Come Retribution: The Confederate Secret Service and the Assassination of Lincoln [Hardcover]

William A. Tidwell (Author), James O. Hall (Author), David Winfred Gaddy (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: October 1988

Many Confederates believed that Abraham Lincoln himself was the sponsor of the Union army's heavy destruction of the South. With John Wilkes Booth as its agent, the Confederate Secret Service devised a plan of retribution--to seize President Lincoln, hold him hostage, and bring the war-weary North to capitulation. The code word for this stratagem was "Come Retribution."

But when Booth was stymied, the Secret Service took another course. They conspired to bomb the White House during a conference of senior Union officials. But this plot also failed. Next, the Confederates devised for Confederate forces to abandon Richmond and Petersburg and to link up with General Joseph E. Johnston in the South before General Grant's forces were prepared to move. This plan was thwarted, however, when Grant took Richmond. By April 9, 1865, Lee was forced to surrender.

Yet the willful, ardent Booth, smarting from the South's loss of the war, took decisive action at Ford's Theater during that spring night in 1865.

Investigating the assassination from their perspective as career intelligence officers, William A. Tidwell and David Winfred Gaddy, joined by James O. Hall, one of the leading authorities on the assassination, find and follow the clues, interpret the clandestine evidence, and draw well-founded conclusions. They are the first to explore the Confederate Secret Service's link to the death of Lincoln. In Come Retribution, originally published in 1988 and now available again in a paperback edition, they offer startling insights and give a new direction to the well-known and often-told story of Lincoln and Booth.

"The facts presented and the inferences drawn are provocative," said Nathan Miller in The Baltimore Sun. "Every account of the Lincoln assassination published in the future will have to take account of the arguments presented in this book."

--This text refers to the Paperback edition.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Was the assassination of Lincoln the result of a Confederate conspiracy? The authors (Tidwell and Gaddy are retired U.S. intelligence officers; Hall is a retired U.S. Department of Labor official) introduce sources that they say have never been consulted to reconstruct the covert operations of the Confederate Secret Service, including an elaborate plan to capture Lincoln in March 1865 that involved his eventual assassin John Wilkes Booth. Proposing that, contrary to the normative views of Civil War historians, the South was confident of its strength in 1864 and 1865, the authors speculate that the unexpected successes of Generals Grant and Sherman that forced Lee to surrender in April 1865 did not daunt Booth, who may have reasoned that "all was not lost; there were still Confederate armies in the field. Some dramatic action might yet save the Confederacy, and he was the one to do it." Acting on his own initiative, the authors advance, Booth shot Lincoln, then escaped via the route that would have served in the abduction plot. The evidence is, as the authors admit, circumstantial, the argument highly conjectural, the writing frequently infelicitous (an agent "went in to kill Vice-President Andrew Johnson but his courage was not sufficiently screwed up"). Nevertheless, Civil War and military history buffs will be intrigued by the documentation amassed in this hefty book. Illustrations not seen by PW.
Copyright 1988 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Library Journal

In the wake of Iran-Contra intrigue, this book, the first detailed look inside Confederate intelligence operations, makes good reading. Though lightly documented, it shows the Confederacy developing a sophisticated network of intelligence gathering and such modern practices as "disinformation." The authors, both former intelligence officers, assert, without proving, that the Confederacy had a well-conceived plan to kill Lincoln and end the war. Students of the Lincoln assassination will do better to rely on William Hanchett's The Lincoln Murder Conspiracies ( LJ 10/1/83). Randall M. Miller, St. Joseph's Univ., Philadelphia
Copyright 1988 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to the Paperback edition.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 385 pages
• Publisher: Univ Pr of Mississippi (Trd) (October 1988)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0878053476
• ISBN-13: 978-0878053476
• Product Dimensions: 9.2 x 6.2 x 1.7 inches
• Shipping Weight: 2.2 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (5 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #3,599,338 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Most Helpful Customer Reviews

17 of 19 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars A fresh look, new evidence, a must read., June 26, 1996

By A Customer

This review is from: Come Retribution: The Confederate Secret Service and the Assassination of Lincoln (Hardcover)

