Hello and welcome to this day in esoteric political history from radiotopia.

My name is Jody Avergan. This day, March 1889 President Andrew Johnson pardons a man by the name of Samuel

Arnold along with Samuel Mud and Edmund Sprangler. The three had been in prison for about five years, convicted of being part of a conspiracy to kidnap President Abraham Lincoln.

Their kidnapping plots and attempts took place just a few months before Lincoln was of course assassinated

by John Wilkes Booth in April of 1865.

So this man who is arrested in the wake of Lincoln's assassination and then parted in years

later Samuel Arnold.

He actually knew John Wilkes Booth and was part of what we can say is like a loose network of Confederate

sympathizers who are targeting Lincoln in 1864, 1865.

There were failed kidnapping plots,

failed bioterrorism schemes, all sorts of stuff.

So this is our chance, I guess,

to talk about all the other ways in which Lincoln

might have been assassinated assassinated and our chance to

talk about what pardoning some of these conspirators signaled about the

aftermath of the Civil War. So here to do all that are Nicole Hammer of Vanderbilt and Kelly Carter Jackson of

Wellesley. Hello there. Hello Jody. Hey there. So there's a lot here but I

suppose we should just go beat by beat and start with not the pardoning five years later but the stuff

that Samuel Arnold and his pals are up to in 1864 1865 so failed kidnapping plots what do we know about this? This is wild I just

feel like gosh poor Lincoln you know he can't a break. I mean there were so many attempts to harm

this man, to assassinate this man, or kidnap him, or, you know, cause some sort of violence and this plot was really not a part of an

attempt to assassinate Abraham Lincoln but really to kidnap him in exchange for other Confederate soldiers.

...