Wilkes Booth Came To Washington – Larry Starkey, 1976 ★★

Killing Lincoln: The "Blame Canada" Theory

Mystery still surrounds the assassination of Abraham Lincoln. It’s not about who did it; but why.

This 1976 account suggests Lincoln’s murder was a kind of Hail Mary pass by the Confederacy, designed to trigger an outsized reaction from the North that would force Great Britain into the U. S. Civil War. 

To this end, author Larry Starkey challenges the conventional view of Lincoln’s assassination. Why did John Wilkes Booth, a nationally-famous tragedian, affect such a rage-inducing scheme without any discernable escape plan? Why did he make sure people recognized him after he shot the President, both at Ford’s Theatre and later on when he crossed a bridge to escape Washington, D. C.?

Most scholars say this is all because Booth was a narcissistic madman. Like other assassins, he sought fame for his sick act. Starkey pushes against this theory hard.

“The evidence concerning how John Wilkes Booth moved from American Idol to Contemporary Judas is scanty,” Starkey writes. “Perhaps that is why historians have been so tempted to go along with the delusion of his insanity.”

Starkey’s Booth is a cool, rational operator. Rather than acting on the spur of the moment, Booth cleverly sets up false clues designed to mislead investigators and give him time enough for flight into Canada. This is the lynchpin of the plot as Starkey sees it. Canada was then part of the British Empire, and the Confederates wanted to provoke the North into attacking it.

“Such extraordinary duties had been the mission of the Confederate agents in Montreal since [Confederate States of America] Secretary of State [Judah] Benjamin had first sent them to Canada a year earlier – to strike with guerrillas across the international border in order to create war between the United States and Canada,” Starkey writes. “And so it would not be difficult for them to create a scenario that would send Booth against Lincoln.”

This explains why the one target of Booth’s conspiracy other than Lincoln was Secretary of State William Seward, who had worked to keep Anglo-American relations on a low boil. But there’s other material Starkey skims over, or sometimes even gets wrong, which makes me suspicious his theory is being more forced than found.

Booth is presented as a reasonable and gentle man, of both a sensitive nature and iron will. “I must confess that in all the years of research, I’ve grown to like him – much as, along with every American, I must detest the shot he fired,” Starkey writes.

He even presents, late in the book, a hypothetical account of Booth’s internal monologue as he approaches Lincoln’s box at Ford’s Theatre and considers the magnitude of what he is about to do. “A national hero does not become a national villain without regret or remorse,” Starkey writes.

When it comes to freeing the slaves, Starkey quotes Booth’s claim that slavery was an uplifting experience for the black man, otherwise deprived of the fruit of white civilization. It’s a hateful concept, Starkey admits, but not uncommon in its time. Starkey compares it to similar pronouncements made by Lincoln himself.

It’s here that Starkey draws noticeably farther from the conventional story. One famous utterance attributed to Booth, made after hearing Lincoln give a speech about black suffrage, spoke directly to motive, and the white-hot passion that fueled such a self-destructive act: “That means n– citizenship. Now, by God, I’ll put him through. That is the last speech he will ever give…” But this pungent comment never appears in Starkey’s account. His is a calmer, gentler killer.

Other variations from accepted truth are just as strange. There was supposed to be a guard on station outside Lincoln’s box at Ford’s Theatre, one John Frederick Parker. But Parker didn’t wait around for Act 2 of “Our American Cousin,” instead visiting a bar down the street. Scholars debate whether Parker was granted permission to do this or not. Starkey for some reason places Parker outside Lincoln’s box when the shooting occurs, Booth having presented him with a calling card.

I did like Starkey’s supposition of a misdirection ploy, which accounts for some of Booth’s odder actions following the crime. This is why he would have fled to Canada, though he wound up going South instead.

The Atzerodt angle is where Starkey’s book held the most interest for me. George Atzerodt was a German immigrant with a drinking problem who operated a ferry on the coast of southern Maryland. He was convicted of being a member of Booth’s conspiracy to kill Lincoln and, along with three others, was eventually hung for his part in the crime.

George Atzerodt, looking suitably glum as he awaits the verdict for his part in Abraham Lincoln's murder. Was he truly an active participant in the killing? Or was he set up by his supposed partner, John Wilkes Booth? Image from history.com

Atzerodt’s assigned role in the conspiracy, according to the case made successfully against him by Army prosecutors, was to murder Vice President Andrew Johnson at the same hour Booth killed Lincoln. The thing is, in the annals of would-be presidential assassins, Atzerodt made Squeaky Fromme look like a ninja. After getting in the same hotel Johnson was staying in, Atzerodt made himself conspicuous asking where the Vice President was, then got stinking drunk and wandered off into the streets of Washington when the time to kill the man upstairs arrived. They found his weapon hidden under a pillow in his hotel room. Atzerodt stayed with a relative until he was picked up.

Atzerodt said he never agreed to a conspiracy to kill Lincoln, just to kidnap him and ferry him to Virginia. Starkey details how this plan shifted when Southern war fortunes changed for the worse and Booth discovered a kidnapping would be too difficult. Had Atzerodt been deliberately left in the dark, and set up for a fall?

“Add to everything else the fact that a map of Virginia was among the clues left in Atzerodt’s room, and the fact that Atzerodt’s primary usefulness to the Southern cause had come from the clandestine ferryboat he operated across the Potomac into Virginia, and the logic becomes almost a compelling argument that Atzerodt is being used to provide a string of misleading clues,” Starkey writes.

There are also the actions of another conspiracy member, one who avoided the noose himself: John Surratt. Starkey places Surratt shuttling between Washington and Montreal in the months before the assassination, a theory Starkey repeats with the authority of fact.

Taking this a step further, Starkey posits the idea that Surratt carried a final message from Confederate President Jefferson Davis, “whose policies at this stage of the war could be compared to those of another military dictator a century later who led another nation in the enslavement of a minority, and who, in the face of defeat, chose Götterdämmerung.”

Could the South have been an active participant in the plot to kill Lincoln? I don’t think so. The plan to merely kidnap him was still on until early April, when a military defeat became too obvious to ignore. Such a change in plans would have taken a while in those pre-iPhone days. However much Starkey pushes the Canada idea, it seems far-fetched. What if the Canadians had captured Booth once he arrived there and turned him over to U. S. custody?

If Starkey had tied his theories to concrete proofs, like say actual testimony, rather than informed speculations, I might have found him more worthwhile. While he does have a talent for placing you in 1865 Washington, and offers useful insights on the secondary characters in and around Booth’s conspiracy, Wilkes Booth Came To Washington fails to convince regarding its key suppositions, leaving you with as many questions as when you began.