Tag Archives: assassination

Our American Cousin Revisited

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A Slate writer reads through Our American Cousin so we don’t have to. (For that we should be grateful – it sounds pretty dire.)

It’s the hoariest sick joke in America: “Other than that, Mrs. Lincoln, how did you like the play?” By now it isn’t even a joke; it’s become a familiar way to complain that undue attention is being given to some frivolous aspect of an otherwise grim and urgent matter. But we’ve had a century and a half to ponder the awful tragedy of Lincoln’s assassination at Ford’s Theater and its effect on the post-Civil War Reconstruction, the presidency, and the American character. Surely that interval is sufficiently decent that we may now ask, in earnest: What sort of aesthetic experience occupied the Great Emancipator’s final hours?

A pretty terrible one…

via The hackneyed play that ended Lincoln’s life. – Slate Magazine.

Leale’s Letters

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You’d think all the Lincoln documents would’ve been unearthed, after 150 years of access, but you’d be wrong, thankfully.

The latest news is Charles Leale’s official report on the assassination. Leale’s experiences are already well-documented – Sarah Vowell quotes extensively from a letter to his mother in the days following – but new documents are new documents, and I’ll happily take them. (Can you tell I was a history student? So jealous of these stack-diggers who uncover the gems!)

A doctor’s account of his frantic efforts to save the life of President Abraham Lincoln has been rediscovered in the United States, after being lost to history for 150 years.
It was found by chance among hundreds of boxes of old medical reports in the National Archives.
On April 14, 1865, Dr Charles Leale happened to be in the same Washington theatre as the US President, watching the play My American Cousin, when he heard a gunshot and saw a man leap onto the stage.
Leale, 23, who had only received his medical degree six weeks earlier, then became the first person to tend to Lincoln’s wounds and documented the tragic encounter in a 21-page handwritten report.

via A doctor’s bid to save dying Lincoln – timesofmalta.com.

Ford’s Theater Expansion

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Today is the anniversary of Lincoln’s death, the process of which started the night before at Ford’s Theater, and ended across the street at the Petersen House. This year, both events and locations have been commemorated in a newly expanded museum housed in the building adjoining the House Where Lincoln Died.

Wait a minute, you might think. Education and leadership? The Civil War is barely over. Lincoln is dead. The nation is in shock. How do we get from there to a “center for education and leadership”? I have questions about that, but before exploring the quirks of contemporary commemoration, it is worth paying tribute to what has been accomplished. Lincoln has long been at the heart of the capital city: the National Mall is an affirmation of the Union he championed, the Lincoln Memorial on one end, and the Ulysses S. Grant Memorial on the other. But there was, until recently, no extensive exhibition here about Lincoln and his times. Ford’s Theater, Mr. Tetreault explained, used to be a brief stopping point.

Now, with these exhibitions, Lincoln has found a home in a place best known for his death. With the historian Richard Norton Smith as adviser, and displays designed by Split Rock Studios and Northern Light Productions, Mr. Tetreault has given visitors a grounding in the history of Lincoln’s time, a sense of the melodrama of his murder and an affirmation of Lincoln’s influence.

The biography is omitted — for that you should visit the Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library and Museum in Springfield, Ill., which turns his life into a series of special effects and tableaus — and his ideas could be more fervently explored, but there may be no better survey of Lincoln than the one offered here. The emphasis is not on artifacts, though you can see the ring of keys found on Booth’s body and other objects. But the exhibition succeeds because of a careful narrative, well-chosen images and informative touch screens; the new completes the old.

I keep putting off my trip to Washington, and keep finding articles like this chastising me and reminding that this is a bad decision!

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/02/11/arts/design/lincolns-legacy-at-expanded-fords-theater-complex.html?_r=1

False Witness

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It’s the anniversary of the Lincoln Assassination. I saved this Knoxville newspaper’s article for today. Despite its poor research and even poorer writing, I thought it worth discussing.

The story trumpets a letter inherited by a local man from his great-great-grandfather. There’s no indication of whether he’s connected to the writer or the addressee, but as the following is transcribed without question, I suppose investigative reporting is not this paper’s strong suit:

Ohio Congressman James Morris is in the audience watching as Abraham Lincoln is shot. He documented that night through a detailed letter to a Senator friend…

Morris explained.”I saw the assassin, as he proved to be, in the President’s box making for the front. when he had reached it he placed his hand on the banister and cried out sic semper tyrannis and leaping over alighted on the stage bringing down with him some of the drapery surrounding the box. The President fell or leaned forward, and I think his head rested on the banister front.”

If there’s one thing the eyewitnesses agreed on that night, it’s that they couldn’t agree on anything. I’d picked up the book We Saw Lincoln Shot a few years ago, and it was an interesting insight into the fallacy of memory. 100 eyewitness accounts, with myriad subtle (and just as many enormous) changes between each telling.

The story recounted in this “news” item makes me wonder if the writer was there at all. It reeks of an attention-seeker trying to impress a superior. Sadly, were this modern day, I get the feeling the paper would’ve printed it with as little care for the truth as they did here.

http://www.volunteertv.com/home/headlines/139770423.html

Bill’s Book

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It seems Bill O’Reilly has co-authored a book on the Lincoln Assassination. After spending this summer reading James Swanson’s exhaustive (but not exhausting) Manhunt: The 12-Day Chase for Lincoln’s Killer and other readings related to the exhausting (in the boring sense) movie, The Conspirator, I feel like my Assassination needs are met.  These needs were met by some quality sources, too, which O’Reilly’s book seems not to be.  Salon.com is giddily listing the experts who’ve taken issue with the factual errors, and the factual errors themselves. I am no O’Reilly fan, and some of the complaints are, frankly, nitpicky, but one in particular stands out as a prime example of inattention to detail:

Steers adds that one entire passage of the book about co-conspirator Mary Surratt is flat-out untrue:

The authors write that she was forced to wear a padded hood when not on trial, and that she was imprisoned in a cell aboard the monitor Montauk, which was “barely habitable.” She suffered from “claustrophobia and disfigurement caused by the hood,” and was “barely tended to by her captors.” “Sick and trapped in this filthy cell, Mary Surratt took on a haunted, bloated appearance.” None of this is true. Mary Surratt was never shackled or hooded at any time. She was never imprisoned aboard the Montauk, but taken to the Carroll Annex of the Old Capitol Prison before being transferred to the women’s section of the Federal Penitentiary at the Washington’s Arsenal.

I won’t be adding this one to my library.

http://www.salon.com/2011/11/12/second_expert_trashes_oreillys_lincoln_book/singleton/