Come Retribution is opaque, at times difficult but a wonderfully fresh look at the official role of the CONfederate government in the assasination of Abraham Lincoln. Unlike most works on the Civil War, it is not a re-comilation but a new look at an old subject using new evidence. And the evidence is damning -- the authors, all modern day intelligence experts, argue convincingly that the death of President Lincoln was a runaway operation that was designed to kidnap the president and/or blow up the War department. The authors ability to uncover fresh evidence at so late a date is an indication that modern research and analytical techniques used by the intelligence community have a strong and valuable role in historical reseacrh as well. This book is an absolute must read for anyone interested in the assasination of Lincoln, the Confederate Secret Service or historical detective work.
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8 of 8 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Putting Context on the Lincoln Assassination, October 31, 2004

By 

D. S. Thurlow (Alaska) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Come Retribution: The Confederate Secret Service and the Assassination of Lincoln (Paperback)

"Come Retribution" is a lengthy and often technically detailed effort to place the assassination of President Abraham Lincoln into the context of Confederate Secret Service operations during the Civil War. The first half of the book lays the ground work by an extended discussion of Confederate intelligence and covert action activities. This discussion highlights the difficulties of reconstructing activities that were highly secret and poorly documented, especially in the chaos of the closing months of the Civil War. The second half of the book is the application of what is known about the Confederate secret service to the events around Lincoln's assassination. What emerges is a more richly nuanced explanation of those events, in which an extended effort to orchestrate Lincoln's kidnapping becomes an assassination plot after the fall of Richmond in April 1865. The gaps in the record, based both on the passage of time and the secrecy in which these actions would have been carried out means the authors must often imply or suggest links in their explanation based on their characterization of the assassination as an organized secret service mission. The motley band of misfits led by an allegedly insane actor found in traditional histories are in this version replaced by a purpose built organization recruited, financed, and directed to some significant degree by the Confederate Secret Service. The authors' explanation is reasonable and plausible, if not fully documented. The writing in this book is sometimes tedious and repetitive, and will be of most interest to serious students of the Civil War and especially of Lincoln's assassination. This book will be of particular interest to those with a background in intelligence or special operations; indeed, a full understanding of the book almost presupposes such a background. Those who choose to favor exotic conspiracy theories about the Lincoln assassination will be disappointed; Tidwell and his fellow authors prefer simpler explanations.

8 of 9 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Excellent Research Excels on Confederate Special Operations, Booth and the Lincoln Assassination, April 15, 2006

By 

Daniel Hurley (Chesapeake, VA.) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Come Retribution: The Confederate Secret Service and the Assassination of Lincoln (Paperback)

Although many people today have assumed that Booth acted to kill President Lincoln, Seward and Johnson as an act independent of Confederate complicity, the authors of 'Retribution' document that Booth was well connected with the Confederate special operations unit and agents. The complicated Confederate special operations provided agents not only in Washington D.C. and Maryland but also NYC, Canada and other keys areas inside Union lines. After describing in detail the clandestine activities of the Confederates, the authors outline how the network of agents were implanted that were active in gaining and transferring information but also prepared to support Booth and his companions in the kidnapping of Lincoln aiding his transport through Maryland all the way to Ashland, Virginia and beyond. Unfortunately, definitive proof of the Confederate secret operations may not be explicitly connected to Lincoln's death, it is apparent that Booth was active with operatives in NYC, Canada and agents in eastern Maryland, the flight of his escape. When Booth determined to assassinate Lincoln, there is no conclusive evidence that Confederate authorities approved of his action; however, as the authors point out, the approved element of kidnapping risks death of the object of that kidnapping. In that sense authorities knew with the initial kidnapping plan, that the possibility of Lincoln being killed was a risk does indicate complicity in the possibility of his death. This is a very detailed and well documented book that demonstrates that the Confederate special operations were very active whether in germ warfare with a failed effort to contaminate NYC with yellow fever or to contribute to anti-war sentiment particularly in NYC or even to free Confederate prisoners in the Great Lakes, it is very apparent that Confederate agents were willing to use extraordinary measures to end the war. It's amazing that Lincoln was so vulnerable to being kidnapped or assassination and that he was virtually unafraid, leaving it all to fate as he often rode off alone and refused protection unless coerced upon him. It is ironic that perhaps an unwritten code not to assassinate Lincoln protected him when he was vulnerable during most of the war and just a reasonable complement of bodyguards in the end would have saved his life. While Stanton somberly stated, "Now he belongs to the ages," upon Lincoln's death, it appears that Lincoln trusted a higher authority in protecting his life or in determining his time. How good is this book? The author of one of the most recent and acclaimed books on the Lincoln assassination, "Blood on the Moon" frequently references "Come Retribution" calling it a great scholarly history on the Confederate spy and special operations network and its activities.