Blood on the Moon: The Assassination of Abraham Lincoln

Introduction

Abraham Lincoln has become the subject of more writings than any other person in American history.At last estimate,there were approximately 16,000 entries in a bibliography of works on him that FrankJ. lhTilliamsis compiling .' To be sure, a majority of these entries appear as pamphlets or journal articles, but the total number of monographs still ranks Lincoln among the top four individuals in history.?The greater number of books written about Lincoln are concerned with his period as a war president and commander in chief while the topics least written about are concerned with his religion and his assassination. Unlike Lincoln's life, which has been a favorite subject of academic historians, his death has been left almost entirely to the avocational or nonprofessionally trained historians. The first book on Lincoln's assassination written by a professionally trained historian did not appear until 1982, 117years after his death.A second book appeared one year later in 1983,and a third, in 1999. These three books remain the only books written by academic historians on this important subject to date.3 This paucity of writing by academiciansremains unexplained. One Lincoln scholar suggested that professional historians allowed the assassination to fall between the two major fields of study, the Civil War and the period of Reconstruction immediately followingit.+ThatLincoln's death did not somehow fit into either category suggests it has little importance to either one. hTothingcould be further from the truth. Lincoln's murder was a logical consequence, given the reasons for the Civil nTarand his pivotal role in it. His death forever changed the course of American history that followed. Yet professional historians mark Lincoln's passing as an end point rather than a continuation. Contrary to most professional historians' interest, Lincoln's assassination has captivated the general public from a conspiratorial point of view, which may explain why many academicians have shied away from writing about it. nTilliamHanchett, a professionally trained historian whose excellent book on Lincoln's assassination was published in 1983, wrote that Lincoln's death was something that the great body of professional historians thought of as a matter that should be described rather than explained.' To these historians, the story of Abraham Lincoln ended with his death. Having been left to nonprofessionally trained historians to explain, much of the telling of Lincoln's murder has fallen short of the quality of research and insightful writing normally found in other academic studies. This has led to a 2 Blood on the Moon series of publications that espoused bizarre conspiracy theories of his murder . In these studies, Lincoln's secretary of war, Edwin Stanton,is portrayed as an archangel of death orchestrating the murder of his ~resident.~ Unable to engineer such a monstrous crime alone, Stanton received help from a cadre of the rich and powerful among his northern compatriots. Such theory is based on flawed and even fabricated evidence, all designed to titillate the reader and create a type of shock history that, although financiallyrewarding to the author, misleads. In other accounts, authors have focused only on the simplest parts of the story, drawing on secondary sources and ignoring the rich source of primary documents housed in various archives.: Once told, this simple story of Lincoln's murder has been retold again and again by replowing the same furrows. Errors of one author soon become incorporated into the works of subsequent authors until repeated so many times they become an integral part of the story. This method of replowing has resulted more in historical fiction than truthful history and left us with many misconceptions. Thus John Wilkes Booth was a madman who acted as a puppet for others; the man cornered in the Virginia barn and hlled by army pursuers was not Booth but an innocent bystander who was substituted for Lincoln's killer;Mary Surratt, the keeper of a boarding house frequented by Booth and his cohorts, was an innocentvictim of avengeful government; the militarytrial that tried Lincoln's hllers was an illegal tribunal that sought vengeance, not justice; Booth and his co-conspirators were simply a gang of semi-intelligent miscreants who are described as "the gang that couldn't shoot ~traight."~ The most widely held and egregious myth is that Dr. Samuel Alexander Mudd, the Charles County physician who set Booth's broken leg, was an innocent man persecuted for simply following his Hippocratic Oath. None of these commonly held beliefs are true. Booth was fully rational, and while he received...