New and Noteworthy: Science Meets Lincoln's Assassination and an Author Interview

A Finger In Lincoln's Brain: What Modern Science Reveals About Lincoln, His Assassination, And Its Aftermath, E. Lawrence Abel, Praeger an imprint of ABC-CLIO, 270 pp., 18 b/w illustration, bibliographic end notes, bibliography, index, $48.00.

CWL:  E. Lawrence Abel brings his professional training in psychology and anatomy to a comprehensive examination of the Lincoln assassination. His arguments deal with the sciences of ballistics, disease, human behavior. Very well written in an accessible style. Myths and misunderstandings are explored and explained. Very likely to be the touchstone for all past and future considerations of the Lincoln assassination.

From the Publisher: In this book, E. Lawrence Abel sheds much-needed light on the fascinating details surrounding the death of Abraham Lincoln, including John Wilkes Booth's illness that turned him into an assassin, the medical treatment the president is alleged to have received after he was shot, and the significance of his funeral for the American public. 

The author provides an in-depth analysis of the science behind the assassination, a discussion of the medical care Lincoln received at the time he was shot and the treatment he would have received if he were shot today, and the impact of his death on his contemporaries and the American public.

The book examines Lincoln's fatalism and his unbridled ambition in terms of empirical psychological science rather than the fanciful psychoanalytical explanations that often characterize Lincoln psychohistories. The medical chapters challenge the long-standing description of Lincoln's last hours and examine the debate about whether Lincoln's doctors inadvertently doomed him.

The Interview: 

CWL: You suggest that Booth's shot was a 'lucky one.' With Booth so close to Lincoln, how could Booth have missed his target?

ELA: Even at a distance of 5 feet, a derringer is inaccurate. I have just written an article for the Surratt Courier going into this in depth and I also cover it in detail in my talk at the archives (with illustrations).  You can see it by googling:  e. Lawrence Abel archives youtube.  In short, the youtube shows that an expert aiming at a target five feet away, missed, and there is also a clip showing that the gun had a lot of recoil, causing it to jerk upward from the target. It was "lucky" in the sense that Booth was likely aiming at Lincoln's back (the larger target).


CWL: Recently Dr. Charles Leale has been excoriated for his medical treatment of Lincoln?  Do you agree?

ELA: No, he did what he was trained to do. Although what he did would be sanctioned today, he shouldn't be blamed for making what in those days, wasn't a mistake. The ones who should be "excoriated" are the other doctors who also inserted their fingers into Lincoln's brain. It's as if they thought their fingers were better than Leale's.

 

CWL: Recently, historians and psychologists have described Lincoln has being both emotionally depressed and fatalistic.  You suggest that Lincoln may have dealt with these conditions by successfully managing his depression, fatalism  and his ambition.  How so?

ELA: I don't suggest he did other than his fear of death [that] motivated him to do things that would result in a "symbolic immortality" such as becoming president, issuing the Emancipation Proclamation.

CWL:  What does a modern understanding of forensics make clear about Lincoln's wound?

ELA: The fact that the wound was smooth and round means that Booth had to have shot Lincoln from Lincoln's right and not behind him. This is because Lincoln was leaning to his left when he was shot, and the only way to get a round smooth entry wound is if the gun is perpendicular to the target. If Booth were standing behind him, the entry wound would have been oblique and sharp edged. 

CWL: In what ways does your professional career bring clarity to the many myths of the assassination?

ELA: Coming from a science background, I focused on issues that other historians largely ignored because they don't feel comfortable dealing with aspects of the assassination and individuals involved.

CWL: How would you rate Samuel Mudd's medical treatment of John Wilkes Booth?

ELA: I don't go into Mudd's medical treatment in the book. From what we know, he did what he could. The controversy is whether he lied about knowing he was treating Booth

 

CWL: Was the embalming of Lincoln's body a 'state of the art' in 1865 effort?

ELA: Yes. Lincoln was embalmed using state of the art methods for that time. The deterioration in his body afterwards may have been due to the embalming fluid or poor perfusion.

 

CWL:  Describe your case for John Wilkes Booth not being a tool of the Confederate government.

