The Farewell to Lincoln (review)

BOOK BEVIEWS325 author describes the North of early 1865 as suffering a military despotism. Yet in November, 1864, the United States for the first time in recorded history offered the world the example of a nation involved in civil war holding free elections that the party in power might weU have lost which would have meant victory for the Confederacy. Even Great Britain in World War ? suspended elections. The mid-nineteenth century European world was expert in authoritarian regimes. No onlooker there, and except for Copperheads no commentator here, mistook the internal security processes of Lincoln's administration for a dictatorship. Mr. Shelton also does not know, or if he has read them does not understand , the accumulating réévaluations of Lincoln's wartime reconstruction policies. He is abysmally unacquainted with or in gross error about the personal and administrative relationships that obtained between Lincoln, several cabinet officers, and the second echelon of war-emergency officialdom including Baker. The whole story of the assassination, minus the conspiracy excrescences, was recently far better told by the article by Dorothy Meserve Kunhardt and Philip H. Kunhardt Jr., in American Heritage (April, 1965). The real point is that Mask for Treason is a "non-book," not a serious historical inquiry. After reading it (not an easy task considering the turgid prose and shock subtitles) I wanted to write to the editor of CwU War History to say that Mask deserves no review space. It still doesn't. But I feared that if this overpriced and underthought volume went undescribed some innocent readers of this periodical might waste funds by purchasing a copy. Don't Two years ago Kennedy's murder, and Oswald's televised slaying that followed so sickeningty soon after, seemed to make clear that solo madmen can pierce even modern security screens. Extrapolation from the Warren Commission's report on that tragedy to the printed and manuscript evidence on the Lincoln killing, reaffirms my conviction that the sordid Booth apparatus neither had nor needed accomplices or masterminds in high government offices. But history can teach only those who wfll listen. Harold M. Hyman University of Illinois The Farewell to Lincoln. By Victor Searcher. (New York and Nashville : Abingdon Press, 1965. Pp. 320. $5.95.) In 1865, William CoggeshaU published The Journeys of Abraham Lincoln, an account of Lincoln's trip from Springfield to Washington for the inauguration and the funeral trip back again little more than four years later. Now Victor Searcher, who wrote Lincoln'« Journey to Greatness covering the first Springfield to Washington leg, has duplicated the cycle with The Farewell to Lincoln, detailing the funeral journey. The book is based on extensive reading in Lincoln literature, newspapers, 326CIVIL WAR HISTORY and manuscripts in Washington. The notes in the back are somewhat inconvenient since there are no numbers in the text. There are errors, such as a suggestion that Salmon P. Chase was the Democratic candidate for President in 1872, and that the Kansas-Nebraska Act made slavery legal throughout the United States. Yet even those familiar with the Lincoln story are likely to find something new and of interest in the extended account of the funeral, since most biographies end with Lincoln's death. Searcher finds in Lincoln the embodiment of American ideals and in the great outpouring of grief at his death a general American realization of these ideals. For twelve days the funeral train wound over 1,654 miles, stopping at principal cities for public ceremonies of mourning. Even where no stops were scheduled, people stood by the tracks: in Ohio a woman lifted a bouquet towards the train as it hurtled past. This book is several books. Primarily it covers Lincoln's last few days, death, and funeral. Hints to tourists about how to see places and things associated with Lincoln's life and death are scattered throughout. Often the narrative stops for a retrospective section in which Searcher analyzes Lincoln's life and times, much as if he, himself, were a passenger on the funeral train, brooding over the death of Lincoln. Between New York and Albany, for example, Searcher probes the nature of American government to defend Lincoln against vague charges of indulging in...