by This latest post by student assistant Claire Peterson will be the last issue of “Students in the Stacks” to feature a work from her list of top Civil War books in Special Collections (though we welcome you to visit us in Room 307 of Pius XII Memorial Library and to see more Civil War related materials any time!). From this fine month of May, 2016, Claire looks back 151 years to May 1865, when John Wilkes Booth was on trial for the murder of President Abraham Lincoln.
Claiming to contain “the whole of the Suppressed Evidence” of John Wilkes Booth’s guilt, The Trial of the Assassins and Conspirators at Washington City, D.C., May and June, 1865, for the Murder of President Abraham Lincoln falls into the genre of sensationalist literature spawned by the murder of President Abraham Lincoln.
The small, cramped print of the testimonies of witnesses at the 1865 trial displays the cheap, tabloid quality of the work. Among the book’s simple illustrations are depictions of John Wilkes Booth and his executioner and maps of “The Scene of the Great Tragedy” (the site of Lincoln’s assassination on April 15, 1865).
In contrast to the somber images of Lincoln’s coffin in the railroad car that carried his remains to Springfield and in “Old Independence Hall,” the book includes a mocking image titled “Portrait of ‘Jeff. Davis’ in his wife’s clothes.” The confederate president was rumored to have grabbed his wife’s coat in his haste to escape capture by Northern forces in Georgia on May 10, 1865.
Seemingly out of place in a book about Lincoln’s assassins, the image of Jefferson Davis in his wife’s clothing was part of an 1865 media trend after his capture. Photographs that had been “photo-shopped” with petticoats and crinoline — the nineteenth-century equivalent of memes — were published. Although out of context, the inclusion of such an image in The Trial of the Assassins and Conspirators contributes to its appeal as a work of sensationalist journalism.
