History: John Wilkes Booth remains a mystery
By Phil Connelly May 22, 2020
Despite his success as an actor, John Wilkes Booth will always be remembered as the man who assassinated President Abraham Lincoln. Before killing the president, he had actually performed in front of Lincoln in 1863. Booth was a fierce Confederate sympathizer during the Civil War. Prior to that momentous night at Ford’s Theater, he had conspired to kidnap Lincoln. The president would then be exchanged for all Confederate prisoners. When that plan did not work out, Booth and his co-conspirators decided to kill the president, Vice President Johnson, and Secretary of State Seward.
Johnson was stabbed, but not fatally, by fellow conspirator Lewis Powell. Another conspirator, George Atzerodt, was supposed to have killed Johnson, but lost his nerve. Booth was the only one who succeeded in the plot.
On April 14, 1865, Booth entered the theater’s balcony, shot Lincoln at close range, jumped to the stage, and uttered these words "Sic semper tyrannis” — "Thus always to tyrants." Unfortunately, as he leapt over the railing, Booth caught a spur on the flag, causing him to land awkwardly and breaking his right leg. After righting himself, he immediately fled the theater.
After a 12-day manhunt, Booth and another man were cornered in a barn on Richard Garret’s property. One man surrendered, but Booth refused to come out. The troops decided to flush Booth out by setting the barn on fire. During this time, one of the soldiers fired his gun into the air. As luck would have it, the bullet somehow found an opening in between slats on the barn’s roof and miraculously entered Booth’s neck, killing him instantly. Case closed.
Maybe not. For over 150 years, many people have claimed that the man shot in Garret’s barn was not Booth.
One such claim was made by John Stevenson, a friend of Booth. After Booth's death, Stevenson asked Booth's widow, Izola, to run away with him. She told him that would not be possible because after the assassination, her husband had returned to the farm to recuperate from the broken leg.
In another instance, Kate Scott, who had met Booth while working as a nurse during the Civil War related this story — “In July of 1865, I received a letter in handwriting that was certainly Booth’s, asking me to retrieve an important envelope. The letter writer said that I should have it at our farm on September 15th. On that date, Booth appeared, but without his moustache and featuring an appearance such that he looked completely different.”
In 1877, lawyer Finis Bates took his dying friend's confession. In his confession, John St. Helens claimed that he was John Wilkes Booth. After not dying after all, St. Helens decided it would be best to leave town and disappear.
In 1903, a man in Enid, Oklahoma, by the name of David E. George, was dying. Before he died, he confessed to his landlord, Mrs. Harper, that he was John Wilkes Booth. It was later determined that David E. George and John St. Helen were one and the same.
In 1872, the marriage of a John Wilkes Booth and Louisa Payne was recorded. A few months later, John wanted to take Louisa to Memphis to collect money owed him by the Knights of the Golden Circle. However, after arriving in Memphis, Booth was recognized by several people. Fearing for his life, he sent his wife back to their hometown, and he disappeared, never to see Louisa again.
https://ravallirepublic.com/news/local/article_d5ae8047-3585-57bb-abd4-e5c75075fdb2.html
Sunday, May 24, 2020
Thursday, April 2, 2020
Knights of the Golden Circle
Knights of the Golden Circle, a semi-military secret society that was active in the Midwestern states during the American Civil War.
In 1859 George Bickley, a freebooter and adventurer, launched a fraternal order which proposed the establishment of military colonies of Americans in Mexico. The eventual goal of the plan was the annexation of all of Mexico to the United States. This would, according to Bickley, protect the Southern states from being overwhelmed by the industrial and commercial interests of the North. Widespread publicity in Southern expansionist newspapers called attention to the new order, and Bickley soon claimed it had 65,000 members. He later increased his claims to 115,000, but such numbers were widely dismissed as fanciful.
The order itself had little influence in the South and had few or no Northern adherents. With the outbreak of the war, however, Republicans charged that Democrats who opposed the conduct of the war were influenced by, or were members of, the Knights. The order and its alleged influence sparked the formation of Union League clubs to carry on counterpropaganda. Although civil and military authorities made strenuous efforts to uncover the order and charges abounded in newspapers and in political oratory, no single member or unit of the organization was ever conclusively brought to light.
A successor organization, the Sons of Liberty, was alleged to have taken its place. Some 250,000 to 300,000 oath-bound members were said to have existed in the Midwest. Copperheads Fernando Wood, former Democratic mayor of New York City, and Clement L. Vallandigham of Ohio were reputed to be the chief officers. They opposed the U.S. government’s war policy, actively encouraged desertion, prevented enlistments, and resisted the draft. Receiving reports of the activities of the Order of American Knights (a new name for the alleged order) in Missouri and Illinois, U.S. Pres. Abraham Lincoln sent his secretary, John Hay, to investigate. The new charges, said Lincoln on receiving Hay’s report, were “as puerile as the Knights of the Golden Circle.” Treason trials against members of the Sons of Liberty in Indianapolis on the eve of the election of 1864 furnished campaign material for the Republicans. The leaders were sentenced to death or imprisonment by military commissions, but the sentences were suspended, and in 1866 the convictions were overturned by a decision of the U.S. Supreme Court.
