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Posted on 07/03/2025 11:20:06 AM PDT by Red Badger
Helen Alderman was a young girl when she learned that her great-uncle was the Florida soldier executed on July 7, 1865, with three others who had conspired to assassinate President Abraham Lincoln.
On a sunny afternoon 129 years after Lewis Thornton Powell’s death, Alderman, 72, and about two dozen friends, family and historians gathered Saturday under the shade of six cypress trees at a Geneva community cemetery to bury a small mahogany box and close the story of the Florida farm boy who joined John Wilkes Booth in one of the most notorious acts in American history.
“Never in my life did I realize I would one day have to prove my relationship to the Powells,” Alderman said, trying to sum up her role in this odd twist of history.
The Smithsonian Institution, which in 1991 discovered the skull of the Florida rebel among thousands of Native American bones, recently released Powell’s only known remains to Alderman after documenting that she was his closest living relative.
Soon after Lincoln historian Michael Kauffman found Alderman and told her of the Smithsonian’s discovery, Alderman petitioned the museum to allow her to arrange for burial of the skull next to the grave of his mother, Caroline Patience Powell, in northeast Seminole County.
Alderman called Saturday’s funeral service a celebration of reuniting Powell with his family.
(Excerpt) Read more at orlandosentinel.com ...
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PinGGG!.................
Lewis Payne/Powell was huge; his task was to assassinate Secretary of State Seward, prob. the best to ever occupy that position, at the same time as Lincoln. He barged into the Seward home, bashed his son on the head with a pistol, pointed the pistol at him and it jammed. He then went into Seward’s bedroom and stabbed at him repeatedly, Seward being protected by a wire contraption around his head but severe injuries to his face. Seward’s other son and a wounded Army orderly came in, smashed Payne down and saved Seward’s life. On the way out, Payne beat down Seward’s 20 year old daughter who died of fright a year later. Seward sent a servant to get the Army from a house a few hundred feet away and they policed the Seward home for the rest of the evening.
I went to Surrattville High School my freshman and sophomore years in high school. (boy, did I ever hate that place-they began bussing the years I was there.)
The Surratt Boarding House was a dilapidated place I stood by to catch my bus, and kids would drink in there and light fires inside the place at night.
I went by that place a few years back, and it was a national park site now.
THAT’S THE KIND OF STUFF THEY NEVER TEACH IN HIGHSCHOOL HISTORY CLASSES! ...............But they should!.............
https://www.iment.com/maida/familytree/burnett/lincoln.htm#seward
Description of Powell and his attack on Seward.
Great grandfather was called to D.C. to run the investigation for Stanton, was a Special Judge Advocate during the trial, and put together the Library of Congress records, which are in his handwriting. Husband had gotten me a HUGE microfilm reader to scan into the computer when I spent the year reading 18th century NY newspaper poetry sent by NY State Archives, and I bought most of the Lincoln microfilm as a souvenir. Fun research.
The conspirators wanted to kill Lincoln, Seward and VP Andrew Johnson at the same time so that the federal government would be decapitated. Atzerodt, who was to kill Johnson, chickened out of the task at the last minute. Payne/Powell did not succeed in killing Seward due to the intervention at his home. I was always amazed by the fact that Lincoln had but one bodyguard at Ford’s Theater who was in the theater bar drinking at the time Wilkes Booth entered the box where Lincoln was seated.
That was horrible.
History is full of conspiracies, not just theories.
I don’t remember the name of Lincoln’s guard but he was a real flake and incompetent in many instances.
I don’t remember the name of Lincoln’s guard but he was a real flake and incompetent in many instances.
https://www.iment.com/maida/familytree/burnett/lincoln3.htm#planning
14 APRIL 1865
Ford Theatre
On the evening of the 14th of April, 1865, Major Rathbone and Miss Harris of Washington joined the President and Mrs Lincoln and drove with them in the President’s carriage to Ford’s Theatre, reaching there about half past eight. When the President reached the theatre and the fact became known, the actors stopped playing, the band struck up Hail to the Chief, and the audience rose and received him with cheers and shouts rocking chair of applause. The party passed to the right into the President’s box in the second tier which was on the left of the stage. The President seated himself in an armchair which had been provided for him that afternoon by Mr Ford to the left of the box, and nearest the audience. Mrs Lincoln sat next on the right of the President and on her right was Miss Harris,and immediately behind her sat Major Rathbone.
