All right, Mike, I'll grant the authenticity of these checks, not having seen anything to the contrary. It is even possible the Confederate Signal Corps, as the clandestine operations of the CSA was characterized, had a plan, involving Booth, to KIDNAP Lincoln. An attempt was made in March, 1865, but failed. But the assassination of Lincoln was an act conceived and accomplished by Booth on his own, after the ANV surrendered.

The site noted, http://spitfirelist.com/for-the-record/ftr-691-the-confederate-secret-service-and-the-assassination-of-abraham-lincoln/ outlines an audio production based on the book "Come Retribution", by William A. Tidwell, James O. Hall, and David Winfred Gaddy; University Press of Mississippi, Copyright 1988 by UPM; ISBN 0-87805-348-4.

Tidwell and Gaddy are retired U.S. intelligence officers; Hall is a retired U.S. Department of Labor official. According to a Publishers' Weekly editorial on the Amazon.com website, "the authors speculate that the unexpected successes of Generals Grant and Sherman that forced Lee to surrender in April 1865 did not daunt Booth, who may have reasoned that "all was not lost; there were still Confederate armies in the field. Some dramatic action might yet save the Confederacy, and he was the one to do it." Acting on his own initiative, the authors advance, Booth shot Lincoln, then escaped via the route that would have served in the abduction plot. The evidence is, as the authors admit, circumstantial, the argument highly conjectural, the writing frequently infelicitous (an agent "went in to kill Vice-President Andrew Johnson but his courage was not sufficiently screwed up"). Nevertheless, Civil War and military history buffs will be intrigued by the documentation amassed in this hefty book."

The notes on the Spitfire site are filled with "it is possible", "may have", and other speculative phrases and ideas. The attempt to involve Mosby in the plot is ludicrous. His troops were supposed to have been in place to protect and guide the group kidnapping Lincoln. Booth was still on the run when Mosby disbanded his unit April 21, 1865. Booth was not killed until April 26. He received aid from no one except the unfortunate Dr. Mudd. If there were other co-conspiritors, they must have been the most inept group ever assigned a task of such magnitude. Even the book cited grants that Booth acted on his own in the assassination. Given Lee's surrender, and the Confederate government's abandonment of Richmond, no sane official unit would have proceeded with their plan; to whom would they have delivered Lincoln? Any checks paid to Booth would have been for the Lincoln kidnap plot, not his murder. Stan