# The Confederate government in Richmond, and Jefferson Davis himself, secretly ordered the assassination of Abraham Lincoln, using John Wilkes Booth as its agent

**No verdict.** The established record is real and often surprising: John Wilkes Booth had traceable contact with the Confederate secret service operating out of Canada, carried Confederate money, and ran his original plot, to kidnap Lincoln, through a genuine Confederate underground of couriers and safe houses. The claim we rate is the step beyond that: that Richmond, or Jefferson Davis personally, ordered the murder. It is unproven. The switch from abduction to assassination is dated to the days after Appomattox, when the Confederate government had already fled Richmond and ceased to function, and the 1865 trial's central evidence for a Davis-directed killing came from witnesses later exposed as paid perjurers. No dispatch ordering the assassination has ever been produced, and the government that most wanted to hang Davis ultimately declined to try him for it. Serious historians still debate how far Confederate sanction reached; that Booth was a Confederate partisan with Confederate contacts is documented, that Richmond commanded the murder is not.

Category: Government & Intelligence · Era: 1860s · First circulated: The accusation was made officially by the United States government at the 1865 military commission, which charged Jefferson Davis and the Confederate agents in Canada with having incited and procured the assassination. The scholarly case was revived in 1988 by Come Retribution and in 2001 by Blood on the Moon. · Believed by: A serious minority of intelligence and Civil War historians who argue for a strong Confederate connection, alongside a broader popular sense that a killing this large must have had a state behind it. The academic mainstream treats Confederate direction of the murder as unproven and probably false.
URL: https://theconspiratory.com/theory/confederate-lincoln-assassination

## Summary
This is the one grand theory about Lincoln's death that credible historians still argue over. Booth did not act in a vacuum: he traveled to Montreal in 1864 and met Confederate agents at their known hub, carried a Canadian bill of exchange found later on his body, and built his plot to kidnap Lincoln on the Confederacy's real underground of couriers and safe houses. When the abduction scheme failed and Booth turned to murder, the 1865 military commission charged that the order had come from Richmond and named Jefferson Davis. The case rested heavily on witnesses who were soon exposed as paid perjurers, the assassination charge against Davis was quietly dropped, and he was never tried for it. This file keeps the established record, that Booth was tied into a Confederate covert network running a sanctioned kidnapping plan, separate from the claim it rates, that Richmond or Davis ordered the killing. On the evidence, the second remains unproven.

## The claim
That the assassination of Abraham Lincoln was not the improvisation of a Confederate sympathizer but an operation ordered or sanctioned by the Confederate government, coordinated through its secret service in Canada and Richmond, with John Wilkes Booth acting as its paid agent, and that Jefferson Davis and his covert apparatus were the true authors of the crime.

## Origin and timeline
- 1864: Jefferson Davis sends a Confederate commission to Canada under Jacob Thompson, a former United States Interior Secretary. Working from Montreal and Toronto, often called the Canadian Cabinet, its agents run raids, sabotage, and propaganda against the Union from neutral British soil.
- 1864-10-18: Booth arrives in Montreal and registers at the St. Lawrence Hall hotel, the known hub of Confederate operatives. Over about ten days he meets the Confederate agent and blockade-runner Patrick Martin and the operative George Sanders, moving into the orbit of Thompson's ring. What was actually said is not recorded.
- 1864-10-27: Booth obtains a bill of exchange drawn on the Ontario Bank of Montreal, a Canadian financial instrument later found on his body at the Garrett farm. Martin agrees to forward Booth's theatrical wardrobe south by blockade-runner; the men who receive it become links in his later escape network through southern Maryland.
- 1864-1865: Back in the United States, Booth recruits a cell to capture Lincoln and hold him hostage for a mass prisoner exchange. This is a kidnapping conspiracy, run along the Confederacy's real courier lines, not a plan to kill.
- 1865-03-17: The kidnapping attempt fails when Lincoln changes his plans and never appears on the expected route. The cell begins to fracture, and some members pull back.
- 1865-04-11: 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.
- 1865-04-14: Booth shoots Lincoln at Ford's Theatre; Lewis Powell nearly kills Secretary of State Seward the same night; George Atzerodt fails to attack Vice President Johnson.
- 1865-05-01: President Andrew Johnson orders trial by military commission. The charge names Jefferson Davis and the Confederate agents in Canada as having incited and procured the assassination. Davis is captured in Georgia on 10 May and imprisoned. The prosecution's Canada witnesses claim to have seen Booth plotting the murder with Confederate agents.
- 1866: The Canadian testimony collapses. A House investigation exposes the prosecution's chief witness, Sanford Conover (real name Charles A. Dunham), as a fabricator who coached and paid others to lie. He is convicted of perjury and jailed, gutting the trial's central evidence for a Confederate-ordered killing.
- 1865-1869: Davis is never tried for the assassination. The government shifts to a treason charge, holds him until his release on bond in 1867, and in February 1869 enters a nolle prosequi, dismissing the case. In 1988 the study Come Retribution revives the argument for Confederate direction.

