At Garrett's farm, Colonel Everton Conger found on the body of John Wilkes Booth a small red book, which Booth kept as a diary. In an entry written sometime between the assassination and his capture, Booth wrote: "For six months we had worked to capture, but our cause being almost lost, something decisive and great must be done. But its failure was owing to others, who did not strike for their country with a heart." The prosecution did not introduce Booth's diary into evidence in the 1865 trial. In 1867, it turned up in a forgotten War Department file with eighteen pages missing. |