to take some action against Lincoln.[2]
Allegations of a connection between Beall’s execution and Booth’s assassination of Lincoln also emerged early in the trial of the Lincoln conspirators, which took place in May 1865, as government prosecutors attempted to prove that the assassination plot began in Canada.[3] This effort failed, however, after it was revealed that two witnesses for the government gave perjured testimony, although it did not relate to Beall, Booth, or a Canadian connection to the assassination.
Various versions of the story linking Booth and Beall continued to appear in the decades after the Civil War in journals, such as Confederate Veteran, popular among former members of the Confederate military. One of the accounts said that when Booth learned of Beall’s execution he “swore in his wrath that he would take the life of Lincoln if it cost him his own.”[4]
Is there historical evidence supporting the notion that Booth and Beall had a relationship that motivated Booth to assassinate Lincoln? Over the years, historians who have examined the topic have come to different conclusions.
One of the first to address the controversy was Frederick J. Shepard, who wrote in 1906 about Beall’s raid on Johnson’s Island and its aftermath. In the house organ of the Buffalo Historical Society, Shepard quoted a Philadelphia auctioneer who professed to have documents proving that “Booth was impelled to his act by his friendship for Beall and a desire to avenge him.” However, after contacting a longtime friend of Beall who denied Booth and Beall knew each other, Shepard discounted the likelihood of any connection.[5]
Parts of the Booth-Beall story are demonstrably false, such as the claim that they were classmates at the University of Virginia. While Beall attended the university, Booth grew up near Baltimore and never attended college. In addition, there is no evidence that Beall and Booth were cousins or that Booth was engaged to Beall’s sister.
Other historians have put a more positive light on the possibility of a Booth-Beall connection. Historian Terry Alford, author of the Booth biography Fortune’s Fool, concluded, “There is a grain of truth to the connection.” He noted, “It is doubtful if Booth appealed directly to Lincoln for clemency, but there can be no doubt the [Beall] hanging formed an element in Booth’s volatility which led to the president’s murder.” Booth and Beall likely met when they both served with Virginia military units at the hanging of John Brown in Charles Town, Virgina (now West Virginia) in late 1859, according to Alford, who is quoted in a biography of Beall by a distant relative of the Confederate raider.[6]
Another recent examination by Barry Sheehy in his book, Montreal: City of Secrets, cited evidence that Beall and Booth were both in Montreal in October 1864. Not only were they both in the same city around the same time, but Sheehy’s examination of hotel records showed they both stayed in St. Lawrence Hall, the favored gathering place of Confederates.[7]
Other evidence shows that Booth knew about Beall’s execution and reacted strongly to it. In Fortune’s Fool, Alford noted Booth broke down when he learned of Beall’s execution. Alford also cited a Booth acquaintance who said Booth “damned” Lincoln as a murderer when he learned of Beall’s execution and warned that “somebody would one day give it to him [Lincoln].”[8]
After the assassination, close friends of Beall and Beall family members publicly denied there was any relationship between Beall and Booth, possibly because of the shock that spread across the nation following the first assassination of a president.
The daughter of a close friend of Beall wrote in a 1927 issue of The Confederate Veteran that there was no truth to the Booth-Beall friendship, citing statements from her father, Daniel Lucas, a friend of Beall’s since childhood.[9]
There are also reports that Beall’s friends and family took steps to destroy evidence of any connection. A biographer of Beall, his distant cousin Cameron Mosely, wrote: “The brutality and seeming unfairness of Beall’s execution and the possibility that it was linked directly to Booth’s assassination of Lincoln were strong reasons for family, friends, pundits, and officials both North and South to lock the Booth/Beall skeleton in a closet.”[10]
A biographer of Beall’s fiancée, Martha O’Bryan, interviewed members of O’Bryan’s family who said that after the assassination “it became dangerous” to know of any connection between Booth and Beall, adding that “letters vanished.” [11]
In the end, with respect to any purported Beall-Booth connection, perhaps it is enough to say that historical conclusions—after more than 150 years—are difficult to reach even when substantial evidence is available. With the possibility that evidence was purposely expunged in the case of Beall and Booth, the safest conclusion may be the axiom that “absence of evidence is not necessarily evidence of absence.”
Ralph Lindeman is a former trial attorney with the U.S. Justice Department and later worked as a journalist in Washington, D.C., where he covered the White House and Congress. This blog post is adapted from a section in his book, Confederates From Canada: John Yates Beall and the Rebel Raids on the Great Lakes (McFarland & Co. 2023).
Endnotes:
[1] The War of the Rebellion: A Compilation of the Official Records of the Union and Confederate Armies, Ser. 1, Vol. 49, Part II, 566-567.
