Trials & Tribunes

PETER: If you’re just joining us, this is BackStory. And today, on the show, we’re focusing in on the assassination of President Abraham Lincoln. Now as you may know, John Wilkes Booth was never prosecuted for the murder. A week and a half after the assassination, a Union soldier discovered him hiding out in a Maryland barn** and killed him after he refused to surrender.

But eight of the other conspirators were put on trial. They were all found guilty of at least one of the charges against them. And four of them were sentenced to death.

BRIAN: One thing that’s important to know about this trial was that it did not take place in a civilian court. It was a military trial, convened with the rationale that an attack on the president before the full cessation of the war was itself an act of war. Many have argued that this was an excessive use of war powers and that the convictions were pushed through to prove a point to the South. And the person they point to as most responsible for this perversion of justice is Joseph Holt.

He was the head of the Bureau of Military Justice, tasked with playing the role of chief prosecutor and the role of chief judge. And by all accounts, he had a brilliant legal mind.

ELIZABETH LEONARD: You know, he’s the kind of person you like to read anything he ever wrote, extremely eloquent. You certainly would want him on your side.

BRIAN: This is historian Elizabeth Leonard. She’s the author of a biography of Holt as well as a book on the trial itself. And in the course of all of her research on Holt, she developed a certain, let’s just say, fondness for the guy.

ELIZABETH LEONARD: Children, apparently, adored him. Dogs adored him. He was a great lover–

BRIAN: We always go for the dog audience here on BackStory. I’m glad you mentioned that, Elizabeth.

ELIZABETH LEONARD: He– well, and he had gardens that he tended with the enormous care. As his biographer, I certainly love him in some way, as a close friend of mine for many years. But he would have been very difficult to live with and part of–

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Part of his problem was that he was an unforgiving sort. You wouldn’t want to be in his crosshairs.

BRIAN: When the trial began, it became clear that the conspirators weren’t the only ones in Holt’s crosshairs. Holt believed this was a much bigger conspiracy and was determined to prove that Jefferson Davis himself had ordered the assassination. Holt knew that Confederates had networks in Canada and that some of the alleged conspirators had recently traveled there. He just needed it the evidence to link it all together. So how successful was Holt in doing this? I put the question to Elizabeth Leonard.

ELIZABETH LEONARD: In terms of whether it went well or poorly, I would say for Holt, it basically went pretty poorly. It involved bringing in witnesses, who in their testimony, would tie these local events in Washington to members of what was called Jefferson Davis’ Canadian Cabinet. People who were stationed in Canada and serving the Confederacy from there and tie Jefferson Davis to the action team in Washington, and so on.

So there were a number of witnesses who were brought in. But a lot of Holt’s commitment to that idea arose from his connection with this very, very poor and self-interested witness who was known as Sanford Conover, who just seemed to keep supplying some reasonably believable evidence and some completely concocted evidence that would suit Holt’s imaginings about what had happened and kept saying he needed more money to make the tie a little tighter and so on.

BRIAN: Is that when things started falling apart in the grand conspiracy, when Conover was on the stand?

ELIZABETH LEONARD: Absolutely, that’s when the grand conspiracy theory really starts to fall apart. And then there’s this growing pile of evidence indicating that he– you know, from– not just from people who might have been supporters of the prisoners, but people who were members of the United States Army. And so an officer is saying, you know, we know a little bit about what’s going on here and we got to tell you this guy is a fraud and so on. That’s when it really starts to fall apart. And Holt was so susceptible for someone with a brain, and so eloquent, and so highly educated, and all that stuff. And you know, he just really couldn’t let go.

BRIAN: Elizabeth, would you say that vengeance is too strong an adjective to describe part of Holt’s motivation?

ELIZABETH LEONARD: No, I would not say that’s too strong. He had a degree of rage built up since 1861 against Jefferson Davis for his willingness to leave the government as he did in January 1861 and helped to found the Confederate States of America, which Holt saw as the ultimate crime against the United States. So he was very angry at Jefferson Davis already and angry at the Confederacy, and could not imagine that Davis himself and the other leadership were involved.

BRIAN: I think I can guess what the ACLU might have made of this trial. I’m curious to hear what you take away from all of this.

ELIZABETH LEONARD: Well, I know that there are those people who have said that this trial was unjust and that if the eight prisoners at the bar had been tried in a civil court, things would have gone differently, and so on. I don’t actually believe that’s true and I don’t see it that way. I also, as a historian who has done a lot of work on the post-Civil War period, I really do understand Holt’s perspective on the importance of using this moment to lay some foundation for what reconstruction would look like.

He had inklings that there were others in the federal government who, looking ahead, thought mostly in terms of forgiveness and reuniting the nation. And I think he was right. Maybe the trial wasn’t the right place. I don’t know what would have been a better place. But I think he was right to be concerned that Lincoln’s successor, Andrew Johnson, was preparing to give away the farm in the name of harmony, and peace, and forgiveness.

And while I’m all for harmony and peace and forgiveness in most circumstances, this harmony and peace and forgiveness that Andrew Johnson sought, he sought it at the expense of the freed slaves. They got thrown under the bus for that. And I think Holt anticipated that. That, for him, that was one of the great implications of Union victory, was that there would be protection for these 4 million newly freed slaves. And that in order to ensure their safety, that the South and that Confederate sentiment would have to be squelched. And this was an opportunity to do it or to begin to do it.

BRIAN: Elizabeth, I’m going to come back to an aside you made though, that as much as I agree with you in terms of the larger objectives and outcomes, I do wonder whether a trial is the right venue for a vengeful prosecutor, who is also the general manager of the trial, who is operating on shoddy evidence and connecting the defendants to a case that, frankly, is not believable on the face of it. And by that, I mean the larger conspiracy entailing Jefferson Davis. So I wonder if the courtroom is really the right place to achieve all of this, as you so eloquently put it.

ELIZABETH LEONARD: No, I think you’re right. No, I think– in that sense, I do think you’re right. I mean, I desperately wish, I guess, that Holt had given up on the grand conspiracy sooner and just focused on the prosecution of the eight who were before him and found another place to express this deep concern he had. So I guess I would agree with you there.

I just– we have to understand the terror and chaos that prevailed in Washington in April, and even still in May. I mean, the war wasn’t over. It didn’t end for a while. It didn’t end till the end of May, actually, when the last Confederate forces finally surrendered. So the war was still going on.

The president was killed, the Secretary of State had been terribly wounded. The attackers might have killed Andrew Johnson, the vice president. They might have killed Ulysses Grant. People were terrified that this was just the beginning of something much darker and much worse. And that chaos and confusion and fear, we have to understand the trial, Holt’s response, and so on, all within that context.

BRIAN: Well, thank you for joining us on BackStory today.

ELIZABETH LEONARD: Oh, you’re so welcome.

BRIAN: Elizabeth Leonard is a historian at Colby College. She’s the author of Lincoln’s Avengers– Justice, Revenge, and Reunion after the Civil War, and also of Lincoln’s Forgotten Ally– Judge Advocate General Joseph Holt of Kentucky.

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