On April 2, 1865, Confederate President Jefferson Davis and his cabinet were in the final stage of abandoning the Capitol in Richmond, Virginia.  The plan was to establish a new capitol further South with Davis proclaiming victory for the confederacy now that it was not burdened with defending Richmond from the invading Union forces. The spin didn’t fly, and historians portrayed the confederate government which operated for two weeks from a freight train, as a government on wheels. No plan or purpose, aimlessly roaming further south. The circumstances show that Davis had a plan.

In the early part of 1864 Davis established the “Confederate Secret Service,” with the original purpose being to undermine the Unions currency, and promote General George McClellan’s Presidential race against Lincoln’s re-election. When that failed Davis had only one option left. The assassination of President Lincoln and his cabinet.

The true activities of this shadow arm of the confederate government will never be known. Davis delayed the trains departure from Richmond for hours while the official records of the secret service were burned, keeping them out of Federal hands forever. Destroying those records took priority on that frenetic day as evidence pieced together indicate the confederate secret service was more than a collection of spies tracking Union army movements.  The secret services budget was established with Davis’s government depositing one million dollars in a Canadian bank.

Davis kept his government intact even as his General, Robert E. Lee, surrendered one week later on April 9th at the Appomattox Courthouse.
It was not until five days later on the night of April 14th that the last act of the confederate secret service’s operation reached its climax with the stabbing of Secretary Seward and shooting of Abraham Lincoln at Fords Theater. Seward survived, Lincoln did not.

Details emerged about the assassin, John Wilkes Booth, and his ties to the confederacy. A fifteen hundred dollar check from that Canadian bank was deposited one week before the assassination into Booths account in a DC bank, and Booth had a series of meeting at the confederate White House with Davis and his Secretary of State Judah Benjamin.  Other ties would emerge in the two years following the assassination while Davis was held for trial in a basement at Fort Monroe. Details about the other conspirators and their ties to Davis, and the Vatican, also emerged. However, those conspirators were quickly hung following Lincolns death.

Davis, however, became the symbol of the “Lost Cause,” a set of nondenominational values preached from the pulpit in the postwar era. The details of the Lincoln conspiracy were lost in a country that united Southerners across class lines.

The Confederacy’s elusive unity was found in the ashes of defeat. It would define the South for a century.

John O’Hara is an attorney.  He lives in Brooklyn