Latest / In Focus with Carolyn Hutcheson / Lincoln Conspiracy - TPR's In Focus - April 1, 2026

Transcript

Lincoln Conspiracy - TPR's In Focus - April 1, 2026 · In Focus with Carolyn Hutcheson

• 0:00
  Speak: Support
• 0:00
  Support comes from the Rosa Parks Museum on Troy
• 0:04
  University's Montgomery Campus. Located on the spot of Mrs.
• 0:07
  Parks' historic 1955 arrest and featuring exhibits that
• 0:12
  chronicle the history of the Montgomery Bus Boycott. More
• 0:16
  information at Troy. edu/rosaparks. From Troy Public
• 0:23
  Radio, this is In focus, and I'm Carolyn Hutcheson. Today, we
• 0:28
  delve into the story of the death of Abraham Lincoln and the
• 0:33
  conspiracy behind his assassination. Our guest retired
• 0:38
  Alabama National Guard Carl Bryan Morgan spent his military
• 0:43
  career assigned to the Joja Vocat General Corps. And he
• 0:48
  shares a legal perspective on the story. And much of the
• 0:53
  information about the Sarat family can be found in the book
• 0:58
  John Sarat, the Lincoln Assessor, who got away by Michael Sean.
• 1:07
  Colonel Bryan Morgan, welcome back to Troy Public Radio. Hello
• 1:12
  Carolyn. What can you tell us about Lincoln's assassination
• 1:16
  and conspiracy theories even today?
• 1:18
  Well, we're celebrating the 250th anniversary of our nation.
• 1:23
  That was the sad tragic assassination of President
• 1:27
  Lincoln in April 1865. Of course, the shooter was John Wilkes
• 1:31
  Booth, who had a history both here in Montgomery and in
• 1:35
  Maryland. One of the conspirators, John Sarat, who
• 1:39
  acted with Booth, got away from prosecution and punishment.
• 1:43
  Booth, as you know, was an actor and I do want to contrast
• 1:47
  Sarat's escape with that of James Earl Ray, who pled guilty
• 1:52
  to shooting King. Booth was the key in the conspiracy and it all
• 1:58
  developed basically when they got to Maryland. Booth was an
• 2:01
  actor, he was here in Montgomery with his brother. But when he
• 2:04
  moved to Maryland, he met Mary Sarat, who had a boarding house,
• 2:09
  and she and her son and about five other conspirators can cut
• 2:14
  to the idea that they would one capture President Lincoln or two
• 2:19
  assassinate him. If they captured him, they were going to
• 2:23
  get him a whole hostage and send word to Richmond that all
• 2:27
  Confederate prisoners were to be released. But that course of
• 2:32
  action failed at, ultimately, Booth shot President Lincoln,
• 2:36
  April 14th 1865.
• 2:38
  You mentioned that John Wilkes Booth, the actor, appeared in
• 2:43
  Montgomery and as I understand it, he appeared at the
• 2:46
  Montgomery Theatre. The night of October 14th 1860, the plate,
• 2:53
  the school for scandal and John Wilkes Booth was there.
• 2:57
  Well, he was, he was a famous actor who had traveled to South.
• 3:02
  He and his brother, his brother's sympathies lay with
• 3:06
  the North. So there was a split once the war started and after
• 3:10
  Booth developed this great reputation with the audience and
• 3:14
  the women, he moved on to Maryland and that's where the
• 3:18
  conspiracy was hacked. There were rewards offered in Alabama
• 3:22
  for someone to assassinate President Lincoln.
• 3:26
  The scandal really became international in scope. Mary
• 3:30
  Sirot's son was involved in this and he escaped. So what's the
• 3:35
  thread there?
• 3:37
  Well, Booth, after the shooting, his leg was fixed by Dr. Samuel
• 3:42
  Mudd. He escaped to Northern Virginia where he and another
• 3:45
  one of the conspirators were shot. There was a huge man hunt,
• 3:49
  10,000 troops all over Maryland and Northern Virginia and they
• 3:54
  found the other conspirators, which included John Sirot's
• 3:58
  mother Mary, who ran a boarding house in Northeast Washington
• 4:03
  where the weapons that Booth used were housed and the plans
• 4:06
  were made. Sirot's defense and he could prove that he was in
• 4:10
  upstate New York at the time, investigating a Union prison
• 4:15
  camp for Confederate soldiers. Sirot's friend was Lewis
• 4:19
  Whiteman and they had done each other growing up. Whiteman
• 4:22
  worked in the U. S. War Department. So he would always
• 4:25
  give Sirot troop movements of the Union Army, which Sirot had
• 4:30
  carried back to Richmond. But after the murder of President
• 4:33
  Lincoln, Sirot escaped into Canada ultimately to get on a
• 4:37
  ship to Liverpool, England. And that's where he's similar to
• 4:41
  James Earl Ray. Ray left the U. S. to go to Canada and he went
• 4:45
  to England as well. In Ray's case, he was stopped on his way
• 4:49
  to Portugal. And he was funded by someone. So was Sirot. Sirot
• 4:54
  made his way across England to France where he toured
• 4:57
  Versailles and then he went all the way to Rome and he joined
• 5:01
