Fellow ridiculous historians, Welcome to this week's classic episode. Back in twenty eighteen, we looked at each other, we had that Ghostbuster's eye contact moment where they figure out the statue of Liberty, and we said, how deeply have we really dove into the infamous tragic story of the Lincoln assassination?
Not nearly deeply enough, Ben, is what our longing gays told each of us psychically.
Yes, yeah, now we do know knowl that on April fourteenth, eighteen sixty five, an actor named John Wilkes Booth assassinated President Abraham Lincoln there in Ford's Theater, watching a play with his wife. That story aside. We know that Booth escaped the scene of the crime and he went on the run. But it turns out there's some more to the story.
Hm, yeah, more like on the limp. If I'm not mistaken, I think that's right. We did have a injury can jump, that's correct. But boy, are we going to dive into a bit of an assassin meta episode today. We're talking about everybody loves an assassin, but what about an assassin's assassin? Okay, maybe everyone doesn't love an assassin, but you get what I'm getting at.
Yes, so joined us as we dive into the bizarre life and times of a man named Boston Corbett. Ridiculous History is a production of iHeartRadio. Today's story kind of but not really starts in eighteen sixty five. On April fourteenth, Graham Lincoln is assassinated by John Wilkes Booth while watching the play Our American Cousin at Ford's Theater in DC.
You think it was any good, Ben, our American cousin? Uh huh?
I remember I think hearing about it in school, But it wasn't my kind of play. And it does remind me of one of those very tasteless middle school jokes. Did you ever hear this one?
Well?
Other than that, missus Lincoln, how did you find the play? Oh that's funny, that's terrible. Yeah, too soon, surely not, surely not.
Ben. You called out the date and it sounded to me like it was long ago.
Long ago, far away, right. And this is ridiculous history. It is ridiculous history. And there's our super producer, Casey Pegram giving us his stamp of approval. Let me lean by the window and see, I see if we get a thumbs up. Oh, we got a pretty good thumbs up.
Thumbs up indeed, as you would text me thumbs up emoji thumb when you do that. Oh thanks man.
Yeah, yeah, I want to be clear that it is an emoji, because you know, some people don't know this, but emojis translate differently across different folks.
I think, oh, aps, we've talked about Have we talked about this on this show? I don't, you know, we just hung out. It's a bit of a blur. We do talk about all kinds of things. Today we're talking about Abraham Lincoln getting a bullet to the back of the dome by a crazed I don't know, maybe it's not fair to call him craze, but a zealous actor by the name of John Wilkes booth during said play that may or may not have been any good, and then he leapt from the balcony. It was a point
blank shot to the back of the head. Six temper Tyrannus onto the stage, caught his his pant on something on the way down and broke his leg and somehow managed to escape.
Yeah, made it seventy three miles to Port Royal, Virginia while the Feds were chasing him, his accomplices were dropping out one by one. He eventually was cornered in a barn surrounded by veterans from the Union Army.
But wait, we need to back up again.
Yes, beep, beep beep, that's the sound of the history truck moving back. Because we gave you a little bit of a I guess, a cold open. We should start at the as the Mad Hatter says at the beginning the Mad Hatter, Yes, story, Yes, that's appropriate for this, isn't it.
It really is.
Our story starts with a soldier by the name of Boston Corbette.
Although he was born Thomas Corbett and was not a soldier out of the womb, as it turns out, his his initial occupation was as an incorrigible drunk.
Yes, Thomas Corbett was a hatter, not yet mad, and this was a pretty solid job for an upstanding American in the mid nineteenth century. But his wife and his first child, a girl, died during childbirth, and this sent him on a downward spiral.
He got a lot of death and childbirth things happening in these last this episode and then the last one about the Cocklane Ghost it's true. Check it out. Yeah, if you haven't already, And if you haven't, then shame on you. But yeah, no, he did not. He did not do well after this blow from on high and he, you know, became, like I said before, an incorrigible drunk. So that wasn't his first profession. His first profession was a hatter, and then he gave that up for the bottle.
And he lived in New England in Boston and he would just haplessly stumble around drunk. He was kind of because he was a vagrant. He became known as kind of like one of the town shift layabouts, right. And it was one night late in the eighteen fifties when he ran into someone that would change his life forever.
