Lewis Payne (Powell) was just sixteen when he enlisted in the Confederate Army in 1861. He fought in the Peninsular Campaign, the battles of Chancellorsville and Antietam, and then Gettysburg. Unfortunately, he took a bullet during the charge upon the Federal center at Gettysburg on July 3, 1863.
He was taken prisoner and made a nurse in a Union hospital
in Pennsylvania. Not long after that, he transferred to another hospital on
Pratt Street in Baltimore. He deserted in October 1863 and rejoined the
Confederate cavalry at Fauquier. He deserted
again in January 1865 and made his way back to Baltimore. It was there he
renewed his acquaintance with John Wilkes Booth.
Payne said he
was recruited in a plot to kidnap the president. He was “acting under orders of
his government” and still considered himself a Confederate soldier. Even though
what he did now appears “foolish and wicked,” he “thought he was right then.” Payne
was a realist. When sentenced to die, he told reporters he did not fear death.
It would “end the terrible life he had been living this past four years.”[i]
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