ELA: That would take a long time and I cover it in my book.  Even if he were a "tool" that would not solely explain his attitude toward Lincoln, or his willingness to murder--there were other "tools" and others with the same deep seated hatred, and they didn't try to kill Lincoln.

CWL: You make a persuasive case for John Wilkes Booth being very ill previous to the assassination.  What symptoms do you see in Booth that suggests this?

ELA: I have about ten pages of arguments that Booth was suffering from syphilis before the assassination, which was a spur of the moment act.

CWL:  Thank you for your work regarding Lincoln's assassination.

News---Two Images of Lincoln's Funeral Procession In NYC Found, Maybe.

Maryland Man May Have Found Two Lost Or Forgotten Photos Of Lincoln’s Funeral Procession, Michael E. Ruane, Washington Post, March 19, 2014.

In the first photograph,the crowd outside the church seems to be waiting for something to come down the street. Children stand up front so they can see. Women, in the garb of the mid-1800s, shield themselves from the sun with umbrellas. White-gloved soldiers mill around. And a few people have climbed a tree for a better view.

In the second shot, some heads are bowed. Men have taken off their hats. And the blur of a large black object is disappearing along the street to the left of the frame. What the scene depicts, why it was photographed, or where, has been a mystery for decades, experts at the National Archives say. But a Maryland man has now offered the theory that the two photos are rare, long-forgotten images of Abraham Lincoln's   funeral procession in New York City.

 

Paul Taylor, 60, of Columbia, a retired federal government accountant, believes the scene is on Broadway, outside New York’s historic Grace Church. The day is Tuesday, April 25, 1865, 11 days after Lincoln was assassinated at Ford’s Theatre in Washington. And the crowd is waiting for, and then seems to be paying homage before, a horse-drawn hearse, whos motion makes it appear as a black blur as it passes by in the second picture.

If Taylor is right, scholars say he has identified rare photos of Lincoln’s marathon funeral rites, as well as images that show mourners honoring the slain chief executive.
Plus, it appears that the photographs were taken from an upper window of the studio of famed Civil War photographer Matthew Brady which was across the street from the church. “It’s a big deal,” said Richard Sloan, an expert on the Lincoln funeral ceremonies in New York. “What makes it even a bigger deal is to be able to study the people. Even though you can’t see faces that well, just studying the people tells a story.” Sloan added, “It’s as if you’re there, and you can see the mood.” Many people, including children, are in their Sunday best. A few look up at the camera. Flowers are in bloom. But there is no levity.

Sloan said he is convinced that the pictures show the funeral scenes: “There’s no doubt about it.”
But experts at the Archives caution that although the theory sounds good, there could be other explanations, and no way to prove it conclusively. The digital photographs were made from some of the thousands of Brady images acquired by the federal government in the 1870s and handed down to the National Archives in the 1940s, according to Nick Natanson, an archivist in the Archives’ still-picture unit. Next year is the 150th anniversary of Lincoln’s assassination. The two photos in question, both captioned “scene in front of church,” apparently had gone unnoticed for decades.
“We’ve had many inquiries about many images in the Brady file,” he said. “I can’t remember . . . any inquiries about these two particular images. I don't think I ever noticed them before.”

Full Text Continued at Washington Post March 19, 2014

News: Dr. Charles Leale's Long-Lost Homicide Report 'Discovered' In A Box At The National Archives

Report Of First Doctor To Reach Shot Lincoln Found,  John O'Connor, Associated Press, June 2, 2012.

 The first doctor to reach President Abraham Lincoln after he was shot in a Washington theater rushed to his ceremonial box and found him paralyzed, comatose and leaning against his wife. Dr. Charles Leale ordered brandy and water to be brought immediately. Leale's long-lost report of efforts to help the mortally wounded president, written just hours after his death, was discovered in a box at the National Archives late last month.

The Army surgeon, who sat 40 feet from Lincoln at Ford's Theater that night in April 1865, saw assassin John Wilkes Booth jump to the stage, brandishing a dagger. Thinking Lincoln had been stabbed, Leale pushed his way to the victim but found a different injury. "I commenced to examine his head (as no wound near the shoulder was found) and soon passed my fingers over a large firm clot of blood situated about one inch below the superior curved line of the occipital bone," Leale reported. "The coagula I easily removed and passed the little finger of my left hand through the perfectly smooth opening made by the ball."

