Posted by: Phil Jayhan
February 21st, 2007
Original Link: General Links on Abraham Lincolns Assassination
- Abraham Lincoln Assassination – Complete coverage of the assassination of Abraham Lincoln is provided by this web site including a research service.
- Abraham Lincoln’s Assassination and Freemasonry – Explores the involvement of the Freemasons in the assassination; also draws parrallels to JFK’s murder.
- Abraham Lincoln’s White House Funeral Sermon – Complete text of the sermon delivered at Lincoln’s funeral.
- Assassination of Abraham Lincoln – Provides the assassination story with hundreds of organized links to primary sources, photographs, and documents from official US archives.
- Blood on the Moon – Edward Steers discusses his book, Blood on the Moon: The Assassination of Abraham Lincoln, on Booknotes.org.
- Did Lincoln Deserve to be Assassinated? – An alternative view of Lincoln’s Assassination. What were the motives behind the murder? Did Lincoln fit the definition of a tyrant? Did Lincoln preserve the Union at the price of individual liberty?
- Flight and capture of John H. Surratt – Excerpt from Gen. T. M. Harris’ book of the 1890s.
- Ford’s Theatre National Historic Site – Photos and a brief history of the site of the assassination, which is now managed by the National Park Service.
- Gen. Henry L. Burnett’s Memories of the Lincoln Assassination Trial – The text of a talk given by Brigadier-General Henry Lawrence Burnett, an assistant special judge advocate for the Lincoln Assassination Trial, to the Presbyterian Church of Goshen, NY on his memories of the times and the trial.
- Historical Coincidence – Describes some parallels and coincidences between Lincoln and Kennedy assasinations and other historic coincidences.
- Images of the Civil War – Lincoln’s Assassination – Photographs related to the assassination of Lincoln, including a large photograph of the hanging of the four conspirators.
- Lincoln Assassination Report – Police blotter listing the assassination of President Abraham Lincoln, 11:00 p.m., April 14, 1865. National Archives, Records of the Government of the District of Columbia.
- The Lincoln Writings of Charles P.T. Chiniquy – Includes excerpts from Chiniquy’s controversial writings that suggest Lincoln’s assassination stemmed from a Jesuit plot. Also includes background information on Chiniquy.
- Mr. Lincoln’s Virtual Library-assassination – Account of the assassination with contemporary illustrations. From the Library of Congress.
- News of Abraham Lincoln’s Death – Official dispatches as published in the New York Times following Lincoln’s death.
- Surratt House Museum – The home of Mary Surratt, who was executed for her alleged part in the assassination plot.
- The Web of Conspiracy – The story of the 1865 Conspiracy Trial told through contemporary news reports and illustrations.
- Wet With Blood – The Chicago Historical reproduces a classic text that examines the physical evidence of Lincoln’s assassination.
John Wilkes Booth – General Information on Booth
Original Link: General Information on John Wilkes Booth
- The Capture of John Wilkes Booth – Official cavalry report describes Booth’s capture.
- Colossus of Rhodes – Minibiography of John Wilkes Booth includes analysis of assassin’s personality and details of the conspiracy.
- The Death of John Wilkes Booth – The last moments of Lincoln’s assassin, described by eyewitness Lieutenant Edward Doherty.
- Did John Wilkes Booth Flee to Granbury – Examines the story that Booth fled to this Texas town shortly after taking the President’s life.
- A History of John Wilkes Booth – Tells the story of Booth’s life, focusing on the years before his infamous act.
- John Wilkes Booth – The Postmortem Career of John Wilkes Booth
- John Wilkes Booth: A Catholic? – Contends that Booth was not a Catholic and, therefore, not the agent of a Catholic Church conspiracy as some have suggested.
- The John Wilkes Booth Exhumation Case Brief – A summary of the court proceedings in which Green Mount Cemetery fought the exhumation of the body believed to be Booth’s.
- John Wilkes Booth’s Autopsy – Attempts to dispel rumors that John Wilkes Booth escaped by providing details of his positive identification and the doctor’s account of his autopsy.
- The Life and Plot of John Wilkes Booth – Biography and photographs of John Wilkes Booth as well as information on his plot to assassinate Abraham Lincoln.
- Life, Crime and Capture of John Wilkes Booth – News letters about John Wilkes Booth, written for a newspaper during the time the events were happening.
- On the Track of the Assassin John Wilkes Booth – Freelance journalist and author Bob Allen reflects on the crime that claimed the life of a President.
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The President, the Pope, and the Pastor
The Catholic Connections to Lincoln’s Murder
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| “After twenty years of constant and most difficult research, I come fearlessly today before the American people, to say and prove that the president, Abraham Lincoln, was assassinated by the priests and the Jesuits of Rome.” — Charles Chiniquy, Fifty Years in the Church of Rome |
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Posted by: Phil Jayhan
February 21st, 2007
Original Link: http://www.weirdload.com/lincoln.html
Pastor Charles Chiniquy (above right), born in 1809, was a noted French Canadian ex-priest who left the Roman confession after a long struggle with the bishop of Chicago over property (among other issues).
His most important book, Fifty Years in the Church of Rome is powerful, part autobiography, part diatribe, and a scathing indictment of the Roman Catholic Church. The grim picture he paints of greedy bishops and lascivious priests sounds so familiar, it proves that in some respects at least the Church is indeed changeless through the ages.
