Boston Corbett: The Hat Maker Who Shot Booth Through a Burning Barn

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Thomas Corbett was born in London in 1832, grew up in New York, and trained as a hat maker, inhaling mercury nitrate vapors linked to the condition behind the phrase "mad as a hatter." After his wife Susan died at sea as the couple left Virginia, he fell into homelessness and drinking in Boston, where street preachers took him in. He joined the Methodist Episcopal Church, renamed himself Boston, grew his hair long, and in 1858 castrated himself after reading the Gospel of Matthew, then attended a prayer meeting before seeking treatment.

In the Union Army he reprimanded a colonel for swearing and was court-martialed and sentenced to a firing squad, later reduced. Captured in Virginia in 1864 after fighting alone from a ditch, he was sent to Andersonville. In April 1865, despite orders to take John Wilkes Booth alive, Corbett fired through a crack in the burning tobacco barn, hitting Booth near the same spot where Booth had shot Lincoln. Edwin Stanton let him go with a share of the reward. Years later in Kansas he drew a revolver on state legislators, was committed to the Topeka asylum, escaped on a horse in 1888, and vanished.

At Andersonville he crossed the deadline under the guards' rifles to bring water to a wounded prisoner.
He told the War Department both that Booth was about to shoot and that a divine force guided his hand.
He toured as "Lincoln's Avenger," giving lectures with lantern slides.
At an Ohio veterans' reunion he pulled a pistol on men who questioned whether the man in the barn was Booth.
Rumors placed his death in a Minnesota forest fire, and impostors tried to claim his military pension.

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