FBI: Escape and Suicide of John Wilkes Booth

Editor’s Note: This is actually one book that is very much worth your time. At least one FBI Director has gone on record backing the assertions of this book. As late as 1977, the FBI did in fact investigate the issue of Booth’s possible survival. (Recently the Bureau released 184 pages in PDF format.)

On January 23, 1923, William J. Burns, by then the acting director of the Department of Justice wrote “I have gone over with considerable interest the volume entitled “The Escape and Suicide of John Wilkes Booth” by Finis L. Bates of Memphis, Tennessee… The work contains very strong evidence in support of the old belief that Booth did escape and live many years after the assassination of President Lincoln…”

Herein, the said volume.

BY FINIS L. BATES.

1907

 

PREFACE

 

In the preparation of this book I have neither spared time or money, since I became satisfied that John Wilkes Booth was not killed, as has been supposed, at the Garrett home in Virginia, on the 26th day of April, 1865, and present this volume of collected facts, which I submit for the correction of history, respecting the assassination of President Abra­ham Lincoln, and the death or escape of John Wilkes Booth.

Personally, I know nothing of President Lincoln, and knew nothing of John Wilkes Booth until, my meeting with John St. Helen, at my home in Texas, in the year 1872.

The picture which John St. Helen left with me for the future identification of himself in his true name and personality, was first identified by Gen. D. D. Dana, of Lubec, Maine, as John Wilkes Booth, January 17,1898.

The second time by Junius Brutus Booth, the third, of Boston, Mass., (he being the oldest living nephew of John Wilkes Booth), on the 21st day of February, 1903, at Memphis, Tenn.

The third time by the late Joe Jefferson (the world’s famous Rip Van Winkle), at Math, Tennessee, on the 14th day of April, 1903, just thirty-eight years to a day from the date of the assassination of President Lincoln. I here make mention of this identification because of its importance. Among the personal acquaintances of John Wilkes Booth none would know him better than Mr. Jefferson, who was most closely associated with him for several years, both playing together on the same stage. I know of no man whose knowledge of Booth is more to be trusted, or whose words of identification will carry more weight to the world at large. While there are many other important personages equally to be relied upon that have identified his pictures there is none other so well known to the general public, having identified the picture taken of John St. Helen, in 1877, as being that of John Wilkes JBooth—thus establishing the fact of actual physical proof that John Wilkes Booth was living in 1872, when I met him under the name of John St. Helen, as also when he had his picture taken and left with me in the late winter or early spring of 1878, twelve years after the assassination of President Lincoln.

It is well in this connection to call attention to other physical proofs of the identification of John Wilkes Booth by referring to the deformed right thumb, just where it joined the hand, and the mis­matched brows, his right brow being arched and unlike the left. The deformity of the right thumb was caused by its having been crushed in the cogs of the machinery used for the hoisting of a stage curtain. The arched brow was caused by Booth being accidentally cut by McCullum with a sabre while they were at practice as the characters of Richard and Richmond, the point of McCullum’s sword cutting a gash through the right brow, which had to be stitched up, and in healing became arched. And especially attention is called to the identity of these marks in his pictures, more particularly the one at the age of 64, taken of him while he was dead and lying in the morgue. During life Booth carried a small cane between the thumb and forefinger of the right hand to conceal that defect; observe this cane in his hand, in the picture of him at the age of 27. These physical marks on Booth’s body settle without argument his identity. However, in all instances of investigation I have sought the highest sources of information and give the conclusive facts supported by physical monument and authentic record.

Wherefore, it is by this authority I state the veri­fied truth with impartiality for the betterment of history, to the enlightment of the present and future generations of mankind, respecting the assassination of one of America’s most universally beloved Presi­dents and the fate of his assassin.

 

FINIS L. BATES.

 

 

TABLE OF CONTENTS.