Spangler About nine o’clock of that evening, Booth rode into the alley in the rear of the threatre and called upon Spangler, a stage carpenter employee of the theatre, to hold his horse. Spangler sent a young man named Burrows, another employee. Booth stepped into the theatre through the rear door, took a brief survey of the house, passed out the same way, and soon after appeared at the front.
There he held a private and hurried conversation with two or three persons. Just before 10 o’clock, he went into a saloon near the threatre and took a drink of Whiskey. He then came out and joined his confederates, the parties he had been conversing with, and then passed into the passage leading to the stage from the street.
At this time, one of the confederates stepped into the vestibule of the theatre, looked at the clock, came out and called the time, started up the street, was gone a few minutes, returned, looked at the clock and called the time again. By this time Booth had reappeared in front of the theatre. Presently the same party who had called the time came and looked at the clock and called the time again in a loud voice, “ten minutes past ten.” He then started up the street, and Booth passed into the theatre.
As stated, this was about ten minutes past 10 o’clock, and was during the second scene of the third act of “Our American Cousin,” then being performed by Laura Keene and her company at Ford’s Theatre.
Booth passed to the right up near to the president’s box, where he stopped a moment and leaned against the wall. He then stepped down one step, placed his hand on the door of the passage leading to the President’s box and his knee against it, and pushed the door open. He then placed a brace against the door on the inside, which had previously been prepared by him or some one of his confederates for the purpose of preventing an entrance of intrusion from the outside; passed along the passageway to the door on the left opening into the President’s box, stopped and looked through a hole which had been cut in the door to see the President’s position and if his attention was concentrated upon the stage; softly pushed the door open and entered, no one observing him; then, standing within two or three feet of the President, fired.
shooting
The ball entered the back part of the left side of the President. The pistol used was a large sized derringer, about six inches in length, carrying a large handmade ball. Upon hearing the discharge of the pistol, Major Rathbone looked around and saw through the smoke a man between the door and the President. At the same time he heard the man shout some word which he thought was “freedom!” Another witness thought he shouted “Revenge for the South!”
Booth, the moment he fired, dropped his pistol and drew a long knife. Major Rathbone instantly sprang upon him and seized him. Booth wrestled himself from the major’s grasp, and made a violent thrust at his breast with the knife, which Rathbone parried, receiving a wound in his left arm between the elbow and the shoulder about one and one half inches deep and several inches in length.
Booth then rushed to the front of the box, Major Rathbone attempting to seize him again, but only caught his clothes as he was going over the railing. Booth put his left hand on the railing, holding in his right hand the knife point downward, leaped over and down to the stage about twelve feet. As he was going over or descending, the spur on his right foot caught in the flag, which had been draped in front of the President’s box in honor of his presence, and clung to it, causing his left foot to partially turn under him as he struck the stage, and thereby one of the bones of his left leg was broken.
Had it not been for this accident, Booth doubtless would have made his escape into Virginia within the Confederate lines, possibly out of the country. Thus it was that the national flag was a mute instrument in the vengeance that overtook the President’s murderer. Booth as he fled across the stage, partially turned facing the audience, threw up his hand holding the gleaming knife and shouted, “Sic semper tyrannis!”
In taking the statements of persons at the theatre who had witnessed the tragedy, an Irishman in the second row said that Booth shouted as he fled across the stage, “I’m sick, send for McManus!
killing Lincoln was an absolute catastrophe for the South.
And yet Andrew Johnson was a SOUTHERNER.......
If Lincoln had been a Catholic maybe he would have gone to church rather than to see a comedy in the theater...it was Good Friday.
While I was in my sophomore year, I went out for a short period of time with a girl named "Mary Mudd" and it turned out she was the great, great granddaughter or a great, great, great granddaughter of Dr. Samuel Mudd, who was imprisoned for setting the leg of Booth.
He did get pardoned, but his conviction was never overturned.
There was a lot of evidence tying Mudd to the conspiracy; while his actions at the prison healing Yellow Fever victims at the prison in the Dry Tortugas were laudable, his role in fixing Booth’s leg and in advance of the murder meeting with the conspirator make it likely he was involved. The CBS newsman Roger Mudd was a descendant of Dr. Mudd as well.
Maybe he would have gone to church in Illinois, where his law practice was located. He would not have been elected president.
She had the inn/tavern in Maryland. Also a boarding house in DC that may have played a bigger role in the assassination story.
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