News, Information, and Misinformation Theme Analysis

Lincoln’s assassination occurred at a time of flux and uncertainty. The Civil War was a close one, and by early April 1865, it seemed possible either that Union victory was at hand or that the Confederacy was secretly planning a march on Washington. Everyone had a deep desire for the latest news, but accepted interpretations of how events might develop were few and far between. There was a sense that anything could happen. With the assassination on April 14th, this uncertainty intensified.

To make things more complex, the Civil War took place in the early years of a communication revolution. Up until the mid-19th century, the fastest way to send a message a long distance was to send a messenger galloping on horseback. By the mid-1860s, though, new technologies like the telegram were making it possible to send information much more quickly. Still, these technologies were so new that people were not used to them and sometimes relied on older ways of communicating. Important news was often still communicated by word of mouth, with neighbors knocking on one another’s doors to let them know the latest news, or by reading newspapers which took hours to be printed.

At first, misinformation and lack of information reigned after Booth shot Lincoln, and Booth was able to literally outrun the news that the president had been shot on his galloping horse. The lack of authoritative sources led to deep confusion the night Lincoln was killed, as two groups of people, one coming from Seward’s house and the other spreading outwards from Ford Theater, argued about the target of the attack, not realizing that both Seward and Lincoln had nearly simultaneously been attacked. They also mistakenly said that Seward was dead. It took several days for the general public to come to understand what had actually transpired. The prevalence of misinformation early on had an impact on how quickly the manhunters were able to home in on their targets.

Eventually, however, the situation began to clarify. The first step was for Secretary of War Edwin Stanton to begin to use the technology of the telegram to clarify the situation and communicate with manhunters in far-flung states. Then, once the newspapers had printed their accounts of the killing and word of mouth had been circulating for several days, the picture became clearer. By the end of the manhunt, the authorities marshalled the evidence they had collected to home in on the killers by spreading good, correct information to the public and the many well-informed manhunters spreading out across the country.

Indeed, something much more important became clear during the manhunt than just the location and identities of the assassin and his co-conspirators. The news of Lincoln’s death and the coverage of him as a martyr for the cause of national unity had the effect of making the final conclusion of the four-year war seem more apparent. The North became determined to finish the job that Lincoln had started, while the disturbing accounts of the assassin’s action in the newspapers more fully demoralized Confederate sympathizers. Although the final battles of the war would take another six months to wrap up, the understanding that Lincoln’s death meant something had a unifying effect on many in the country.