The Lincoln Assassination Conspirators: Their Confinement and Execution, as Recorded in the Letterbook of John Frederick Hartranft

Preface

PREFACE Amidst the history fever that engulfed the country at the time of the Civil War centennial in the 1960s, a major trove of priceless original wartime records came unexpectedly to light—but remained little known or appreciated, except by historians, amid the din of battle reenactments and other, noisier public events. In fact, the rediscovered material spoke more powerfully than the most earnest commemorations to the horrifying end of that long, hard war: assassination, justice, and retribution. For here were the meticulously kept, hand-written records of John Frederick Hartranft—the Union general who had charge over the Lincoln assassination conspirators and sent four of them to their deaths—unexpectedly rediscovered in family hands a century later, and generously made available to the public by his descendants. The general’s grandson, Hartranft Stockham, decided to deposit the material at Gettysburg College, a school that stood near the most famous battlefield of the entire war, but one of the few major actions, ironically, in which General Hartranft had not participated. There the records remained until 1994, when they were transferred to the Pennsylvania State Archives in Harrisburg on permanent loan from the family. The State Archives, in turn, agreed that official title to the records be assigned to the U.S. National Archives and Records Administration (NARA), since the material relates wholly to official federal action. The arrangement went into effect in June 1995, and NARA has been responsible for their safekeeping ever since. The following year, the general’s great-granddaughter, Helen Shireman, and her husband, Ronald Shireman, added to this important collection by providing copies of ninety-three family and official photographs, along with Hartranft’s gubernatorial papers—comprised of election records, legislation, commissions, and revealing memoranda on the state labor unrest of the late 1870s—an archive now totaling 1.5 cubic feet on microfilm. Even at this writing, the repository is busy microfilming additional family-held papers dating to Hartranft’s military period. Today, any researcher can access and study the records of the Hartranft Affiliated Archives (RG 393) at the State Archives in Harrisburg. But to date, they have remained underutilized. And that is what has inspired this publication. The “Letterbook,” a detailed record of the months the xii preface general spent in Washington with responsibility for the imprisoned Lincoln assassination conspirators, first came to the attention of assassination scholars in the fall of 1983 when Mrs. Nancy Scott, curator of Special Collections at Gettysburg College, showed them to Betty Ownsbey, biographer of Lewis Thornton Powell, during a research session at the library. Believed to have been lost, the Letterbook was a major find in the field of assassination documents . Together with the rest of the Hartranft Papers, the Letterbook opens a long-shaded window onto one of the most tumultuous summers in American history. During the long, hot weeks of incarceration and trial, Americans— many frightened, most angry—looked on anxiously as Hartranft all but shut his ears to cacophonous calls for both vengeance and mercy and made certain that his notorious charges were treated properly and humanely. The National Archives’ mid-Atlantic regional administrator, V. ChapmanSmith , approached the editors of this study to suggest that the time had come to make the Hartranft Papers a part of the all-important publicly accessible records of this momentous event. This book is the result. It is our hope that these records, presented within their historical context, will shed new light on an important period of our history and also serve as a reminder—particularly in our own troubling times—that sometimes it is not the battles we win but the manner in which we mete out justice, even under the pressure of war, that defines us as individuals and as a society. The grinding workload and numbing details through which Hartranft negotiated, under intense and continuous pressure, during the weeks that followed the assassination, have been generally lost to history, overwhelmed by the grander drama of the trial and execution of the conspirators. Although consulted by scholars and cited in books, the records of his oversight at the Arsenal have never before been published in full, and never until now subjected to analysis that places his work in the context of the entire Lincoln assassination story, and its valuable lessons for the future. The legal and moral issues raised by the assassination and its aftermath— the extraordinary use of military rather than civil justice, the treatment of the accused while incarcerated, and the fine line...