Charles Chiniquy was a famous and respected priest known as “apostle of temperance to Canada” for his work promoting sobriety. Hence the shock of his leaving was that much greater. No taint of scandal clung to him, despite the efforts of the Catholic hierarchy to discredit him after he left the Roman Church. In his book, he claims he was physically assaulted numerous times, even being stoned on occasion, by papist mobs for speaking out. He ultimately became an independent Catholic bishop and a revered founder of the Community Church movement.
Chiniquy may have had an ax to grind but he was no raving lunatic. After all, he was a personal friend of Honest Abe’s and owed him his freedom, if not his life. He even visited him several times at the White House.
The future president had saved him from prison and probable death during his legal battles with the minions of the bishop of Chicago in the late 1850s, and Chiniquy said he told Lincoln at the time that that alone was enough to make him a marked man. The evidence Chiniquy gathered was highly circumstantial but intriguing, nonetheless.
The Conspirators and the Church
In the first place, Booth and the other conspirators, Chiniquy claimed, were devout or at least closet Roman Catholics. Priests frequented Mrs. Surratt’s boardinghouse, which served as the plotters’ rendezvous. Indeed, several priests actually lived there.
Her son, John Surrat, escaped the noose (unlike his devout mother), by fleeing to Canada where priests harbored him. When he was finally discovered and returned for trial in 1867, believe it or not, he was serving in the Pope’s guard at the Vatican.
Chiniquy claimed that the Roman Church, because of its autocratic principles, favored the South, and in any case wanted civil war to weaken America and its support of liberty in general. He claimed that Lincoln was well aware of this, and that the hierarchy had fomented conspiracies against him, but did not make it publicly known, lest it “become a war of extermination on both sides.” The false rumors that Lincoln had been born Catholic, Chiniquy said, were spread by the Jesuits to make it appear that Lincoln was an apostate and renegade, and thus deserving of the ultimate fate the Church saved for heretics — death.
Chiniquy claimed that the South would never have dared attack the North without assurances of covert assistance from the Church. He did make some extreme claims, such as that Beauregard was chosen to fire the opening shot at Ft. Sumter because he was Catholic, that the bishop of New York was responsible for the anti-draft riots and the failure of Meade, a Catholic, to pursue Lee after Gettysburg was due to the direct intercession of a Jesuit.
Even more intriguing is the fact, attested by sworn affidavits, that priests at the monastery near the town of St. Joseph in Minnesota, far beyond the reach of train and telegraph, were talking about the killings of both Lincoln and Seward some four hours before the attacks occurred. Chiniquy claimed that the clergy in Minnesota were “intimate friends” of those lurking at Mrs. Surratt’s nest of spies, though he produced no proof of this.
However, in 1864 Pope Pius IX wrote Jefferson Davis a letter that was made public, addressing him as the President of the Confederacy — in effect becoming the only foreign power to recognize the South. Chiniquy claimed that he told Lincoln that this was “a poisoned arrow thrown by the pope at you personally and it will be more than a miracle if it be not your irrevocable warrant of death.”
Why would the Pope favor the South? The papacy had been humiliated, if not humbled, by Napoleon and the excesses of the French Revolution. Pius, though he ascended to the throne as a liberal, became a bitter reactionary. More than once, the French army had to save him from the Italians rebels seeking to reuinte the peninsula.
During his extremely long reign, the Papal States were forever lost and the pope became a prisoner of the Vatican. But having lost his grip on the state, Pius acted ruthlessly to make sure he had total control over the Church, by convening the First Vatican Council and ramrodding through the doctrine of “papal infallibility.” This new dogma, like that of the Immaculate Conception of Mary which he also promulgated, disgusted many, including some bishops who left to form the “Old Catholics.”
In a similar vein, Pius also promulgated the infamous Syllabus of Errors, which condemned secret societies such as the Masons, along with such radical notions as the separation of church and state, freedom of religion and public schools. After bewailing the state of the Church in Europe, he wrote, “Nor are things any better or circumstances calmer in America, where some regions are so hostile to Catholics that their governments seem to deny by their actions the Catholic faith they claim to profess.”
Pius, despite his liberal beginnings, became a true autocrat. Perhaps that was enough to make him fear the democracy and egalitarianism of the American experiment. There was also the dangerous practice, especially in the United States, of congregations themselves owning the property and assets of the Church. This was seen as an attack on the authority of the bishops and by extension, the papacy, and would ultimately be defined as heretical. Thus Pius had reason to dread the growing power of the United States. His support of the Confederacy would not be as much for its victory as for the Union’s defeat.
The Day of Atonement
The one fact that may be most significant is one that all theorists including Chiniquy seem to have ignored completely: April 14, 1865 was not just any Friday, but Good Friday. Perhaps this oversight was because the president’s life lingered until Saturday. To most historians, who see the assassination largely as a crime of opportunity triggered by the fall of the Confederacy, this means nothing; but even if it was, would Booth and his fellow plotters have seen it that way? Would it not be seen as entirely providential and foreordained that the “bloodthirsty tyrant” be slain the very day Christ was crucified? Would it not have given a fanatic even further impetus?
And how, for that matter, did the fact that Lincoln was shot on Good Friday contribute to his later being deified as the “savior” of the country?
As with that other assassination nearly a century later of a “martyred” Catholic president by a “lone gunman”, the truth will never be known. But considering the equally dubious conspiracy theories in regard to Kennedy that seem less implausible as time goes on, it may not be quite so easy to dismiss the Catholic connection to Lincoln’s murder as it once was.
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Links
Assassination of Abraham Lincoln
Lincoln’s Assassination Theories
Fifty Years in the Church of Rome
Rev. Charles Chiniquy
Pope Pius IX
Who was Charles Chiniquy? Facts versus Falsehood
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