I looked over my blog stats for this first week of the new year and saw that the #1 search string that brought visitors to my blog as “Marcus P. Norton”.
What? Really!?! Surely you’ve got to be kidding!
Who was this Marcus P. Norton, you ask?
I have mentioned him in four of my previous posts:
7/3/2009 – the Earliest Case of Going Postal on Record
5/15/2011- Yes, His Name is Still Mudd
5/16/2011- Still Mudd II
5/23/2011-Still Mudd… III
Other than my rather curious interest in this very obscure character from American history, I had no idea someone would actually be interested enough to search for the guy!
But, since the searcher left no note mentioning their interest in the guy, one can only wonder what the heck was going through their minds?! What were they thinking? Better yet, what were they smoking?
If you missed the earlier postings (or don’t want to bother looking for them) Norton is the person who implicated Dr. Mudd in the Lincoln Assassination case. And it is only his testimony that performed this act. Others saw Mudd elsewhere on the day in question and – though the defense attorneys attempted to have his testimony impeached – his testimony was allowed to override the others’ sworn word. And this even though the guy had been impeached in previous trials and was proven to have mis-remembered the day in question by none other than the Clerk of the Supreme Court!
And this does not even take into account his presence at Ford’s Theater in the week before the assassination, when the manager of the theater was forced to break the lock on the box adjacent to the one in which Lincoln would be killed in a few short days.
What has that to do with the death of Lincoln? What has his perjuring before the tribunal really covering up?
Marcus P. Norton did not tell anyone what was really going on but it is enough questions to open some sort of investigation, I should think. Especially when we are talking about the “crime of the century”.
Scott’s Standard Catalog of U. S. Stamps still lists Norton as the inventor of the first postal cancellation machine… and this even in the face of the Patent Office throwing out his patent in 1871 because he could produce no evidence to reapply for patents on that invention or any of the many other inventions he had patented.
And why did they throw it out? Norton was a patent attorney and he (and others) had been accused of stealing the inventions rather than patenting them for the rightful inventors. Since Norton had no data on any of these patents other than the original (purportedly stolen) documents, he lost all the patents.
Really?! No one thought it odd that a patent attorney was also an engineer and a machinist in his spare time!!
What were they thinking??
Anyway, we will probably never know who really invented the canceling device. Or why he perjured himself at the trial of the century.
Conspiracies? - No, Just One 