The Sinking of the U.S.S. Cairo (review)

book reviews279 and carried his unconscious body to the Petersen home, where he would breathe his last. Taking into account the inevitable "wannabes" who fabricated their narratives, nearly a tenth ofthe audience authored reminiscences ofthat night's events that are reprinted in Timothy S. Good's anthology We Saw Lincoln Shot. The first thirteen narratives, all composed within days of the event by close by-standers and such participants as Major Rathbone, Lincoln's attending physicians and military guard, and the assassin Booth himself, are documents of primary importance to our historical understanding ofthe event. A few ofthe later accounts add to the historical record names of those who helped carry the stricken Lincoln to his deathbed. The vast majority reprinted in the anthology add nothing to our understanding. One is a patently dishonest addition, an 1877 letter from Mary Todd Lincoln to Edward Baker, Jr., on the general topic of bereavement that makes no reference whatever to the assassination. In the mind of the reviewer after this brief read is the question of why this volume was published, why Good labored so mightily to bring forth a mouse. One possible apologia, not explored in the volume, is suggested by Good's notes that the 1877-1908 narratives tended to be less reliable than fresher accounts, with such embellishments as Booth's fractured leg now incorporated into the folklore of the event, and that accounts published from 1909 to 1954 tended to make the eyewitness the focus of the event, along with such improbabilities as one account from a woman of ninety-six years who claimed to have known Booth, that his leg had been shattered, but that he was able to swing to his escape on a rope provided by his accomplices! The relationship of human memory to historical scholarship is profound, as witness the current furor over the validity of the memoirs of Lincoln housemaid Mariah Vance's on life in Springfield with the Lincoln family as she remembered them half a century later. It would seem that as years pass, two phenomena tend to occur. Factual recall gradually gives way to inroads of imagination, embellishment, and downright invention—usually accompanied by ego aggrandizement. But at the same time, the presence of dominant accounts dictates a tyranny of sorts, so that especially colorful embellishment raises doubts as to whether the person was there and sufficiently sane and sober to have witnessed events properly. Good does not explore these phenomena but does provide a splendid textual base for others to do so. Roger A. Fischer University of Minnesota-Duluth The Sinking ofthe U.S.S. Cairo. By John C. Wideman. (Jackson: University of Mississippi Press, 1993. Pp. xii, 139. $20.00.) The USS Cairo, raised from the depths ofthe Yazoo River in 1964, is a stunning exhibit at the Vicksburg National Park. A glance at the exploding gunboat on the dustjacket of this work whets the appetite of any Civil War buffor scholar. 28oCIVIL WAR HISTORY Instead, this slim, mistitled volume (eighty-two pages) attempts to trace the career of Zere McDaniel in the Confederate Secret Service and his role in developing and using torpedo explosive devices against the enemy. Wideman, a liscensed professional investigator and formerly a captain in U.S. Army intelligence, has written a conjecture-laden, disjointed, and uncritical narrative that does nothing to replace M. F. Perry's Infernal Machines (1965). No creditable Civil War scholar could possibly have approved this manuscript for publication. The work is dedicated to the "men and women of the Confederate . . . intelligence services . . . [and] to McDaniel" (iii), and it is told from the "Confederate perspective." Chapter 1 's title, "Constantly Engaged in the Cause," is taken from a letter written to Jefferson Davis in July 1863. (This is one of two letters used as the primary sources for his activities.) He notes that he has been in the service since February, 1862. Appointed acting master, as a cover, in the Confederate navy, he and a colleague took a crew to the Yazoo River to obstruct it with "torpedoes" against the Union gunboats that had descended the Mississippi. The crew members whose names were "lost to history" (dust jacket), are all...