Customer Reviews

The Darkest Dawn: Lincoln, Booth, and the Great American Tragedy

5 star:		(3)
4 star:		(3)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

The Darkest Dawn is an excellent read. Typical of Tom Goodrich's style, the book puts you "in the moment" with the characters and the characters truly come to life. I just finished reading Team of Rivals by Doris Goodwin, Manhunt by James Swanson and Darkest Dawn by Goodrich. They are all unique and excellent contributions to Lincoln scholarship. Darkest Dawn captures the response to Lincoln's death like no other work I've read. You see how incredibly polarizing the event was and how its timing contributed to incredible anger, anxiety and outrage by both north and south. Top Notch!

He is one of the most recognisable figures in history: The tall, angular frame, the sad half smile, eyes dark, tired and sunken. The last picture of Abraham Lincoln, 16th president of the United States, and reproduced here, is that of a man whose race is almost run.

Taken four days before the prominent actor and Southern sympathiser John Wilkes Booth ended his life with a shot to the head, Lincoln seemed ill at ease, the slight blurring around the hands indicating he was unable to keep them still for the time required for the exposure to take effect.

Could he be wondering about the next four years of his presidency, the monumental task of healing the wounds of a civil war he had insisted should be fought? The conflict, in which he had thrown the overwhelming might of the United States at the rebel Confederacy to bring about a difficult and costly victory, was all but over, but as shrewd a man as he would have guessed that the peace was going to be an even more formidable adversary. Did he have the answers?

We shall never know as Booth's dramatic act at Ford's Theatre in Washington relieved Lincoln of that responsibility, leaving him simply as the leader who saved the union. Dying with Southern armies still in the field and the final acts of the war yet to take place, his administration was linked wholly with the conflict. The emotions his assassination unleashed ensured not just his place as a great American president, but his conversion into a secular saint.

As Goodrich points out in his epilogue: "In the stampede to elevate the slain president, his virtues were magnified and his vices diminished until the one became a caricature and the other all but forgotten." The cynic might add: "good career move, Abe."

The author, an historian and storyteller, who has specialised in this brief, dark period in American history, has taken the events of a few weeks of the spring and summer of 1865 and made them live again.

An act of outstanding scholarship, he has amassed hundreds of contemporary sources - biographies, eye-witness accounts, newspaper articles - to the point where he blends his own narrative with the quotations from which he draws, producing compelling descriptions that immerse the reader in the zeitgeist. His passage on the chaos that resulted from a `lying in state' in Philadelphia during Lincoln's cross-country funeral procession is typical.

"Mingled with the normal dull roar of so many thousands were the shrieks of crushed women, the shrill cries of trampled children, and the cursing and shouting of men. Silk hats, bonnets and parasols were smashed flat, dresses were ripped, hoop skirts were broken and mangled, the neatly pinned hair of ladies now fell to their waists in a disheveled mass. Ragged and tattered debris, including destroyed mourning badges and black crepe, littered the ground below."

The book is full of such rich description, including the wild and random acts of vengeance wreaked on anyone who did not show proper respect for the slain president. Any words said against Lincoln in public risked a beating or worse. Lynch law took hold. Even those whose mourning was not considered sincere enough faced the anger of the mob.

In the occupied Confederacy, civilians were forced to decorate their houses in black to honour the man they hated and reviled. Most swallowed their pride and complied, some like Mrs Stuart, hung herself rather than yield to the humiliation.

From the fall of Richmond, which signaled the end of organised resistance in the Confederacy, and Lee's surrender at Appomattox, through the assassination, its aftermath, the funeral procession, the death of Booth and the trial and execution of his associates, Goodrich opens a series of windows on those troubled, turbulent times.

For a while the victorious north, plunged from the pinnacle of joy to the depths of despair, became unhinged. As one witness recalled: "The sorrow and sadness caused...cannot be written; no pen can tell it. Only those who lived in these dreadful days can appreciate the pain we suffered."

Thanks to this book, we can appreciate a little of the anguish experienced by the bloody, war-ravaged nation as, united once more, it wearily resumed the journey towards its ultimate destiny.