[2] L.C. Baker, History of the United States Secret Service (L.C. Baker, Publisher, 1867), 544-545.
[3] The Assassination of President Lincoln and the Trial of the Conspirators (New York: Moore, Wilstach & Baldwin, 1865), 35.
[4] “Why Booth Killed President Lincoln,” Confederate Veteran 9, no. 1 (January 1901), 3-4.
[5] Frederick J. Shepard, “The Johnson’s Island Plot,” Publications of the Buffalo Historical Society, IX (1906), 43-44.
[6] Cameron S. Moseley, John Yates Beall: Confederate Commando (Great Falls, Va.: Clan Bell International, 2011), 39.
[7] Barry Sheehy, Montreal: City of Secrets, (Montreal: Baraka Books, 2017), 21; Copy of St. Lawrence Hall guest register, November 2, 1864 provided by Barry Sheehy to Ralph Lindeman.
[8] Terry Alford, Fortune’s Fool: The Life of John Wilkes Booth, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015), 221
[9] Virginia Lucas, “John Yates Beall: An Appreciation,” Confederate Veteran 35, no. 8 (August 1927), 301.
[10] Moseley, Confederate Commando, 40.
[11] Louise Littleton Davis, More Tales of Tennessee (New Orleans: Pelican, 1978, 173.
If you want to find out who was behind the assassination of a major political or social leader, be it Lincoln, or JFK, RFK, MLK, the recent attempts on Donald Trump, etc. find out who will gain the most from his death, and there is your answer.
As for Lincoln, note that in the only instance of this in history, the plot was to kill not just the President, but the top tier of the U.S. Government…and all were men of power who supported Lincoln’s post-war plans…with which the Radical Republicans violently disagreed. After his death, who had control of America for 20 years and profited hugely in political and financial power in the most corrupt era until the Obama-Biden era, which, interestingly, ahem, including an attempt to impeach and remove a President on false charges? The Radical Republicans.
As for the most recent incidents, why was President Trump left practically uncovered twice in less than a month? Why was the first, supposed, assassin such a mysterious figure…whose phones, computers and family have been totally silenced? Odd, isn’t it, that the FBI cannot break into Thomas Crooks’ phones or online accounts 8 months after the Butler shooting…yet 8 minutes after J6, the FBI knew the names, addresses, and other relevant information on the people they would soon arrest…not only breaking into their phones that had been seized…but remotely. Gee. Golly. Gosh – how’d they manage that?
As for the attempt on Trump in Florida, Ryan Routh was arrested…his most recent activities being repeated worldwide travel despite his “not having a job” and having just $117.42 in his bank account…and he’d been often in Ukraine, where he was running guns to the Zelensky government and recruiting foreign mercenaries to fight for Ukraine, both of these activities being classic CIA tradecraft. And what have we learned or heard of him since? Crickets chirping.
Do you normally let unhinged conspiracy theories go unchallenged here, or is this a special occasion?
I don’t know what the director does. I’m glad that, for my sake, I never advance conspiracy theories, let alone them being unhinged. But you know, I have found that if you merely state proven facts for people to consider, the deeply insecure, the paranoid, and the unimaginative become violently unhinged and insist that facts are theories. Fascinating!
Dude this is weird. You’re tying way too hard.
Nah. To quote the immortal Sgt. Joe Friday, “Just the facts, ma’am.”
This is an interesting article. I thought I knew all of the various conspiracy theories, but I hadn’t heard this one. The Lincoln Murder Conspiracies by William Hanchett takes a blow torch to the line of conspiracy theories and books centered around Secretary of War Stanton, such as Mask For Treason by Vaughan Shelton. Of course, the original conspiracy theory was that the Confederate government was behind it and that may be true. There’s a pretty good book called Come Retribution that makes that case. The minor miracle in all of this is that Lincoln lasted as long as he did. He was president during an obscenely bloody civil war, living directly across a river from the rebellious states, and had virtually no security to speak of. I don’t know if God looks out for fools and drunks, but He definitely looks out for the United States.
