THOMAS H. "BOSTON" CORBETT

 You can easily be forgiven for not knowing who Thomas H. "Boston" Corbett was. He did one super important thing in history, and you all know what that deed is. You just don't know the man behind the deed.

Don't look him up yet. Just go with the flow on this.

He was born in England before going to New York City with his parents as a child. They wound up in Troy, NY, and he started working as a milliner. Back in the 19th Century that involved working with a lot with mercury nitrate, ie. the reason the Mad Hatter is mad. When you take this into consideration, his later life makes a lot of sense. He did many crazy things, and chemical psychosis explains that away pretty neatly.

He married and became an American citizen, but he found it hard to keep a job in Virginia because he was very much against slavery. There are abolitionists, and there is this guy. He chomped at the bit whenever the subject came up. His wife grew sick and died, and he took up the bottle and drank heavily until he fell under the sway of the Methodist Church. They sobered him up, and now that his head was clear, he devoted his life to God. So much to the point that whenever someone cursed in his presence, he stopped to sing and pray for the lost soul doing the cursing. He regularly stopped doing his job to do this, so he made a lot of bosses angry.

And Corbett didn't fuck around. He took the teachings of the Bible literally, especially when it comes to what happens when one's eye offends thee. He desperately wanted to be celibate, but his sexual thoughts kept getting in his way. So he did the Biblical thing to do: he castrated himself. With scissors. He didn't rush to get to a hospital, either. He had enough time to grab a bite to eat and to go to church and pray first.

And he was happy about it. Without sexual thoughts he was able to preach more. At around this point he picked up the nickname "Boston." It was the city in which he'd converted. He spent a lot of his time rounding up drunks and feeding them, getting them sober and hopefully converting them to Jesus.

And then the Civil War began. As anti-slavery as he was, he couldn't wait to join the Union Army even though he had to cut his Jesus-long hair to do so. He carried a Bible with him always and read to his fellow soldiers whether they liked it or not. He routinely got into trouble with his superiors and eventually was sentenced to death by firing squad for taking one to task over cursing and using the Lord's name in vain. They decided not to shoot him and discharged him instead. He quickly joined up with the Cavalry where he was demoted from sergeant to private over something that history has forgotten.

Late in the war he found his unit surrounded by Confederates. His fellow soldiers were captured, and he was left in a ditch with a repeating rifle. They didn't stop him until he ran out of ammo. One of the Confederates put a gun to his head but was stopped because "[h]e has a right to defend himself to the last!" And so he was sent to the horrorshow that is Andersonville. After months of torment and torture he was released. For his heroics he was promoted back to sergeant.

And then came April 14, 1865. You know that date. And now you may suspect why Corbett is important to history.

When Abraham Lincoln was shot, Corbett was part of his funeral parade. Not long after that he was given orders to follow up a lead on John Wilkes Booth's location. They had him cornered at a Virginia farmhouse. Corbett had his men surround the house, at which point David Herrold, one of Booth's co-conspirators, surrendered, leaving Booth inside on his own. Corbett asked his CO for permission to go in alone to get Booth. He reasoned that if Booth shot him, then the other soldiers can get Booth. He was denied and positioned at the perimeter around the farmhouse. They set it on fire to burn out Booth, but Corbett found himself near a large crack in the wall, where he could see into the house and to Booth.

Corbett said that he saw Booth aim his carbine, forcing him to shoot Booth before he could pull the trigger. The minie ball struck Booth in the exact same place that he'd earlier shot Lincoln. Pure coincidence. Corbett might have called it divine intervention. In fact when asked about it, he said, "Providence guided my hand."

They dragged a screaming, mortally wounded John Wilkes Booth out into the open like a vampire. He begged for water, but when he got some he couldn't drink it. Lincoln had been lucky. He'd been unconscious until he succumbed to the assassin's bullet. Booth was not so lucky. He remained conscious as he died inch by inch. It took him so long to die that he literally begged the Union soldiers to kill him. Then, finally, hours after being shot he died. In case you were wondering, his last words were, as he looked at his hands, "Useless . . . useless."

Here's the thing: by shooting Booth, Corbett had gone against orders according to some historians, and it was a bit of a scandal. Corbett insisted that he thought Booth was going to shoot his way out, so shooting him dead was self-defense. "Booth would have killed me if I had not shot first. I think I did right." He then said that he hadn't intended to kill Booth, but at the same time he didn't have any problems with the result. Secretary of War Edwin Stanton famously said of Booth and Corbett, "The rebel is dead. The patriot lives. He has spared the country expense, continued excitement and trouble. Discharge the patriot."

Corbett became a celebrity. People wanted his autograph. They wanted to hear him tell the story of killing John Wilkes Booth. They wanted to buy the gun that killed the rebel, which he wouldn't sell "at any price" because the gun belonged to the government. But this is how he usually told the tale:

I aimed at his body. I did not want to kill him....I think he stooped to pick up something just as I fired. That may probably account for his receiving the ball in the head. [W]hen the assassin lay at my feet, a wounded man, and I saw the bullet had taken effect about an inch back of the ear, and I remembered that Mr. Lincoln was wounded about the same part of the head, I said: "What a God we have...God avenged Abraham Lincoln.

The public didn't agree with that last part. Corbett picked up another nickname: Lincoln's Avenger.

The fame had a double edge to it. Southerners routinely sent him death threats, so he made sure to be armed at all times. When discharged he went back to being a hatter but kept getting fired for stopping work to pray. When he could no longer find work as a milliner he capitalized on his fame and gave lectures and such, almost like the Coward Robert Ford did after killing Jesse James. But due to his fame and the threats to his life and the constant stream of being fired, he became paranoid, and his speeches became more incoherent as he ranted and raved at anyone who would listen.

In 1875, while attending a soldiers' reunion, one of the men expressed his doubt that Booth had even been killed. This enraged Corbett to the point of him pulling his gun on the accuser. The others rushed him out of there. Like when someone told Buzz Aldrin that the moon landing was faked. Aldrin and Corbett didn't respond well to such accusations.

In a last ditch effort at a normal life Corbett was given a job as the doorkeeper of the Kansas House of Representatives, but his paranoia got the better of him. He thought the Representative officers were after him, so he brandished his gun and chased after them. He didn't hurt anyone, but that was enough for a judge to sentence him to a mental institute in Topkea.

In 1888, around the time Billy the Kid was fighting a war in Lincoln County, AZ, Corbett escaped from the asylum on horseback. He was last seen in Neodesha, KS, where he stayed with a farmer before moving on to Mexico, or so the farmer said. People speculated that he'd actually gone to Minnesota where he died in the Great Hinckley Fire. Why speculated? Because if the story about Mexico is true, he did exactly what Ambrose Bierce did decades later: he went to Mexico and was never seen again.

Bizarrely there were two people who later claimed to be Corbett, one of them as late as 1905, but both were dismissed as fakes and were imprisoned.

So what really happened to the man who shot John Wilkes Booth? No one knows. But it's a strange way to end the strange tale of Thomas H. "Boston" Corbett.