The historians who discovered the report believe it was filed, packed in a box, stored at the archives and not seen for 147 years. While it doesn't add much new information, "it's the first draft" of the tragedy, said Daniel Stowell, director of the Papers of Abraham Lincoln. "What's fascinating about this report is its immediacy and its clinical, just-the-facts approach," Stowell said. "There's not a lot of flowery language, not a lot of emotion."

A researcher for the Papers of Abraham Lincoln, Helena Iles Papaioannou, found the report among the U.S. surgeon general's April 1865 correspondence, filed under "L'' for Leale. Physicians continue to debate whether Lincoln received proper treatment. With trauma treatment still in its infancy, Leale's report illustrates "the helplessness of the doctors," Stowell said. "He doesn't say that but you can feel it." "For his time, he did everything right," said Dr. Blaine Houmes, a Cedar Rapids, Iowa, specialist in emergency medicine who has studied the assassination. Accounts vary about how Leale did it — Houmes thinks he might have pounded on the victim's chest — but the doctor resuscitated the president.

"When Dr. Leale got into the president's box, Lincoln was technically dead," Houmes said. "He was able to regain a pulse and get breathing started again. He basically saved Lincoln's life, even though he didn't survive the wound." Leale wrote a report for an 1867 congressional committee investigating the assassination that referenced the earlier account, but no one had ever seen the original, said Stowell, whose group's goal is to find every document written by or to Abraham Lincoln during his lifetime.

At least four researchers have been painstakingly scouring boxes of documents at the National Archives for more than six years. They methodically pull boxes of paper — there are millions of records packed away and never catalogued, Stowell said — and look for "Lincoln docs," as Papaioannou called them.

She was assigned the surgeon general's mail and was leafing through letters pitching inventions for better ambulances and advice about feeding soldiers onions to ward off disease when she hit Leale's report, likely rewritten in the neat hand of a clerk. "I knew it was interesting. What we didn't know was this was novel," Papaioannou said. "We didn't know that this was new, that this was an 1865 report and that it likely hadn't been seen before."

Leale, who was 23 and just six weeks into his medical practice when Lincoln died, never spoke or wrote about his experiences again until 1909 in a speech commemorating the centennial of the president's birth. While Leale's report includes little sentiment, Papaioannou believes the way he described the moments after Booth disappeared shows how deeply he was affected.

"I then heard cries that the 'President had been murdered,' which were followed by those of 'Kill the murderer' 'Shoot him' etc. which came from different parts of the audience," Leale wrote. "I immediately ran to the Presidents box and as soon as the door was opened was admitted and introduced to Mrs. Lincoln when she exclaimed several times, 'O Doctor, do what you can for him, do what you can!'"

The Papers of Abraham Lincoln, administered by the Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library and Museum in Springfield, has found and is digitizing 90,000 documents, Stowell said. Leale's report — neither written by or to Lincoln — doesn't technically fall in the group's purview, but Stowell said some exceptions are made for extraordinary finds.

Text and Image Source: Yahoo News

New and Noteworthy----Lincoln's Kentucky Ally And Prosecutor of The Conspirators

Lincoln's Forgotten Ally: Judge Advocate General Jospeh Holt of Kentucky, Elizabeth Leonard, Univ. Of North Carolina Press, 448 pages, notes, bibliography, index, $40.00, Release Date: October 10, 2011.

Lincoln's Forgotten Ally, Review by William C. Davis, History Book Club.

First impressions are important, and for most people who first see his hard stare and cold features, impressions of Joseph Holt seldom improve upon familiarity. When he is recalled at all, it is as the implacable and merciless prosecutor of the conspirators involved in the kidnapping and assassination plots against Abraham Lincoln. Almost a century and a half after the trial of the criminals, Holt is still largely remembered for allegedly suborning perjury and paying for damning testimony to take the trial beyond just those immediately involved, seeking to implicate Confederate President Jefferson Davis and others in high position in the Lost Cause.

Elizabeth D. Leonard's new Lincoln's Forgotten Ally: Judge Advocate General Joseph Holt of Kentucky is a welcome tonic to long-held prejudices. If Holt was indeed relentless in his pursuit of Lincoln's killers, still he was also firmly opposed to slavery and a staunch supporter of the Union from the outset despite being a Democrat from slave-holding Kentucky.

