Victor R. Claveau, MJ
Abraham Lincoln once said: “History is not history unless it is the truth.”
New York Herald; Lincoln, Abraham, 1809-1865–Assassination; Seward, William Henry, 1801-1872– assassination attempts. Top half of the first newspaper to report the news of Abraham Lincoln’s assassination. On the left is a list of the secondary headlines.
In 1922, a disgruntled ex-Catholic, Burke McCarty, wroteThe Suppressed Truth about the Assassination of Abraham Lincoln. It was Mr. McCarty’s view that the assassination of Abraham Lincoln was a Jesuit plot. He also claimed that the Jesuits killed Presidents Henry Harrison and Zachary Taylor and attempted to assassinate President James Buchanan, all by arsenic poisoning. McCarty also claimed that the orders for these actions came directly from the Pope of Rome.
Over time, McCarty’s book has been published and re-published and these accusations have taken on a life bordering on immortality. There are hundreds of Internet sites which quote McCarty’s book as fact. Many of these sites are posted by factions of the Seventh Day Adventist Church.
Unfortunately, it is extremely rare to ever see truthful history written by any of the various anti-Catholic authors who have claimed that the murder of Abraham Lincoln was the result of a conspiracy by the Catholic Church. The writings of Emmett McLoughlin are an excellent example.
McLoughlin is the author of the book, An Inquiry into the Assassination of Abraham Lincoln (Lyle Stuart, Inc., 1963). It is one of the more well-known books pertaining to this subject.
McLoughlin’s basic thesis is that the Catholic Church was a “silent partner” in the assassination of Abraham Lincoln, and he strongly implies that Pope Pius IX was a tacit co-conspirator or perhaps even the actual instigator of the plot.
First of all, McLoughlin himself has zero credibility. According to the dust jacket on his book, he was once a Catholic priest, but left the priesthood when his superiors objected that his extracurricular activities were interfering with his clerical duties. So, here is a man who takes vows of obedience, and then promptly breaks them when his superiors give him instructions he doesn’t like. So much for keeping one’s word.
John Wilkes Booth was NOT a Catholic. John Wilkes Booth was baptized and confirmed as an Episcopalian protestant. His baptism took place at St. Timothy’s Episcopal Church in Catonsville, Maryland, on January 23, 1853. This is documented by the writings of Booth’s sister. See, Clarke, Asia Booth, John Wilkes Booth: A Sister’s Memoir, (University Press of Mississippi, Jackson, 1996 edition), pp. 44-45.
Moreover, in the 1850s, John Wilkes Booth was an active member of the American Party, an organization better known as the “Know-Nothing Party”. This was a strongly anti-Catholic and anti-immigrant political party. See, Rhodeehamel, John and Taper, Louise, eds., Right or Wrong, God Judge Me: The Writings of John Wilkes Booth, (University of Illinois Press, Urbana 1997), pp. 38-39; see also, Clarke, Id., p. 75.
Payne spent the night and morning in company of Rev. Dr. Gillette, a Baptist minister.
Harold was visited by an Episcopal minister.
Atzerodt was attended by two Protestant ministers.
SPECIAL DISPATCH TO THE BOSTON POST]
Washington, July 7, 1865
The last great tragic chapter of the great conspiracy to assassinate the President and Cabinet is finished. Today, at half-past one o’clock, within the Penitentiary walls when they were tried and convicted, Lewis Payne Powell (sic), Mary E. Surratt, David Harold (sic), and George A. Atzerodt, were hung by the neck until they were dead, in execution of the sentence of the Military Commission, duly approved by the President, for the crime of conspiracy and treason and murder.
“Mary Surratt was arrested with Lewis Payne (who had wounded William Seward, the secretary of state), George Atzerodt (who had failed to murder Vice President Andrew Johnson), David Herold (who had accompanied Atzerodt), and two other alleged conspirators. She stood trial on May 12, 1865, before a nine-man military commission. On July 5 all were found guilty, though only four—Mary Surratt included—were sentenced to hang. At then-president Johnson’s insistence, they were hanged within 48 hours. Most later historians believe Surratt to have been unconnected with the conspiracy and innocent of any crime” (Encyclopedia Britannica, Vol. 11, p. 411).
