A horse and his man

For years after Baker returned to Lansing, Baker was a fixture at the Decoration (Memorial) Day parade, mounted on his trusty horse, Buckskin. When the horse died, Baker had him stuffed and trotted him out on wheels. At personal appearances, Baker sold an “imperial sized” postcard emblazoned with a photo of horse and rider. An “autobiography” of Buckskin, written from the horse’s point of view, was included on the back.

Saturday at Dart Auditorium, historian Steve Miller of Chicago will talk about the capture of John Wilkes Booth, concentrating on Baker and several other principals that lived, or ended up, in Michigan.

Baker was a detective and a trusted lieutenant to his cousin, Union spy Lafayette Baker.

“They hunted spies, seized counterfeit money, raided brothels, destroyed illegal alcohol and things like that,” Miller said.

Miller has been studying Lincoln´s assassination for over 30 years. He has written a lot on the subject and appeared in the National Geographic special, “The Hunt for Lincoln’s Assassin.”

Although he read a lot of history as a student at the University of Oregon, Miller didn’t get hooked on history until he started reading letters from the Civil War and meeting the descendants of people who were swept up in its carnage and drama.

When he learned that two of the soldiers in the patrol that killed Booth ended up in Portland, Ore., he tracked down their families.

The descendants of the two soldiers still had letters dating from the Civil War. One of the letters was written by Emory Parady to his parents in Nashville, Mich., only two days after Booth’s capture. Reading the letter gave Miller a thrill of immediacy.

“Stories like these have kept me home nights for many years,” Miller said.

Parady (and his descendants) said he was the first soldier who laid his hands on Booth after he was shot, but Miller found it to be a dubious claim. He did, however, find it interesting that Parady had a younger brother named Lincoln. (His father was a Lincoln fan.)

Later, Miller met Parady’s granddaughter in a house in Portland where Parady had lived.

“You can´t get closer to the story than that,” he said.

Michigan’s connections to Lincoln’s assassination are richer than Oregon’s, with Luther Baker in a starring role.

“He was in constant motion from the moment they received word the president was killed until they caught Booth 12 days later,” Miller said.

Part of Miller’s job has been to sift through Baker’s accounts of the Booth manhunt, which evolved over the years.

Baker’s lectures included a few tales about Boston Corbett, the man who shot Booth, that Miller calls “questionable.”

Conflicting factual claims are part and parcel of Lincoln lore, but Miller is troubled by a bigger mystery surrounding the president´s assassination.

“I don´t think we’ve really come to terms with why Booth did it,” Miller said.

He called Lincoln´s assassination “probably the greatest misreading of time and circumstance in American history.”

If Booth was trying to strike a blow for the South, Miller said, he certainly picked the wrong time. For one thing, the South was already lost. What is more, the assassination hardened postwar national policy.

“Lincoln would have been more conciliatory to the South,” Miller said.

As it happened, the South was blamed for Lincoln’s death and postwar terms were harsher than they would have been otherwise.

Historians will never stop debating the details and ramifications of the Civil War, but now and then a truce breaks out.

At a banquet several years ago, Miller met Thomas Mudd, the great-grandson of Dr. Samuel Mudd — the doctor who fixed Booth´s broken leg and was convicted of aiding and abetting the assassin. (Thomas Mudd spoke in his ancestor´s defense at a Lansing Historical Society talk April 9.)

Miller made it clear to Mudd that he had formed no opinion on his grandfather’s guilt or innocence.

“We got along great after that,” Miller said.

“Luther Baker and the Capture of John Wilkes Booth”

Lecture by historian Steve Miller 4 p.m. Saturday, April 25 FREE Dart Auditorium, Lansing Community College, 500 N. Capitol Ave., Lansing lansinghistory.org