Yes, And there's a great recounting of this in the Washingtonian in an article by Bill Jensen. He meets one of these proselytizing preachers, a street evangelists, and it gets to him. Corbett is mesmerized by this word of God. He becomes a regular at the what they call sidewalk churches around the city, which was an interesting phrase I
had not heard before. But it's like a regularly occurring church meetup that doesn't necessarily have its own physical building, and he became sort of a hype man at these street preaching get togethers. He stopped drinking and he started he started being the guy who just yells amen along with you know, sort of punctuating what the preachers are saying.
Yeah, Hype Manning is is sort of like in the trap music up today, they's going to go yeah.
Yeah, that was what he would do, except he was going huck Florid to God free this.
Yep, yeah, that kind of thing. And now on speaking of Jesus, he also grew his hair his man long, to appear to resemble Jesus Christ himself. He was baptized in the Methodist faith, and he changed his name to Boston from Thomas because Boston was the town where he credited this meeting with the street preacher that turned his life around.
Right. He was twenty six at this time, and the ministers eventually said, hey, you should get your own turf.
In other words, maybe it's sort of like back up off our turf with Hype Manning. We don't need you anymore.
I feel like Jesus is leading you to preach elsewhere, elsewhere, to leading you're to preach down on fourth.
I think that's right. I think we have to remember we haven't said this yet, but I'm sure a lot of people know this already. But hatters used mercury to treat the felt, to to form the felt, to make the hats, and as we know, long term exposure to mercury does have some debilitating effects on the brain.
Yeah, as some debilitating cognitive effects. We do want to tell you that the next part of this story takes a brief and grisly turn.
Yes, we'll try to make it as brief as possible, but yeah, it's it's it's not a pleasant image that's coming up here.
So he's out ministering to the people in the summer of eighteen fifty eight when he feels that a pair of sex workers are googling him or giving him the eye, and he is discussing with himself when he feels physically excited to rise us to the occasion, right, So he proceeds directly home, takes a pair of scissors, and you, after making an incision in his scrotum, he removes his testicles and then goes directly to a prayer meeting.
Like you do. It was a different time. Yeah, and not only that he went to his prayer meeting did whatever that entails. And then, oh, we should also mention that he was when he got home from this encounter with these ladies of the evening, he was in search of answers and he opened the Bible to It's unclear if he was looking for this passage because he was aware of it, or if he was like, you know, did the old FLIPPERO, and this is what came up
tell me what to do? Yeah, exactly. And the passage that he encountered was Matthew nineteen twelve, which has a part that says there are unit who have made themselves eunuchs for the sake of the Kingdom of God. And that's what he went and did with the snip snip. So he goes on to the prayer meeting and then what, oh, he goes to the hospital immediately.
Right, No, he goes the next day after the prayer meeting, he grabs Denner and takes a walk through the city, thinking his thoughts.
Surely he's bleeding profusely from his genitals.
At this point, one would think that he was able to staunch the wound because otherwise, surely it would have been noticed during a prayer meeting if the guy's bleeding through his trousers. But either way, he did eventually check himself into a Massachusetts general and spent some time trying to heal. Eventually he says, Okay, I'm better. A few weeks later and he moves to New York City to become a hat maker again. But he's still very religious.
Oh boy, is he. Ever? He's possibly the most religious person we've ever encountered in any story or we've ever done for this show. Can you think of anyone more staunchly religious?
Staunchly religious? Probably not that guy who mooned all those people now, definitely not who was still unidentified. Yeah, this guy might take the cake so far. He would often use his lunch break to go to prayer meetings. So he still kept these these very i would say, dogmatic religious practices. And then in eighteen sixty one, the Confederate Army attacks Fort Sumter, which one was that in the Civil War nice ironically named uh huh because it because
it was very uncivil. Yes, they were not nice to each other, they were not. He enlisted in the Union Army and he had a quotation here that he allegedly told the women at his church, did you see this one?
No? I had not been. Oh, give it to me.
