Kathy Canavan's New Book!

[Lincoln Wonk]

(01-22-2017 06:06 PM)Gene C Wrote:  Lots of interesting details and information, especially regarding the Peterson House, where Lincoln died. I found the information about the family, and other tenants of the house interesting. Lots of good photographs, and well documented with lots of footnotes.

Some of the details really caught my eye, and left me wondering if they really happened, or did the source that was referenced take some liberty with the facts. Such as....

p92-93. William Withers was laying unconscious backstage, bleeding and disheveled after his encounter with Booth. Detectives drag him out of the theater into Baptist alley. A mob gathers and as he drifting in and out of consciousness, he is almost hung, but the mayor of Washington recognizes him and intervenes (Broadway Magazine, May 1904)
p 111. Investigators find in Booth's motel room among other things, a letter from a women who pleaded for Booth to forget his plot (Louisville Daily Union Press, April 17 1865)
p112. She (Mary Lincoln) suddenly began tearing out her own hair out of her head by the hand full....They were all relieved when Bob Lincoln persuaded his mother to stop. (Styple, Generals in Bronze p.304)

I just wonder if these are accurate reports, or just records of an over embellishment made at the time?

Gene
Thanks for mentioning my book about Petersen House. I have the same reservations about some details that you do, so I really vetted every source I used in Lincoln's Final Hours.
I look at history differently than academic historians because my background is in news reporting. After working on newspapers since 1972, you learn about the worth of various sources. For instance, if you're covering a tornado, your first question should never be, "What happened?" It should be, "Where we you when the tornado hit?" That's because the people who are on the scene when you arrive might have arrived two minutes before you did. Often, they'll tell you a long story full of details and then you'll find out they weren't eyewitnesses at all. They heard the story from a victim who was just carried to the hospital. So, you have to become a good judge of sources quickly.
Some people have questioned Withers' accounts, because he really enjoyed recounting his part in the assassination, and he did, after all, give slices of his tuxedo to friends as souvenirs. The thing that rang true to me from this particular account in Broadway magazine was his physical perspective. He speaks about what he saw from the perspective of a person lying on his back in the alley, and you can tell that his view of what's going on is limited by the crowd's movements. At some points, he can see more than others, and he has to rely on his hearing. That kind of perspective is hard to make up. Some of his other accounts did not ring true to me, and I didn't use them.

I believe Maj. J.R. O'Beirne's account is accurate because he told it to sculptor James Kelly as they were shooting the breeze while Kelly sculpted his face years after the assassination. He didn't expect it would land in a book. He wasn't bragging about it -- it was just the thing that stuck with him for all those years. As an officer, he probably couldn't discuss such a graphic detail about the first lady in 1865.

Of the accounts listed above, I have the least confidence in the account from the Louisville paper, and that's only because I don't know the reputation of the reporter. Historians usually value early accounts, and it is one of the first accounts of the police investigation, but I know from covering police investigations that sometimes police sources aggrandize what happened and some reporters sensationalize news. It was a highly competitive environment, I'm sure, and Booth had a reputation as a womanizer, so the officer or the reporter could have been
aggrandizing the evidence. I used it because it was published in a well-respected newspaper of record, and because it shows what was filtering out from the investigation.