My Journey on Lincoln's Assassination

[mikegriffith1]

Soon after I began to seriously study the Civil War, I began to form doubts about the traditional version of Lincoln's assassination. Even as a relative novice, I could not bring myself to buy the idea that any Confederate or Southern sympathizer would want to kill Lincoln, the one man who stood the best chance of preventing the Radical Republicans from imposing harsh reconstruction on the South. It just didn't make any sense.

On the other hand, since I was very critical of Lincoln and viewed him as being almost a tyrant, I didn't really care about his death, and so I didn't have much interest in reading about his assassination.

A few years into my research, I stumbled across Otto Eisenschiml's book Why Was Lincoln Murdered? I thought, "Now, this makes sense. If anyone had a motive to kill Lincoln and had proven themselves capable of such treachery, it was the Radicals."

I also read Eisenschiml's book In the Shadow of Lincoln's Death. I found this book hard to get through because I still held a harsh view of Lincoln and thus did not really care about the trial of Mary Surratt or whether or not Booth escaped. Eisenschiml seemed to make a good case that Booth did not escape but died in the barn. Besides, the idea that Booth escaped struck me as irrelevant and unbelievable.

About two years ago, as I began studying George McClellan, George Thomas, John Crittenden, and Stephen Douglas, my views on Lincoln began to change. I found J. G. Randall's research on Lincoln particularly enlightening and persuasive.

Then, about two months ago, my interest in Lincoln's assassination was rekindled when I watched, out of sheer boredom one day, a short documentary on Nathan Orlowek's efforts to have the body in Booth's grave and the alleged Booth spinal fragment subjected to scientific testing.

After that, I began to read everything I could find on Lincoln's death and on Booth. I read a couple of books on Booth and numerous online articles about Lincoln's assassination. I also read two books on the case of Mary Surratt. Just today I finished reading Dr. Robert Arnold's book The Conspiracy Between John Wilkes Booth and the Union Army to Assassination Abraham Lincoln. And I'm in the process of reading Roscoe's The Web of Conspiracy.

I'm still undecided about some aspects of Lincoln's assassination, but I now believe that Stanton and other War Department/Army officials were involved, that Booth was not shot in Garrett's barn, that the assassination was not a spur-of-the-moment act (as Booth claimed in his diary) but had been planned weeks in advance, that Mary Surratt was innocent, that John Surratt was not involved in Lincoln's murder, that O'Laughlen was innocent, that Dr. Mudd was not part of the assassination plot, that one of the people who jumped onto the stage after Booth shot Lincoln--Major Stewart--was there to ensure that Booth got to his horse in the alley, and that Andrew Johnson was bullied, or tricked, by Stanton into going along with a military tribunal and not pardoning Mary Surratt.