Boston Corbett

Preposterous Historical Figure of the Week
Boston Corbett

When it comes to presidential assassins and attempted assassins, we have their descriptions already in mind. The presidential assassin is a loner and outcast like Lee Harvey Oswald who couldn't even fit in with the Communists, a possibly mentally ill fanatic like Charles Guiteau, Squeaky Fromme and John Hinckley, or a foreign radical like Leon Czolgosz or Giuseppe Zangara.

As for the people who catch up with these villains or prevent the deed, they are dashing men, filled with passion and derring do, and possibly mustachioed.

These presidential assassination archetypes…they didn’t start with the first presidential assassination, Lincoln's. In fact, you might say they started out the reverse.

In all the villainization that John Wilkes Booth has undergone over the years (and oh yes, deservedly so), it's easy to forget who he was before he became America's Judas. The man was a famous actor, and the brother and son of a famous actor as well, and quite the ladies man, dying with five women's portraits in his pocket. It'd be like if a young Jeff Bridges had decided to off the president. Booth likely used the shelter that this fame gave him in order to be a Confederate smuggler and spy during the war, though he never served in the army.

His assassination of the president was absolutely premeditated, due to his Southern nationalism, and the product of typical human egomania rather than any neurological disease or loose screw. He went about his assassination of the president and his flight from justice with an actor's flair for drama. He shot Lincoln on a balcony in Ford's Theater during a laugh line in the play, jumped down to the stage yelling "Sic Semper Tyrannis" but landed badly and broke his leg. He managed to escape and was on the run from the law for eleven days, penning several hilariously pathetic diary entries along the way bitching about the way he was being painted not as a hero but as a common killer.

But the law caught up with him at the Garrett family's tobacco shed in Virginia. Booth's accomplice gave himself up, but Booth remained inside the shed, even as it was set ablaze. Then a shot rang out, finding Booth through a sizable crack in the side of the shed. Booth staggered out of flaming shed, mortally wounded. His last request was for the people present to "Tell my mother I died for my country." Then he reportedly stared at his failing hands, muttered "Useless, useless" and died with the break of dawn.

What a drama queen.

Booth's killer, Boston Corbett had fired without orders, so he was placed under arrest as a formality. Some within the government and public had wanted Booth to be brought to trial so he could be executed publicly and properly. Corbett's stated reasons for shooting Booth varied. Once he told it as a matter of self defense, that Booth had raised his pistol and he was only defending his own life and the lives of the other men. He said at another point that not even Booth deserved to be burned to death like that. But judging by the man's prior history, and the course his life took afterwards, I tend to think his most honest version was when he claimed that God had told him to shoot Booth.

Corbett testified:"When the assassin lay at my feet, a wounded man, and I saw the bullet had taken effect about an inch back of the ear, and I remembered that Mr. Lincoln was wounded about the same part of the head, I said: 'What a God we have…God avenged Abraham Lincoln.'”

You see, Corbett saw himself as a rather dedicated servant of his Lord. He was born Thomas Corbett in England and came over as a child, making his living as a hatter when he was old enough. Anyone who has ever heard how Lewis Carroll came up with the idea of a Mad Hatter just might see where this is going, as mercury exposure can have a disastrous way with the mind. He wound up in Boston and this is where he was saved, so he rechristened himself after the city where he had found his Lord. He grew his hair long because that's how Jesus had worn his hair. He upheld the principles of the church in the face of opposition, even getting tossed in the guardhouse while serving in the Union army for reprimanding his superior for taking the Lord's name in vain, and went there cheerfully.

Oh yes, and then there's the time that he became a eunuch to live according to the Bible...by his own hand. Boston's wife had died in childbirth, and he never remarried. As the story was told by a contemporary who claimed to have known the man put it, one day while he was leaving a prayer meeting...

"He was accosted by two young women who sought unsuccessfully to inveigle him from the path of virtue. Desiring to have no inclinations in that direction (as he said "to be holy"), he proceeded to self-castration, for which he was treated in the Massachusetts General Hospital, from July 16 to August 18, 1858."

