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THE CONTINUING WAR by Robert R. Dykstra The murder of Abraham Lincoln was, among other things, the greatest failure of Federal security in the Civil War. Lacking anything like a nineteenth-century Warren Report to dispel them, countless questions about that first presidential tragedy linger to this day. These vary in degree of probability. Bizarre, for example, are contentions that the assassination was a Jesuit plot ( seriously iterated in book length as recently as 1963) or that Secretary of War Stanton was the real impetus behind Booth's bullet—possibly with the connivance of Lafayette C. Baker, according to a recent corollary. On the other hand, diat the Confederate "special operations" outfit in Canada, for which John Surratt served as courier and widi which Booth himself evidently conferred in late 1864, may have been privy at least to the plan to kidnap Lincoln which preceded the assassination plot is a relatively feasible thesis that remains to be soberly dealt with. Among those suspecting that the National Archives had unknown assassination material to yield was Phihp Van Doren Stern, author of many a popular Civil War volume including The Man Who Killed Lincoln and Secret Missions of the Civil War. In the February, 1957, issue of American Heritage Mr. Stern claimed to have discovered a hitherto obscure individual perhaps importantly involved in die event. As Stern recounted it, one Joao M. Celestino, a Portuguese sea captain, commanded a British schooner which was captured off Cape Fear in 1864,allegedly while attempting to run the Union blockade. Aldiough Celestino denied die charge, his ship was declared a prize vessel. Through the British embassy he thereupon entered a claim against the U.S. government and hung around Washington for a year while the State Department processed his case. Understandably irritated with the length of the proceedings, he was heard, on the night of April 14, 1865,to declare that he would like to murder Secretary of State Seward. Later that evening, of course, Booth shot Lincoln and Seward narrowly escaped death at die hands of anodier conspirator. On April 18 Celestino was arrested and confined in Old Capitol Prison in Washington. On April 25 guards transferred him to one of the ironclads anchored in the Potomac on which the major assassination 434 suspects were held. On May 28 he was returned to Old Capitol. And on July 8, after considerable agitation both by his lawyer and by die Portuguese minister to Washington—and the day following die hanging of Paine, Atzerodt, Herold, and Mary Surratt—he was ordered released on condition that he leave the country within ten days. But he continued to petition for compensation through his attorney, who suggested diat Celestino be paid out of die government's "Secret Service fund." On November 18 the lawyer wrote Seward that he had heard die claim had been approved. At that point, said Stern, the documentation ceased. Altiiough the article displayed the title "The Unknown Conspirator," an editorial blurb asked, "Did the mysterious Portuguese sea captain help plot Lincoln's assassination, or was he an informer?" Mr. Stern himself inclined to the latter view. Jailed ostensibly as a suspect, he reasoned, Celestino was actually an agent lodged with die conspirators to get incriminating information from them. The fact that he was personally committed to Old Capitol by Lafayette Baker, "head of the Secret Service," the fact that Celestino's attorney suggested compensation from the secret service fund, that no formal charges were brought against him, that he remained in die country after his release while the lawyer pressed the compensation claim, and that he was set free immediately after the hanging of the convicted conspirators all added up to a convincing picture. Alas, this intriguing "discovery," while certainly not the most earthshaking of the many factual manipulations and mistakes connected widi the assassination, serves admirably to demonstrate that sheer archival research is no bar to historiographie error. All kinds of folks went to jail on Baker's own orders—draft dodgers, bounty jumpers, transients with questionable credentials, citizens arrested for "hurrahing for Jeff Davis," minor blockade-runners, Federal quartermasters and paymasters and clerks caught with their hands in Uncle Sam's pocket. That...

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