Hate-Filled Zone: The racist roots of a Northwest secession movement
By Knute Berger
https://crosscut.com/2015/07/hate-filled-zone-a-group-of-white-racists-wants-a-nw-secession-a-vile-dream-with-deep-historic-roots
For much of our history, the Pacific Northwest has been remote physically and psychologically. We’re a place people come to when they want to escape, improve their lot in life and build their idea of utopia. Joseph Smith, fleeing persecution, once considered establishing the Mormon homeland at Nootka on Vancouver Island. In the 1970s, discussion ramped up of Ecotopia, a green secession movement echoed in today’s talk of the sustainable nation of Cascadia.
In the 1990s, when Richard Butler and the Aryan Nations were making headlines, a joke went around that America consisted of the “49 states and the Reich of Idaho." Their racist "dream" of a separate nation — a nightmare, more accurately — didn't die with Butler.
In the wake of the Charleston, South Carolina church massacre in which a young white supremacist slaughtered African American churchgoers, a Northwest connection was made that highlights two aspects of our history: separatism and race. The accused shooter, Dylann Roof, left an online manifesto describing his journey to racist extremism, and in the course of that referred to the Northwest Front, a white supremacist organization seeking to create an all-white “homeland” in the Pacific Northwest.
Roof was critical of the Northwest Front for encouraging separatism instead of action. Wrote Roof, “To me the whole idea [of a Northwest white homeland] just parralells [sic] the concept of White people running to the suburbs. The whole idea is pathetic and just another way to run from the problem without facing it.”
The Roof reference sparked online interest in the Northwest Front, a Seattle-based group (at least, that’s where their P.O. Box is) that wants to create what they call a Northwest American Republic. The group has a website, a detailed draft constitution (whites-only, no gays, no Jews) and the prime mover behind it, Harold Covington, hosts a podcast, Radio Free Northwest.
He promotes white flight to the region to prepare for the new country. As the group’s draft constitution says plainly, “The Northwest American Republic shall be a Homeland solely for the use and habitation of White people of all nationalities, cultures and creeds worldwide, in order that Western civilization may be preserved and White children may be raised to responsible adulthood in safety, prosperity and tranquility.”
A how-to 101 on white migration by a Northwest Front Seattle supporter can be found here. Aryan migrants are urged to move to Seattle and Portland to engage in the cause.
Covington has a long association with white supremacist and Nationalist groups, from neo-Nazis to the Klan. Unlike Dylann Roof, he’s actually been to racist countries he admires, like the old South Africa and Rhodesia (today's Zimbabwe). He embraces a frankly racist agenda.
A recent Covington podcast following up on the aftermath of the Charleston shooting is an eclectic mix of commentary, advice and music, including a warning to followers to keep their mouths shut and only express their real racist opinions to other white true-believers — he doesn’t encourage acts like Roof’s. He insists that whites be “on lockdown” like defeated slaves, biding time until they are free again — free to express their race rage and white angst without fear of being outed on Facebook by someone with a cell phone camera.
Yes, in Covington’s upside-down world, it is whites who are the slaves, quietly preparing for rebellion and secession.
Covington freely uses derogatory terms for minorities and women, speaks of “suck-ass white traitors,” and calls Hillary Clinton the “Hilldebeast” or the “Sea Hag.” His July 2 show includes a performance of a jazz-folk Holocaust denial song (“The holocaust is not what it appears to be … an impossibility,”), a review by “Gretchen” of a book on practical Odinism (a kind of neo-paganism), a Nazi SS marching song, and commentary on the recent Supreme Court decision on what he calls “sodomitic marriage.”
It’s an ugly, alternative universe; from a Seattle ideological standpoint, it’s anti-matter. It’s delivered in an avuncular style. Think of host Covington as white hate’s answer to Garrison Keillor. Covington writes novels, too, only his Lake Woebegon is a dystopian future that gives rise to white Northwest republic.
How much of a following Covington has is unclear, though it must be small since he represents a subset of a white supremacist subset — he says that a recent try at a call-in show produced only two calls. He complains of a lack of coverage by the mainstream press, which he believes is due to being on a government and media blacklist. (He was recently profiled by The Guardian.)
But he has been adept at getting his message out via the Internet and You Tube where the Dylann Roofs can find him. It also might help sell a few of his many self-published books on Amazon. He had been around long enough that he is tracked by organizations that keep tabs on hate groups, such as the Southern Poverty Law Center (check out their interview with Covington’s brother explaining the family background), and the Anti-Defamation League.