The new Catholic Encyclopedia’s article on Mary Surratt, describe her as an allegedconspirator in the assassination of Abraham Lincoln:
“Surratt was descended from an old colonial Maryland family, she was educated at a Catholic school in Alexandria, Virginia, becoming a convert to Catholicism. About 1835, she married John Harrison Surratt, plantation and store owner, in Surratt Surrattsville, Maryland. He died in 1862, leaving his family and straightened financial circumstances. Two years later, Mrs. Surratt opened a rooming house at 541 H St, Washington, D. C.. Her son John, a Confederate agent was introduced in December 1864 to John Wilkes Booth and became a friend and probable accomplice with booth in his plot against Lincoln. Both visited at the Surratt home during the following months, and two other accomplices, George Atzerodt and Lewis Thornton Powell (alias Payne), lodged there briefly. After Lincoln’s murder, Mrs. Surratt was arrested on a charge of complicity and imprisoned with other defendants in the Old Penitentiary. The trial before a military commission began May 12, 1865, and the verdict was announced July 5, after presidential approval. The evidence against Mary Surratt was largely circumstantial, having been based mainly on the testimony of Louis Weichman, one of her first lodgers, and John Lloyd, her Surrattsville tenant. Five of the nine-member commission refused at first to agree to the death penalty for Mrs. Surratt, but finally yielded to pressure, probably from Secretary of War Edwin M. Stanton through Judge Advocate General Joseph Holt. Efforts of several friends, including Father Jacob A. Walter [1827-1894], her spiritual adviser and Father B. F. Piget, to persuade President Johnson and other responsible officials to consider evidence in her favor fails, and she was hanged July 7, 1865. Her son escaped arrest by flight to Canada and Europe. Recent scholarly research supports the belief that Mrs. Surratt was not involved in the assassination plot and had no knowledge of it. Guy W. Moore holds Stanton and Holt to have been the key figures in her conviction and execution. He attributes their insistence on her execution to bitter anti-Confederacy statements sincere belief in the guilt of Mrs. Surratt and the other defendants, and frustration at the escape of her son. The latter was captured and tried in a civil court in 1867.” When the jury voted for acquittal of Surratt was freed in the case dismissed.
During the night Mrs. Surratt conversed freely with the Catholic priests on the crime for which she was convicted, claiming all the time it is understood, that she was innocent of any complicity in the assassination of the President.
Mary Surratt turned to Father Jacob A. Walter, for guidance and spiritual comfort following her arrest/conviction for her involvement in Lincoln’s assassination. Father Walker was a staunch defender of Surratt’s innocence and he walked with her to the gallows on July 7, 1865.
Father Jacob A. Walter of Washington was described as “a zealous, worthy priest,” in a letter, dated March 30, 1871, to Archbishop John Baptist Purcell of Cincinnati, OH, from Bishop John McGill of Richmond, VA.
The primary helper in Surratt’s escape from Canada was Confederate General Edwin Gray Lee stationed in Montreal. Lee was a cousin of Robert E. Lee. Lee was also one of the heads of Confederate covert operations in Canada. Once Surratt was in Canada, he stayed at St. Lawrence Hall which was headquarters for the Confederate Secret Service in that city. Once it was announced Surratt had a $25,000 reward for his capture, Lee felt Surratt was no longer safe at St. Lawrence Hall. Lee had Surratt transferred to the private home of Confederate agent John Porterfield. Then, from Porterfield’s, Lee helped Surratt make his way to the home of Father Charles Boucher where Surratt was introduced as Charles Armstrong, a southerner who came to Canada for his health. Eventually Boucher came to know Surratt’s true identity, but he chose to let him stay anyway. Later, when Surratt felt unsafe in Canada, it was Lee who arranged passage on a steamer first to Quebec and then on to England.