This is simply the best book ever written on the Lincoln assassination. Mr. Goodrich allows you to relive this tragedy in the moment as though it just happened. You find yourself walking amongst the people feeling what they are feeling, thinking what they are thinking, and fully understanding the significance and the impact this American tragedy had on this country then as well as today.

I've read all I've found on Lincoln and yet I found new details about his death here that I had not read elsewhere. It doesn't rehearse the ins and outs of the conspiracy which is good if you've read "Blood on the Moon" and, even more so, "American Brutus". My cavil with 'Darkest Dawn" is that it portrays Booth all but sympathetically and Mrs. Lincoln as the devil herself. Mary Todd Lincoln was, without doubt, a manic-depressive who was dogged by bad health and hellish luck. She was a difficult lady who nevertheless withstood considerable slander and ridicule from both North and South. However, she was a staunch abolitionist who loved her husband dearly and was a kind and devoted mother. The author has the irritating habit of referring to her consistently as the "woman" and even finds her breakdown immediately after the assassination as reason for criticism. I guess if she hadn't, he'd be accusing her being part of the murder plot.

I enjoyed this book a great deal. The author is obviously not as much an admirer of Lincoln as I am. Other books I've read are more biased in Lincoln's favor. This author went much deeper into the history of the conspirators and others surrounding the assassination than other have done. A refreshingly unbiased account of the months before and after America's greatest tragedy.

One of the better books on the assination of Lincoln because it takes you to places that many books do not. There are stories of what happened around Washington (other than Seward's attack)as well as stories about the funeral that are only available in other, separate volumes. Quick read. Recommended.

I thought I knew a lot about the assassination of Lincoln. I was wrong. This easy to read book holds your attention as well as a novel, but is completely documented to please an academic. It provided intriguing information on the era, the people, and most notably to me, Mrs. Lincoln. I highly recommend this book to anyone interested in American history.

He was merely a player in this tragedy. Trained as an actor, he did his biggest role which changed the face of this country forever and ended his short life. John Wilkes Booth would never have killed Lincoln on his own. For some reason, by indoctrination or brain-washing by the conspirators who wanted Lincoln dead, he was used by the group and was in his own mind playing the theatrical role of his life. He was A Deluded Southern Sympathizer. He sprang from a great family of actors; his brother Edwin was an accomplished stage actor. Edwin did his deed so as to be famous in his own right. Many books have been written about John Wilkes Booth's participation in the Lincoln death.

It is sad that so much blame was put on his shoulders. I have been interested in Lincoln's assassination for over twenty years, mainly because they hanged Mary Surrat, the first woman to be officially killed in this manner. It was at her boardinghouse where the conspirators met to discuss and plan killing Lincoln and others in his Cabinet. John Wilkes Booth, from a prominent acting family, was a Confederacy sympathizer. But that in itself does not make him guilty. He was denied his right to a trial.

Most of the South were more than a little upset when Lincoln was inaugurated for the second time. They refused to accept him as "our" President. We had Jefferson Davis who married Zachary Taylor's daughter. I have read so much about Lincoln and also sympathized with Booth's reasoning. Lincoln, as it so happens, was a Shakespeare fan and enjoyed going to Ford's Theatre. John Wilkes Booth (Brutus) was one of the most promising young Shakespearean actors of his day. Booth considered Lincoln an "American Caesar." John Wilkes Booth is sometimes called the "American Brutus." There is a book out with that title, also one called The Myth of John Wilkes Booth.

He was a very handsome man and, even though he broke his leg in the leap to the stage (instead of running down the back stairs), he eluded capture with the help of a Dr. Mudd for twelve days. He was not given a chance to tell his side and the complex, misleading reasons he did what he did. That took fortitude! He did not act alone! That's a major issue. He was cornered in that barn like an animal and burned (at the stake) by the vigilante cowards. He was merely a misinformed player who ended up "on his own" after the dasdardly deed. He deserves better than to be called a devil. To some, he was an avenging angel. Terry Weber played the dual role in the Knoxville production of "Killing Lincoln," and had both Lincoln and Booth down pat. I have read many books about Abraham Lincoln and several about John Wilkes Booth which I have reviewed for Amazon.com