Covington refers to the destiny of an all-white Republic in the Northwest as the “Northwest Imperative.” Why the imperative isn’t more operative in parts of the nation that are “whiter,” like New England, isn’t entirely clear, but parts of Idaho and Eastern Oregon are somewhat comparable, and King County is the whitest "big" urban county in the country. We have a history of red-lining, racial covenants and segregation, and mistreatment of minorities, from the indigenous peoples to the Chinese exclusion riots to the Japanese internment.
The idea that the Northwest could be a “white homeland” for non-indigenous peoples (the DNA check on Kennewick Man didn’t turn out the way Odinists had hoped) is not unique, either to Harold Covington nor to this century or the last.
The most relevant example, especially given the Confederate flag controversy that the Charleston murders kicked off, is the so-called Pacific Republic movement of the 1850s and ’60s. The notion that the West Coast — California, Oregon and Washington — might one day be a separate country is an idea that goes back to Thomas Jefferson and a time before the transcontinental railroads and telegraph. Jefferson imagined the Pacific Northwest as the germ of a “great, free and independent empire.”
The idea bubbled up in a number of ways. The annexation of Texas from Mexico planted the seed, the short-lived Bear Flag Republic of California, as well as disenchantment on the part of the far Western settlers toward the faraway federal government that seemed to neglect them. Writing on the history of the Pacific Republic idea in Oregon Historical Quarterly, Joseph Ellison observed, “Remoteness and isolation have always fostered the spirit of self-reliance and independence.” In an era when America’s borders were in flux and Manifest Destiny strong, no lines on the map seemed to be written in dry ink. With the rise of sectional conflict in the run-up to the Civil War, however, the idea of the Pacific Republic began to morph into a pro-Southern secessionist scheme — an opportunity to enable the expansion of slavery and the subjugation of other races.
The region had never been friendly to blacks, and laws were passed to restrict their rights and even their presence in the region, most infamously Oregon’s voter-backed decision to exclude all blacks from the state, whether slave or free. Oregon is the only state to enter the Union (in 1859) with such a racial exclusion law embedded in a state constitution. One town in Oregon flew the Confederate flag during the war, and it still flies along I-5 in southwest Washington.
During the 1860s, the notion of a Pacific Republic movement became mostly a scheme to assist the South by turning the West Coast into a friendly foreign power as a way of furthering Southern causes, like the expansion of slavery into the West. One plan outlined in 1860 indicated “slaves were to be procured by inviting coolies, South Sea Islanders, and negroes to immigrate to California, and then reducing them to slavery.” The new Pacific Republic was to feature an aristocracy with inherited nobility and limited suffrage.
Another concept imagined the new country encompassing all or parts of what are now California, Oregon, Washington, Idaho, Montana, Utah, Nevada and New Mexico broken into 10 states, of which half would be permanent slave states. Many Pacific Republic advocates also wanted to extend slavery and white colonization into Mexico.
The West Coast secession movement was real, and serious, and backed by many of the West’s most prominent politicians, including California’s first senator, William Gwinn and Oregon’s first senator, Joseph Lane, who ran as vice president with John C. Breckinridge on the pro-slavery Democratic ticket in 1860. Southern sympathizers abounded in the region before and during the Civil War, and there were plots by secret societies — most notably the Knights of the Golden Circle, a group that played a key role in Southern secession and formed the model for the post-Civil War Ku Klux Klan. John Wilkes Booth was a member, by the way, as allegedly were Gwinn, Lane and other prominent figures.
The Knights were especially active in California and Oregon and there is some evidence they attempted to smuggle arms through Washington. The Pacific Republic movement, essentially hijacked by Southern interests, began to lose credibility as Southern states seceded after Abraham Lincoln’s election in 1860, but persisted as a subversive "Copperhead" element throughout the war. The majority sentiment in the Pacific Coast states remained loyal to the Union. Washington Territory, Oregon and California all eventually formally repudiated the Republic idea.
On January 30th, 1860, the Washington Territorial legislature passed a resolution that said in part, “That we utterly discountenance — as fraught with incipient treason, and the insidious offspring of reckless aspirations and disappointed ambition, or culpable ignorance — all projects for a Pacific Confederacy.” Oregon lawmakers did the same, calling the “Pacific Confederacy” a “weak and wicked scheme.”
The use of the term “confederacy” instead of “republic” had new and purposeful political meaning as America faced a civil war that the Knights and Southerners largely welcomed. It also reflected how the issues of race and slavery had become central to the debate of Northwest identity during the 1850s and ‘60s.
A pro-slavery, white-dominated Pacific Republic was officially rejected 155 years ago, but for some haters, that vision somehow limps on.
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