This weekly article that I write is almost always about something going on in North Dakota or the surrounding states or provinces. Today, I have to deviate from that model as I ran across a piece of history that certainly shocked me and I expect it might shock you as well.
The story takes place about Christmastime 1863 in a doctor’s office in Toronto. An American physician named Luke Pryor Blackburn, who was born in Kentucky, was a staunch supporter of the confederacy and had established a friendship with another Confederate sympathizer Godfrey Hyamns.
On the surface, Blackburn was a physician who treated ailments and brought new babies into the world. He was also part of the Confederate underground and was using Toronto as a safe haven while he and Hyamns did their dirty deeds to move the Confederate cause forward.
One day he came up with what he thought was going to be a brilliant idea and that was to assassinate Abraham Lincoln using biological warfare. The plan was to have someone in Cuba collect clothing that had been exposed to yellow fever, seal it in a trunk and deliver it to the White House as a “gift.”
Because yellow fever doesn’t know who “the enemy” is, Hyamns was quite skeptical and didn’t want anything to do with it because it would kill Confederate soldiers as well as women and children. Blackburn changed Hyamns’ mind because the Confederate government was prepared to pay the two men $700,000 to carry out the plan.
Blackburn took a trip to Cuba and successfully gathered enough clothing to fill a trunk. He sailed back to Halifax with his cargo convinced the Union Army would be exterminated without the confederacy having to fire one shot.
The trunk made its way first to Boston. A reluctant Hyamns waited in Boston five days for the shipment to arrive from Halifax. From there it went to Philadelphia, then Baltimore, then the nation’s capital.
Hyamns actually saw the trunk being delivered to the White House and although he never found out what happened to the contents, he and Blackburn waited patiently for the untimely death of President Lincoln.
Several weeks passed and nothing had happened. Lincoln, his family, nor any members of Congress became ill. Hyamns returned to Toronto where he was unable to locate Blackburn or the money he had promised to pay Hyamns.
On April 14, 1865, Lincoln was assassinated never to know of the attempt on his life using biological warfare.
Blackburn was later arrested and tried in a Toronto court for allegedly violating Canadian neutrality, but was later acquitted. He returned to the United States and was actually elected as governor of Kentucky. To this day, historians disagree about the strength of evidence against Blackburn.
After the trial though, he remained in Canada to avoid prosecution by U.S. authorities, but returned to Kentucky in 1868 to help combat a yellow fever outbreak along the Gulf Coast of Texas.
Oddly enough, Blackburn tried to kill Lincoln with yellow fever, but treated others for it after he returned to Kentucky prior to becoming governor in 1879.
It remains unclear where Blackburn got his idea, but by 1881, Cuban physician Carlos Juan Finlay theorized that yellow fever was transmitted by mosquitoes. The theory was later proven in 1900 by the Yellow Fever Commission led by Dr. Walter Reed who confirmed the aides aegypti mosquito as the carrier of yellow fever.
Members of the Yellow Fever Board visited Finlay in his home in Havana. They used mosquitoes hatched from eggs in his lab to test the hypothesis that the insects transmitted the disease. After a series of experiments, it showed that Finlay’s research was correct.
