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Review
| The Darkest Dawn: Lincoln, Booth, and the Great American Tragedy, by Thomas Goodrich. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2005. 362 pages. $21.95, paper.
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| The story is a familiar one. The assassination of President Abraham Lincoln at Ford's Theater on Good Friday, April 14, 1865 continues to fascinate historians as well as the casual reader. Beginning in 1937 with Otto Eisenschiml's Why Was Lincoln Murdered?, publishers have continued to crank out books on all aspects of what Thomas Goodrich calls "our great American tragedy." Regardless of the level of scholarship involved, it begs the question, what can we learn that is new and revealing about this seminal event in American history? The author expresses the hope that he will be able "to add something new to the story and to tell the tale in such a way that the reader became emotionally invested in the drama" (p. x). Using diaries of ordinary citizens and newspaper accounts of the day, author Thomas Goodrich begins his task by placing the assassination in the environs of a changing city. Washington, D.C. at the end of the Civil War was still an emerging metropolis. According to newsman Noah Brooks, it was "the dirtiest and most ill-kept borough in the United States" (p. 23). Its streets, including Tenth Street that bypassed Ford's Theater, was still a muddy path following the torrential downpour of March 4, 1865, the day when the President had been inaugurated for his second term. That day, according to author Goodrich, "had an evil onset" (p. 3), from the weather to the ominous presence of the young actor John Wilkes Booth, peering down on the President from above the inaugural platform. As the actor was later to write in his diary, "What an excellent chance I would have had to have killed the president on inauguration day." |
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Using newspapers of the day, Goodrich shows the apparent antipathy with which our 16th president was portrayed. His decision to issue the Emancipation Proclamation in 1863 and his evident intention to eventually grant Negro suffrage were described in a Kansas newspaper as divisive, raising the question of "whether the white man shall maintain the status of superiority or be sunk to the level of the Negro" ( p. 42). It was this type of discussion as well as "the dread specter of Negro enfranchisement that ignited John Wilkes Booth to contemplate bloody deeds" (p. 42). The Lacrosse Daily Democrat in Wisconsin went so far as to print an editorial that "openly hoped that some assassin would stab the President in the heart for the public good" (p. 48). Lincoln's well-known bouts with depression and the frequent verbal assaults from his own jealous wife, Mary Todd Lincoln, add to Goodrich's ominous story. For the period following the event at Ford's Theatre, the author uses his sources to illustrate the scope of national mourning that took place following Lincoln's death and to describe his funeral starting at the White House and ending in his old home in Springfield, Illinois, a ceremony that lasted twenty days and included the cities of Philadelphia, New York, and Chicago. Goodrich's work clearly demonstrates extensive research in the sources. There are forty-two pages of reference notes covering the book's thirty-four chapters. Additionally, there are twelve pages of source materials. Fifteen pages of photographs have been assembled from a variety of sources such as the Library of Congress and several major college and university libraries. Thus The Darkest Dawn represents a unique addition to Lincoln scholarship and it has great potential for use in the classroom for those studying the Civil War era. |
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| Pasco-Hernando Community College, Florida |
Michael E. Long |
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