Sees Lincoln Killing as Outgrowth of Failed Kidnaping : Book Connects Booth to Rebel Plot

Circumstantial clues strongly suggesting that John Wilkes Booth believed Confederate leaders backed his assassination of Abraham Lincoln and that a Confederate underground tried to abet his escape are detailed in a forthcoming book on the South’s intelligence operations.

The book is entitled “Come Retribution,” which was a Confederate code phrase. It was assembled over seven years by three retired civil servants, all Civil War buffs with experience in intelligence. They drew on documents in the National Archives and on the written postwar recollections of principals in the complex drama to reconstruct a case federal prosecutors failed to make 120 years ago.

The book’s central thesis is “that the Confederates had the knowledge and the technical skill to mount an operation against President Lincoln; that they engaged in a number of activities in 1864 and 1865 that could have been related to planning such an operation; that John Wilkes Booth was in contact with known Confederate agents; and that the course of the war developed in such a way that an attack on Lincoln was a logical amendment to the original plan to capture him.”

Intelligence Experience

The authors, all schooled in modern intelligence work, are William A. Tidwell, a veteran of 23 years with the Central Intelligence Agency, James O. Hall, a retired Labor Department official who served in Army intelligence in World War II, and David Winfred Gaddy, a former National Security Agency official.

Tidwell said research work had put him in touch with Hall, a student of the Lincoln assassination who found himself, like many others, unable to account for seemingly contradictory elements in Booth’s bizarre story. Tidwell said he had suggested ways those elements fitted together when CIA techniques were used.

“When you look at some of these things as an intelligence officer,” Tidwell said, “they don’t look like coincidences any more; they look like things that are supposed to happen, like managed things.”

As they checked the data out, Tidwell said, “we kept looking for negative evidence. But every time we turned over a new rock, we found new evidence to support our case.”

Elite Confederate Spies

Tidwell said Gaddy’s particular interest had been the Confederate Army signal corps, which included intelligence operations by an elite covert unit of specialists sworn to secrecy, as well as overt operations in more conventional fields.

Prosecutors who sought to bring treason charges against Confederate President Jefferson Davis could find no hard evidence that an official Confederate organization directed a conspiracy to kill Lincoln.

Since then, most historians have portrayed Booth both as the author and principal performer in the assassination plot and as an ardent Southern sympathizer and self-dramatizing actor who recruited a crew of like-thinking misfits to help with the deed.

But the volume, to be published shortly by the University Press of Mississippi, underscores Booth’s known links with Confederate intelligence agents in the United States and Canada. It points out that governments keep few records detailing clandestine operations, and many less sensitive records vanished when the Confederates evacuated and burned their capital at Richmond, Va., on April 2, 1865. Just a week later, Gen. Robert E. Lee surrendered the main Confederate force at Appomattox, and, on April 14, Booth shot Lincoln in a box at Ford’s Theater in Washington.

Trigger for Wild Plot

The fall of Richmond is presented as the trigger that set off Booth’s wild plot to kill the Yankee President before a theater full of witnesses. Even though he appears to have made that decision on his own, the book argues, it can be assumed that Booth had reason to believe he was acting as the agent of top Confederate officials.

From many sources--regimental records, correspondence, journals and reports on trials and investigations--evidence is assembled that, in the half year before Appomattox, high officials in Richmond had sanctioned plans to kidnap Lincoln and hold him hostage.

Their aim was to use him as a bargaining chip to negotiate independence for the Confederacy before it was overwhelmed. Evidence is offered that they even stationed an underground military force of perhaps 1,000 men on secret detail to protect the projected escape route through Virginia’s rural Northern Neck and that a special train was available to whisk the captured Yankee President on the last leg of the journey to a hideaway near Richmond.

The book turns up signs that Booth was picked to recruit a team to handle the abduction, which fizzled because Lincoln failed to show up where the conspirators awaited him.

In February and March, 1865, the book notes increasing pressure to evacuate Richmond rather than have Lee’s dwindling force chewed up defending the capital before his army could withdraw to join other rebel troops still fighting in North Carolina.

Dramatic Coup Needed

Military leaders were concerned that the end of the winter mud season would signal a new assault by Union Gen. Ulysses S. Grant’s superior forces, but Davis was worried about Southern political reaction to surrender of the South’s capital. He was eager to balance the retreat from the capital with a Confederate coup dramatic enough to fire up the war-weary home front for yet another all-out effort--and to sow confusion among the Yankees.

Records indicate that a team, which included an explosives expert, was ordered to infiltrate Washington, and there are clues suggesting that its goal was to blow up the White House and that Booth was in charge of the plot. If this was the plan, it collapsed with the demolition specialist’s capture outside Washington on April 10.

The book says that, unwilling to concede that the Confederacy was on its deathbed, “Booth seems to have decided to do the best he could to carry out his mission as he understood it.” He thus arranged for co-conspirators to stalk Vice President Andrew Johnson and Secretary of State William H. Seward while he took over the starring role at Ford’s Theater. Booth alone killed his man.

Tidwell, whose research included review of voluminous records from both sides that are still being organized at the National Archives, said he was convinced that the Confederacy’s top brass “was aware that Booth was their agent.”

Blowing Up White House

“My scenario,” he said, is “that they instructed him in March to carry out the plan to blow up the White House by April. When it fell through, he was left with a mission unfulfilled, and he took the rest of it upon himself.”

The book traces Booth’s flight, along a route long used by the Confederate underground, during the 11 days before he was shot in a burning Virginia barn. With one companion, he made his cautious way south along the Northern Neck, enduring a leg broken in his leap from Lincoln’s box to the stage at Ford’s Theater.

Research by the authors determined that 12 of the 17 individuals who aided the attempted escape had demonstrable links with the Confederacy and that at least eight of them had participated in Confederate clandestine operations.

“Booth’s escape appears to have involved the main Confederate underground network leading into the North,” the book says. It goes on to suggest that members of an established intelligence system would not have aided a clandestine operation without clearance from the top.

It further infers that “there was an official connection and that the Confederate clandestine organization felt a responsibility to keep Booth from falling into the hands of his Union pursuers.”

Used ‘Dirty Tricks’

The authors detail the activities of a Southern intelligence operation that effectively spied in Washington, New York and Chicago and less effectively plotted subversive activities across the border in Canada. Items they report range from imaginative “dirty tricks,” including electrically detonated mines, to details of the Confederate cipher system. It was based on an acrostic code chart that could interpret ciphered messages by use of a key word or phrase, which was changed at intervals. Such a chart was found among Booth’s effects.

“Come retribution,” the phrase from which the book draws its title, was the last code key used by Confederate intelligence, a defiant exit line for the Lost Cause.