Six weeks after
9/11, I found myself in Washington DC on a last-minute invitation from a friend
who was visiting his daughter who was an intern at the White House. With all the security concerns at the time,
visiting the White House was impossible as was the Capitol and a great many other
attractions in the city. One place that
was on my list and was open was the Ford’s Theatre and Peterson House, the
respective sites of President Lincoln’s assassination and his death. Having long respected Lincoln as the “second
father” of our country, I truly enjoyed the interpretive museum that is at the
theatre. But across the street at
Peterson House a greater experience awaited.
It was a very cold and rainy day and there were no visitors coming in
and so it was that I was able to talk to the guide who was a virtual
encyclopedia of “Lincolnalia” for a couple of hours straight. He was utterly fascinating and definitely had
his take on how and who might have been behind America’s first assassination of
one of its presidents.
Equally
fascinating is Bill O’Reilly’s Killing
Lincoln which, in my opinion, demonstrates that the commander-in-chief of
the Union was the last official casualty in the Civil War. That the assassination was in reality a
conspiracy (as opposed to JFK’s which is merely supposed) and part of a
coordinated effort to take out the VP and Secretary of State (those who would
succeed Lincoln if he died in office) at the same time is well-documented and
well-known. What I had a hard time
wrapping my mind around was how accessible the POTUS was prior to Lincoln’s
assassination. That people could just
come into the White House without an appointment or sleep on the floor the
night before so they might be able to get his attention in the morning when he
passed down the hall is astounding. But
the expectation of the time was that the President be a man of the people,
which in part meant actually accessible to the people. That Abraham Lincoln’s body guard was in the
tavern next to Ford’s theatre at the same time as John Wilkes Booth who had
come in to drink while he waited for the right time in the play (Ten o’clock)
is one of several ironic details that O’Reilly brings out in this book. Many years ago I had read another book about
the assassination that led me to conclude that Secretary of War Stanton was
more than just a little involved, but the book never addressed it. This one stops short of fully implicating
Stanton as the man behind the plot, but certainly doesn’t hesitate to point out
that he certainly seemed to have either inside information about the conspiracy
or a preternatural intuition about who to look for and where to look.
Another detail I
found fascinating in Killing Lincoln
was that the Lincolns chose to go see a comedy that night called Our American Cousin. John Wilkes Booth actually attended the
troupe’s mid-day rehearsal to find one of the best laugh lines in act two just
to maximize the moment of distraction for him to carry out his “performance”. Something else that is amazing is that Booth
had always planned his getaway route to be via jumping from the Presidents box
to the stage and that he had successfully done such feats on the stage from
even greater heights. But the new flag
that was hung as bunting in front of the Presidential box was just slightly
larger and that small difference caused Booth’s spur to catch and throw him off
balance and thus break his leg when he landed.
He got away initially, but his injuries slowed down his escape which in
turn led to his capture.
The Lincoln
assassination had reverberations for the entire nation. Lincoln’s post-Civil War policy was reunion
not retribution with the Confederacy.
Unfortunately, his successor Andrew Johnson moved in the direction of
punishing the South which only caused the national wounds to further
fester. John Wilkes Booth, didn’t help
matters either. He thought killing
Lincoln would be considered a heroic act of war, but instead found himself
regarded as a merciless killer. Most
people are aware that Mrs. Lincoln suffered the effects of this trauma the rest
of her life but so did Union officer Henry Rathbone and his fiancé Clara Harris who attended the theatre
that night with the Lincolns. Rathbone over time became mentally unstable from the trauma and his perceived inability to protect Mr. Lincoln. Eventually Major Rathbone went mad and killed his wife and children and ended up dying in an insane asylum.
Following Lincoln, the POTUS
has been slowly and inexorably accompanied with more and more bodily protection and less and less
accessibility to the public. While there is less danger of assassination, the creation of the "bubble" has become its own insoluble problem. It is a sad
reality, that Lincoln, who said “the ballot is stronger than the bullet”, was
the first to prove with his own life that this is not always the case. Sometimes bullets commit the evil of undoing our ballots Get the book for a long weekend as once you
start reading, you’ll be unable to put it down.
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