When he told the people as church that he was going to join up with the Union Army, he said, when I come eye to eye with my gray suited enemies, I will say to them, God, have mercy on your souls. Then pop them off.
Ah. Yes, I do remember this one. And pop them off is what did it for me? Very slang. You know what? It reminds me of them. It reminds me of Samuel L. Jackson's character in pulp fiction, does the whole And I will smite thee with great anger and furious vengeance those who attempt to poison and destroy my brothers, you know the one. Yeah, it's good though. I wonder if he got that idea from from from old Corbett. Uh.
Perhaps perhaps he did. That would be interesting. We'd have to ask Quentin himself. Right, there was a big bummer about him joining the army. He had to shave his Jesus is.
Jesus, jam is Jesus locks.
Yeah, and by most of the accounts we've just got, he was an ok soldier.
He could Ryan he could fire a gun pretty good shot, but uh wasn't uh the wasn't the best at he answered to a very particular authority, didn't he, man, it was no, it was not earthly, nor was it his his commanders. And that's gonna come up time and again in this man's story. But one funny anecdote in this Washingtonian article is about the time where when he was training in Franklin Square in New York, his colonel, a man by the name of Daniel Butterfield, who they point out,
I did not know this composed TAPS. I didn't think TAPS was composed. Thought it happened just was you know, yeah, but no the sky. Butterfield also apparently had a bit of a potty mouth, because he was just effin and jeffin and swearing all over town. And Corbett was not having it.
Was he, No, absolutely not. Corbett, who shall also mention is still very green his training. Here he when the courl's yelling at them and cursing, he yells back, Colonel, don't you know you're breaking God's law. Butterfield is a gas like he's speechless for a second. This has probably never happened to him. So what what does he do in response?
Yeah, he he reads him in the Riot Act, probably in a very measured kind of hannibal electric kind of way. I don't know this guy. Corvett kind of gives me the creeps, the whole self near relation thing that that's a that's a bridge too far illness, I think for sure. And yeah, again we should point out that he had been exposed to these vapors, these mercury vapors for quite some time in his in his hatting career, before he
for any of this happened. Yeah, and he says, colonel, don't you know you are breaking God's law?
Uh?
And yeah, Butterfield was probably just like, you know what, my boy, thank you so much for pointing that out. Thank you, thank you for saving But no, it's not he did at all. It's not what he did at all.
No, h he said, I'm gonna send you to jail. So Corbette begins loudly singing hymns, pretty much shouting hymns while he's in jail. He's asked to stop, he won't. Butterfield eventually throws up his hands and says, look, if you just say you're sorry, I can let you out of prison, to which Corbett.
Says, oh. He says a no, sir, I have no cause to apologize to you, for you are but immortal, and you half offended the delicate sensibilities of the Lord thy God. So if you ask God to forgive you, then maybe I'll ask you to forgive me the Chutzbaugh. It's out of control for a guy without balls. This is really ballsy. Seriously, Yeah, no, no doubt about that. To think it just goes to show that those kind of balls come from within. My friend. There we go.
So he is released at jail, Yeah, because he's like, this guy's impenetrable, you know. Yeah. Yeah. Also there's a war going. Yeah, they probably need him. He's a crack shot. He's at least a passable soldier. So yeah, they need him. And okay, let's see, God, this guy's got a really storied, storied life. Yeah, where do you want to go? Well?
He he. He becomes a pretty important figure in the Union cause he fights in all these very very deadly conflicts that most people would not have survived and did not survive. And I don't know if he had God's God on his side or whatever, but it's I don't know, it's hard to not think that his piety maybe had something to do with it, or maybe it was just he was stark, raving, mad and fearless and just kind of like had luck on his side.
Yeah, yeah, Like the New England Historical Society covers a little bit of his activity in the Civil War. I did not know that he had enlisted re enlisted three times. He took to this conflict and he wasn't the best soldier, but he was consistent. The thing people hated about working with him is that he was always telling people not to curse or do sinful stuff.
Sure like you know, like you do in the army. Right. He sounded like a real killjoy. But he eventually got captured and sent to Andersonville. Do you know what Andersonville Prison been? Yes?
No, Andersonville Prison is a terrible terrible place, or it was a terrible terrible place.
