Speculation, Innuendo and Fanciful Manipulation of Facts

I got this book back in '95 and just pulled it from my shelf to read it again. Nearly 22 years hasn't changed my assessment.
A quick read but completely fanciful!

Tidwell gives a gallant try at linking the Confederate government, and Jefferson Davis, with the assassination of Abraham Lincoln. But much like the prosecutors of the Booth conspirators in 1865, Tidwell was completely unable to do so. April '65 is full of maybe's and perhaps' and if's and so much speculation and innuendo that it really amounts to nothing more than presumptive historical pseudo-fiction.

For 150 years this myth has been propagated with no proof and confidently asserted as truth in other works (ex; Killing, Lincoln by O'Reilly). Actual evidence confirms just the opposite or at the very least cannot substantiate any of the allegations. This book, with all of its assumptions and stretching's to place people and events such that it points to full fledged government conspiracy among the top tiers of the Confederacy, ends up doing just the opposite. Unacknowledged by the book, there is simply no evidence that points to Davis or any other Confederate official or soldier in the assassination of Lincoln. An honest reading of this books purported "evidence" goes far in proving there is none.

Tidwell goes to great lengths, examining the allocation of Confederate money and resources to "prove" the government's collusion with Booth. Supposing that because Davis signed a release warrant for $X in March of '65, that it MUST have gone to finance the assassination, or that because John Mosby was slow to surrender and still in Northern Virginia in April of '65, he MUST have been part of a plan to help Booth escape is ludicrous in the extreme and worthy of tabloid news rather than historical presentation. Absurd.

It's a case of turning the tables. In the wake of the Dahlgren mission - an official union army order to assassinate Jefferson Davis and his cabinet - suddenly it's Davis and the Confederacy who are the authors of a state assassination? The Dahlgren incident, where there is actual evidence of official union complicity; photographs, lithography, surviving testimony, was an actual event and an actual order. The Confederacy's supposed connection to Lincoln's assassination is supported by no evidence whatsoever.

While there appears to be ample evidence to support that Booth, a Marylander, was sympathetic to the southern cause, he was never a soldier, never served the Confederacy in any capacity, and had only speculative contact with any Confederate official; military or government. ( )

In the late 1980s, three authors, two historians and a longtime American intelligence officer, offered a compelling new theory to the assassination of Abraham Lincoln. Published in 1988, “Come Retribution” used lots of circumstantial evidence to show Confederate government involvement in the planning of the ultimately fatal attack against Lincoln, first conceived as a kidnapping, by the Confederate Secret Service.

William Tidwell, the intelligence officer among the group, follows up that substantial work with more evidence in “April ’65: Confederate Covert Action and the American Civil War.” In this case, he has dramatic evidence that suggests Confederate President Jefferson Davis was aware of the kidnapping plot and approved it.

Here, the case is again circumstantial. There are few new bits of evidence about the Lincoln kidnapping/assassination plot itself, but there is new evidence regarding other covert operations which tantalizingly suggest parallels to the Lincoln plot. Tidwell gives an overall mapping of covert operations in the Confederacy, considering how they were funded and how they were supervised and assessed. The evidence suggests that there were no “lone wolves” among the Confederate operatives, implicitly and preemptively rejecting an argument that although Booth might have been an operative, in the case of the Lincoln plot he was acting of his own volition.

Much evidence points to the use of Confederate gold funding some of the kidnapping plot, including the possible payment of gold to John Wilkes Booth. In this book, Tidwell documents the use of gold to fund all sorts of covert operations, and offers evidence that all such uses of Confederate gold required Davis’ signature. This implies that Davis knew of, and approved of, some version of a plot against Lincoln in order to have issued a directive to the treasury to release some gold to involved operatives in Canada. (This inference is not ironclad, however, given that the funding for the Secret Service in Canada was made in large payments designed to cover multiple operations.)

Tidwell is always careful to never overstate his conclusions, leaving them implied most often. This is most obvious in the final chapter in which he details circumstantial evidence of the involvement of Mosby’s raiders in the kidnapping plot. Using parole information of certain of Mosby’s companies, he discovers that several of them surrendered after others along a line related to Booth’s escape route, shortly after Booth’s death at the hands of pursuing US troops. Alongside a few other extant orders, he traces the movements of many of Mosby’s troops around Washington DC during the period of Lee’s daring escape toward, and ultimate surrender at, Appomattox Court House. Tidwell posits that these soldiers were detached to facilitate Booth’s escape after either kidnapping or killing Lincoln.

Although not as shocking as “Come Retribution,” this book furthers and supports the central thesis of that book that there was a larger Confederate operation behind the assassination of Abraham Lincoln by John Wilkes Booth. As with any circumstantial argument, the theory cannot be proven beyond doubt, but the weight of the evidence makes the theory highly credible. If I doubt a few of Tidwell’s conclusions, I find his overall assessment compelling, particularly in light of the known details of Booth’s escape from Washington using a network of Confederate agents. Edward Steers, whose “Blood on the Moon” remains the best single volume on the assassination, also finds value in this research, incorporating some of it into his narrative.

In short, this book is a worthwhile addition to the large number of books on the Lincoln assassination. Unlike other books that posit wild conspiracy theories, this one rarely argues beyond the evidence or stretches the evidence – and credulity – to make its claims. At times a little dry (though less so than “Come Retribution”), it is always reasonable and coherent. For the student of Lincoln’s assassination, it is an important new argument.

This review is also published at http://lincolniana.blogspot.com/2012/02/book-review-april-65.html ( )