My Journey on Lincoln's Assassination

[Rob Wick]

Thanks, Laurie. I appreciate your kind words.

Roger, I'm writing this with the understanding that it's been well over 20 years since I did any deep research into Eisenschiml via his papers in the ALPLM in Springfield. My initial thought was that I couldn't remember anyone, but there was some quiet voice nagging at me. On a whim I turned to Eisenschiml's O.E. Historian Without an Armchair and specifically to a chapter that originally appeared in the Journal of the Illinois State Historical Society about Stanton's involvement. Reading that chapter, it dawned on me why I felt as I did. Eisenschiml writes:

At the time I wrote Why Was Lincoln Murdered?another unanswered question bothered me: how did it happen that in the decades which have passed since 1865, no one had voiced a suspicion like mine Why had the press, in particular the anti-administration papers, accepted the official version of the crime, provided another version existed? The contemporary reporters were no simpletons and must have suspected that something was wrong, if there was something wrong to suspect. If they had, it was reasonable to expect that they had put their suspicions into words, even tough their publishers may have suppressed what they had written. But where were these words? Up to the time my first book on this subject was published, my search had been in vain.
My earlier belief that the reporters of 1865 harbored no suspicion about Stanton proved unfounded. While immediately after the tragedy at Ford's Theater no one leveled a direct accusation about his complicity, three years later convincing proof that not all contemporary journalists agreed with the official version of the assassination came to light, and in a most fantastic manner.

I'm not going to type all the details of this, but this is the May 2, 1868 copy of the People's Weekly in which the editor, Ben Green wrote an editorial entitled "That Wicked Old Man" in which Green (who was the son of Duff Green) wrote that the "real instigators" of the assassination of Lincoln was Stanton, Joseph Holt and Lafayette Baker. Anyone interested in this flight of fancy is free to read O.E. or what Thomas Reed Turner wrote in Beware the People Weeping.

So, despite the fact that ONE editor believed that Stanton and others played a role in the assassination, no other writer ever seriously offered such a theory, at least publicly.

One final note on the man that my Civil War history professor termed "Crazy Otto." For good or ill, and I stand firmly in the "for ill" camp, Eisenschiml played a major role in the study of Lincoln's assassination. If you look at the number of popular magazines and newspapers (and even some academic, peer-reviewed journals) that agreed to carry his work, his influence was felt far and wide throughout the country. One cannot discount Eisenschiml with just a wave of the hand. One certainly can discount his conclusions, or lack thereof, and see that he was a charlatan more interested in lining his wallet than in promoting good and valuable history. But one ignores him at their own peril. He is someone who deserves a biography although it must be built on the work of Bill Hanchett who once told me he couldn't stomach writing such a book. It angered him too much.

Best
Rob