## The evidence, claim by claim
- Claim: Booth was inside the Confederate covert network, not merely a sympathizer, so the plot must have been Confederate business.
  Evidence: The connection is real and well documented, and it is the strongest part of the case. Booth's October 1864 trip to Montreal, his contacts at the St. Lawrence Hall, the Canadian bill of exchange found on his body, and an escape route that ran through the Confederacy's existing courier lines and safe houses all place him inside the network rather than beside it. A lone actor would not have known or been trusted with that infrastructure. But being an asset of a covert service for one purpose does not establish an order for another. The documented business Booth shared with Richmond's agents was the kidnapping scheme, not a killing.
- Claim: A cipher key found in Booth's trunk matched the cipher device in the Confederate State Department office in Richmond, proving a direct channel to the government.
  Evidence: This is true and striking, and it proves capability, not orders. Investigators recovered a cipher key associated with Booth that matched a cipher device taken from the Richmond office of the Confederate Secretary of State, who oversaw covert operations, and a War Department telegraph officer testified the two worked on the same system. What the match shows is that Booth had the means to communicate securely with Richmond's clandestine apparatus. What it does not contain is a message. No decrypted dispatch ordering Lincoln's death has ever been produced. A shared cipher is a channel, not a command.
- Claim: The 1865 trial established that Jefferson Davis and the Confederate leadership ordered the assassination.
  Evidence: The trial asserted it; it did not establish it. The prosecution's case for a Canada-run murder plot rested on Sanford Conover (Charles A. Dunham) and witnesses he produced. Within a year a Congressional inquiry exposed Conover as a serial perjurer who had coached and paid witnesses to fabricate their accounts; he was convicted and imprisoned. The single most important pillar of the Davis-ordered-it case collapsed. Prosecutors who badly wanted to convict Davis then dropped the assassination theory entirely, shifted to a treason charge, and finally declined to try him at all. When the side with every incentive to prove the order walks away, that is telling.
- Claim: A Confederate Torpedo Bureau agent was sent toward Washington in April 1865, showing Richmond planned to decapitate the Union leadership.
  Evidence: This is the intriguing thread that keeps the debate alive, and it is genuinely unresolved. Come Retribution documents that a Confederate demolition agent, Thomas Harney, was dispatched toward Washington in the war's final days, and reads it as evidence that Richmond contemplated a strike at the Union government. Skeptics read the same assignment as ordinary sabotage. Even on the strongest reading, a contemplated Confederate operation is not an order for Booth's specific act, and Harney was captured before reaching the capital. It widens what Richmond might have reached for; it does not prove what it commanded.
- Claim: After his capture, John Surratt himself said Jefferson Davis knew of the plot, which is direct testimony that Richmond was behind it.
  Evidence: There is a real documented line here, and it should be weighed for exactly what it is. In an 1866 dispatch from Rufus King, the United States Minister to the Papal States, the informant Henri Beaumont de Sainte-Marie reported that Surratt, confronted while hiding in the Papal Zouaves, admitted his part in the plot, said Jefferson Davis was privy to it, and seemed well provided with money. That is a specific, citable primary record, and it is the closest thing to a participant tying Davis to the scheme. But it is a single informant, hoping for a reward, relaying what Surratt is said to have said, not a document from Davis and not sworn testimony, and Surratt in his own 1870 public lecture admitted only the kidnapping and denied the murder. It is a genuine thread worth pulling, and it remains hearsay at two removes, which is why it deepens the debate rather than closing it.
- Claim: The murder was Booth's own act, improvised after the Confederacy had already lost.
  Evidence: This is the core of the skeptical case, and the dates support it. Booth's plan was to kidnap Lincoln, and that scheme failed on 17 March 1865. The turn to assassination is documented in the days after Lee's surrender on 9 April and after Lincoln's 11 April speech, at a moment when the Confederate government had fled Richmond and ceased to function as a command authority. There was, in a literal sense, no Richmond left to issue an order. The killing reads as the desperate act of a defeated partisan whose abduction plot had already collapsed, not as an operation dispatched from a functioning capital.

