The Lincoln Assassination Crime and Punishment, Myth and Memory A Lincoln Forum Book

by Holzer, Harold; Symonds, Craig L.; Williams, Frank J.

• ISBN13: 9780823232260
• ISBN10: 0823232263
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2010-06-07
• Publisher: Fordham University Press

Summary

The assassination of President Abraham Lincoln remains one of the most prominent events in U.S. history. It continues to attract enormous and intense interest from scholars, writers, and armchair historians alike, ranging from painstaking new research to wild-eyed speculation. At the end of the Lincoln bicentennial year, and the onset of the Civil War sesquicentennial, the leading scholars of Lincoln and his murder offer in one volume their latest studies and arguments about the assassination, its aftermath, the extraordinary public reaction (which was more complex than has been previously believed), and the iconography that Lincoln’s murder and deification inspired. Contributors also offer the most up-to-date accounts of the parallel legal event of the summer of 1865—the relentless pursuit, prosecution, and punishment of the conspirators. Everything from graphic tributes to religious sermons, to spontaneous outbursts on the streets of the nation’s cities, to emotional mass-mourning at carefully organized funerals, as well as the imposition of military jurisprudence to try the conspirators, is examined in the light of fresh evidence and insightful analysis.The contributors are among the finest scholars who are studying Lincoln’s assassination. All have earned well-deserved reputations for the quality of their research, their thoroughness, their originality, and their writing. In addition to the editors, contributors include Thomas R. Turner, Edward Steers Jr., Michael W. Kauffman, Thomas P. Lowry, Richard E. Sloan, Elizabeth D. Leonard, and Richard Nelson Current.

Author Biography

Harold Holzer, Senior Vice President for External Affairs at The Metropolitan Museum of Art, is one of the nation's leading authorities on Lincoln and the political culture of the Civil War era. He served as co-chairman of the U.S. Abraham Lincoln Bicentennial Commission. He has written, co-written, or edited thirty-five books.
Craig L. Symonds is Professor Emeritus at the U.S. Naval Academy and the author of ten previous books, including Lincoln and His Admirals, which won the 2009 Lincoln Prize.
Frank J. Williams, a renowned Lincoln scholar, is a former Chief Justice of the Supreme Court of Rhode Island, a member of the Lincoln Bicentennial Commission, and author or editor of many books, including Judging Lincoln.

Table of Contents

List of Illustrations	p. vii
Acknowledgments	p. xi
Introduction	p. 1
Lincoln's Deathbed in Art and Memory: The "Rubber Room" Phenomenon	p. 9
Abraham Lincoln's New York City Funeral	p. 55
Not Everybody Mourned Lincoln's Death	p. 95
Lincoln's Chief Avenger: Judge Advocate General Joseph Holt	p. 115
The Lincoln Assassination in Law and Lore	p. 137
Writing History in a Vacuum: The Lincoln Assassination	p. 157
"Let the Stain of Innocent Blood Be Removed from the Land": The Military Trial of the Lincoln Conspirators	p. 175
Process versus Truth in the Case of the Lincoln Conspiracy	p. 195
The Martyr and the Myth: The Lincoln Nobody Knows	p. 217
List of Contributors	p. 241
Board of Advisors of the Lincoln Forum	p. 245
Index	p. 247
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