The fact that Father Charles Boucher and possibly other Catholic priests may have helped hide Surratt (and even facilitate his escape) DOES NOT MEAN they were part of any sort of conspiracy to murder Abraham Lincoln. Men of God hiding a man from certain death should not be viewed as either that unusual or as part of any sort of alleged grand Catholic conspiracy.
Lincoln was opposed to the Know-Nothings because he abhorred what they stood for….primarily immigrant political power. Lincoln was opposed to any group which interfered with the rights of foreigners.
As far as Mary Surratt’s relationship with Catholic priests, the best source I know of is Elizabeth Steger Trindel’s “Mary Surratt: An American Tragedy.” There is plenty of information on that topic in her book. Included is information on Reverend Joseph Maria Finotti with whom Mary may have had a romantic relationship in the early 1850’s. Because of local gossip of this relationship, Finotti was transferred to a post in Massachusetts. The book also has plenty of information on Reverend Walter and Reverend Wiget.
William Hanchett, professor of history at San Diego State University, in his scholarly work, The Lincoln Murder Conspiracies (University of Chicago Press, 1983, pp. 234-241, completely exonerates the Catholic Church of any such conspiracy.
Since some Americans were in the habit of blaming whatever they did not like on Catholics, it was natural that some of them should have blamed Catholics for Lincoln’s assassination. The investigation and trial papers contain warnings from well-meaning citizens about Romish conspiracies against the government and institutions of the United States and about the danger of more assassination. The newspapermen George Alfred Townsend contributed to such fields by reporting early in May 1865 that all the conspirators awaiting trial or Catholics. He was wrong, but the error circulated as a fact; only tSurratt and Mudd were Catholics. Later it was stated that Booth himself had been a “Protestant convert to Catholicism.”
I discovered that after the assassination that John H. Surratt had been hidden for several months by Catholic priests in Canada and that at the time of his arrest, he was serving the papal guards at the Vatican, many anti-Catholic Americans saw a direct link between Rome and Ford’s theater.
But it was not until 1886, when Charles Chiniquy published his 50 years in the Church of Rome, that the idea of the assassination as a Catholic grand conspiracy received systematic development. Deeply moved in 1865 by Lincoln’s death, Chiniquy prayed for the time and strength to demonstrate to the world what he said he knew to be the truth, “that that horrible crime was the work of Popery.” 20 years later, he announced that “I became fearlessly, today, before the American people, to say and prove that the president, Abraham Lincoln was assassinated by the priests and the Jesuits of Rome.”
As a French-Canadian priest, father Chiniquy in 1851 another group of his parishioners to Illinois, where they were found at the village of St. Anne’s near Kankakee, 50 miles south of Chicago. Feeling inadequately supported by the church hierarchy, Chiniquy began to waver in his faith, world bitterly with his Bishop, and in the mid-18 50s was the defendant in the suit for slander brought by one of the bishop’s friends. To defend him, Chiniquy engage the services of the prominent Illinois attorney, Abraham Lincoln. As he preferred to do in such cases, Lincoln arranged a compromise settlement out of court, and the jury was dismissed. Chiniquy professed to believe, however, that he had been vindicated, and therefore that Lincoln had humiliated the Catholic Church and won its everlasting enmity. He even thought he could read Lincoln sentence of doubts in the eyes of some Jesuits present in the courtroom at the time the case was thrown out. In 1860 Chiniquy left the Roman Catholic church (if he had not already been defrocked), and with his followers affiliated with the Church of Christ.
Chiniquy claim to have continued his friendship with Lincoln, visiting them three times in the White House. The first time was in August 1861, when he won the president of the Catholic assassination conspiracy. During the presidential election to ban of 1860, the Democratic press, which, according to Chiniquy, “was then, as it is still now, almost entirely under the control of Roman Catholics,” had not only denounced and ridiculed Lincoln, but also had reported that he had been born a Roman Catholic but had left the church. ‘Let me tell you that I wept as a child when I read that story for the first time,” Chiniquy says he told Lincoln. “Do not forget that in the church of Rome and apostate is an outcast, who has no place in society, and who has no right to live.” If Chiniquy wept when he read the story that Lincoln had been born a Catholic, Lincoln did not. “I laugh at that,” Chiniquy quotes the president as having said, “for it is a lie. Thanks be to God, I have never been a Roman Catholic.