He served in the lackluster cabinet of the equally lackluster President James Buchanan, first as postmaster general, and then as secretary of war after scandal rocked the administration. When war broke out Holt at first took a commission as colonel of a Union infantry regiment, but in 1862 Lincoln appointed him judge advocate general of the Union army. No one likes a prosecutor as a rule, and as judge advocate, prosecution was Holt's mandate. He pursued the case against General Fitz-John Porter, a popular and capable officer who ran afoul of internal army politics, and then became the guiding force behind the trials of the Lincoln conspirators. The convictions were perhaps his greatest success, though the manner in which they were obtained tarnished his image ever after, and effectively ended any hopes he may have had for a postwar political career.

Lincoln's Forgotten Ally is the first full biography we have had of Holt, and the author is more than equal to the task of taking a two-dimensional figure and putting flesh on his bones. Throughout Holt's life his devotion to the Union comes through, from his efforts to keep Kentucky from seceding, to his work in making the Emancipation Proclamation effective, and his postwar efforts to use his office to make sure that military forces occupying the South during Reconstruction effectively implemented the reforms implicit in the 13th, 14th and 15th amendments to the Constitution, while combating the rise of the Ku Klux Klan and other extremists. When he died in 1894, his body was wrapped in a battle flag that he had kept for that purpose for almost 30 years.

Combining in-depth research and able narrative with measured judgment, Elizabeth D. Leonard has given Holt that necessary third dimension at last, and in the process filled an important void in our understanding of the men and measures that turned Lincoln's vision into a reality.

Text and Image Source: History Book Club

Review by Ron Briley--- Film: The Conspirator

"The Conspirator": Film and Historical Truth, Ron Briley, History News Network, February 7, 2011.

Mr. Briley is Assistant Headmaster, Sandia Preparatory School. He is the author of The Politics of Baseball: Essays on the Pastime and Power at Home and Abroad.

This is an abridgement of the review which is found in full at History News Network, February 7, 2011.

Although academic journals such as The American Historical Review and The Journal of American History have expanded their focus to consider cinema, most historians still seem to approach historical films with considerable suspicion. Thus, the American Historical Association’s (AHA) Executive Director James R. Grossman demonstrated both excitement and trepidation when he introduced a screening of The Conspirator on the last evening of the AHA’s 2011 annual meeting.

The 2011 film session, however, was somewhat different as, despite the disclaimer of Grossman, the AHA appeared to be endorsing a film project on which members of the historical organization served as consultants. The Conspirator is the first completed project of the American Film Company. CEO Joe Ricketts, founder of the online brokerage firm Ameritrade and a member of the family which owns the Chicago Cubs, explained to the assembled historians that his goal is to produce high quality and entertaining feature films which will attract adult audiences and be historically accurate. Ricketts asserted that with the rich variety of stories offered by American history there is no need for filmmakers to fabricate the nation’s past. The producer concluded that if The Conspirator is successful, the American Film Company is considering other projects such as a film on Paul Revere based upon the scholarship of David Hackett Fischer.

The production values of The Conspirator are certainly first rate. The film is directed by Oscar-winning filmmaker Robert Redford, and the cast includes such respected performers as Robin Wright, James McAvoy, Kevin Kline, Evan Rachel Wood, Tom Wilkinson, and Danny Huston. Budgeted for approximately $20 million, The Conspirator will be distributed for theatrical release in the spring by Lionsgate and Roadside Attractions.

The conclusion of the [AHA] panel was that the film deserved high marks for its historical detail regarding the case of Mary Surratt, who was executed for conspiracy in the assassination of President Abraham Lincoln. On the other hand, several members of the audience questioned whether it was really possible to make a motion picture about the Civil War without mentioning slavery. Thus, The Conspirator may be perceived as getting the details right, but missing what scholar Robert Rosenstone describes as the larger historical truths such as placing slavery at the center of our discussion on the Civil War.

Although the film focuses upon the trial of Mary Surratt (Robin Wright) by a military tribunal, the story is told from the viewpoint of her attorney Frederick Aiken (James McAvoy), who was a Union war hero before resuming his law career. Aiken is reluctant to accept the Surratt case, but he is assigned the case by Reverdy Johnson, a former attorney general currently serving as a United States senator from Maryland.

