Confronting Bad History: How a Lost Cause and Fraudulent Book Caused the John Wilkes Booth Exhumation Trial Paperback – January 23, 2025

Confronting Bad History is about our history’s most infamous villain and debunks the conspiracy stories that Booth escaped justice and that Vice President Johnson was a co-conspirator in the assassination.Booth’s assassination of President Lincoln is the most infamous political assassination in U.S. history. The assassination of Lincoln suddenly ended the prospect of peace with malice toward none, with charity for all. The collective expectations of the people – reconstruction, reconciliation, and equality -- were shattered. Most importantly, the assassination pushed aside Black freedom and civil rights for nearly 100 years.The traditional history is that Booth was tracked down by the New York 16th Cavalry, captured, shot, and died at Garrett Farm in Virginia, on April 26, 1865. On June 26, 1869, Booth was buried in Green Mount Cemetery in Baltimore. Rumors of Booth sightings popped up occasionally, but they never developed into a complete narrative. This changed in 1907. In a book entitled The Escape and Suicide of John Wilkes Booth, author Finis L. Bates created a Booth-escaped-justice story that implicated Vice-President Johnson and Booth in a conspiracy to assassinate Lincoln. Bates asserted that Booth did not die on April 26, 1865, but instead escaped justice and lived until 1903.The 1907 book ebbed in and out of public consciousness until two Booth escape proponents talked NBC’s Unsolved Mysteries into producing a Booth-escaped-justice episode in 1991. This gave wide publicity to the Booth-escaped-justice conspiracy story. Moreover, it emboldened the proponents to request the exhumation of Booth’s remains buried in Green Mount Cemetery. The request was denied, and an impasse was reached. The proponents and two distant relatives filed a lawsuit in the Circuit Court for Baltimore City, resulting in a 1995 trial in which sixteen witnesses testified -- anthropologist, a medical examiner, history scholars, historians, and others. The trial attracted national attention and publicity.Frank represented the Cemetery at trial. He describes the history surrounding the conspiracy story, the four-day trial, the witnesses, the evidence, the tactics, the examinations and cross-examinations of witnesses, and the judicial decisions. The trial exposed the Bates book as a Lost Cause false narrative.Yet the Booth escaped story persists in books sold by Amazon and on You Tube. Confronting Bad History gives voice to the Baltimore trial and confirms that Booth met his fate at Garrett Farm on April 26, 1865. Read more