Come Retribution: The Confederate Secret Service and the Assassination of Lincoln (review)

176CIVIL WAR HISTORY logistical problems, but because he relies almost entirely on the brief report of Sherman's quartermaster he does so in such a superficial way as to give a misleading view of those problems and the role they played in Sherman's operations. Finally, he credits Sherman with the employment of improvised fortifications when making assaults whereas it was his troops who did this on their own initiative, sometimes even carrying logs with them while advancing, and his account of the tactics used by the Federals in their attack at Kennesaw Mountain reveals only that he knows little what actually occurred in this battle, having obtained most of this information from Moseley's aforementioned dissertation, which in turn makes several major errors in its treatment of the subject. It is unfortunate that a book that has been nearly twenty-five years in the making and which contains so much that is original and valuable should be marred by such flaws. Otherwise it would be even more what it is in spite of these flaws—a work from which all who are seriously interested in the military history ofthe Civl War can and certainly will learn much that is worth learning. Albert Castel Western Michigan University Come Retribution: The Confederate Secret Service and the Assassination ofLincoln. By William A. Tidwell, with James O. Hall and David Winfred Gaddy. (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1988. Pp. xv, 510. $38.50 cloth, $17.95 paper.) Like other readers of this journal, I have often been asked whether anything really new can be said about the Civil War. Replies that speak of revisionist interpretations, new perspectives, enriched syntheses, and the like tend to leave the questioner unsatisfied with this professionaljargon. But with the publication of Come Retribution, we can now point to a genuinely new study of the Confederate secret service and its relationship to Lincoln's assassination. The reader must be warned, though, that this book promises more than it can deliver. Its argument suffers from problems of evidence and exposition . The authors—a retired CIA officer, a Defense Department intelligence analyst, and a Lincoln-assassination aficionado—are up front about the first problem: "There is no documentary evidence that directly proves Confederate involvement . . . in the Lincoln assassination. . . . The evidence presented in this book is largely circumstantial"(p. xiii). Despite this caveat, the authors use their experience as intelligence analysts to patch together hundreds of pieces of information, some of them from previously undiscovered sources, to form a pattern that points "toward a central role for Jefferson Davis in the clandestine warfare ofthe 1 860s—and the fateful BOOK REVIEWS177 act that ended it" (pp. xiv-xv). The unwary reader is likely to be convinced by this pattern; even the wary reader cannot help but be swayed by it. But the careful reader will note the authors' frequent use of such phrases as "could have been," "was doubtless," "must have been," "appears to have," and the like. There is no smoking gun here to prove the direct involvement of the Confederate secret service in Lincoln's assassination, nor to prove that Davis authorized or knew about such a plot ifone existed. The authors make a plausible case, but the canny reader will render the Scotch verdict: Not Proven. The writing style makes this book hard going. It is in fact two books stitched together awkwardly by three authors with varying skills. The first half portrays the operations of sundry secret service agencies of the Confederate War and State Departments. The second half links these activities to the Confederate plot in 1864-65 to kidnap Lincoln and hold him as a bargaining chip for peace negotiations or the return ofConfederate prisoners of war, a plot whose failure led to the more desperate act of assassination . In the hands of a skillful writer, this would be a dramatic, gripping story. But the authors present it as if they were writing a detailed intelligence report to their superior officer. Like graduate students writing the first draft ofa dissertation, they cram in every fact they have found in their ten years of research. Indeed, some of the same facts get crammed in repeatedly , in different...