"Anthony Pitch's "THEY HAVE KILLED PAPA DEAD!": The Road to Ford's Theatre, Lincoln's Murder, and the Rage for Vengeance is the only new major work to focus on the assassination and its aftermath."
I am sometimes described as a "student of the Lincoln assasination." I suppose that is true although I only developed an interest in the subject after reading Bill Tidwell's two fine books on the subject some twenty years ago. Further reading led me to the question of the Dahlgren Papers, their authenticity, or the lack of it, and the possible chain of opinion changes in Richmond that may have led to a decision to capture or kill Lincoln. The long defended "Booth as lone rogue in charge of a band of nuts" theory is so discredited that it is hardly worth discussing. The great irony in that theory of the killing has always been that Southerners are its principal defenders. Why would they not be? The possibility that the secet services of the Confederacy killed Lincoln either wittingly or in an unauthorized action by Booth (their agent) is still resisted with fire and brimstone by what I call the "SCV crowd." Heaven forbid that their ancestors might have tried to "take out" what they saw as the enemy head of state and commander in chief of the armies and navies over-running their homes. Heaven forbid! Now we have this interesting book, named for the agonized exclamation of one of His children. God bless them. They would need his blessing in years to come.
Pitch, evidently English by birth and Northern by the grace of residence and taste, went to enormous trouble in researching the book. Nine years, he says? Nine years in the bowels of the National Archives and countless libraries. God bless him too. The book is a marvelous resource for someone like me. Pitch has dug up a mass of detailed first person narrative and quoted newspaper stories, columns, proceedings and other primary or nearly primary source material that makes the protagonists in this national "passion play" stand up and walk around. The author makes you see the sky as it must have looked the week after Lee's surrender of his army. He makes you smell the horses on Pennsylvania Avenue. Pitch brings to life all the seedy hotels and bars of 1865 in Washington. He fills in the details in one's imagination of what it was like to rent a horse for a day, what the stableman said to you in letting you ride off on his horse, what the country people of southern Maryland were like, how they spoke and thought. It is striking that so many of Booth's team were Catholic Marylanders. Two had been in the major seminary at Baltimore before the war and left to join the Confederate Army. They were back in civilian life two years later after taking the "Oath of Allegiance" to please the ever-gullible US Government.
The book is marred for me by Pitch's inability to see any sort of higher motivation in anyone on the Southern side of the American Iliad. In his view, they are all wretches and madmen pursuing a hopless dream of disunion in this best of all possible countries. Powell, the man from Mosby's Rangers sent in to Washington to join Booth's team and give it "spine" is portrayed as a coarse lout, savage in nature and uncomprehending of the gravity of the meaning of his actions. In fact Payne/Powell left his Florida home at seventeen to soldier. He was captured wounded in Pickett's Charge at Gettyburg and when sufficiently recovered escaped to Virginis where he joined Mosby's command. Pitch says that he was a deserter from the Confederate Army. In fact, he was still on the muster role of Mosby's regiment the day that he was executed in Washington. He pleaded for Mrs. Surratt's life even on the gallows.
So, on balance, I judge this book to be a marvelous resource, wonderfully documented but a work that would have benefited from a modicum of neutrality toward the events and people of that far off time. pl
I wonder if that Powell guy was an ancestor of mine from my mom's side? Also have Harpers (Harper's Ferry) on the dad's side. The only bad guys known are Big and Little Harp the Naches Trace robbers and killers.
Thanks for your continuing efforts in SST to argue that Israel's interests do not necessarily match the interests of the United States'. Most people (bloggers) don't have the stomach for that.
Posted by: dilbert dogbert | May 09, 2009 at 08:20 PM