Why Does Edwin Stanton Burn the Pages of John Wilkes Booth's Diary in 'Manhunt'?

By Dustin Rowles | TV | April 15, 2024 |

By Dustin Rowles | TV | April 15, 2024 |

In the South, where I grew up, the version of history taught in schools during the 1980s and 1990s often glorified the Confederacy and emphasized the Lost Cause Myth. This revisionist historical narrative is part of the reason why there are at least two Confederate monuments that remain on the grounds of the Arkansas State Capitol in Little Rock, along with a 10 Commandments monument and plans for an anti-abortion monument.

As a journalism and history major, I was surprised to realize that I didn’t even know about the existence of the manhunt for John Wilkes Booth after he assassinated President Abraham Lincoln. When I asked friends from New England about it, they were at least aware of the manhunt, although the details were hazy for them as well. This is likely because the manhunt itself — as depicted in the Apple TV+ series Manhunt — is not all that compelling. Booth is not a particularly interesting historical figure, and aside from the fact that the man who eventually killed him, Boston Corbett, had stoically castrated himself, the 12-day, 90-mile journey Booth took after the assassination is somewhat uneventful, even with the dramatic liberties taken by the television series.

However, the rabbit holes that Manhunt has led me down have been fascinatingly, particularly those involving Secretary of War Edwin Stanton (played by Tobias Menzies in the series). For instance, I didn’t know that Stanton had previously defended Daniel Sickles, a member of the House of Representatives after Sickles confessed to murdering Philip Barton Key, the son of “The Star-Spangled Banner” composer Francis Scott Key. Sickles killed Key because he had been sleeping with Sickles’ wife. Stanton, using the first temporary insanity defense in U.S. history, secured an acquittal for Sickles, who the American public was largely sympathetic to.

Meanwhile, as depicted in Manhuht, Stanton organized the manhunt for Booth and, once he was killed, ensured that Booth would never be lionized in the South by burying his body in a “secret, unmarked, and unhallowed grave.” There was also the matter of Booth’s diary, which we know did at one point come into Stanton’s possession, as depicted in Manhunt. There are a number of missing pages in Booth’s diary, and there are a number of conspiracies that Manhunt leaned into suggesting that Booth burned those pages.

Again, to be clear, this is a conspiracy theory, and I’m not entirely sure why the Manhunt series decided to indulge in them. There are a number of conspiracies concerning what was supposedly contained in the missing pages of Booth’s diary, but the chief one — at least the one involving Secretary of War Edwin Stanton — suggests that he was part of a larger conspiracy behind the assassination of President Lincoln.

This conspiracy theory posits that Stanton and others had originally plotted to hire Booth to merely kidnap Lincoln in an effort to stop him from carrying out his more lenient Reconstruction policies towards the South. However, after the conspirators supposedly had a change of heart, Booth went rogue and ended up assassinating Lincoln.

Furthermore, this conspiracy theory alleges that the person who was actually killed and buried was not John Wilkes Booth at all, but rather a Confederate prisoner of war named James William Boyd. The claim is that Booth managed to escape to safety, and Stanton then covered up the true identity of the dead body to prevent Booth from being lionized as a Confederate hero in the South. The series further dabbles in conspiracy by suggesting that Stanton had multiple bodies buried to disguise the whereabouts of Booth’s actual gravesite.

Of course, these are all bullshit conspiracy theories that most legitimate historians completely dismiss as baseless. It is curious, then, that the Manhunt series would choose to lend legitimacy to them. We’ll find out how much the series continues to indulge in them in next week’s finale.