That's right. His wife died, and to avoid the lure of prostitutes, he castrated himself with a pair of scissors. In some reports of the incident, he came back down from his room, ate a hearty meal and went to another prayer meeting before seeking medical attention. In particularly lurid version of the tale that I found, the pair of bloody scissors was left in the Bible he was reading for guidance, holding it open to the motivating passage, Matthew 5:29 : "And if thy right eye offend thee, pluck it out, and cast it from thee: for it is profitable for thee that one of thy members should perish, and not that thy whole body should be cast into hell."

Yup, so apparently you don't need much by way of a member to take down John Wilkes Booth.

Corbett's time in custody was a formality, considering that he'd probably shortened Booth's life about a week and a half, and it wasn't like those grieving Lincoln didn't want someone to rally around. Secretary of War Stanton proclaimed him a patriot and had him released.

Former Andersonville prisoner, current presidential avenger Boston Corbett found himself suddenly famous, posing for photographs, being pestered to make speeches, getting offered thousands of dollars for the pistol that had killed Booth. He didn't waste any chances to use his fame to sermonize and try to win souls, as the years wore on, his fame took a darker turn.

Doesn't he just radiate sanity?

He had trouble collecting his reward money and wound up only getting 1,653.95 of it, his split of the reward money that he had to split with all the other men that had been with him, as he'd shot Booth without orders, and the government was still a little miffed about that. Still a pretty big sum for the day, but a fraction of what the pistol that had killed Booth would have got him if he'd gone back on his decision not to sell it because "it was government property." Trouble was, his admirers had grown tired of trying to buy it off him, and someone stole it.

Also, it must be remembered here that Booth hadn't acted in a vacuum, that there were plenty who would have taken a shot at the president if he'd failed, and they weren't quite as taken with the austere long haired, wild-eyed Union soldier who'd shot Booth down like a dog. He began to get hate mail that said things like
"HELL, September 1, 1874
Boston Corbett: Nemesis is on your path.
J.Wilkes Booth"

Several newspapers printed the erroneous story that he'd been murdered in Baltimore and he considered it a portent of disaster. Receiving daily death threats would have been tough for a man with a wholly intact mind, and Boston Corbett didn't quite have that. Admirers and autograph-seekers didn't come 'round quite as often anymore after Corbett started greeting them with a drawn pistol, a frisking and heavy questioning. He was arrested and courtmartialed for pulling a gun on another sergeant while at a military stable and reprimanded.

Though I can't believe that he could have found much appreciation in the thought, Corbett was now feeling persecuted, pursued and conspired against, much like the man he'd killed to gain his fame. He got his discharge and took his reward money and got the hell out of the limelight, moving to Concordia, Kansas in 1878.

He got himself a homestead, and was much in demand in the area as a revival preacher. I don't know if it was his infamous past that people came for, or what was probably some top-notch fire and brimstone rhetoric. He'd still confide to people that he was sure that Booth's friends were conspiring against him.

There's also this amazing anecdote that seems almost beneath him. The town's young people would play ball by his homestead, and sometimes these games would fall on Sundays, which you can imagine would infuriate him. I feel bad for the guy, I really do, a desperately paranoid mentally ill man, who only got cracked up worse upon receiving fame instead of any sort of treatment. But the thought of him as the cranky old man who wants to chase kids off his lawn for playing ball on Sunday just kills me. The way that he did this by driving them away screaming that it was Jehovah's command, is a little less quaint.

When the ballplayers complained to the magistrate and had Corbett brought before the court to tell his side, things went a little more out of lovable crankpot territory. He told the judge and jury that they were in league with the devil, and must disperse. As he'd pulled out his revolver, they were happy to oblige. So he left and rode back home.

