Conspiracy theory of the day

I am belatedly listening to Professor Bob's podcast on the Assasination of President Lincoln, and the podcast about John Wilkes Booth's background said he was a Catholic convert.

Hmm...I don't remember reading about that in O'Reilly's bestselling book.
I was aware that the owner of the boarding house where the plot was hatched, Mrs. Surratt, was a Catholic, (but I didn't know she was a convert); and that her son fled to Catholic Montreal to avoid arrest, but years later was acquitted of the charge.

And Dr. Mudd was also Catholic, and anti Catholic bigotry might have been one reason he was convicted:

In reviewing Samuel Mudd's "military records," the Army ought to have considered some issues which affected the fairness of Mudd's trial, at least by modern standards. * Samuel Mudd was a Roman Catholic, a fact which was brought out during the trial. One of the members of the Hunter Commission was Brigadier General Thomas W. Harris. In 1897, Harris published a book entitled Rome's Responsibility for the Assassination of Abraham Lincoln. The theme of this book was that President Lincoln's assassination had been the result of a Catholic plot. It is open to question whether Brigadier General Harris was fully free from bias against Dr. Mudd, in view of Dr. Mudd's religion and Harris' later writings about that religion. Bias on the part of a judge is, of course, a good reason to set aside a trial verdict.

No one today (even O'Reilly) notices the anti Catholic conspiracy theory that said the Jesuits were behind the assassination, but one wonders if the bigotry had something to do with the conviction of Mudd and Suratt...

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The AtlanticMonthly has some stories from the Civil war period on line HERE.
including this one, printed 3 months after the assassination.

We have the authority of a high Government official for the statement that "the President's murder was organized in Canada and approved at Richmond"; but the evidence in support of this extraordinary announcement is, doubtless for the best of reasons, withheld at the time we write

but guess who the author blames for inspiring the thinking that inspired the plot? Cicero...

Cicero, for example, is never tired of sounding the praises of eminent homicides. He scarcely praised himself more than he eulogized illustrious murderers of other days. And on his eloquent words in honor of assassination are the "ingenuous youth" of Christian countries trained and taught.

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In a related item:

Evidently somebody at one time thought this was a good idea:

Bobblehead dolls of the man who assassinated President Abraham Lincoln have been pulled from sale at the Gettysburg National Military Park visitors’ center bookstore.

The dolls of John Wilkes Booth with a handgun were removed from shelves on Saturday, a day after a reporter for Hanover’s The Evening Sun newspaper asked about them, officials said.

via Dustbury