## Why people believe it
- A world-historical death feels like it demands a world-historical cause. A lone fanatic getting lucky is emotionally unsatisfying next to a defeated nation's secret service reaching out to kill the president, and the mind reaches for the larger cause.
- The documented substrate is unusually rich. Unlike most conspiracy theories, this one rests on real spies, real money, and a real kidnapping plot, which makes the leap from Confederate contact to Confederate command feel small, when that leap is the entire disputed question.
- The government itself made the charge. The United States officially accused Davis of ordering the killing in 1865, and that dramatic accusation is far better remembered than the perjury scandal that later gutted it.
- The escape network really was Confederate infrastructure. Because Booth fled along genuine Confederate courier lines, his flight looks pre-arranged for murder even though that same underground existed for other purposes.
- Both sides have a stake in keeping it open. Some want to prove ultimate Confederate villainy; Lost Cause defenders want to prove Davis blameless, and the argument between them never fully closes.

## Open questions
- Did Richmond explicitly authorize the March 1865 kidnapping, or did Booth freelance with Confederate agents' knowledge but not their formal order? The chain of approval for the abduction itself is still argued, and it matters, because a sanctioned kidnapping is the closest the established record comes to Confederate direction.
- What was the Harney mission meant to do? The Torpedo Bureau agent sent toward Washington in April 1865 is read by some as evidence Richmond planned a strike on the Union leadership and by others as routine sabotage. The intent is genuinely unresolved.
- Where did Booth's money come from, and how much of it was Confederate? The Montreal bill of exchange is documented, but the full picture of his financing is not.
- What was actually said in the October 1864 Montreal meetings? No reliable record survives, and that silence sits exactly where kidnap could have become kill, or could not have.

## Sources
- The Lincoln Conspirators, National Park Service, Ford's Theatre NHS: https://www.nps.gov/foth/learn/historyculture/the-lincoln-conspirators.htm
- Investigating the Assassination, Ford's Theatre: https://fords.org/lincolns-assassination/investigating-the-assassination/
- Did Jefferson Davis Approve the Lincoln Assassination Conspiracy?, Famous Trials (Douglas O. Linder): https://famous-trials.com/lincoln/2147-davisevidence
- The Trial of the Lincoln Assassination Conspirators: An Account, Famous Trials (Douglas O. Linder): https://famous-trials.com/lincoln/2163-home
- Come Retribution: The Confederate Secret Service and the Assassination of Lincoln, University Press of Mississippi (Tidwell, Hall, Gaddy) (1988): https://www.upress.state.ms.us/Books/C/Come-Retribution
- Blood on the Moon: The Assassination of Abraham Lincoln, University Press of Kentucky (Edward Steers Jr.) (2001): https://www.kentuckypress.com/9780813191515/blood-on-the-moon/
- The Family Plot to Kill Lincoln, Smithsonian Magazine: https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/the-family-plot-to-kill-lincoln-2093807/
- Review of Cumming, Devil's Game: The Civil War Intrigues of Charles A. Dunham, H-Net Reviews: https://networks.h-net.org/node/4113/reviews/4641/culbert-cumming-devils-game-civil-war-intrigues-charles-dunham

Rated by The Conspiratory, a neutral, sourced encyclopedia of conspiracy theories. Full page: https://theconspiratory.com/theory/confederate-lincoln-assassination