Beschreibung:

Letter signed "L. C. Baker" to historian Benson Lossing sending him photographs of the assassination conspirators.
New York: 15 May 1865. 1 p., Office Special Agency, War Department stationery (250 x 203 mm). Condition: light toning and usual folds. [With:] Four unmounted albumen photographs of Clement C. Clay, Jacob Thompson William W. Cleary, and N. Beverly Tucker. [N.p.: 1865]. Each 85 x 55 mm. Each heavily retouched. the secret service chief sends lossing photographs of four confederate agents implicated in the plot to assassinate lincoln. Clement C. Clay, Jacob Thompson William W. Cleary, and N. Beverly Tucker were wanted by the Secret Service as suspected conspirators in the plot to assassinate Lincoln. Responding to Lossing's request for a copy of a reward poster for the men, Baker writes: "…Enclosed please find the photographs you desired as yet there has been no posters published containing pictures of Davis, Saunders, Clay, Thompson, Tucker, & Cleary. Respectfully Yrs, L.C. Baker, Col. & Agt. War Dept." Baker, chief of the U.S. Secret Service, was in charge of efforts to capture the Lincoln conspirators. Three weeks earlier, on April 26, he received a promotion to brigadier general and a $3,750 reward for his role in planning the operation which resulted in the capture of John Wilkes Booth and D.C. Herold. On May 2, 1865, President Johnson issued a proclamation announcing the involvement of Jefferson Davis, Thompson, Clay, Tucker, and Cleary in the conspiracy. A reward of $100,000 was offered for Davis's capture and a $25,000 reward for the capture of any of the rest. On May 9, the same men were named as conspirators by the military commission headed by Judge Advocate General Joseph Holt. All had taken orders from Judah P. Benjamin, Confederate secretary of state, who the administration believed to be the ultimate authority behind the assassination. Following Johnson's proclamation, Thompson escaped to Europe. He lived there for a time, later back in Canada, and finally he returned to Mississippi in 1868. Clay, who had returned to Richmond in Jan. 1865, fled the capital with Davis and his cabinet in April. However, when he heard of the reward posted for his arrest, he turned himself in. He was held prisoner at Ft. Monroe, along with Jefferson Davis, although neither were ever charged with a crime. Clay was paroled in April 1866, after a year spent in solitary confinement, and finally pardoned by Congress in 1880. Cleary defended himself and his cohorts in a November 1865 letter to Johnson in which he denied any involvement in hostile plots. Tucker also denied any direct involvement in violent plots, which may have been truthful. The government withdrew the reward for his arrest in Nov. 1865. In the months surrounding the Lincoln conspiracy, Lossing was engaged in an intense effort to collect information and images for his Pictorial History of the Civil War in the United States of America (1866-1888), explaining his request here for a reward poster.