-- [ From: Jackson H. Day * EMC.Ver #2.5.3 ] -- In response to R Davenport's query, I searched my DB on John Yates Beall and found the following. Sounds like you may be on the trail of an interesting person! Thomas Balch Beall, b. G1830. "John Yates Beall and Thomas Balch Beall, my maternal grandfather, were first cousins. For the past several years I have been doing extensive research on JYB, with the invaluable assistance of a scholar who is writing a new biography of John Wilkes Booth. Booth and Beall quite probably became acquainted when both were members of militia units on guard duty; during John Brown's trial and execution in Charlestown, Virginia in the fall of 1859. They may have met again when both were in Canada in 1864. It is possible, though unlikely, that Booth visited Lincoln to plead for Beall's life. Booth did express anger when he learned of Beall's hanging...[however]...Booth was three years younger than Beall and they were not boyhood friends. Booth never attended the University of Virginia, where Beall's roommate was Daniel Bedinger Lucas, later his memoirist. Beal enlisted as an army private when war broke out, but was badly wounded on October 1861 and saw no further service. He received a medical discharge from the army in March 1863 and was then commissioned in the Confederate Navy as an "acting master", not in line for promotion." As leader of two commando groups, one on the Chesapeake, one on Lake Erie, he was addressed as "Captain", thus leading to much confusion about his actual rank and branch of service. In January 1865 he was tried by a military commission, not a court martial, at Fort Lafayette (destroyed in 1868). After one reprieve, he was transferred to Fort Columbus (now Fort Jay) on Governor's Island a few days before his execution, which occurred on February 24, 1865. Beall's prison diary makes no mention of a visit by Booth. (Cameron S. Moseley, 21 Whiffletree Way, Riverside, CT 06878. (203) 637-2901. In "Bell-A-Peal", 11:2, 12147 Holly Knoll Circle, Great Falls, VA; AMJ, 1997.) Jack Day