On December 1, 1864, four-and-a-half months before J. Wilkes Booth shot President Abraham Lincoln in Ford’s Theater, a plea for crowd-funding the assassination appeared in Alabama’s Salem Dispatch:
One Million Dollars, Wanted, to Have Peace by the 1st of March
If the citizens of the Southern Confederacy will furnish me with the cash, or good securities for the sum of one million dollars, I will cause the lives of Abraham Lincoln, William H. Seward and Andrew Johnson to be taken by the first of March next. This will give us peace and satisfy the world that cruel tyrants cannot live in the “land of liberty.” If this is not accomplished nothing will be claimed beyond the sum of fifty thousand dollars, in advance, which is supposed to be necessary to reach and slaughter the three villains I will give, myself, one thousand dollars towards this patriotic purpose. Every one wish to contribute will address Box X, Cahaba, Alabama.
After the assassination, Henry Grimes of Ohio cut it out and attached the ad to a letter to Secretary of State Seward (above). Seward had barely survived being murdered and was saved thanks to a metal collar around his neck, a device a doctor had installed because Seward suffered a fall from his moving carriage the day before. Isn’t it somewhat strange zero investigation was conducted as to how much money was sent to this post office box in sleepy Cahaha, Alabama, and who picked it up? Also suspicious is why are Seward and Johnson signaled out for death with Lincoln, when the South hated Thaddeus Stevens and Charles Sumner far more, not to mention Edwin Stanton, a former Democrat, was universally detested. So the choice of Lincoln, Seward and Johnson seems odd and not really emanating from a true Southern patriot, but an agenda of a different stripe.
I imagine the ad was placed by Sandford Conover (real name Charles Dunham), who is a bit of a Zelig in the story of Lincoln’s assassination, always in the shadows at key moments, although few history books mention his name or any of his many aliases. Conover had a knack for creative fundraising and I suspect he also forged the letter from Booth to Edwin Stanton postmarked New York City the day of the assassination. His use of disinformation, misdirection and manipulation of news is absolutely spellbinding and nearly impossible to fully unravel, but it appears Conover wrote the book on military counterintelligence propaganda, while managing to stay completely hidden from history until now. My spotlight shines 
brightly on him in my expose Killing Lincoln: The Real Story.
The beginning of December is when this operation was set in motion to bend a previous plot to kidnap Lincoln into Lincoln’s assassination, employing the same cast and crew. Isn’t it strange that a similar ad attacking President Kennedy appeared the day of his arrival in Dallas? And in case you missed the morning paper, there was a similar flyer handed out on the streets accusing JFK of treason.
Consider the crew that killed JFK was the same team that had been hired months earlier to kill Castro, but when JFK shut down the get-Castro mission, the same get-team was diverted to get him. It goes to show how similar deep political events are: similar problems, similar solutions and similar scripts appear again and again.