On his second visit, in June 1862, Chiniquy reports he found Lincoln so busy he stayed only long enough to shake his hand.
The third of alleged visit occurred two years later, when Chiniquy he says he joined the president and his wife on a tour of some of the Washington Hospital. By this time, Chiniquy discovered, Lincoln was fully aware of the peril from Rome; indeed, he even held Catholicism responsible for the war. “This war would never have been possible,” Lincoln is said to have explained, “without the sinister influence of the Jesuits. We owe it to Popery that we now see our land reddened with the blood of her noblest sons.”
Chiniquy reports that back at the White House Lincoln asked him if he had seen the letter which Pope Pius IX had sent the previous December to the “illustrious and hon. Jefferson Davis, President of the United States of America.” Chiniquy said that he had, and that he had come to Washington to make sure Lincoln understood its significance. “That letter,” he said to the president, “is a poisoned arrow thrown by the Pope that you personally; and it will be more than a miracle if it be not your air revocable warrant of death.” For, by addressing Davis is President of the Confederate states, the Pope had in effect to recognize the legitimacy of the Confederate government and that meant that in addition to being an apostate Lincoln was fighting a bloody war against the will of God.
Lincoln indicated to Chiniquy that he had understood the letters meaning. Before they could read the Pope’s letter, “the Roman Catholics could see that it I was fighting against Jeff Davis and his Southern Confederacy,” he explained. “But now they must believe that it is against Christ and His holy vicar, the Pope, that I am raising my sacrilegious hands.” Assassination plots were being discovered almost daily, Lincoln added, and they all apparently originated with the Jesuits. He had come to believe that Catholics were such a threat to the nation that they could no longer be tolerated. “I am for liberty of conscience,” he was quoted as having said. “But I cannot give liberty of conscience to the Pope and his followers.”
From Chiniquy’s Leslie report of his conversations with Lincoln, it is evident that, as far as Chiniquy was concerned, the two men were in complete agreement about the menace of Roman Catholicism.
Of those Chiniquy’s theory of the assassination was the climax of his autobiography all fulmination against the church, he did not devote much space to it. Who lived in and visited the Surratt boardinghouse with the assassination was applauded, he asked. And then he answered his own question: “the most devoted Catholics in the city!” At the conspiracy trial the testimony given by priests themselves demonstrated that they had visited the house frequently and that they used it is kind of a rendezvous. “What does the presence of so many priest in that house revealed to the world? No man of common sense, who knows anything about the priests of Rome, can entertain any doubt that, not only did they know all that was going on inside those walls, but that they were the advisers, the counselors, or the very soul of that infernal plot… Every one of those priests was a rabid rebel in heart.”
Chiniquy was convinced that Booth was nothing but the tool of the Jesuits. It was Rome who directed his arm, after corrupting his heart and damning his soul… Who does not see the lessons given by the Jesuits to Booth, in their daily intercourse in Mary Surratt’s house, when he reads those lines written by Booth [in his diary] a few hours before his death: ‘I can never repent, God made me the instrument of his punishment!’ Compare these words with the doctrines and principles taught by the councils, the decrees of the Pope, and the laws of the holy Inquisition… and you will find that the sentiments and believe of Booth flow from those principles as the river flow from its source…. There is not the least doubt that the priesthood perfectly succeeded in persuading Mary Surratt and Booth that the killing of Lincoln was a most holy and deserving work, for which God had an internal reward in store. There is a fact to which the American people have not been given sufficient attention. It is that, without a single exception, the conspirators were Roman Catholics” (Investigation and Trial Papers, Roll seven, frames 0120 — 31).
