Lincoln's killer is killed.

• Author: Emord, Jonathan W.
• Position: OUT OF THE PAST - Abraham Lincoln, John Wilkes Booth

MANY PECULIAR FACTS surround the assassination of Pres. Abraham Lincoln, but one of the more obscure and odd-set events involve Boston Corbett, the little-known man who shot the President's assassin, John Wilkes Booth. In his article in The American Scholar, "The Man Who Shot the Man Who Shot Lincoln," former Baltimore Sun correspondent Ernest B. Furgurson succinctly resurrects the bizarre life history of one Thomas Corbett, who renamed himself Boston upon undergoing a born-again experience at the hands of a Boston, Mass., Salvation Army evangelist following Corbett's alcoholism. Shiftless, Corbett caught the war bug in 1861 and enlisted to fight for the Union as a private in the 12th New York Volunteers. After suffering capture and near death in the infamous Confederate Andersonville prison, Corbett recovered and then happened to make his way serendipitously into the history books.

Furgurson recounts how, on April 26, 1865, Booth remained holed up on the Richard Henry Garrett farm in Port Royal, Va. There, in the tobacco bam, he and his co-conspirator David Herold hoped to avoid discovery when Union soldiers, under the command of Lt. Edward Doherty, and detectives descended on the bam. Herold gave himself up, but Booth resolved to die in defiance, inviting the soldiers to "make quick work of it; shoot me through the heart." The soldiers set the bam ablaze, hoping to smoke Booth out. A strange private known for his unwelcome evangelism to his superiors and fellow soldiers, Corbett spied Booth through a large crack in the barn and, without authorization, fired upon him. His bullet shuck Booth in the neck, breaking through his vertebrae and severing his spine, rendering Booth paralyzed and in mortal peril. Union soldiers pulled Booth from the bam and placed him on the porch of Garrett's farmhouse, where he bled to death over the next few hours.

Controversy surrounded the shooting. On the one hand, citizens grateful for the elimination of the man who killed the President, viewed him as a hero. On the other, Secretary of War Edwin M. Stanton and several Lincoln Administration officials were livid at having lost the one man who could testify whether Confederate States of America Pres. Jefferson Davis was behind the assassination.

For his part, the Corbett recited that "Providence directed my hand," claiming that God had caused the bullet to hit Booth in the same place where Booth "had shot the President." Corbett said Booth took aim with his...