Booth Shot Lincoln After Rebel Plot Failed, Researchers Say

Abraham Lincoln’s assassination 120 years ago was not the action of a crazed Southern sympathizer acting alone, but the result of John Wilkes Booth’s “mistaken sense of duty” after elaborate Confederate military plans to kidnap the President or blow up the White House failed, researchers said Monday.

The reinterpretation of events surrounding Lincoln’s April 14, 1865, assassination, detailed in a study that has not yet been published, challenges assumptions that Booth was an aberration and theorizes instead that he and other Confederate agents were well-funded and working full time in Washington.

The Civil War researchers contend that the Confederate government developed a campaign in the waning weeks of the war--including a planned attack on Lincoln or the White House--which they believed would have ensured at least a stalemate.

Later, the Confederacy, seeking to avoid any direct links between itself and Booth, encouraged speculation that the assassin’s actions were an aberration.

“The South won the battle of disinformation,” said James O. Hall, a historian who is believed to have the largest single collection of Lincoln documents.

The study was prepared by Hall, a former Labor Department official; William A. Tidwell, a retired CIA officer and Army intelligence general, and Defense Department analyst David W. Gaddy. Their hypothesis was pieced together from evidence gathered from existing and newly discovered documents.

The researchers contend that Confederate operations by agents such as Booth under a clandestine campaign in Washington were to be coordinated with last-ditch military maneuvers by Confederate Gen. Robert E. Lee.

The study notes that the assassination was pointless from a military standpoint because Lincoln was shot five days after Lee surrendered. But it said that Lee’s withdrawal cut off communication to Booth and that the assassin was “left hanging,” not knowing that he no longer needed to attack Lincoln.