We should say. It's here in Georgia, right, hunt.
It was a Confederate run prison here in Georgia, which you can visit. I've actually been. It's the Andersonville National Historic Site now, so it preserves Camp Sumter, which is also known as the Prison and it held forty five thousand Union soldiers prisoner during the war. Nearly thirteen thousand of them died not from execution, but from diseases, scurvy, diarrhea, dysentery, the bloody flux.
Yeah, is that what it was called. I think that's what they call it. Yeah, that was the shorthand, although it's sort of longer. No, just dysentery, the blood deflux, same number of syllables. But it sounds a lot scarier, doesn't it. It does, Yeah, because the flux, I guess, is when you expel blood. Right now.
The thing about the thing about mister Boston Corbette is that maybe it's a matter of his faith. Maybe it's a matter of luck. He survived. Yeah, this man was nothing if not resilient. I mean, he survived a self administered castration, first and foremost. He survived you know, drunkenness in the streets, and he survived some of the most intense battles of the Civil War. And he survived this prison, which was built to house ten thousand inmates and ballooned to over thirty two thousand.
There was like a little stream that ran through it, and apparently it had just become a swamp of human filth, and all of these diseases ran rampant. The guy who was in charge of this facility was actually brought up on war crime trials because thousands, if not tens of thousands of men died in his facility.
Yeah, thirteen thousand that we know of, So that guy was rightly brought up a war crimes what's his name?
His name was.
Captain Henry wurrez wr Z. Not only he's tried for war crimes, but he was executed. So after Corbette gets away, after he survives this, it.
Convalesces for a bit, one would imagine.
Right, learns to eat solid food again. He still stays with the army. He had eventually reached the rank of sergeant in the sixteenth New York Volunteer Cavalry. Now to the point where we began the story.
Oh man, weren't we having a barn burner? I don't Maybe we hadn't quite gotten there yet. But our man John Wilkes Booth, hobbled from his idiotic fall at the Ford Theater after putting a bullet in Old Abe Lincoln's head is now hold up in this barn, along with two accomplices. I want to say, yeah.
Everybody else has deserted them. He's seventy three miles away from the theater and being hunted like a dog. Boston Corbette is one of the twenty six elite cavalrymen sent from the unit to pursue John Wilkes.
Booth and pursue him. They did. They got a tip from a local innkeeper who put them in touch with a man who kind of cave gave a give it to us man. I'm I'm not doing a very good job here. Oh no, you got it. You got it.
We've got a Booth and his conspirator, David Harold, in a tobacco farm owned by a guy named Richard Garrett. So what do the Calvern men do once they have them cornered in that barn?
Well, they're not coming out right, So they light some straw and fire and poke it through in anthole in the in the barn, and you know, like old dry wood tends to do it. It went up in flames pretty quickly. And David Harold says, Okay, this is crazy even for a terrorist like me. I give up Booth, who has already made his decision made his peace with
whatever powers he thinks exist, stays inside. But as the barn disintegrates in the conflagration, the soldiers outside can see Booth's silhouette moving back and forth in the burning barn. And let's let's just remind our listeners. Maybe not a
really reminder, because we haven't said it yet. The instructions of this brigade was to bring back these men alive because the plot against Lincoln there was a good chance that had been organized orchestrated by forces on the Confederate side, and they wanted to, you know, get to the top of this conspiracy. Right, So when our boy Corbett popped one off, as he would say, right at John Wilkes Booth as he hobbled away, people were understandably annoyed, right.
And another government employee says, what on earth did you shoot him for? And he's rushing to yank Booth out of the burning barn. They wanted him alive to you know, run up the ladder of the conspiracy, and Corbett refused to apologize. Booth dies around seven am the next day, and the government forces are are wondering why this guy is completely contradicting his orders. And all he says is that God Almighty directed me to So instead of John Wilkes Booth going back to DC, they take Corbett.
Yeah, and Edwin M. Stanton, who's the Secretary of War who had issued a reward the War Department of one hundred thousand dollars fifty for Booth, twenty five for Surrat and twenty five for Harold, and a total of one hundred thousand dollars. And this guy questioned Corbett personally, and I think he sort of decided it wasn't worth pursuing that. You know, the guy's dead. The justice has been served. This guy's going to be kind of a national hero. Let's it. Let's let it slide.
