We Saw Lincoln Shot: One Hundred Eyewitness Accounts (review)

Abstract

278CIVIL WAR HISTORY David Rintels's Andersonville is what most readers have come to expect in any portrayal of the most notorious Civil War prison. Stereotypical portraits of the "good guys" versus the "bad guys" dominate. Still, Rintels is a good dramatist, offering well-developed characterizations of a small band of Massachusetts and Pennsylvania soldiers and the Raiders' nemesis, "Limber Jim." (However, the latter pops up so often one almost wants him to go away.) Rintels paints a memorable portrait of deteriorating prison conditions that steadily sap the prisoners' mental and physical health. Yet, the "bloody shirt" portrayal is balanced somewhat by a more sympathetic treatment of Captain Wirz. My main criticism of the screenplay is Rintels's reliance on literary license and anachronisms. Illustrative is a memorable scene wherein Confederate Colonel O'Neal invites the near-death Union prisoners to take a Confederate loyalty oath and thereby obtain their releases. Rintels has the half-dead Massachusetts sergeant order his men to perform a contemptuous "about face." In fact, O'Neal did not appear until fall, when Andersonville was virtually empty, and a small number of fatalistic prisoners did, in fact, become "Galvanized Yankees." Similarly, though an attempt is made to be accurate, the final scene suggests that the prison is emptied at once in early September and its inmates freed. Rather, the hardiest endured another five months at various Southern prisons. And the capture and trial of the Raiders assumes greater importance in the screenplay than in more contemporary accounts. Yet, for all its faults, Rintels's screenplay brings to twentieth-century life the tortured story of Andersonville. Wayne Mahood Geneseo, New York We SawLincoln Shot: One HundredEyewitnessAccounts. Edited by Timothy S. Good. (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1995. Pp. viii, 215. $42.50, cloth; $17.95, paper.) Only the 1 963 John Kennedy assassination in Dallas compares in shock value in American memory to the fatal shooting of Abraham Lincoln by actor John Wilkes Booth in Ford's Theatre during an April 14, 1865, performance of Our American Cousin. The Lincoln assassination has inspired a massive body of scholarship and still provokes lively debate over such topics of controversy as Booth's mental stability, co-conspirators, and motivation or whether or not the presence ofUlysses Grant in the presidential box would have averted the tragedy or only expanded it. For the thousand or more playgoers, it had to have been a moment of complete confusion followed by a slower realization of horror—the percussion of Booth's Deninger, a brief scuffle between Booth and Maj. Henry Rathbone, Booth's "Sic Semper Tyrannis " leap to the stage and escape from the theater, the sobs ofdespair as medics and military personnel attended to Lincoln book reviews279 and carried his unconscious body to the Petersen home, where he would breathe his last. Taking into account the inevitable "wannabes" who fabricated their narratives, nearly a tenth ofthe audience authored reminiscences ofthat night's events that are reprinted in Timothy S. Good's anthology We Saw Lincoln Shot. The first thirteen narratives, all composed within days of the event by close by-standers and such participants as Major Rathbone, Lincoln's attending physicians and military guard, and the assassin Booth himself, are documents of primary importance to our historical understanding ofthe event. A few ofthe later accounts add to the historical record names of those who helped carry the stricken Lincoln to his deathbed. The vast majority reprinted in the anthology add nothing to our understanding. One is a patently dishonest addition, an 1877 letter from Mary Todd Lincoln to Edward Baker, Jr., on the general topic of bereavement that makes no reference whatever to the assassination. In the mind of the reviewer after this brief read is the question of why this volume was published, why Good labored so mightily to bring forth a mouse. One possible apologia, not explored in the volume, is suggested by Good's notes that the 1877-1908 narratives tended to be less reliable than fresher accounts, with such embellishments as Booth's fractured leg now incorporated into the folklore of the event, and that accounts published from 1909 to 1954 tended to make the eyewitness the...