Backstage at the Lincoln Assassination

[L Verge]

Betty,

Tom's book has been on order for months, so hopefully we will receive it this coming week. Shipment is all at the whim of the publishers or their agents. I have also asked our gift shop manager to contact Tom to see if he will come down one day and sign all of the first shipment of books so that we can offer signed copies to the first buyers. He will also be speaking at the March conference and participating in the Authors' Hour with signings.

Speaking of our Lincoln assassination conference (Lincoln's Assassination: Collateral Damage), the information packets will go out in the mail to all Surratt Society members this week. Everyone is welcome at our conferences, however; so if you are not a Society member, just send us a name and mailing address, and a packet will be sent to you. It is the weekend of March 14-16, and includes off-site bus tours on Friday and Sunday.

Friday's tour will take us into D.C. to visit Clara Barton's downtown office, where she aided families and soldiers after the war; a visit to the newly restored Trial Room at the Old Arsenal (now Ft. McNair); then over to the National Portrait Gallery for a Civil War exhibit. Lunch will be at a restaurant that occupies a ca. 1875 former Masonic Lodge. The bus will return in time for our opening reception at the James O. Hall Research Center.

On Sunday, Yankees who go on the bus tour better be prepared to chase that crafty John Singleton Mosby because we're spending the day on his trail in the Shenandoah Valley.

In between those bus tours, we will spend Saturday getting educated by talks on the missing autopsy photo, people and relics of the assassination story, the actors, actresses, and theater personnel caught in the drama at Ford's Theatre, Henry Rathbone, Mrs. Lincoln, and Robert Lincoln. The banquet that evening will end with a presentation on finding clues through period photography.