Yeah. Even though Corbette kind of changes his message at the trial, and he says, I didn't fire the ball from fear. I was under the impression that he, meaning Booth, had started to the door to fight his way through, and I thought he would do harm to my men if I didn't fire. So it changes a little bit.
He's not quite as self righteous about it. But how does his story end, Noel, he doesn't get the whole fifty grand, No, he gets a portion of it, though I think he gets a little over sixteen hundred, and then he asked if he can take his horse home, which I thought was pretty sweet. He says, he's not valuable, but I'm attached to him and I'd like to take him home.
He's a sentimental man. He's a sentimental eunuch mad hatter.
Later he is largely forgotten. He starts initially going back to work as a silk hat finisher, then he turns to being a lay preacher, making two hundred and fifty a year, two hundred and fifty dollars dollars, yes, not thousands, of course, And by eighteen seventy four he has his mental state has further deteriorated. He is convinced that John Wilkes Booth is actually still alive, and that Booth has sent people from the former Confederacy to kill him.
That being said, though he was not a popular man among his cohorts, for the reason we talked about earlier, that he's always in people's faces preaching the Holy Roller line. But also like even the other troops that he was with in his unit, they would have been irritated with him because he kind of stole their glory, right Yeah, that could have been any of them. Also, it would have been much more of a group victory if they had brought the man back alive like they were supposed to,
but instead he took it upon himself to pop one off. Yeah, and so he was getting threatening letters, right, that was real. Yes, he was getting threatening letters. Don't know if they were meant just to torture him, but some were signed Jay Wilkes Booth. So in his mental state, he felt that these really were from this guy, and there was this
overarching conspiracy to assassinate him. By eighteen seventy eight, increasingly unpopular, despised by half the country, strongly disliked by his colleagues, he hops in a wagon and says that he's going to head west. Where's it go, Ben?
He goes to a place called Cloud County, Kansas and starts the homestead on eighty acres.
Yeah. Unfortunately, that doesn't go super well, and because of some pretty intensely erratic behavior, he does not get to
continue in that endeavor. Some of that behavior includes, in eighteen eighty seven, he holds the Kansas House of Representatives hostage basically using two revolvers and a sword, and then he declares that the session has been adjourned, and then he has various in sundry run ins with the law, and in eighteen eighty seven October, that is, he is declared insane and he is committed to a Kansas asylum. But that's not the end.
That is not quite the end. He escapes from the asylum on May twenty sixth, eighteen eighty eight, because he sees somebody making deliveries and tethering a horse to the front of the building. So he breaks away, jumps on the horse, and takes off all the way to Neodesha, Kansas, home of a fellow veteran and survivor of Andersonville, a guy named Richard Thatcher.
And that caused this kind of bolo letter to be generated with the heading insane man escaped Topeka, Kansas, May twenty sixth, eighteen eighty eight. Dear Sir Boston Corbett, an insane man escaped from the insane asylum at Topeka this morning and is supposed to be heading for Cloud County. He's about fifty five years old and five feet four inches tall. It is a clever detail. This is a
smart move. He has plucked all his beard out down to the lower part of his ears, his gray chin, whiskers, and mustache, gray hair cut square at bottom and parts his hair in the middle. He wore a dark jeans suit and black soft hat and was riding a bay or a sorel pony with a boy's saddle. So keep a lookout for that guy.
He is regarded as a dangerous man, but was unarmed when he escaped. If he comes your way, arrest him and return him to the asylum at once, or telegraph doctor B. D. Eastman, Superintendent Insane Asylum, Topeka for orders. What happens when he meets up with his old pal Thatcher or when he reaches Thatcher's property.
We should say, well, the first thing he did when he got there to Neodosha, Kansas, was he he took that stolen horse that he referred to as a borrowed horse, and he tied a note onto it and slapped on the button and send it on its way. And it was quite a ways of way, so it's unclear if that horse made it to its rightful owner. But the note kind of was like, sorry, I just had to do it here, Please take this horse back. I didn't I wasn't stealing it. But yeah, he went to a
train station and was trying to get to Mexico. And that is the last anyone ever heard from him.
