Wilkes Booth Came to Washington, and: The Trial of the Assassin Guiteau: Psychiatry and Law in the Gilded Age (review)

BOOK REVIEWS183 Sherman and the Burning of Columbia. By Marion Brunson Lucas. (College Station: Texas A and M University Press, 1976. Pp. 188. $10.95.) On February 17, 1865, the Federal army of General William Tecumseh Sherman occupied Columbia, South Carolina. By the next morning approximately one-third of the city lay in smouldering ruins, a great fire having raged uncontrolled throughout the night. The origin of the fire has been the subject of considerable controversy from the day it occurred. Confederates blamed Sherman and his drunken men for the holocoust. Sherman in turn accused Confederate General Wade Hampton, whose cavalry withdrew from the capital city shortly before the arrival of the Federal troops. Professor Marion Lucas has with scholarly detachment attempted to find out what really happened and why. After examining all available material on the subject, he concluded that the destruction of Columbia was not the result of a single act or events of a single day. Neither was it the work of an individual or a group. Instead it was the "culmination of eight days of riots, robbery, pillage, confusion and fires, all of which were the byproducts of war. The event was surrounded by coincidence, misjudgment, and accident" (p. 163). It is impossible, he maintains, to determine with certainty the origin of the fire. "The most probable explanation was that it began from the burning cotton on Richardson street" (p. 165). Columbia at this time was a virtual firetrap because of the hundreds of cotton bales in her streets. Some of these had been ignited before Sherman arrived and a high wind spread the flamable substance over the city. Also, poorly disciplined Federal troops, many of whom were intoxicated, became incendiaries . This splendid little volume should put to rest forever the question of who burned the capital city of South Carolina. The author has presented a convincing case that the tragic events of February 17 were "an accident of war" with both Confederates and Federals sharing the responsibility for what happened. John G. Barrett Virginia Military Institute Wilkes Booth Came to Washington. By Larry Starkey. (New York: Random House, 1976. Pp. xiii, 209. $7.95.) The Trial of the Assassin Guiteau: Psychiatry and Law in the Gilded Age. By Charles E. Rosenberg. (Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 1968. Pp. xvii, 289. Paper, $4.95.) There once was a happy time when Americans regarded political assassination as an exotic custom practiced in despotisms but 184CIVIL WAR history unthinkable in a popular republic such as ours. Time and sad experience have modified this naive view, and today assassination is not only an ever-present possibility, it has also become a flourishing sub-genre of the publishing industry. With an eye to recent events, the publisher's blurb for Wilkes Booth Came to Washington boldly promises fresh revelations of conspiracy and of "the Government's century-old cover-up." The author, more modestly, admits that he has "no startling new information " nor any "hitherto-undisclosed revelations" to offer. He has, instead, a theory. John Wilkes Booth, a "very decent and young man who felt obligated to do what he believed a patriot should do," was part of a Confederate cabal headquartered in Montreal which intended to precipitate a war between the United States and Great Britain. Booth's mission was to assassinate President Lincoln and Secretary of State Seward and then flee to Canada. The Canadian government would refuse to extradite the murderer, forcing an enraged United States to invade its northern neighbor which would, in turn, bring Great Britain and France into the war on the side of the Confederacy. Only the accident of Booth's broken leg, which kept him from escaping to his intended destination, prevented this scheme from being carried out. This is an interesting speculation, but a trifle thin to support an entire book. Starkey, consequently, is compelled to pad out the volume with irrelevant digressions, imaginary conversations and gratuitous excursions into tangential topics. He could instead, one supposes, offer proof for his theory but such proof, he sadly confesses , is lacking. Also conspicuously lacking is adequate documentation for such facts as Starkey does assert. The reader must take his claims...