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The Lincoln Assassination: Crime and Punishment, Myth and Memory
The assassination of President Abraham Lincoln remains one of the most prominent events in U.S. history. It continues to attract enormous and intense interest from scholars, writers, and armchair historians alike, ranging from painstaking new research to wild-eyed speculation. At the end of the Lincoln bicentennial year, and the onset of the Civil War sesquicentennial, the leading scholars of Lincoln and his murder offer in one volume their latest studies and arguments about the assassination, its aftermath, the extraordinary public reaction (which was more complex than has been previously believed), and the iconography that Lincoln’s murder and deification inspired. Contributors also offer the most up-to-date accounts of the parallel legal event of the summer of 1865—the relentless pursuit, prosecution, and punishment of
the conspirators. Everything from graphic tributes to religious sermons, to spontaneous outbursts on the streets of the nation’s cities, to emotional mass-mourning at carefully organized funerals, as well as the imposition of military jurisprudence to try the conspirators, is examined in the light of fresh evidence and insightful analysis.
the conspirators. Everything from graphic tributes to religious sermons, to spontaneous outbursts on the streets of the nation’s cities, to emotional mass-mourning at carefully organized funerals, as well as the imposition of military jurisprudence to try the conspirators, is examined in the light of fresh evidence and insightful analysis.
The contributors are among the finest scholars who are studying Lincoln’s assassination.
All have earned well-deserved reputations for the quality of their research, their thoroughness, their originality, and their writing. In addition to the editors, contributors include Thomas R. Turner, Edward Steers Jr., Michael W. Kauffman, Thomas P. Lowry, Richard E. Sloan, Elizabeth D. Leonard, and Richard Nelson Current.
256 pages, Hardcover
First published June 7, 2010
About the author
Craig L. Symonds
45 books204 followersCraig Lee Symonds is a retired professor and former chairman of the history department at the United States Naval Academy. He earned both his MA (1969) and Ph.D. (1976) from the University of Florida.
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Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews
May 3, 2017
Unexpectedly apposite this week (*facepalm*), this is a collection of essays originally presented at the Lincoln Forum (except for a reprint of the first chapter of The Lincoln Nobody Knows). As is inevitable, the quality varies pretty widely, from the essays by Edward Steers Jr. and Michael Kauffman on the trial of the conspirators, which are well-written and thought-provokingly at odds with each other, to Frank J. Williams' disorganized assemblage of remarks about Lincoln, Obama, and the constitutional rights of political detainees. I disagree with Williams' politics pretty vehemently, but my actual problem with the essay is that it has no clear thesis and doesn't seem to be sure what it's trying to talk about.
The essays in this collection have in common the attempt to understand Lincoln's assassination, and the responses to it by various parties, in the context of April 1865. These attempts range from a collation of newspaper accounts of Lincoln's funeral procession in New York (and how much of the route and the buildings along it are still extant today); to a biographical assessment of Judge Advocate General Joseph Holt, the man who oversaw the conspirators' trial and who became lost in his obsession with avenging Lincoln's death on the men he thought responsible: the leaders of the Confederacy; to an examination of the trials of people accused of celebrating Lincoln's death (sentences of up to ten years' imprisonment were imposed; one soldier was sentenced to death by firing squad for saying, "Abraham Lincoln was a long-sided Yankee son of a bitch and ought to have been killed long ago." (His sentence was commuted, although what happened to him after that is not shown.)
Oddly, the most resonant part of the collection for me (aside from the stupid grief I feel for a man who would have been dead long before I was born anyway) are Elizabeth Leonard's quotes from Joseph Holt's writings. Holt became wrong, and I make no apologia for his conduct of the conspirators' trial, but before that, he wrote: We are all with our every earthly interest embarked in midocean, on the same common deck, the howl of the storm in our ears, and [...] while the noble ship pitches and rolls under the lashings of the waves, a cry is heard that she has sprung a leak at many points, and that the rushing waters are mounting rapidly in the hold. The man who in such an hour will not work at the pumps is either a maniac or a monster. (Joseph Holt, open letter published in the Louisville Journal and the New York Times, May 31, 1861, qtd. in Elizabeth Leonard, "Lincoln's Chief Avenger: Judge Advocate General Joseph Holt," p. 123). The ship of state is certainly storm-tossed at the moment and (to bring this into a ring-composition), I wish I believed that the man at the helm was neither monster nor maniac.
The essays in this collection have in common the attempt to understand Lincoln's assassination, and the responses to it by various parties, in the context of April 1865. These attempts range from a collation of newspaper accounts of Lincoln's funeral procession in New York (and how much of the route and the buildings along it are still extant today); to a biographical assessment of Judge Advocate General Joseph Holt, the man who oversaw the conspirators' trial and who became lost in his obsession with avenging Lincoln's death on the men he thought responsible: the leaders of the Confederacy; to an examination of the trials of people accused of celebrating Lincoln's death (sentences of up to ten years' imprisonment were imposed; one soldier was sentenced to death by firing squad for saying, "Abraham Lincoln was a long-sided Yankee son of a bitch and ought to have been killed long ago." (His sentence was commuted, although what happened to him after that is not shown.)
Oddly, the most resonant part of the collection for me (aside from the stupid grief I feel for a man who would have been dead long before I was born anyway) are Elizabeth Leonard's quotes from Joseph Holt's writings. Holt became wrong, and I make no apologia for his conduct of the conspirators' trial, but before that, he wrote: We are all with our every earthly interest embarked in midocean, on the same common deck, the howl of the storm in our ears, and [...] while the noble ship pitches and rolls under the lashings of the waves, a cry is heard that she has sprung a leak at many points, and that the rushing waters are mounting rapidly in the hold. The man who in such an hour will not work at the pumps is either a maniac or a monster. (Joseph Holt, open letter published in the Louisville Journal and the New York Times, May 31, 1861, qtd. in Elizabeth Leonard, "Lincoln's Chief Avenger: Judge Advocate General Joseph Holt," p. 123). The ship of state is certainly storm-tossed at the moment and (to bring this into a ring-composition), I wish I believed that the man at the helm was neither monster nor maniac.
November 24, 2021
A short compendium of essays about the assassination of Lincoln, this volume was a breeze to read and more than moderately entertaining. The contributors cover several aspects of the assassination that have been overlooked by most modern scholars. Bringing together this material in time for the bicentennial of Lincoln's birth was a stroke of genius for the editors; any serious Lincoln student needs to give this volume a prompt perusal.
Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews