This is a statement made by Colonel John Singleton
Mosby to Caroline Long Harper during an interview she had with him a short time
before his death. The interview was conducted at a farm in Fauquier County near
Warrenton, Virginia. The contents of this statement are not to be divulged
until the hundred and twentieth anniversary of the surrender at Appomattox. The
reason is that Col. Mosby has spoken of such things as occurred, and he wants
to be certain that all participants are not around to be embarrassed by his
revelations.
The original of this interview was notarized and duly
signed and delivered for safekeeping to Judge Howard Smith of Alexandria,
Virginia. It will be placed in safekeeping by him, and all other copies are put
with people who will honor the confidentiality of the document.
The original statement was handwritten and was signed
by Col. Mosby. It was copied by Caroline
Long and later transcribed by Beth Rhoades.
It was later retyped by Laura Smith and sealed in envelopes. Five (5)
copies were made and so distributed. This is copy number 3.
April 22, 1930
Note
February 10, 2025, Troy Cowan converted Laura Smith’s
typewritten papers into a Word document. When Troy inserted information, he put
it in curly brackets {}.
SWORN STATEMENT OF COLONEL JOHN SINGLETON MOSBY
I am not going to write my life history as I have
already published my memoirs. What I am putting forth here is the part that I
was advised to avoid disclosing in that volume. My reason for writing this
missive is plain; there are things which I was privy to that need to be
disclosed, and I know full well that unless I write of it, future generations
will be deprived of important facts which they have a right to have, be they
for better or for worse.
After Abraham Lincoln was shot on April 14, 1865,
Secretary of War Edwin M. Stanton accused me of complicity in that
assassination. A price was put on my head, and I was hounded until the
benevolent and honest General Grant put me out of the reach of Stanton. The
reason Stanton posted me was not a reason at all but one of his fantasies.
Stanton was afraid to death that I was coming into Washington after the
administration, and he constantly was alarmed by each incident, which seemed as
though that might be the case. To be fair to the man, he was constantly being
given information which was inaccurate or only partially true and he was
constantly kept in a state of mental anguish. I have to admit that I was partly
to blame (or be credited) for it.
The posting of me was based entirely on a report by
General Sheridan that when Marcellas Lemos was hired by him as a spy he brought
to the general’s headquarters a man who, after Linco1n’s death, was by Sheridan
thought to have been John Wilkes Booth. The man was, in fact, Captain John
Rodgers, one of my agents.
Because Sheridan reported the presence of a man
thought by him to be Booth associated with a man who, after Lincoln was dead,
was found to have been my agent, he assumed that I had sent Booth to kill
Lincoln. In Stanton's confused mind, all this seemed possible. The Confusion was in part due to actions
taken by me. In order to put things into perspective, I must, for a time,
simply tell it in a running narrative.
At the time of my initial recruitment of men for my
rangers, one of the officers went to Warrenton and signed up a number of men.
Among those signed up at the Warren Green Hotel was the actor John Wilkes
Booth. He used a nom de guerre, a name he had used on the stage, and he was
assigned to Washington as an agent. When he was not, as been stated, an
officer, but an enlisted private and nothing more. He was assigned to supply
information on various activities in the City of Washington. He was at other times
assigned other duties but he was never assigned the task of killing Abraham
Lincoln. Neither did I nor any of my men ever enter into any agreement,
conspiracy, or plan to do bodily harm to the man, Lincoln. We did plan,
conspire, and plot to capture him as a prisoner of the Confederate States of
America.
By the Summer of 1864, the North was tired of Lincoln's
politics, and even though he was elected by a large vote, it was more through the
default of his opponents than through his great leadership. But more important,
the backers of the war were becoming weary of it. The men who were supposed to
get rich were not getting rich fast enough and they wanted a change. We, the
South, decided to cater to that idea for a time, but only to the extent that it
could grant us a real advantage. I decided to capture Abraham Lincoln and
certain members of his cabinet and hold them as hostages for a treaty of peace
between the USA and the CSA. I felt that it was entirely feasible.
The success of the plan depended on the desire of
certain men in the United States government to assist in the plan, all the time
thinking that they were the beneficiaries, either monetarily or politically.
Colonel L. C.
Baker of the War Department of the US had decided to come after me and
clap me in irons. We arranged for his embarrassment and when that was finished,
we went about the capture.
