#booth conspiracy

[deadpresidents]

The Seward attempt is wild because Powell tried to shoot (at point blank range) the first son that intercepted him but the gun jammed (at which point he bludgeoned the son with it and cracked his head open but he lived) and while he maimed Seward, the only reason he didn’t manage to kill him was because Seward rolled off the bed onto the floor and it was dark enough in the room that Powell couldn’t see very well. Seward’s bloodstained sheet is actually on display in the Seward House museum in Auburn NY in a room set up to look like Seward’s bedroom in his Washington house.

Seward had also been badly injured in a carriage accident a little over a week before the assassination attempt and was wearing a bandage or brace on his face to help heal a broken jaw.

The metal from the brace and the thick canvas of the bandages helped protect Seward when Powell started stabbing him. Seward was still nearly killed by Powell, but that probably kept the attack from being fatal. It's pretty remarkable that Seward not only survived, but eventually went back to work as Secretary of State and even bought Alaska!

[deadpresidents]

Booth had died onstage dozens of times in Richard III, Hamlet, and Shakespeare's other great tragedies, but tonight he was not playacting. He wanted to go down fighting, not hang like a petty thief. "I have too great a soul to die like a criminal," he wrote in his diary a few nights before. "Oh may he, may he spare me that and let me die bravely." For Booth, this was his final and greatest performance, not just for the small audience of soldiers at the improvised theatre of Garrett's farm, but also for history.

He had already perpetrated the most flamboyant public murder in American history. Indeed, Booth had not only committed murder, he had performed it, fully staged before a packed house. At Ford's Theatre, Booth broke the fourth wall between artist and audience by creating a new, dark art -- performance assassination.

-- James L. Swanson, Manhunt: The 12-Day Chase for Lincoln's Killer (BOOK | KINDLE | AUDIO)

[ckc4me]

The Good Friday Presentiment: Lincoln Foretold His Own Assassination

LONG SHADOWS: More Ghosts and Haunts of the Civil War Some say this late war photo of Lincoln is the image of a man who has had a vision of his own funeral. On Good Friday in April of 1865, President Lincoln was assassinated during a performance of Our American Cousin at Ford’s Theater in Washington, DC. Far away to the north, young Mary Brennan, an Irish immigrant only recently arrived to our…

View On WordPress

[deadpresidents]

Do you believe in any president related conspiracies?

Well, yeah, there was that conspiracy to kill Abraham Lincoln and decapitate the rest of the Union government. That’s the definition of a “conspiracy”.