A little known American myth* alleges Secretary of War Edwin Stanton became so disillusioned with the way President Abraham Lincoln was handling the Civil War in the fall of 1862, following a summer of disastrous Union defeats, he decided to kidnap Lincoln and his wife and hold them under guard in the White House basement.  Diverse historians pieced the story together from reports of interviews with surviving participants of the bizarre ordeal.

Stanton found a deserter in the Old Capitol Prison to impersonate Lincoln and an imprisoned Confederate spy to impersonate Lincoln’s wife.  After intensive research, historians identified the man as Duff Read of Michigan who was sentenced to hang and the woman as Alethia Haliday of Bladensburg, Md., who was convicted of trying to sneak an escape plan into prison to notorious spy Rose Greenhow.  After the war, Smithsonian Institution officials requested Old Capitol Prison to turn over its records for historical preservation.  Mysteriously they discovered pages missing during September of 1862.  Careful study revealed that Duff and Miss Haliday were admitted to the prison in early 1862 but no records noted when they were removed.  When the Smithsonian delegation confronted Prison Superintendent William Woods about the missing records, he refused to comment.  After museum researchers went to the hometowns of the missing prisoners, they found evidence the couple indeed bore striking resemblances to the Lincolns and that no one ever saw either one after the war.

Stanton chose Private Adam Christy to guard over the Lincolns and tend to their daily needs.  Christy, by coincidence, came from Stanton’s hometown of Steubenville, Ohio.  Rumors began to circulate throughout Steubenville after the end of the war that Christy did not die at the Second Battle of Manassas as reported in official War Department documents.  Christy’s father swore to the day he died that Secretary Stanton had assigned his son to duties at the White House.

At the turn of the twentieth century, relatives of poet Walt Whitman found among his papers a curious story about a half-witted janitor in the White House named Gabby Zook.  According to the story, Zook stumbled into the basement to discover the kidnapping.  The story also claimed that Stanton forced Zook to join the Lincolns for the next two and a half years.  Literary circles dismissed the story at the time as poetic expression of the feeling of confinement all Americans underwent during the war.

The questionable Whitman papers also alleged Stanton often went to the basement for advice from Lincoln because his own policies were not working as expected.  Zook told Whitman of an incident in which the guard Christy became so distressed by his role in the conspiracy that in a rage he killed an unnamed White House butler.  Zook insisted Stanton and one of his henchmen disposed of the body.  Some historians speculate the henchman was Secret Service officer Lafayette Baker.

By the end of the war, the secretary faced the dilemma of what to do with two Lincolns.    No one knows exactly what happened to the Lincoln impersonators.  According to the Whitman account, Zook believed Stanton blackmailed Christy with the butler’s murder, forcing Christy to find assassins to kill the real Lincoln at Ford’s Theater, Secretary of War William Seward and Vice-President Andrew Johnson .  Conventional history identified the presidential assassin to be John Wilkes Booth.

Zook confided in Whitman that Lincoln in the final days of the war had succumbed to extreme melancholia.  He did not interact with his wife and Zook in the basement room nor did he eat.  On the last day, Zook described Lincoln’s emotional state as one heading to the gallows, unable to control his own destiny.

Grandchildren of President Andrew Johnson told friends in Greeneville, Tennessee, that Johnson revealed on his deathbed that he discovered the kidnapping plot and the eventual assassination of Lincoln at the hands of Stanton.  That discovery led Johnson to fire Stanton in 1867, provoking Congress to impeach Johnson.  The Senate failed by one vote to remove Johnson from office.

To this day, no one knows what happened to the other participants in the plot.

*This report is absolutely true because I made up the myth myself in 1988.