The historians on the AHA panel, however, assumed that Surratt was probably involved with the murder conspiracy, but they did acknowledge that the government employed the prosecution of Surratt to gain leverage against her son.

. . . Several members of the AHA audience suggested, it becomes easy to read the film as an allegorical commentary on the response of the Bush administration to the terrorist attacks of 9/11. Screenwriter Solomon, however, asserts that that the script for The Conspirator was written before 9/11. Nevertheless, it would certainly appear that doubts about the Patriot Act and concerns over violations of the civil liberties of those incarcerated in the global war on terror contributed to getting this script to the screen.

Yet, Solomon insists that his script is really rather ahistorical. He uses the stories of Mary Surratt and Frederick Aiken to examine the love of a mother for her son, alongside a surrogate son prepared to assume the role abandoned by John Surratt. This confession may explain why several women at the AHA screening expressed disappointment that a film ostensibly focusing upon a female protagonist becomes, in fact, a motion picture about the relationship between a mother and a son. The film belongs to Frederick Aiken and not Mary Surratt.

But this is not the most troubling issue regarding the film. As one AHA member observed, is it really possible to make a film about the Civil War era and not mention the word slavery? The Southern Surratt family had been slaveholders before falling into more difficult economic times, but this fact is not alluded to in the film. Thus, it is possible for viewers to provide alternative answers to this question which deny the centrality of the slavery issue to the origins of the Civil War.

Those who attended a secessionist ball in Charleston, South Carolina may assert that they are commemorating a commitment to states’ rights rather than celebrating an effort to preserve the institution of slavery. And The Conspirator fails to offer any cinematic challenge to such an assumption. One may view The Conspirator free from the disturbing questions of race and slavery. Perhaps this will make the film appealing to a larger audience, but it will do little to foster popular understanding of the Civil War as we observe the 150th anniversary of that conflict. The Conspirator is an entertaining film which includes more accurate historical detail than most Hollywood productions, but it misses some of the larger historical truths and issues which must be examined to understand America in the 1860s and the legacy of slavery and the Civil War.

CWL: The Internet Movie Database lists the release date as April 15.

The First Lincoln Assasination Conspiracy, 1860-1861.

The Baltimore Plot: The First Conspiracy to Assassinate Abraham Lincoln, Michael J. Klein, Westholme Press, 2008, 520 pages, illustrations, maps, notes, bibliography, $29.95.

Are you familiar with 24 a TV show that's been on for about seven seasons? Keifer Sutherland plays Jack Baurer, an action hero with a big Internet and satellite team behind him. The show runs on 'real time' which means there are sometimes three windows, a ticking clock and bursts of music like Law and Order's chun-chung. Well, The Baltimore Plot: The First Conspiracy to Assassinate Abraham Lincoln, is the thinking person's 24. But there is a big, big difference. The Baltimore Plot: The First Conspiracy to Assassinate Abraham Lincoln, is rational like a courtroom is rational.

On February 11, 1861, special train cars began their journey from Springfield, Illinois, to the City of Washington, and carried Lincoln to his inauguration as the sixteenth president of the United States. Over the next twelve days, Lincoln would speak at numerous stops, including Indianapolis, Columbus, Cleveland, Pittsburgh, Buffalo, Albany, New York, and Philadelphia. As Lincoln made his way to Washington D.C., three investigations separately concluded that in Baltimore Lincoln would be assaulted with the intention of killing him.

Allan Pinkerton, noted private detective of the era and working for a railroad president, a separate undercover operation by two New York City detectives, and Winfield Scott, chief of the army, individually uncovered startling evidence of a conspiracy to assassinate Lincoln during his next-to-last stop in Baltimore. Klein reviews Baltimore's consistently history of mob violence. Robert E. Lee's father, Henry "Light Horse Harry" Lee, was nearly beaten to death in its streets by a mob of politically active Democrats.

