Confederate Complicity in the Assassination of Abraham Lincoln – Part 1

By John C. Fazio
The Cleveland Civil War Roundtable
Copyright © 2008, All Rights Reserved

In this four-part series, past Roundtable President John Fazio reviews the current scholarship on the question of whether John Wilkes Booth and his band of conspirators, in their attempt to behead the Union government, acted independently or under the direction of the Confederate Secret Service and the top levels of the Confederate government, up to and including Jefferson Davis.

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On Trees and Forests: Correcting History’s View of J. Wilkes Booth

By John C. Fazio
The Cleveland Civil War Roundtable
Copyright © 2015, All Rights Reserved

Editor’s note: John C. Fazio is a past president of the Cleveland Civil War Roundtable and the author of numerous articles on the Lincoln assassination as well as the book, Decapitating the Union: Jefferson Davis, Judah Benjamin and the Plot to Assassinate Lincoln, published in 2015 by McFarland.


Even the masters go astray occasionally. Edison thought direct current was the wave of the future. Ezra Pound thought Mussolini and Hitler were statesmen instead of the buffoons and bloody tyrants they were. Einstein thought nuclear energy would never be obtainable. So it is, too, sometimes, with historians. Otherwise brilliant and conscientious men and women spend so much time studying trees that they lose sight of the forests.

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Some Thoughts on the Removal of Southern Civil War-Related Symbols

By John C. Fazio
The Cleveland Civil War Roundtable
Copyright © 2017, All Rights Reserved


The recent dismantling and removal of Southern statuary, monuments and other symbols relating to the Civil War and its aftermath has, not surprisingly, generated a lot of heat between those favoring the same and those opposed. It is also unsurprising that proponents and opponents are often identified by race, so that a political and regional conflict morphs into a racial one. For this and other reasons, we need to ask ourselves if what appears to be such a good idea, and one whose time has come, is really that, or if our country and its citizenry would be better served by a different approach, one more in keeping with “the better angels of our nature,” to use Lincoln’s immortal phrase from his First Inaugural Address.

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