Lafayette C. Baker
Encyclopedia
Lafayette Curry Baker was a United States investigator and spy, serving for the Union Army, during the American Civil War and under presidents Abraham Lincoln and Andrew Johnson.

Baker's exploits are mainly known through his book A History of the Secret Service which he published in 1867 after his fall from grace. During the Civil War, he spied for General Winfield Scott
Winfield Scott
Winfield Scott was a United States Army general, and unsuccessful presidential candidate of the Whig Party in 1852....

 on Confederate
Confederate States Army
The Confederate States Army was the army of the Confederate States of America while the Confederacy existed during the American Civil War. On February 8, 1861, delegates from the seven Deep South states which had already declared their secession from the United States of America adopted the...

 forces in Virginia
Virginia
The Commonwealth of Virginia , is a U.S. state on the Atlantic Coast of the Southern United States. Virginia is nicknamed the "Old Dominion" and sometimes the "Mother of Presidents" after the eight U.S. presidents born there...

. Despite numerous scrapes, he returned to Washington, D.C.
Washington, D.C.
Washington, D.C., formally the District of Columbia and commonly referred to as Washington, "the District", or simply D.C., is the capital of the United States. On July 16, 1790, the United States Congress approved the creation of a permanent national capital as permitted by the U.S. Constitution....

, with information that Scott evidently thought valuable enough to raise him to the rank of captain and he swiftly took over charge of the Union Intelligence Service from the Scottish detective Allan Pinkerton
Allan Pinkerton
Allan Pinkerton was a Scottish American detective and spy, best known for creating the Pinkerton National Detective Agency.-Early life, career and immigration:...

.

Baker largely owed his appointment to Secretary of War
United States Secretary of War
The Secretary of War was a member of the United States President's Cabinet, beginning with George Washington's administration. A similar position, called either "Secretary at War" or "Secretary of War," was appointed to serve the Congress of the Confederation under the Articles of Confederation...

 Edwin M. Stanton
Edwin M. Stanton
Edwin McMasters Stanton was an American lawyer and politician who served as Secretary of War under the Lincoln Administration during the American Civil War from 1862–1865...

, but suspected the secretary of corruption and was eventually demoted for tapping his telegraph lines and packed off to New York. He was quickly recalled, however, after the assassination of President Lincoln in 1865. Within two days of his arrival in Washington, Baker's agents in Maryland
Maryland
Maryland is a U.S. state located in the Mid Atlantic region of the United States, bordering Virginia, West Virginia, and the District of Columbia to its south and west; Pennsylvania to its north; and Delaware to its east...

 had made four arrests and had the names of two more conspirators, including the actual presidential assassin John Wilkes Booth
John Wilkes Booth
John Wilkes Booth was an American stage actor who assassinated President Abraham Lincoln at Ford's Theatre, in Washington, D.C., on April 14, 1865. Booth was a member of the prominent 19th century Booth theatrical family from Maryland and, by the 1860s, was a well-known actor...

. Before the month was out, Booth along with David Herold
David Herold
David Edgar Herold was an accomplice of John Wilkes Booth in the assassination of Abraham Lincoln. After guiding fellow conspirator Lewis Powell to the home of Secretary of State William H. Seward, whom Powell intended to kill, Herold fled and rendezvoused outside of Washington, D.C., with Booth...

 were found holed up in a barn and Booth was himself shot and killed by Sgt. Boston Corbett
Boston Corbett
Thomas P. "Boston" Corbett was the Union Army soldier who shot and killed Abraham Lincoln's assassin, John Wilkes Booth. He disappeared after 1888, but circumstantial evidence suggests that he died in the Great Hinckley Fire in 1894, although this remains impossible to substantiate.-Early...

. Baker was promoted to the rank of brigadier general
Brigadier general (United States)
A brigadier general in the United States Army, Air Force, and Marine Corps, is a one-star general officer, with the pay grade of O-7. Brigadier general ranks above a colonel and below major general. Brigadier general is equivalent to the rank of rear admiral in the other uniformed...

 and received a generous share of the $100,000 reward offered to the apprehender of the president's killer.

The following year, however, Baker was sacked from his position as government spymaster. President Johnson accused him of spying on him, a charge Baker admitted in his book which he published in response. He also announced that he had had Booth's diary in his possession which was being suppressed by the Department of War and Secretary Stanton. When the diary was eventually produced, Baker claimed that eighteen vital pages were missing. It was suggested that these would implicate Stanton in the assassination.

Baker died in 1868, supposedly from meningitis
Meningitis
Meningitis is inflammation of the protective membranes covering the brain and spinal cord, known collectively as the meninges. The inflammation may be caused by infection with viruses, bacteria, or other microorganisms, and less commonly by certain drugs...

. As it was scarcely eighteen months after his explosive allegations, some suggested he was killed by the War Department to silence him. Using an atomic absorption spectrophotometer to analyze several hairs from Baker's head, Ray A. Neff, a professor at Indiana State University
Indiana State University
Indiana State University is a public university located in Terre Haute, Indiana, United States.The Princeton Review has named Indiana State as one of the "Best in the Midwest" seven years running, and the College of Education's Graduate Program was recently named as a 'Top 100' by U.S...

, determined the man was killed by arsenic
Arsenic
Arsenic is a chemical element with the symbol As, atomic number 33 and relative atomic mass 74.92. Arsenic occurs in many minerals, usually in conjunction with sulfur and metals, and also as a pure elemental crystal. It was first documented by Albertus Magnus in 1250.Arsenic is a metalloid...

 poisoning rather than meningitis. Baker had been unwittingly consuming the poison
Poison
In the context of biology, poisons are substances that can cause disturbances to organisms, usually by chemical reaction or other activity on the molecular scale, when a sufficient quantity is absorbed by an organism....

 for months, mixed into imported beer provided by his wife's brother Wally Pollack. The Lincoln Conspiracy
The Lincoln Conspiracy (book)
The Lincoln Conspiracy is a book by David W. Balsiger and Charles E. Sellier, Jr. promoting certain conspiracy theories concerning the 1865 assassination of U.S. President Abraham Lincoln.-Cover-up of the plan to kidnap Lincoln:...

 by Balsiger and Sellier cites a diary
Diary
A diary is a record with discrete entries arranged by date reporting on what has happened over the course of a day or other period. A personal diary may include a person's experiences, and/or thoughts or feelings, including comment on current events outside the writer's direct experience. Someone...

 Baker's wife kept which chronicled several dates Pollack brought Baker beer; they correspond to the gradually elevated levels of toxin in the Baker hair samples Neff studied. Wally worked for the War Department, though whether he acted on orders or alone has yet to be determined. Nevertheless, Neff's studies, along with the information chronicled in Baker's diary, serve to bolster a cogent and provocative alternate history of the Lincoln assassination, one distinct from the chronology most commonly promulgated by mainstream U.S. historians.

Baker was born in Stafford, New York and is buried in Forest Hills Memorial Park Huntington Valley, Pennsylvania. His unknown grave can be found behind the Hanover-Kensington Memorial plot.

See also

  • List of American Civil War generals
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