Maryland had secessionist sympathies in its eastern seaboard region. Baltimore was the hothouse for paramilitary conspiracies. Leaders included an Italian anti-monarchist who was a barber, the chief of police, the mayor, future colonels and generals in the Army of Northern Virginia, and future Confederates agents who lived in Montreal during the war. If Lincoln died before the inauguration who would become President in March. His vice-president? The runner-up in the November 1860 election? Better consult the Constitution and make sure that Chief Justice Roger Taney doesn't offer his own side-bar interpretation of it.

If Lincoln had been killed in Baltimore, would then the first-shot of the Civil War would have been there and not Charleston, S.C.? Possibly, except for the fact that Breckinridge, future Confederate general and Secretary of War, was Buchanan's vice-president and future Confederate general Floyd was the Secretary of War. One of the great secret conspiracies in American history, the Baltimore Plot has never been fully investigated. Was evidence of a plot to murder Abraham Lincoln as he traveled through Baltimore en route to his 1861 inauguration genuine? Or was it a product of detective Allan Pinkerton’s imaginative program of self-promotion? Historians have been divided on the issue. Michael Kline, a lawyer by occupation, has made a very convincing argument for a conspiracy to murder charge based on circumstantial evidence. Kline makes it in exacting and fascinating detail. The characters are fully developed and propel the narrative forward.

Kline turns his legal expertise to evaluating primary sources in order to discover the extent of the conspiracy and culpability of the many suspects surrounding the case. Memorable characters like Timothy Webster (later to be hung in Richmond, Virginia) and Kate Warne (probably the first female professional undercover detective) and intriguing plot twists unfold the criminal conspiracy to murder. Much like a courtroom presentation in the best films and novels, the author allows the jury of readers to determine whether there was a true plot to kill Lincoln and if the perpetrators could have been brought to trial.

Relying upon his legal arguments, Kline brings the story to a narrative climax at Harrisburg. Does Lincoln have enough evidence to believe Pinkerton’s report? of Should he to alter his travel schedule through Baltimore? It was a second, independent source of intelligence from Winfield Scott and William Seward that convinced Lincoln to accept Pinkerton's plan. Gathering information, arguing its value, and re-creating the tension of the secession crisis, Kline's narrative absorbs readers.

From the whorehouses of Baltimore to the congressional committee in D.C. investigating the possibility of violence, from the paramilitary drills performed in Democratic meeting halls to the telegraph offices along the trains' route, from the railway stations where 20 assassins await Lincoln's arrival, to the Washington Peace Conference where the secretary from Vermont is witness to an amazing conversation between two Virginia delegates, Kline's narrative is as compelling as any episode of 24.

Klein clearly states which parts of his arguement are conjecture and which are founded upon a close reading of primary sources. He does not hide behind generalizations or best guesses. By the end of the book, CWL accepts Klein's arguements. Louis T. Wigfall, senator from Texas, was a conspirator. John Wilkes Booth, Baltimore native, was a conspirator. Maryland's governor, Baltimore's mayor and it's chief of police were conspirators. They and many more expected Lincoln to be dead by 2:00pm on February 23, 1861 on Calvert Street between the Calvert and Camden Street railroad stations. Killed by a bullet or blade, Lincoln would have died surrounded by 20 assasins and a compliant Baltimore police force, both having motive, means and opportunity.

Related Website: April 19 Baltimore Riot Trail

Image Source: Camden Station, Baltimore

Baltimore's Civil War Museum

DVD---The Hunt for Lincoln's Assassin Doesn't Hunt Very Hard

The Hunt for Lincoln's Assassin, National Geographic Channel, 50 minutes, $19.95, 2008. DVD format.

Thin Soup. The National Geographic Channel didn't try hard enough on this one. The talking heads, reputable scholars each, are given very short (six to ten second)sound clips. During their fragments, the experts come off sounding smarter than the script that is read by an actor who often slips slips into/out of Dixie and New York City dialects.

On the upside Booth's diary is featured and some black and white photographs are colorized quite well. Everton J. Conger is given a place in history but is given a superficial treatment. On the downside John Wilkes Booth has mustache issues. Maps of the route are few and without detail. Five Union cavalrymen were filmed in daylight, dawn, twilight and nighttime riding through woods, over open roads, and across pastures. The riders seem to have more time in the film as the experts.

Suitable for middle school classrooms The Hunt for Lincoln's Assassin offers little to anyone who has read a book on the assassination.

