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John Wilkes Booth's assassination of President Abraham Lincoln is the most infamous political assassination in United States history. The assassination of Lincoln suddenly ended the prospect of a peace with malice toward none, with charity for all. The collective expectations of the people -- peace and normalcy in the North, reconciliation and reconstruction in the South -- were shattered. Only the assassination of President Kennedy is comparable in its immediate disruption of people's hopes for the future.
The assassination in 1865 irrevocably joined Lincoln and Booth. The full history of Lincoln's presidency cannot be told without Booth, and the life of Booth is defined by his dastardly deed. How Booth met his fate cannot change Lincoln's life and presidency, but it can diminish the trust in our own history.
John Wilkes Booth was captured, shot, and died at Garrett Farm in Virginia on April 26, 1865. This is the traditional history, but it was contradicted by a 1907 book entitled The Escape and Suicide of John Wilkes Booth written by Finis L. Bates for the "correction of history." The book ebbed in and out of public consciousness over the years, until two Booth escape proponents talked Unsolved Mysteries into producing the Bates escape story in an episode aired 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, and the proponents sued to force an exhumation relying on the Bates book, resulting in a sixteen-witnesses trial in May 1995 that included anthropologists, a medical examiner, history scholars, and historians.
In Confronting Bad History, How a Lost Cause and Fraudulent Book Caused the John Wilkes Booth Exhumation Trial, Frank Gorman who represented the Cemetery at trial, recounts the trial preparations and strategies, lining up expert witnesses, the historical testimony and evidence, and trial tactics. He describes the overwhelming testimony and evidence showing that the Bates book is unreliable and fraudulent, with citations to the trial testimony in the Appendix. He also exposes the Bates book as a Lost Cause false narrative.
Yet the Booth escaped story persists today, in large part because the 1995 trial is either unknown or ignored. This book gives voice to the trial that confronted bad history and confirms that Booth met his fate at Garrett Farm.
