Book Review

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Book Review | The Journal of American History, 86.4 | The History Cooperative

When the Bells Tolled for Lincoln: Southern Reaction to the Assassination. By Carolyn L. Harrell. (Macon: Mercer University Press, 1997. xiv, 136 pp. Cloth, $29.95, isbn 0-86554-565-0. Paper, $14.95, isbn 0-86554-587-1.)

Thanks to the telegraph, news of Abraham Lincoln's assassination spread across the North within hours. It took days, even weeks, for it to reach parts of the South. Indeed, the news was deliberately withheld from some areas for fear that rejoicing by loyal Confederates would lead to bloody reprisals by angry Union soldiers. By the time the news was generally known, the South (except for Texas) was so firmly under United States military control that southerners who would have liked to rejoice at Lincoln's death seldom dared to do so in public. There were some violent confrontations with the military, but mostly people expressed their emotions privately and recorded them in diaries and letters. Many such documents have been published, and others have survived in public archives and in university and private manuscript collections. Using those sources (the published outnumber the manuscripts), this brief book summarizes not the southern reaction to the assassination, as its subtitle promises, but the reaction of some southerners. . . .

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