Evening Republican, Volume 14, Number 46, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 23 February 1910 — KNEW SLAYER OF LINCOLN. [ARTICLE]

KNEW SLAYER OF LINCOLN.

Cuul Aevnalntann Only Camte of Suspicion A(mtnat New Senator. Col. James Gordon, the new senator from Mississippi, is a spare-built, stooped man, with a scraggly, gray beard wbich covers his thin and upper Up. He Is unreconstructed and has no | apologies to offer for the civil war or the part he played In it. While the War Department was denying that a reward of SIO,OOO was put on his head as one of the Lincoln conspirators the old gentleman was searching his memory for the facts. Col. Gordon met John Wilkes Booth, the slayer of Lincoln; in a hotel in Montreal, the Washington correspondent of the New York World says. It was a casual acquaintance* formed through Col. Jacob Thompson, Secretary of the Interior under President Davis and at that time an agent of the Confederacy in Canada. Col. Gordon was not well acquainted with Booth and the fact that Booth left Montreal and came direct to Washington was the only cause of the suspicion directed against Gordon and Thompson. The new senator went to Canada after his escape from a Union prison ship. He had been abroad negotiating for the purchase of a warship for the Confederacy. In returning the party tried to run the blockade at Wilmington. He was made a prisoner with the common sailors on the boat. An officer noticed that he was not an ordinary seaman and questioned him. Col. Gordon said that he was the son of the Duke of Argyll and that he had fled from Scotland because of com-' plicity in a duel. The officer helped him send a letter to the British ambassador in Washington. Later he was released and in his gratitude he gave a dinner to the Union officers at Old Point Comfort. After his release he made straight for New York and thence to Canada. “When we had crossed the boundary,” said Col. Gordon, “and were nearing St. Johns, I was so happy at being free from the fear of arrest that I jumped up in the car and yelled: ‘Hoowy for Jeff Davis and the Southern Confederacy. Immediately I had a crowd around me, all joining in the yell, and we all got off the train to get a drink. A detective who was followlng me came into the bar. He took a drink, but when I proposed a toast to Jeff Davis he would not drink. I threatened to break his head with a decanter and he changed his mind. He kept on my track after that and after the death of President Lincoln he shadowed me constantly.”