• Chapter I. Lincoln-Booth
• Chapter II. John St. Helen
• Chapter III. John St. Helen Lectures Roland Read
• Chapter IV. St. Helen’s Illness
• Chapter V. St. Helen’s Identity Revealed
• Chapter VI. The Assassination
• Chapter VII. The Man Killed at the Garrett Home
• Chapter VIII. The Separation
• Chapter IX. The Pursuit of Booth
• Chapter X. The East Potomac Bridge
• Chapter XI. The Hand of Secretary Stanton
• Chapter XII. Gen. Dana Identifies Booth
• Chapter XIII. A Baltimorean Still
• Chapter XIV. Informing the War Department that Booth Lives
• Chapter XV. Gen. Albert Pike identified Booth
• Chapter XVI. Press Comments on the Suicide of David E. George
• Chapter XVII. These Are Pictures of John Wilkes Booth
• Chapter XVIII. Reading the Palm of John Wilkes Booth
• Chapter XIX. Joseph Jefferson Identifies John Wilkes Booth
• Chapter XX. Junius Brutus Booth Identifies His Uncle, John Wilkes Booth
• *FBI Documents pertaining to Booth escape

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ABRAHAM LINCOLN, PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES, AND JOHN WILKES BOOTH, THE ACTOR

THE ASSASSINATION OF PRESIDENT LINCOLN BY JOHN WILKES BOOTH.

 

CHAPTER I. LINCOLN—BOOTH

President Abraham Lincoln was born near Salem, Kentucky, United States of America, in a log cabin, on the 12th day of February, 1809, of humble par­entage, and was president of the Northern Federal States of America, after the secession of the South­ern States, beginning March 4th, 1861, whereby was brought about a temporary dissolution of the Union of the United States of America, when the political issues of the rights of States to withdraw and secede from the Union of States and the constitutional right slavery of the black race, as had been promulgated since, before and beginning with the independence of, and federation of the American Colonies; after­ward transformed into sovereign State governments.

When, for the settlement of these issues appeal was had to the bloody arbitrament of battle, in the Civil War fought between the Federal States on the one side, with Abraham Lincoln as President and commander-in-chief of the Federal Army and Navy, with his site of government at Washington, D. C, and Jefferson Davis, President of the Southern seceded States, called the Confederate States of America, and commander-in-chief of the Army and Navy of the Southern Confederate States, with his site of government at the city of Richmond, and capital of the State of Virginia, situated approxi­mately one hundred miles to the south from Wash­ington City.

Mr. Lincoln was inaugurated President of the Federal States, at Washington, D. C, March 4th, 1861, and remained President until he received his mortal wound at the hands of his assassin, John Wilkes Booth, while seated with a party of friends in a private box attending Ford’s Theater, in Wash­ington, D. C, on the evening of the 14th day of April, 1865, and died from his wound on the early morning of April the 15th, 1865.

Mr. Lincoln was a lawyer pre-eminent in his pro­fession, and had never associated himself with any church organization, and, in fact, was a deist, as also a firm believer in dreams, and to him they were presentiments forecasting coming events.

John Wilkes Booth was born near the city of Bal­timore, on a farm, in the State of Maryland, in the year 1838, and was at the time of the assassination of President Lincoln about 27 years of age, and famous as an actor. He came from a family distin­guished as actors and politicians in England as early as the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, being descended from Burton Booth, the most popular actor with the English royalty known to history, and pronounced of all actors the greatest Macbeth the world has ever produced.

Henry Booth, Earl of Warrington, was his great-great-uncle, and John Wilkes, the Democratic re­former, in that he caused the extension of the fran­chise or right of ballot, to the common people of England, and who was at one time Lord Mayor of London, was his great-great-grandfather on his great-grandmother’s side. While John Wilkes of England was distinguished for his great mental ability, he was equally distinguished for being the ugliest man in all England, while his wife was the most beau­tiful woman England had produced to her day.

John Wilkes Booth gets his name of John Wilkes from his great-great-grandfather, and his strikingly handsomje personality from his great-great-grand­mother. Thus it is said that John Wilkes Booth is given to the world from an ancestry known to England in their day as the Beauty and Beast.

John Wilkes Booth was a partisan in his sympa­thies for the success of the Southern Confederate States in the Civil War, bold and outspoken in his friendship for the South and his well wishes for the triumph of the Southern cause. In politics a Demo­crat, and by religion a Catholic, and a son of Junius Brutus Booth, the first, who was known to all men of his day as the master of the art of dramatic act­ing, being himself descended from the Booth fam­ily of actors in England, pre-eminently great as tragedians since the beginning of the sixteenth century.

CHAPTER II.

JOHN ST. HELEN

I have long hesitated to give to the world the true story of the plot first to kidnap and finally assassi­nate President Lincoln by John Wilkes Booth and others, as related to me in 1872, and at other times thereafter, by one then known to me as John St. Helen, but in truth and in fact, as afterward devel­oped, John Wilkes Booth himself, in person telling this story more than seven years after the assassina­tion of President Lincoln, and the supposed killing of Booth at the Garret home, in Virginia. Far re­moved from the scene of his crime, he told me the tale of his dastardly deed at Grandberry, Hood county, Texas, a then comparative frontier town of the great Western empire of these American States.