Right, Rumors still trickle in after that. You'll see a lot of people list his death as eighteen ninety four. One theory says that he was targeted by people who were bitter over the various battles he had had in his time in the Union Army. Someone else said he died the Great Hinckley Fire, and then there were people who would point out other possibilities. You know, in the early nineteen hundreds, the Federal Prison Bureau heard about a Boston Corbette who claimed he was alive and well and
wanted his pension. But the problem was that the guy who claimed to be Boston Corbette, who also went by the nickname Old Trapper Old Trapper, only gave vague descriptions. Yeah, I think he was taller, and he was taller, Yeah, like a lot taller, I believe full eight inches or so. And then people thought that would be the last they heard of him, But more and more stories poured in. They just became less and less credible, if that makes sense.
It does, and now he is largely lost to history except for one one thing that remains.
Right. Yeah, it's like a weird kind of memorial. It's just a pen like a like a fenced area that marks where his final home was. And in this Washingtonian article they wrap up talking about how in nineteen fifty there was a boy Scout troop that made a stone plaque to put there and they called it the Boston Corbett Dugout. And there are two revolvers embedded in the rock.
And here ends the strange story of Boston Corbette war. He wrote a sum a villain to others, but clearly a man in need of medical care of some sort.
Yeah. Absolutely, who left a pretty fascinating mark on history.
And if you'd like to read more about Boston Corbette, you can check out the book The Madman and the Assassin, which has a pretty snappy chronicle of his time, both his normal life leading up to the Civil War and his earlier struggles all the way to that fateful day when he shot John Wilkes Booth. I felt like a very definitive ending. Usually we get to a segue or something.
Huh, yeah, No, that's good. That's good where it's almost like we're getting a little bit better at this. Well, let's jakes ourselves fair enough, fair enough, But we hope you enjoyed this story. We were surprised in the course of our research to learn that, you know, a lot of people haven't heard of this guy. I hadn't.
Yeah, they don't really teach you about it in school, you know.
Well, you know, it's like, I think this is an interesting slice of life of the time too, in terms of, like, you know, the way mental illness was handled, the whole idea of me. There's just so many interesting little twists in this story, the way the whole Andersonville incarceration thing. And I knew a little bit about that, but this was a really interesting inside perspective, like from someone who lived through it, the whole, you know, coming to Jesus stuff.
It's just this is like, why is there not a film.
About this guy who would play him, Crispin Glover?
Yes? Can I tell you that My friend Matt saw Crispin Glover on the subway in New York for like an hour, just sitting by himself, wearing a really nice black suit and listening to earbuds.
I think you may have mentioned that it was he actually going somewhere, just writing the subway, I.
Think he was going. He said, well, Matt works way uptown, and his his theory was maybe that he was shooting something in Harlem, because that's sort of the direction.
Yeah, so I think Crispin Glover would be a good pick.
He would be awesome. I mean, I mean, look, if you look at this guy at listeners, if you want to check it out, tell us what you think. Who would play Boston Corbett, Oh, Crispin Glover all day long? You know who else would be good? Norman Ritas dead in the States.
Also, my favorite moment in the guy's biography is definitely the Other Street evangelists saying God has called you to preach my son about four blocks that way.
That's still my favorite. That's good.
We want to know what you thought about this episode, and as always, some of our best ideas come from you, fellow ridiculous historians. So let us know what other tremendously important characters in American history or in the history of your own country seem to be largely obscured today. We'd like to shed some light on them. As always, thank you, for checking out the show. Thank you to our super producer, Casey Pegram.
Thanks to Alex Williams who composed our theme, and thanks to Christopher Haciotis for being our researcher extraordinaire on this episode.
And by this time, longtime listeners you know the Drill will find us on Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter. You can also check out our community page, Ridiculous Historians, which is a.
Hoot, a real hoot and hot and haller a brewhaha.
Sure are we just going to toss synonyms?
We have to get out of here. We do toss synonyms, huh. I like it. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.