We Saw Lincoln Shot: One Hundred Eyewitness Accounts

By Timothy S. Good

Book Overview

On the evening of April 14, 1865, when President Abraham Lincoln was assassinated in Ford's Theatre, an entire audience was witness to the tragedy. From diaries, letters, depositions, affidavits, and periodicals, here is a collection of accounts from a variety of theatergoers--who by chance saw one of the truly pivotal events in U.S. history. Providing minute first-hand details recorded over a span of ninety years, We Saw Lincoln Shot explores an event that will forever be the subject of debate and controversy. ""I was present at the theater and saw it all,"" said Samuel Koontz. ""In fact, I was only about fifteen feet from the President when he was shot, although he was in a private box in the theater.""In a letter to his parent, Jason S. Knox wrote, ""Dear Father, it is with sad feeling that I take up my pen and address you. Last Friday night at ten o'clock, I witnessed the saddest tragedy ever enacted in this country. Notwithstanding my promise to you not to visit the theater, I could not resist the temptation to see General Grant and the President, and when the curtain at Ford's rose on the play of Our American Cousin, my roommate and I were seated on the second row of orchestra seats, just beneath the President's box.""Although there have been many studies of the Lincoln assassination, few have been devoted to the actual event. Overwhelmingly, historians have been attracted to the conspiracy that preceded Lincoln's death or to the aftermath. Too few have relied sufficiently upon eyewitness accounts, and some, without considering how the human mind fails to preserve minute details in long-term memory, have trusted recollections transcribed many years after Lincoln died. With a sharp focus upon the circumstances reported by one hundred actual witnesses, We Saw Lincoln Shot provides vivid documentation of a momentous evening and exposes errors that have been perpetuated as the assassination has been rendered into written histories.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 087805779X
• ISBN13: 9780878057795
• Release Date: February 1996
• Publisher: University Press of Mississippi
• Length: 256 Pages
• Weight: 0.79 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.6" x 6.0" x 9.1"

Customer Reviews

Fascinating read!

This is a neat book. What a great idea to compile eyewitness accounts of the murder of Lincoln. It's very interesting to see how the accounts are alike and how they differ. The book provides a brief explanation before each eyewitness account. You'll like this book!

Almost as though you were there...

This is an outstanding book for anyone who really wants to get a glimpse of the Lincoln assassination as though you were there, or at least hearing about it via contemporaneous accounts. It helps sort out what probably happened from a lot of the embellishments that came later, but now seem to be accepted as facts in many places. My biggest concern in buying this book was that so many accounts of essentially the same things would become repetitive. As it turns out, not the case at all--not only are the accounts about many different aspects of the assassination and many different perspectives among those, the editor/author adds enough commentary to place each in context. A must-read for anyone interested in the Lincoln assassination.

Great book

Very comprehensive book- the only one out there like it. It is interesting to read what the people in the theatre that terrible night actually saw and heard. I learned some things I didn't know by reading this book, and would definately reccommend it to anyone interested in the Lincoln Assasanation.

Very resourceful as well as interesting!

I had to read a book on American History for my college course. I am interested in President Lincoln's assassination and this book caught my eye! Very interesting and hard to put down! Highly reccommended to anyone, old or young.

FANTASTIC BOOK...EVERY LINCOLN BUFF SHOULD READ IT !

This is a wonderful, very informative book. It's the only written collection of eye witness accounts ever published on the Lincoln assasination. Every Lincoln buff needs to add this one to his or her library.