The Lincoln Conspiracy (film)

The Lincoln Conspiracy is a 1977 film directed by James L. Conway that dramatizes certain conspiracy theories concerning the 1865 assassination of U.S. President Abraham Lincoln. The film, which was based on the 1977 book of the same name by David W. Balsiger and Charles E. Sellier Jr., starred Robert Middleton as Secretary of War Edwin M. Stanton, John Dehner as Col. Lafayette C. Baker, Bradford Dillman as John Wilkes Booth, and John Anderson as Lincoln.

The hypothesis of the film was that, far from being the work of the ringleader of a lonely band of fanatics as most historians had become agreed that it was, Lincoln's assassination was the result of a vast conspiracy involving Secretary Of War Edwin Stanton, Chief of National Police Colonel Lafayette Baker, and various Northern Senators and politicians who were determined to stop Lincoln from carrying out his lenient Reconstruction policies towards the South. The movie further professed that the man killed at Garret's farm in Virginia was not John Wilkes Booth, but another man named James William Boyd.