Booth had formed an alliance with the wife of a Union
Colonel who was of Virginian stock, and she induced her husband to assist
completely, it would appear for the money and any possible future in it. The
Colonel was of foreign extraction and not of very high moral character and
would consider most anything which promised personal Advantage. The wife {Harriet
Stover aka Lola Alexander} was in good with a number of high-placed persons in
the US government, including the future vice-president. She was particularly
involved with Johnson’s private secretary.
By the Fall of 1864, we had a plan in place that had a
very good chance of success. The president, Vice-president, and the secretary
of state would all be wicked away and held hostage. The idea had, in part
thought to be in retaliation for the Dahlgren raid on Richmond - as indeed it
was - but it also made good sense We had from the first made full provisions
for their safety and at no time even considered doing them harm or even
allowing harm to come to them. We had planned carefully.
During the early part of 1865 I had sent a large
number of my troopers to King George County of Virginia to be ready for the
transport of our prisoners south from the river. They were in place and
waiting. I also had some 200 men in Yankee uniforms on the north side of the
Potomac, ready to move east along the south side of the Potomac. I had some 200
men within the City of Washington itself, ready and waiting for the appointed
day. There had also been assembled in the southern counties of Maryland a small
force of partisans dressed in Yankee uniforms and fully equipped, ready and
waiting to bring about the capture. All were hand-picked and highly disciplined
men.
But sometimes, all the plans seem to come to naught in
an instant, and this seems to be what happened in this case. Exactly why I am
not certain, but there was a stalling on the part of our Yankee allies, and the
capture was postponed. This was when Booth came unhinged and shot the
president.
Booth's rash and irrational act placed everyone in
jeopardy. Stanton became so scared that he acted totally different from his
usual self. He was not involved in any of our plans, so far as we know, but he
acted as if he had been. He covered up a number of important facts and
completely distorted the history of the event. He suppressed evidence and kept
the facts from being disclosed, probably so that he could blame me and other
Confederates for the assassination. I have never been able to understand this. The
only person from the Lincoln crowd at the War Department who was in any way
involved in anything was Colonel William Wood. He appeared on one occasion at
my headquarters in Fauquier County with Booth. The two of them presented to me
a plan to take a large supply depot, but I have always believed that it was to
be a trap for my capture, and we never went in that direction. Booth firmly
believed that Colonel Wood was helping him and that he was assisting us, but I
have always thought that his motives were on behalf of the Union. Wood later
set up the Secret Service and was his usual corrupt self in its operation.
After the president was shot, Booth went south along
the same lines that had been set up for the capture. He was assisted by our
forces and crossed the Potomac River. He never was at Garrett’s farm, where he
was supposed to have been killed. He instead went up through Orange and across
the Blue Ridge. He was guided by men of my command from the time he crossed the
Rappahannock River and was passed from one partisan group to another. He spent
several days and nights in the Hawksbill cave known as the "Bear Hole” on
the western slope of the Blue Ridge. He was taken through Rockingham County by
men of the partisan rangers headquartered at Broadway and guided to the home of
his former wife at Harper’s Ferry, where he recuperated. He had had his leg set
three times by different doctors along the way, and the last one had put a hard
cast on it so he could travel. By the time he got to New York, his leg was
healed, and although he walked with a limp, he was able to bear weight on it.
He left California and went to Ceylon, where he was
admitted as a British subject. He had arranged for the assumption of the
identity of another {John Byron Wilkes} and had proper papers to prove that
identity, having arranged with the man in question to assume his identity. All
this had been arranged by the wife of the colonel (Union) who was, whether he
knew it or not, cooperating with us.
Booth died in India in 1883 while I was in Hong Kong
as consul there. I notified General Lomax who was much relieved by the news. We
had both feared that the man would come forth with a statement which would
compromise us both, even though we were both completely innocent of any
involvement in the murder of President Lincoln. While General Grant was
president, he had commissioned an investigation into the strange circumstances
surrounding the deaths of certain officials of the United States Government. He
had chosen General Wallace to supervise it and had used government detectives
who took leaves of absence while they investigated. It was the final conclusion
of these investigators that there was no plot to do away with ex-government men
from those war years. In later years, I have been unable to find those records,
and someone should search them out and see what they contain if they have not
been destroyed.
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