April 16, 2015
Americans' recognized the somber anniversary of the death of President Abraham Lincoln on Wednesday.
Yet, a century-and-a-half since his assassination, one conspiracy theory about the death of his killer lives on.
Time points out that while John Wilkes Booth's body was identified by several people who knew him, many claimed that Booth escaped to Texas and the man shot and killed was actually someone else.
The theory, which subsided for a while in the mid-20th century, was revived after the book and 1977 film adaptation The Lincoln Conspiracy explored several conspiracies surrounding the president's death.
Much of the speculation is fueled by some historians' skepticism that the body buried was actually Booth, and as Time notes, efforts to exhume the body from its final resting place at Green Mount Cemetery in Baltimore for testing have proved unsuccessful:
Historians and Booth descendants have attempted to obtain permission to exhume Booth’s corpse for DNA testing, but all requests so far have been denied.
While not a conspiracy, speculation as to what might have happened if Lincoln hadn't been shot abounds. Discovery spoke to historians about how history may have changed if the president had lived.
Allen Guelzo, director of the Civil War Era Studies Program at Gettysburg College, told Discovery that reconstruction in the South wouldn't have been as devastating, while racial tensions may have seen quicker progress:
"It's hard to imagine being worse than it was under (President) Andrew Johnson. We might have avoided a lot of the icebergs in terms of Jim Crow, segregation and racial hostility."
The fact is in every instance that a president is assassinated, conspiracy theories are guaranteed to follow. Some claim that the 1901 murder of William McKinley in Buffalo has cast a curse on the city's sports teams. And unless you have hours of free time, don't even think about falling down the rabbit hole of John F. Kennedy conspiracies.
