Confronting Bad History: The 1995 Exhumation Trial of John Wilkes Booth

John Wilkes Booth’s assassination of President Lincoln by John Wilkes Booth is the most infamous political assassination in U.S. history. The assassination of Lincoln suddenly ended the prospect of peace with malice toward none, with charity for all. The collective expectations of the people were shattered, and civil rights for Blacks were pushed aside for 100 years.
The traditional history is that Booth was captured, shot, and died at Garrett’s Farm in Virginia, on April 26, 1865. This traditional history was challenged in 1907. In a book entitled The Escape and Suicide of John Wilkes Booth, author Finis L. Bates created a Booth-escaped-justice story that accused Vice-President Johnson of conspiring with Booth to assassinate Lincoln. Moreover, he implied that Secretary of War Stanton knew the body from Garrett’s Farm was not Booth. Bates asserted that Booth did not die on April 26, 1865, but instead escaped justice and lived until 1903.

The book ebbed in and out of public consciousness until two Booth escape proponents talked NBC’s Unsolved Mysteries into producing a Booth-escaped-justice episode in 1991. This emboldened the escape proponents to request the exhumation of Booth’s remains buried in Green Mount Cemetery in Baltimore. An impasse was reached. The escaped-justice proponents filed a lawsuit, resulting in a 1995 trial at which sixteen witnesses testified — anthropologists, a medical examiner, history scholars, and historians.

Our speaker, Frank Gorman, represented the Cemetery at trial. He describes the four-day trial, the witnesses, the evidence, the tactics, and the history surrounding the entire story. He exposes the Bates book as a Lost Cause false narrative. Yet the Booth escaped story persists in some quarters, in large part because the trial is either unknown or ignored.