July 7, 1865 - Booth Conspirators are executed

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All of the Lincoln conspirator execution pictures were taken by the team of the esteemed battlefield photographer Alexander Gardner inside the walls of the prison yard of the Old Arsenal Penitentiary in Washington, D.C. No other photographers were authorized to be present.

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By today's standards, the executions would have taken place 15-20 years because of the appeals.
As it should be if the state wants to issue a death sentence. Would be an interesting development had they been tried by the court system and not a military tribunal and had appeals, certainly in the case of Surratt.
I'm of the school of thought that believes Mary Surratt did not deserve the death penalty. I feel she was a lesser conspirator who was kept in the dark about Booth's real objective. I believe she deserved a jail sentence, but not what she ultimately got.
Everything I've read makes me believe she was just as involved as everyone else. I tend to think they got the charge for her correct.
 
I'm of the school of thought that believes Mary Surratt did not deserve the death penalty. I feel she was a lesser conspirator who was kept in the dark about Booth's real objective. I believe she deserved a jail sentence, but not what she ultimately got.
Meanwhile there were others who were involved who didn't get charged.
 
Meanwhile there were others who were involved who didn't get charged.
Yes. And then there was Mary Surratt's son John, who escaped to Canada and then Europe before being apprehended in 1866. He was then tried in a civil court, the trial ended in a hung jury, and the charges against him were ultimately dropped.
 
I read the Evening Star newspaper report last night for July 6 and 7. On the sixth, it says the temperatures were in the mid-eighties in the shade. The next day of the hanging, I assume it to have been nearly the same, hence the umbrellas.
I had not realized that Payne had a change of heart, and understood he had acted rashly, and was remorseful. All of the condemned forgave the Union men before they were put to death by hanging.
Lubliner.
 
Was the John Wilkes Booth conspiracy the "anti-John Brown conspiracy" or the "counter-John Brown" actions within the U.S. 19th century conflict that "started" in bleeding Kansas and ended in the fratricide of the U.S. Civil War and Reconstruction-era terror?

Carola Dietze, translated from the German by David Antal, James Bell and Zachary Murphy King, The Invention of Terrorism in Europe, Russia and the United States (Verso, 2021), argued that there were five men who "founded" modern terrorism between 1858 and 1866:

--Felice Orsini, who attempted to assassinate Napoleon III in 1858
--John Brown, who attacked the Harpers Ferry U.S. arsenal to start an insurrectionary servile war in the slave states in 1859
--Oskar Wilhelm Becker, who tried to assassinate König/Kaiser Wilhelm I of Prussia in 1861
--John Wilkes Booth, who murdered Abraham Lincoln, POTUS in 1865
--Dmitry Vladomirovich Karakozov, who tried to kill Czar Alexander II in 1866 [Ultimately, he was blown up with nitroglycerine by the Narodnaya Volya or "peoples will" on 13 Mar. 1881...]
 
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By today's standards, the executions would have taken place 15-20 years because of the appeals.
Oh, I don't know... if the conspirators were living abroad, they might be "droned" by a Hellfire missile, no? Hope that's not too "modern day" or "political" for the moderators. If so, then my apologies. Seemed germane to bankerpawpaw's post?
 
Was the John Wilkes Booth conspiracy the "anti-John Brown conspiracy" or the "counter-John Brown" actions within the U.S. 19th century conflict that "started" in bleeding Kansas and ended in the fratricide of the U.S. Civil War and Reconstruction-era terror?

Carola Dietze, translated from the German by David Antal, James Bell and Zachary Murphy King, The Invention of Terrorism in Europe, Russia and the United States (Verso, 2021), argued that there were five men who "founded" modern terrorism between 1858 and 1866:

--Felice Orsini, who attempted to assassinate Napoleon III in 1858
--John Brown, who attacked the Harpers Ferry U.S. arsenal to start an insurrectionary servile war in the slave states in 1859
--Oskar Wilhelm Becker, who tried to assassinate Koenig Wilhelm I of Prussia in 1861
--John Wilkes Booth, who murdered Abraham Lincoln, POTUS in 1865
--Dmitry Vladomirovich Karakozov, who tried to kill Czar Alexander II in 1866 [Ultimately, he was blown up with nitroglycerine by the Narodnaya Volya or "peoples will" on 13 Mar. 1881...]
That's an interesting theory. How does Dietze define "terrorism"? I ask because I don't think the Booth conspirators were trying to terrorize the population. Rather, I think they were trying to directly topple the federal executive branch (as deluded as they were about the probable effects of their actions, even if they had succeeded in assassinating all their targets).
 
Certainly one sees a more indiscriminate targeting of people over time, which may or may not coincide with the emergence of total war, no?

I mean specific people in powerful positions are the early targets for the most part... Emperors, presidents, potentates, the highly placed... By the late 19th century one sees rather more nationalist terrorism that goes after lower-level figures, Irish Fenianism, the Balkans, etc. etc. By the post-WWII era there is true "terrorism" that is increasingly indiscriminate and wanton, like Algeria and other wars of national liberation. Here inflicting suffering relatively wantonly becomes a norm, perhaps driven by the experiences of WWI and WWII where entire populations are targeted and the ideas of total war are born: "If every soldier can be killed by pretty much any means--poison gas, artillery, mines, bullets, etc. etc. then why not the factory worker too? Why not the factory worker's family? Why not the soldier's family? Why not all Armenians--or whoever?" The founder of modern bombing strategy, Giulio Douhet, made these objectives quite explicit in his treatises on air power... But they awaited application in the interwar period in colonial wars and in the Spanish Civil War, China, followed notoriously by the bombing campaigns of WWII in Europe and Asia... So suddenly all the Arabs or Berbers or Pied Noirs or French can be ruthlessly assailed, attacked and murdered... The Arab-Israeli conflict would be a further instance where ethno-nationalism leads to any member of the enemy group becoming, outrageously and contemptibly "fair game." By the 1970s and 1980s there is politically motivated terrorism, car bombing, train bombing, airliner bombing, mass-casualty attacks and more discriminate or targeted stuff going on all over, and the adoption of terrorist methods by nation states, and then in the post-Cold War era the commonly cited age of the internet meets 12th century fanaticism or 16th century religious wars that we presently inhabit. Add to that the phenomenon of private individual fantasies, delusions, and grudges resulting out in so-called "lone wolf" actions...
 
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