  what they had created. It was the Pope's army to protect the
• 5:05
  Pope and the Vatican. His mother has been tried and hanged the
• 5:09
  other conspirators have been called and he's in Italy.
• 5:12
  The big question becomes what happened to John Sirot? What was
• 5:18
  the legal reason he escaped hanging?
• 5:21
  Well, the investigator did get him into custody in Italy, but
• 5:24
  he escaped there called a boat that went to Malta and to
• 5:29
  Alexandria, Egypt, where he was captured. He was captured, sent
• 5:32
  back to Washington two years after the fact of the other
• 5:35
  trials. And the Supreme Court had held you could not try a
• 5:39
  civilian before a military commission, which heard the
• 5:43
  other conspirators trial. So he was tried in a federal district
• 5:47
  court there in Washington. Sirot has the funds to hire a great
• 5:52
  defense? Well, you're two of them. And his defense is twofold.
• 5:55
  Number one, I was not there. I was in upstate New York at the
• 5:59
  time. And number two, sympathy for his mother. They argued to
• 6:04
  the jury that the judge advocate general of the army should have
• 6:09
  carried her clemency petition to the new president Andrew Johnson.
• 6:14
  The judge, general testified, I did take it to the president,
• 6:18
  but the sympathy for his mother and that I was not there,
• 6:22
  convinced the jury. You had eight jurors to acquit and four
• 6:26
  jurors to convict. So it was a hung jury. The key witness was
• 6:30
  this friend Lewis Whiteman, who had been the witness against his
• 6:33
  mother and the other conspirators.
• 6:35
  I read that suddenly the public was horrified that a woman and
• 6:39
  their pictures of her hanging in her black dress with her head
• 6:44
  covered that a woman was being hung by the U. S. government.
• 6:48
  If you recall in the trial of Aaron Burr, Chief Justice John
• 6:53
  Marshall made it a point to define conspiracy as two
• 6:57
  witnesses who could testify to an act to further that
• 7:00
  conspiracy. The government could not produce that. And there was
• 7:04
  no second trial. They even reverted the indictment, but
• 7:08
  they chose not to pursue prosecution of John Sirott. And
• 7:13
  he ultimately lived the life there in Maryland and taught
• 7:16
  school and never punished, prosecuted in any way. And what
• 7:20
  about the fate of John Wilkes Booth? The deaf witnesses at
• 7:24
  Ford Theatre that night to identify, and I do believe they
• 7:28
  shot him. And Booth would have been convicted and hung quicker
• 7:32
  than the other conspirators in my opinion. You knew he was a
• 7:36
  southern simplifying. He came up with the plan to either capture
• 7:40
  or shoot President Lincoln. I think Booth was the key person
• 7:44
  in the whole conspiracy. So if a look at Sirott's escape in these
• 7:49
  other assassination and assassination of Tim's, Arthur
• 7:53
  Bremmer had shot our own governor, Governor Wallace. He
• 7:56
  trailed him all over the country. Liar Viazwald had the means to
• 8:01
  travel abroad, as did Sirott. So any of these assassinations,
• 8:06
  there's usually a network of supporters out there. And the
• 8:10
  government could never marshal the evidence to convict Sirott.
• 8:13
  Sirott was a nest of conspirators. And that's why
• 8:18
  Mary Sirott was sent to her death because they used her
• 8:22
  boarding house. They'd held their meetings, they stored the
• 8:26
  weapons. They drew the plans. Everything was planned at Mary
• 8:30
  Sirott's establishment. So we're talking about military courts
• 8:34
  and civilians. That's right. A military panel in this case was
• 8:38
  five officers who heard the evidence and ruled the fate of
• 8:42
  the original conspirators. Sirott's case was in front of a
• 8:47
  civilian jury, civilian judge and civilian attorneys with a
• 8:51
  lot of different outcomes. So they hung four and they sent
• 8:55
  three to prison for life. The tie-in with the month of April
• 8:59
  is what? President Lincoln was shot on April 14, 1865. The war
• 9:05
  was over. Some have said we would have fared a lot better
• 9:09
  under his president. But John Williams booth ended all that
• 9:12
  along with his conspirators. This was a tragic episode that
• 9:17
  rocked our country. James D'Arre, Arthur Brimmer, Hank Lee, the
• 9:21
  shot president Reagan and Lee Harvey Oswald. They've all had
• 9:25
  these group of supporters that somehow mainly furnished them
• 9:30
  money.
• 9:30
  Well, it's been a fascinating story and I want to thank you
• 9:33
  for sharing it. Well, thank you, Carolyn. The entire Alabama
• 9:39
  National Guard Colonel Brian Morgan, who currently serves as
• 9:43
  director of career development at the Faulkner University Jones
• 9:47
  School of Law. And Carolyn Hutcheson and this is Listener
• 9:52
  Supported Troy Public Radio.