CWL---The Newseum, The Telegraph and Chasing Booth

In the past two years you haven't passed a bookstore that didn't have several copies of James Swanson's Manhunt: The 12 Day Hunt for Lincoln's Killer. In the next year Harrison Ford will track John Wilkes Booth across the widescreen. Soon Swanson's very readable and suspensful account will deserve a paragraph in any discussion of the Civil War in American popular culture. Along with The Spy Museum, The Newseum is among my favorite non-Smithsonian sites to visit in Washington D.C.

This spring the Newseum opened a special exhibit on the media's coverage of the assasination and burial of Lincoln. Virtually you can find a portion of it at Newseum Exhibit on Manhunt: Chasing Lincoln's Killer. The exhibit includes rare artifacts such as a fragment from the dress worn by "Our American Cousin" lead actress Laura Keene that was stained with Lincoln’s blood, a lock of Lincoln’s hair framed with dried flowers from his coffin, and a rare bronze set of Lincoln life mask and hands, created by noted sculptor Augustus Saint-Gaudens in the 1880s directly from the 1860 plaster life mask and hands by Leonard Volk. Virtually visit the exhibits and Swanson's presentation his thesis in a 40 minute talk

You Tube: "I Saw Lincoln Shot."

I've Got A Secret was a very popular TV show that aired during the 1950s. This guest was a man who saw Lincoln shot. Samuel Seymour, 96 years old when this episode aired recalls Booth's fall and hoped that "the man who fell out of the balcony didn't get hurt." Seymour died a few weeks after the show. The cause of death was an injury received when he fell down steps at the hotel before the filming of this episode.

Here is the You Tube link: I've Got a Secret has a Winston cigarette commercial included. The commercial boasts that "Winston tastes good like a cigarette should."

Text Below is located at Inner Tube

On February 9th, 1956, 96 year old Samuel Seymour appeared as a guest on 'I've Got A Secret'. (The celebrity guest that night was Lucille Ball.) Mr. Seymour was the last surviving witness to the assassination of President Lincoln, and he was five years old at the time. He had gone with the family of one of his young friends.
All Mr. Seymour remembered of that fateful and fatal night was that a man fell out of the balcony and onto the stage. It wasn't until after they had escaped the pandemonium in the theater did the little boy find out that the President had been killed. Mr. Seymour lived in Maryland and he died in April of 1956, 91 years after the assassination of Abraham Lincoln.

Other Voices---8th Precinct Police Reports Documenting Lincoln Assassination Pulled From Trash

Reports Documenting Lincoln Assassination Discovered, Paul Wagner, Channel Five News, Washington, D.C., edited and created: Tuesday, 08 Jan 2008, 1:00 AM EST

Source: http://www.myfoxdc.com/myfox/pages/News/Detail?contentId=5420734&version=1&locale=EN-US&layoutCode=VSTY&pageId=3.2.1

CWL---John Wilkes Booth's Escape Route and Much, Much More

John Wilkes Booth Escape Route: History Map: Follow the Route Taken by the Assassin of President Abraham Lincoln As He Fled from Ford's Theatre On April 14, 1865, Until His Capture And Death 12 Days Later at the Garrett Farm in Virginia, Kieran McAuliffe, Thomas Publications, $4.95, 2002.

This three-fold, four page map is a necessary resource for anyone reading any book on the Lincoln assasination and Booth's flight, capture and death. CWL kept the map handy while reading Manhunt by Swanson.

CWL was well served by McAuliffe's work. On one side is the map are twenty-two black and white photographs of the key figures and buildings. Also this side shows the route of flight by Booth with Herold, the two federal pursuit routes, and the route which Booth's body was brought back to Washington, D.C. Each of the four routes have chronological annotations. Modern highways are also shown.

The reverse side of the map contains a brief description of Maryland during the war, and a longer narrative of the flight. Six photographs are on these two pages; featured are Booth's derringer and diary. A bibliography of eleven sources is included. The author and mapmaker, Kieran McAuliffe, credits the assistance of James O. Hall and Edward Steers. The design, layout and color of this publication is great! Easy to use and having lots of essential information, Kiernan McAuliffe's is an exceptional addition on any bookshelf or teacher's resource file.