In case they were still doubters after 500 of such pages, Chiniquy presents what he calls conclusive proof of “the complicity of the priests of Rome in the murder of the martyred President.” It was a sworn affidavit of a Protestant clergymen that on the day of the assassination at about 6 p.m.-hours before the assassination-he was in the Catholic village of St. Joseph, Minnesota, and was told by a Catholic in front of witnesses that the priests in the local monastery were saying that Lincoln and Seward were dead. Where could the priests have heard such news? The clergyman had wondered at the time; the nearest railroad was 40 miles away, the nearest telegraph 80.
Chiniquy had the explanation, no doubt the same as the clergyman’s. The priests of St. Joseph often visited Washington, where they probably stayed at the Surratt house. There they were in daily communication with their brother priests.
“There were no secrets among them, if there are no secrets among priests. They are the members of the same body, the branches of the same tree. The details of the murder, as the day selected for its commission, were all well known among the priests of St. Joseph as they were among those of Washington… There is not a man of sound judgment, who will not have any doubt about that fact. The 14th of April, 1865, the priests of Rome new and circulated news of the death of Lincoln four hours before its occurrence, in the Roman Catholic town of St. Joseph Minnesota. They could not circulate it without knowing it, and they could not know it without belonging to the band of conspirators who assassinated President Lincoln.”
Other writers immediately picked up on Chiniquy’s theme-and Chiniquy’s material. One of the first to do so was Justin D. Fulton, a Baptist minister and prolific writer of anti-Catholic literature, whose Washington in the lap of Rome (1888) summarized much of Fifty Years in the Church of Rome. Under the heading “Behind the Purple Curtain,” the parts of the book dealing with Lincoln and the assassination were reprinted in the anti-Catholic magazine Christian Heritage in 1958, when John F. Kennedy was seeking to become the first Catholic president of the United States.” The details of the tragedy of April 14, 1865,” stated the magazine’s editor,” have long since been suppressed by the Roman hierarchy.” Fulton’s work should have been taken as “a warning to all Americans who see no danger in having a Roman Catholic in the White House. Caveat elector-let the voter beware!”
Equally rabid was Burke McCarthy’s The Suppressed Truth About the Assassination of Abraham Lincoln (1924). Like all other anti-Catholic writers on the subject, McCarty leans heavily on Chiniquy, but she added some imaginative details of her own: the chapter on the nights of the Golden Circle-a forerunner of the copperhead organization, the Sons of liberty-which Booth was said to have joined in Baltimore in 1860 was located across the street from a Catholic cathedral; its password was “Rome. Beware the Negroes”; Booth was chosen to be Lincoln’s assassin while playing in the Roman Catholic city of New Orleans during the winter of 1863-64, and the presentation of the assassination as a simple conspiracy, originating with Booth was conceived in Rome. For Cartesian held the church responsible not only for the murder of Lincoln, but for the deaths of President William harridan Henry Harrison and Zachary Taylor and for the attempted murder by poisoning of James Buchanan as well. These were the same crimes for which fanatics of an earlier time had held the “Slave Power” responsible. Guilt swings easily from one group to another when the case rests upon argumentation and inspiration instead of evidence.
Emmett McLaughlin’s An Inquiry into the Assassination of Abraham Lincoln (1863) is distinguished from other books by the fact that it states the case for a Catholic grand conspiracy without strident and excessive emotion. Like Chiniquy, a former Catholic priest McLaughlin praises Chiniquy and defends him (and himself) against the widely held supposition that because he had left the church he was necessarily biased and incapable of telling the truth about it. With justification, he points out that in the 1950s, the revelations of communists who left the party were not greeted with a similar skepticism; on the contrary, what they said was generally accepted as truth about communism because ‘they had been there.”
Of course, there never has been any evidence of the Catholic Church’s complicity in the assassination, and none that Lincoln himself feared Catholicism. Professor Joseph George, Jr., was shown that in all probability, he Chiniquy never talked to Lincoln and the White House, and it is certain that there were no theological discussions. The anti-catholic sentiments Chiniquy put in Lincoln’s mouth were only a propagandist trick. To the editor of the Catholic magazine, Colombia, Robert Todd Lincoln wrote that he knew of no anti-catholic statement or writing of his father and reminded the editor that through the years. His father’s name had been “a peg on which to hang many things.”