Apparently in 1887 in Kansas these sorts of actions qualify one for a role in government, and some upstanding citizen got the idea that they should reward the man who'd shot Booth with a civil service position. Boston Corbett was nominated and ran unopposed for the position of assistant doorkeeper of the Kansas State Legislature. According to an account of this questionable decision that I found in a history of Kansas "one member who knew Boston was heard to remark that the legislature would be in luck if Corbett didn’t get a notion in his head that he was called by the Lord to kill off a few lawmakers before the session ended."

It's nice to get a little confirmation that these people knew that Boston's career as assistant doorkeeper wasn't likely to last a great many years and end in graceful retirement, since it seems like it should be blindingly obvious. He didn't last a year before becoming convinced that some of these legislators were in league of the devil, as they were known to curse. He drew his revolver, and had himself a bit of a standoff until many police and deputies managed to overpower him.

He was brought before a judge who had him committed. But Corbett escaped the asylum in 1888 due to a young boy leaving his horse tied up too near to the hospital grounds, the 19th century equivalent of an unlocked car with keys in the ignition. Corbett rode away and left the horse tied up with a note to return it to its owner. He stayed with an old Andersonville buddy in Neodesha, KS, then left, claiming that he was sick and tired of this sort of treatment and was lighting out for Mexico.

There's no kind of confirmed word for him after that. Some people say he returned to East Coast and became a peddlar. Some say he became a hermit in Minnesota and died in the Great Hinckley fire. But Enid, Oklahoma thinks they are Boston Corbett's burial spot.

Interestingly enough Enid, OK is also the origin point of the John Wilkes Booth mummy. In Granbury, TX in 1873, a salesman named John St. Helen "confessed" on what he thought was his deathbed to lawyer Finis L. Bates, that he was John Wilkes Booth. St Helen then recovered from his illness and left town. Thirty years later in Enid, Oklahoma, David E. George , a local drunken house painter was also known to confess to being John Wilkes Booth. One day he bought a small dose of strychnine from one apothecary, then another dose from another apothecary, and mixed them into a suicidal dose in his hotel room.

Finis L. Bates showed up to view the body, identified it as John St. Helen, and parlayed into a lucrative career as the author books about the dark conspiracy behind Lincoln's death, and Booth's escape. He took the embalmed body with him on his speaking tour for his book, bringing this Booth mummy to the World's Fair in 1904. The mummy made the rounds in carnivals and sideshows until it disappeared sometime in the 70s.

Anything I looked into on whether Corbett had really died in Enid, Oklahoma eventually led back to this, and no other sort of evidence, so I'm wondering if the two men's fates just got so entwined together in people's minds that the Booth impostor's deathplace was assumed to be the last resting place of Boston Corbett as well. Or maybe Finis L. Bates started the rumor in order to prop up the idea that this mummy was Booth, maybe eventually planning to plant a story that Booth's supposed killer had recognized the mummy. Or hell, maybe the Enid Okies just wanted to drum up some kind of interest in the place.

A theory that I found in some guy's blog that I like but I can't begin to believe is that the Booth mummy is actually Boston Corbett, and in the final throes of his madness he began to believe that he was Booth. After all, for years Corbett had been paranoid that Booth's friends would kill him. He'd been obsessing over the man that he'd killed, and seeing the ways that this action would someday lead to his own end. What if, in a Hitchcockian turn of events, his mind scrambled to the point that he thought he was actually this man he was fixated with, and confessed it to Finis. L. Bates, and the good townspeople of Enid, Oklahoma? Wouldn't that be a hell of a yarn?

Sorry, monsigneur, that dog won't hunt. I want to think that Boston Corbett found some nice place in Mexico where no one knew him, and he farmed for a while, and had some peace and quiet in his twilight years. And that hopefully he never had to brandish a revolver in the name of his Lord again.

However he ended up, Boston Corbett sure is a neglected and weirdass footnote in the Lincoln assassination tale.

For Boston Corbett, I play the Gories. Because it seems appropriately Western, ominous and mad.