Even after he’d been threatened he had practically no security detail! I agree with you, God must have been looking out for the United States…but only until the war ended. Then the President who would have been so much better in peace than in war was taken. Why? It was a grievous wound. I guess that was our punishment…
Thanks Ralph for the article. Of the theories you proposed the Montreal connection makes the most sense since the spy ring in Montreal was tight knit and both were there at that time in October 1864 with the object of getting assistance from the Confederacy. The problem with all of your theories are Booth’s own plot involved kidnapping Lincoln with John Surratt as one of the conspirators who would have known about Beall And a couple days before the assassination Lincoln gave a speech from the White Houses’ outside balcony stating he is going to allow Negros the to vote! In Booth’s own words “that will be the last speech he will ever give” it seems he has changed his mind from kidnapping to assassination! The final indication is that morning of April 14 when he retrieves his mail at Fords Theatre and finds out that Lincoln and Grant will be attending the theatre that night. He spends the rest of his day putting into motion a plot to kill the VP, Sec of State, and Lincoln. Another good one I think you’ll like is Booth wants revenge for Lincoln’s son Robert for having an affair with his girlfriend (secretly engaged)Lucy Hale! The day of the assassination Robert tells his father he is tired from the war front and wants to stay home instead of going to the theater but really he is supposedly spending the night with Lucy! Or that same day Lincoln gave Lucy’s father Senator John Hale the Minister to Spain so he could get Lucy away from Booth! We know for sure Booth met with Lucy the day of the assassination but the not all the contents of that conversation!
It would make for a fine film, no?
Great and thought provoking article. But the best part was dispelling the legend that Booth attended my alma mater.
And now the protestations begin. Just where, Mr. Donovan, was your great-great-grandfather on the night of April 14, 1865?
According to longstanding family tradition, at UVa studying for an exam. His roommate would vouch for him.
Pulling an all-nighter…fell asleep and missed the assassination…and the deadline to return the beer keg. Ah, college…
I have always wondered if there was any connection and/or motivation generated to murder Lincoln because of the infamous papers supposedly found on the body of Col. Ulrich Dahlgren while carrying out the Kilpatrick/Dahlgren raid on Richmond in March of 1864? The authenticity of said papers have always been suspect and disputed, and the original papers/orders (again supposedly) disappeared after the war and after they had been delivered to Edwin Stanton.
But the ‘papers’ were published by Confederate media, and the outrage in the South was quite profound. Dahlgren’s body was put on display by an angry Confederate mob who mutilated his corpse to some extent. Published reports of THAT inflamed emotions in the North. So the question, to me anyway, is did the raid and the ‘discovery’ of those papers, real, fake, imagined, whatever, result in efforts to extract revenge that would end up being specifically directed at Lincoln?
Several historians have noted the possible connection between the Dahlgren raid and the start of Confederate retaliatory efforts against Lincoln. John C. Fazio, in his book Decapitating the Union, writes that after the Dahlgren raid “the gloves were off” with respect to the Confederacy’s intentions to take actions against Lincoln. He notes that it was in April, just one month after the raid, that Jefferson Davis sent three Confederate “commissioners” to Montreal to begin planning raids and attacks in Northern states. Booth visited Montreal and met with them in October 1864.
The gloves might have been off for assassinating leaders but Booth’s plan was a sole plot of kidnapping Lincoln and holding him for ransom in exchange for Confederate held prisoners! On March 17, 1865 Booth and his conspirators fail to capture Lincoln when he changed his scheduled trip to the Old Soldiers Home in NE DC. Unbeknownst to them Lincoln at the last moment changed his plans and in ironic fashion Lincoln ended up at Booth’s hotel (The National) presenting Indiana Gov. Morton a Confederate flag captured by the Indiana 140th Regiment. The Confederacy needed soldiers more than Lincoln dead! Another incident that might have influenced Booth was when he saw a rag tag group of Confederate prisoners marching in the streets of DC and commented the “war is lost” around this same time! After kidnapping attempts on the president the Ohio 20th Light Cavalry provided security for Lincoln as he travel the city.
Good points, though we have to remember, in many cases, myth and invention added to them over decades and centuries has often been accepted as fact. For example, there is no proof that certain movements, statements or thoughts attributed to figures like Booth, Oswald, etc. are true fact. When one considers it, Oswald’s curious statement, “I am just a patsy” could well hold the key to unlocking much of this kind of myth. Study assassinations of major figures: Almost without exception, the man apprehended for the crime either takes pride in it, “I did it to help the cause!” or vigorously denies it. Oswald, in a rare exception, perhaps the only exception, did neither. “I am just a patsy.”
Taking, for just a minute, the view that three expert riflemen were in Dealy Plaza that day, and they did the killing while Oswald did not shoot anyone (the massive weight of evidence supports this theory), clearly it was dawning on Oswald that he had been asked by certain people to do certain things, and those individuals controlling him only let him see a small part of their operation – and then when the mission was completed, he was the little fish thrown into the net to take the fall. Once captured, he could not rat anyone out, because he hadn’t been privy to anything of the plan, nor had he been in contact with anyone important who was in charge. The same lack of mental acuity, skills of violence, etc. in Oswald was curiously absent in Sirhan Sirhan, James Earl Ray, and the Lincoln conspirators who were arrested. It is thus entirely reasonable to conject that all were the patsies for men who were never arrested.