On this day in conspiracies

Two days after Lee's surrender at Appomattox, and after the Confederate government has fled Richmond and effectively collapsed, Lincoln speaks in favor of limited Black suffrage. Booth, in the crowd, reportedly vows it will be Lincoln's last speech. The documented pivot from abduction to murder happens here.

Standing in the crowd outside the White House, Booth hears Lincoln endorse limited voting rights for Black men who had served in the war. By a companion's account he responded that it meant citizenship for freed people and vowed it would be Lincoln's last speech, even pressing the companion to shoot the president on the spot. Historians treat the moment as the trigger that hardened his abduction scheme into a plan to kill.

Christopher Columbus Gray, a fisherman near Buxton, North Carolina, claims to have found a message in a bottle reading that the Deering was captured by an oil-burning boat and its crew handcuffed, a note federal agents later expose, on 26 August, as a forgery Gray wrote himself, collapsing the piracy theory it had fueled.

The subcommittee releases its final report, again alleging that an attack, including onboard explosive charges, caused the crash and blaming Russia. It produces no evidence able to overturn the 2011 conclusions, and its claims are not accepted by international investigators.