Lincoln, the unknown

LINCOLN THE UNKNOWN•237tion at the time, and all cavil in the future, the identityof the man who had assassinated the President.Dr. Merrill,a dentist, identified the body by a filling he hadrecently put into one of Booth's teeth.Charles Dawson, a clerk in the National Hotel, where Boothhad stopped, identified the dead man by the initials "J. W. B."tattooed on Booth's right hand.Gardner, the well-known Washington photographer, identifiedhim; and so did Henry Clay Ford, one of Booth's most intimatefriends.When Booth's body was dug up by order of President AndrewJohnson, on February 15, 1869, it was identified again byBooth's close friends.Then it was taken to Baltimore to be reburied in the Boothfamily plot in Greenmount Cemetery; but before it was reburied,it was identified again by Booth's brother and mother,and friends who had known him all his life.It is doubtful whether any other man who ever lived hasbeen as carefully identified in death as Booth was.And yet the false legend lives on. During the eighties, manypeople believed that the Rev. J. G. Armstrong of Richmond,Virginia, was Booth in disguise, for Armstrong had coal-blackeyes, a lame leg, dramatic ways, and wore his raven hair longto hide a scar on the back of his neck—so people said.And other "Booths" arose, no less than twenty of them.In 1872 a "John Wilkes Booth" gave dramatic readings andsleight-of-hand performances before the students of the Universityof Tennessee; married a widow; tired of her; whisperedthat he was the real assassin; and, stating that he was going toNew Orleans to get a fortune that awaited him, he disappeared,and "Mrs. Booth" never heard of him again.In the late seventies a drunken saloon-keeper with theasthma, at Granbury, Texas, confessed to a young lawyernamed Bates that he was Booth, showed an ugly scar on theback of his neck, and related in detail how Vice-President Johnsonhad persuaded him to kill Lincoln and promised him a pardonif he should ever be caught.A quarter of a century passed; and, on January 13, 1903,a drunken house-painter and dope-fiend, David E. George,killed himself with strychnine in the Grand Avenue Hotel inEnid, Oklahoma. But before he destroyed himself, he "con-