Author: John Chandler Griffin

ISBN (from Pelican promotion): 1589803957

ISBN (from the book): ISBN-13: 978-1-58980-395-4

  Unless historians or other scholars can refute what Professor John Chandler Griffin has revealed in Abraham Lincoln’s Execution, the history not only of the administration of the 16^th President of the U.S. and his death at the hands of John Wilkes Booth will have to be rewritten, but also that of the American Civil War.

            Griffin, professor emeritus at the University of South Carolina, has revisited what happened in the 1860’s for two basic purposes: first, to demonstrate that members of Lincoln’s cabinet were implicated with the Confederate Secret Service in the murder of Lincoln (which is why Griffin calls it an execution in lieu of an assassination); and, second, to demolish the standard mythology re the character of Lincoln and his motives in instigating the military action that metastasized into all-out civil war.

            Rather than “The Great Emancipator,” Lincoln appears in Griffin’s book as “The Great Dictator.”  Blocking the South’s secession in order to establish and maintain a centralized government, Griffin writes, was the true motive behind Lincoln’s instigation of civil war, and not the elimination of slavery.  In fact, Griffin documents, Lincoln repeatedly expressed his view of whites as superior to blacks, opposed equal rights for them, wrote to Illinois legislators that “eliminating every black person from American soil would be a glorious consummation,” appropriated taxpayer money to fund his plan to export freed slaves to a variety of countries; and, despite his famous Emancipation Proclamation, engaged in manipulations so that only slaves in the south would be freed and not those in the north.   Lincoln’s prejudices also showed up, Griffin points out, in Lincoln’s support of the war on American Indians unwilling to move to reservations, resulting in their systematic extermination.

            At the root of the South’s rebellion was the North’s bleeding the southern economy through exorbitant tariffs on goods that had to be purchased from northern industries.  Because many influential northerners were adamantly opposed to military action to stop the rebellion, Lincoln waited until Congress was not in session to use the outbreak of hostilities at Fort Sumter to initiate an all-out war, according to Griffin.  Lincoln then proceeded to declare martial law, suspended the writ of habeas corpus, ordered the imprisonment without trial of thousands of northern citizens opposed to war, ordered the jailing of newspaper editors and publishers opposing his actions and then had their operations shut down and their buildings burned, and initiated a host of other illegal and unconstitutional acts.

            Once war was in full swing, Lincoln enabled well-to-do families to keep their sons out of the conflict by paying $300 per youngster to the government in return for exemption from service.  So it was that the Union army’s enlisted ranks consisted mostly of poor whites and blacks willing to fight.

             Support for Lincoln from hardline Republicans collapsed, Griffin explains, when it became clear that Lincoln opposed their vision of Union military victory resulting in a centralized government’s using its power to confiscate southerners’ property and enrich northern mercantilists by reducing southerners to vassals of their conquerors.  Instead, looking toward a future election with southern as well as northern support, Lincoln laid out a plan for reconstruction of the South with fully restored voting rights.  At that point, in the scenario Griffin presents, plans were formulated – especially by Secretary of War Edwin Stanton and Vice President Andrew Johnson – to get rid of Lincoln.

            The original plan of Confederate Secret Service member Booth and his co-conspirators was not to kill Lincoln, but rather to abduct him, transport him to Confederate headquarters in Richmond, Virginia, and arrange a swap: his return in exchange for the release of southerners held prisoners in atrocious conditions.  Griffin reveals how fate interceded.  Twice Lincoln did not appear at the place where he was supposed to be, and before a third abduction plan could be implemented the Confederate army collapsed and Jefferson Davis and his followers had to evacuate their Richmond headquarters.

            It has been the standard line taken by most writers that the decision to kill Lincoln was Booth’s and that he acted on his own.  There have been writers, of course, who have insisted that there was a conspiracy; but their work has not been well received.  Because the abduction plan Griffin describes had to be abandoned at the last hour, and because Griffin himself writes that Booth did not intend to kill Lincoln at the Ford Theatre on the evening of April 14, 1865, until late in the afternoon on that date, critics of Griffin’s book will argue that the murder must be viewed as a solitary act.  But Griffin lays out in great detail a series of connections, even at the last hour, between Stanton and Johnson and Booth.  In support Griffin presents what amounts to a confession in papers written by the chief of detectives under Stanton’s control, Lafayette Baker, that Stanton and Johnson incited Booth to carry out the shooting of Lincoln.

            Finally, Griffin presents evidence of collaboration in Booth’s escape from the Ford Theatre after he shot Lincoln in front of a full house.  Then comes the stunning finale: an examination of the story that the man who was shot and died in a burning barn two weeks after the murder of Lincoln, the man thought to have been Booth, in fact was not Booth, who lived on and died many years later.  I will not tell you what emerges from that examination of the facts, because my purpose in writing this review has been to induce as many readers as possible to acquire Griffin’s masterpiece so that they can see history revised, and so that at long last we all know the truth in contrast to what we have been conditioned by Lincoln idolaters to believe.

The above review was contributed by: Burton H. Wolfe: Burton is an award winning journalist and the author of hundreds of published articles and of books such The Hippies (New American Library), Hitler and the Nazis (Putnam), and Pileup on Death Row (Doubleday).  Wolfe publishes an occasional newsletter called "Burton Wolfe's Internet Rag" and maintains a web site.

To read Burton's Interview with John Chandler Griffin CLICK HERE