It’s well known that Booth attended & later stated that he was close enough to have shot Lincoln. Some Lincoln scholars claim that several of Booth’s co-conspirators were not only there, but even closer to the President than Booth.
Go here & scroll down to see the photo that spawned this claim.
Even if these aren’t the conspirators, who the hell are they? They’re a motley looking crew & occupying an area where I would expect to see uniformed soldiers if anyone. Hell, one of them appears to be wearing Confederate gray. Could they be Pinkertons?
Why would they have gathered together in such a tight assembly? Many of them had never met before the conspiracy of '65, but now we’re supposed to believe they had been an organized cabal for over a year?
But, still: did they know each other at the time? And why would they appear in a group, calling attention to themselves? That’s the LAST thing a murder conspiracy would want to do.
I may be wrong (odds are 7 to 6) but I believe that several of the conspirators did not meet each other until later…and some never at all.
You’ll remember that it was originally a conspiracy to kidnap Lincoln. I think it only turned to murder after Lee’s surrender in April 1865. So yeah, I think they were already associated at the time of this photo.
Where did I go wrong? Should I have put this in a different forum?
I realize that there probably aren’t any firm answers, but it’s still intrigues me.
Even if these people bore no resemblance at all to the Lincoln conspirators, I would still wonder why they were there. They’re at the President’s inauguration, but they aren’t even looking at Lincoln. It’s more like they are surveying the crowd.
Oh, it’s the right forum. It just feels too much like a conspiracy fantasy. It asks questions, but can’t answer them. Worse, it invites us to ask questions in response, and can’t answer those, either.
The isolated location, and the fact that they’re looking outward, makes me think this is a VIP box, and, far from being a collection of lowlifes, it’s a place of honor for a group of dignitaries.
Look again at the above-and-below pictures in the linked web-site. The resemblances are not convincing. Atzerodt’s nose, in particular, changes shape. Surratt’s nose and ear change shape.
But…who knows? It Booth was really there, then who the hell can say for sure that the others didn’t stage this, as some bizarre ritual of arrant bravado. Obsessive people do weird things. The Secret Service didn’t exist at the time, and security was amazingly lax by our standards. People could just walk in to the White House and were known to be able to see the President without an appointment.
Thank you for attending my thread Trinopus. I first came across this observation in the book Twenty Days in my school library way back in the 1960s. I would like to stress that this was put forth by a respected Lincoln scholar & not some basement dwelling CT believer.
Of course, since there was a conspiracy to assassinate Lincoln, I’m not sure what else a typical CT nutter could do with the subject.
I don’t know if it will ever be positively established that the other conspirators were there, it seems possible but given the resolution of the photo you cannot be certain. Whether they were there or not is one thing, why they would be there is another. Booth didn’t plan to strike there, though he did later boast of how good of a chance he had. I can’t imagine they went to hear what Lincoln had to say. At this point, the conspiracy was still in the kidnap but not kill mode and this was about the worst time you could think of to pull of such a feat.