Booth had gone to Canada, and there discussed this project with Confederate agents, including ultimately Jacob Thompson, the personal emissary of Jefferson Davis and probably the most important representative of the Confederate regime in Canada, which had, throughout the war, been the chief center of intrigue between Confederate agents and Northern traitors. Thompson, who had been Minister of the Interior in the pro-Southern administration of President Buchanan, who preceded Lincoln, was sufficiently impressed by Booth's proposal that he transferred funds to his account in the Ontario Bank in Montreal; a check effecting this transfer of funds was produced in evidence by John A. Bingham, Special Judge Advocate before the military commission which tried the plotters. After securing this official approval and tangible evidence of the Confederate Government's support, Booth returned to the United States to recruit the people he would need to help him to accomplish his objective. It was noticed by his friends that he seemed, in the latter part of 1864, to be unusually well equipped with money. He explained to them that he had made it speculating in oil stock, but at the trial Booth's broker testified that Booth had never made a penny from that source; that, on the contrary, his gambling on the stock exchange had been disastrous.
If the final murderous expression of the plot was Booth's own formulation, as appears most likely, the responsibility for the original conspiracy extends to circles far above him--to respectable and honored men like Jacob Thompson, and so directly to the capital of the Confederacy and its rulers.
This point was made clear by Special Judge Advocate Bingham, after producing the check marked "Pay to order of J. Wilkes Booth" and identifying the writer of the check, under the signature, as "agent of Jefferson Davis." "What more is wanting?" asked the U.S. Government prosecutor. "Surely no word further need be spoken to show that. . .Jefferson Davis and his several agents, named in Canada, were in this conspiracy. If any additional evidence is wanting to show the complicity of Davis in it let the paper found in the possession of the hired assassin Booth come to bear witness against him."
Were Davis and the other Confederate leaders morally incapable of such an act as murder (for, as in any kidnap plot, the threat of murder was implicit)?
Evidence proves they were not above it. On file in the office of the Judge Advocate General in Washington, a letter found in the Confederate Archives reveals that a Lieutenant Alston of the Southern army wrote to President Jefferson Davis in 1864, at the same time Booth was in contact with Canadian agents of the Southern states. Alston proposed to organize a plot for Lincoln's murder which, he said, "would rid his country of some of her deadliest enemies by striking at the very heart's blood of those who seek to enchain her in slavery." Davis ordered the proposal to be thoroughly investigated to find out if Alston's project had a good chance of succeeding. So the murder offer went, by Davis' direction, to the office of the Secretary of War, where the Assistant Secretary gave it his own personal examination and referred it to the Adjutant General, marked "for attention."
None of this, however, could be proved beyond all possibility of doubt, once the assassin had himself been murdered. All the trails between the rebel government and Lincoln's murder passed through Booth--and Booth had been forever silenced. He could never be examined as a witness, and the man who shot him, Boston Corbett, brooded on this fact until he spent the last part of his life in an insanne asylum.
Davis was, of course, eventually arrested, though disguised in women's clothes masquerading as his wife's "old mother".
The above account appears in Thomas G. Buchanan, Who Killed Kennedy?, Macfadden, 1965, pages 34-37.
At the time of its initial publication in the United Kingdom in 1964, a two-page memo on publication details was prepared on CIA letterhead for Director Helms under date of 20 April 1964.
The document was declassified July 1973 and is reproduced on pages 295 and 296 of Alan J. Weberman and Michael Canfield, Coup d'Etat in America, Quick American Archives, 1975/1992.
It is dangerous to look beyond the curtain of the "lone gunman" for his anonymous Broadway angels. A sandbag might fall from the rigging.