The mad hatter who avenged Lincoln’s assassination.
It isn’t a simple story.
And it began years before John Wilkes Booth was cornered in a Virginia tobacco barn.
The man who shot him, Boston Corbett, had his own pack of troubles.
They had begun, probably, when he was a teenage apprentice in a New York City hat-maker’s shop.
Working there exposed Boston to mercuric nitrate, which was used to make felt from rabbit and beaver furs.
Long-term exposure to mercury causes neurological damage, resulting in hallucinations and psychotic symptoms.
It can make you ‘mad as a hatter.’
And throughout his complicated life, Boston Corbett had these problems in spades.
It began with his embrace of religious fanaticism after the death of his wife.
He couldn’t keep a job.
He became a street preacher.
He grew his hair long like Jesus.
And he obeyed a Devine command to castrate himself with a pair of scissors to quell his ‘passions.’
And then came the Civil War.
Boston enlisted with a New York militia regiment a week after the war broke out, but got court-marshalled for frequent Bible readings, prayer meetings and arguments with officers.
They decided to discharge him rather than put him in front of a firing squad, so Boston immediately re-enlisted with another New York regiment.
Confederate forces captured Boston in a Virginia battle, and he spent five months at Andersonville Prison before returning to his unit in a prisoner exchange.
He marched in Lincoln’s funeral parade in Washington and then joined a volunteer unit to pursue John Wilkes Booth.
And they cornered Booth and an accomplice in a Virginia tobacco barn.
The accomplice surrendered, but Booth shouted he would not be taken alive.
And he refused to come out even when the barn was set on fire.
Boston said later that he had peered through a crack in the barn wall, saw Booth taking aim with his gun, and then shot him with his revolver, hoping to hit him in the shoulder.
But Booth turned at the wrong moment and the bullet struck him behind his left ear, in the same spot as Lincoln had been shot.
And, to Boston, this coincidence suggested Devine Intervention.
He was hailed as a hero, but was still unable to hold a job.
So, Boston traveled the country giving lectures as “Lincoln’s Avenger.”
But his new celebrity made his paranoia worse.
Boston became convinced that powerful men in Washington were out to get him because killing Booth had deprived them of the pleasure of executing Booth themselves after a brief show trial.
Hate mail from Booth supporters made Boston fear for his life, so he carried a gun, which he’d pull out when anyone challenged his account of the Booth capture.
Boston moved to Kansas, where his reputation as Lincoln’s avenger earned him the honorary post of assistant doorkeeper at the Kansas House of Representatives.
But he brandished his gun and chased House members out of the building one day after becoming convinced they were conspiring against him.
Boston was arrested and sent to an insane asylum.
And after a few months, he escaped and told a friend he was going to Mexico.
Boston was never seen again.
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I’ll see you tomorrow.
— Brenda
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