This story I could not accept as a fact without investigation, believing, as the world believed, that John Wilkes Booth had been killed at the Garret home in Virginia on or about the 26th day of April, 1865, by one Boston Corbett, connected with the Federal troops in pursuit of him, after he (Booth) had been passed through the Federal military lines which formed a complete cordon surrounding the City of Washington, D. C, on the night of and after the assassination of President Lincoln. But after many years of painstaking and exhaustive investiga­tion, I am now unwillingly, and yet unanswerably, convinced that it is a fact that Booth was not killed, but made good his escape by the assistance of some of the officers of the Federal Army and government of the United States, located at Washington—trait­ors to President Lincoln, in whose keeping was his life—co-operating with Capt. Jett and Lieuts. Bug­gies and Bainbridge, of the Confederate troops, be­longing to the command of Col. J. S. Mosby, en­camped at Bowling Green, Virginia. And the correct­ness of these statements, as well as to my convictions, the readers of this story must witness for or against the conclusion reached, for it is to the American people that I appeal that they shall hear the unal­terable facts to the end that they may bear testimony with me to the civilized world that the death of America’s martyred President, Lincoln, was not avenged, as we have been persuaded to believe, and that it remained the pleasure of the assassin to take his own life as how and when it best pleased him, conscious of his great individual crime and the nation’s loss by the death of President Lincoln, the commission of which crime takes rank among the epochs of time equaled only by the crucifixion of Christ and the assassination of Caesar; in the con­templation of which the physical man chills with in­dignant emotions and the cold blood coursing his viens makes numb the fingers recording the crime that laid President Lincoln in the silent halls of death and made Tad fatherless. But the truth will be told, if needs be, with tremors and palsied hands, in the triumph of right and the exposure of the guilty ones whose crimes blacken history’s page and to associate their names through all coming cen­turies with Brutus, Marc Antony and Judas Iscariot, if they are to be condemned in the story that is to be told.

In the spring of 1872 I was entering the threshold of manhood, a lawyer yet in my teens, in the active practice of my profession, having settled at Grand-berry, the county site of Hood county, in the State of Texas, near the foothills of the Bosque moun­tains. Among my first clients in this locality was a man who had been indicted by the grand jury of the Federal Court, sitting at Tyler, Smith county, Texas, for selling tobacco and whiskey at Glenrose Mills, situated in Hood county, twenty miles to the south­west of Grandberry, who had failed first to obtain a license, as required by the Federal statutes, as a privilege for carrying on such business. The penalty or the violation of this law being punishable as a misdemeanor by a fine and imprisonment, or either fine or imprisonment, at the discretion of the court. Hood county at this time was well out on the fron­tier of the State, and the country to within a few miles of Grandberry was frequently raided by the savage Comanche Indians.

Glenrose Mills was located immediately on the Bosque river, which flows at the base of the Bosque mountains, while at this point on the river was lo­cated a mill run by water power from the falls of the river, and on the bank of the river was located two or three small log houses, together with the old mill house constituting the buildings of the place called Glenrose Mills. One of these log houses was used as a storehouse by the man known to me as John St. Helen, which place, or house, however, for a year or so prior to St. Helen’s occupancy had been occupied as a store by .a merchant doing a gen­eral mercantile business, in a small way, carrying with his line of goods tobacco and whiskey for he retail trade, as did St. Helen in this place, as his successor in business at Glenrose Mills. The former merchant having removed from Glenrose Mills to Grandberry, opened up his business in the latter place before and continued his business in Grand­berry after St. Helen had begun business at Glen­rose. St. Helen occupied this log house not only as a store, but the back part of the same as living apart­ments for himself and a negro man servant, or oor-ter, he having no family or known relatives or inti­mate friends within the time he was doing business at this house in Glenrose. For some reason unknown to me and my client, the merchant at Grandberry and former merchant at Glenrose had been indicted for having done business at Glenrose—selling tobac­co and whiskey in the house occupied by St. Helen, in violation of the laws of the United States, as mentioned. This client had been arrested by the United States marshal and had given bond for his appearance at Tyler, Texas, to answer the United States government on a charge in two cases of sell­ing tobacco and whiskey without first obtaining a privilege license, as required by law.