This is a series where we seek out at least one good solid conspiracy theory about each President of the United States. We prefer those which were active at the time the President in question was, and the theory should be considered, by a majority of Mainstream Historians (as any good Conspiracy Theorist knows them) have decided is pretty surly phony. And it is cheating for me to make up my own. Thus we have not even MENTIONED the possibility that Martin Van Buren was actually a very large koala.
We have now reached our sixteenth president, one Abraha Lincoln. It would make a whole nother blog to assign a ranking to him, but he is certainly one of the top ten most theoried presidents. The stories start before his birth and run right up through his death, and the theories about his assassination alone would fill a couple of blogs (and have already filled books.) I can touch on only a few here, as I want to avoid making a career out of this (and attracting hostile fire from the people who actually have.)
Did Abraham Lincoln help cover up his mother’s illegitimacy? Historians feel Abe was led to believe in his youth that his mother’s parents were married and a number of historians suggest they actually were.
Did Abraham Lincoln cover up his own illegitimate birth? Thoms Lincoln is nobody’s favorite character in this story. By all accounts a slow-moving, slow-thinking man (he was eight years old when he saw his own father killed and would have died next to his father’s body had his older brother not picked up a rifle: does anybody blame his personality, or lack of it, on that?), he is felt by some theorists to have been simply too dumb to be the father of a major figure in American history. As the very spot of his son’s birth is argued by some theorists (North Carolina instead of Kentucky), arguing about famous Southerners who would have made more logical genetic sources has grown up as a hobby as well. Those spoilsport Mainstream Historians point out that Nancy Lincoln was a much more intellectual type (she taught Thomas how to read; he never mastered writing) and let it go at that.
Who did plan to kill Abraham Lincoln? Any good conspiracy theorist knows better than to blame the fellow with his hand on the trigger: who was BEHIND John Wilkes Booth? (And if you want a less-traveled conspiracy theory road, go into the question of whether Booth died when the official histories say, or escaped and lived on in deep regret somewhere in the Wild West.) The idea that Jefferson Davis, the still defiant President of the Confederacy, had planned the whole thing as a means of starting the war over COULD actually have let the war go on. Lincoln’s Secretary of War, Edwin M. Stanton, who was in charge of the hunt for John Wilks Booth, is accused of botching the search on purpose so Booth would not mention Stanton had hired him at the behest of a bunch of Northern millionaires who wanted to plunder the Southern finances. Andrew Johnson, Lincoln’s Vice President, was said to have done it to gratify Northern businessmen himself (this possibility was investigated at the time, and nothing came of it; the fact that the member of the Booth gang given the job of assassinating Johnson went off and got drunk instead is at the heart of this theory). Members of Congress who felt Lincoln would be too soft on the South after the war did it so they could get revenge on the Southern states and make a profit. Pope Pus IX, whom we have already visited in this series, ordered it because the United States was always a threat to the evil Catholic takeover of the civilized world (AND the Surratts, mother and son who went to the gallows for being part of the Booth gang, were Catholic, so what more proof is needed?) I am alarmed to find no evidence that anyone accused the Freemasons of having something to do with it; maybe I just haven’t found the right source. Or one of the people already mentioned was a good Mason, and thus part of two separate evil plots.
And those are just the birth and death conspiracies. For all the theories in between, you will have to climb into your own rabbit holes. The rest of us move on, since we’re only a third of the way through the Presidents. Anyway, if I go on much longer, I’ll start in on that theory that Edgar Allan Poe ghost-wrote the Gettysburg Address, and killed Lincoln for denying him credit. What’s that? Poe died in 1849, long before the Lincoln Presidency? Huh! That’s what the mainstream Historians want us to believe.
Blogsy Babbles 