I have some questions about the alternate history that the author is posing.
1) In actual fact, Booth and his accomplices were planning to kill 1) The President, 2) The Vice-President, 3) the Secretary of State. I've never heard of any historical evidence that there was a larger conspiracy than that. I take it that Major is postulating such a larger conspiracy?
2) Also in actual fact, the line of presidential succession at the time of Lincoln's assassination consisted of 1) The Vice-President, 2) the President Pro Tempore of the Senate (then Lafayette S. Foster), 3) the Speaker of the House of Representatives (then vacant), in that order. The Cabinet wasn't in it, and wasn't put in until 1885-6, when all three posts in the previous line of succession were vacant at once.
The idea seems to be that there was a much larger conspiracy aimed at achieving a complete decapitation strike. However, the novel begins some years afterward, when the rot had already begun to set in and the idolization of the martyred Father Abraham had begun to obscure and distort history. And our protagonist was learning it mostly from textbooks, which already tend to have quite a bit of emory and holystone applied to history's heroes, and some of the more awkward and upsetting parts of history soft-pedaled. So there's a certain amount of unreliable-narrator effect leaving us the readers trying to piece together what actually happened on that dark day, and how much has been the distortions of subsequent hagiography.
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1) In actual fact, Booth and his accomplices were planning to kill 1) The President, 2) The Vice-President, 3) the Secretary of State. I've never heard of any historical evidence that there was a larger conspiracy than that. I take it that Major is postulating such a larger conspiracy?
2) Also in actual fact, the line of presidential succession at the time of Lincoln's assassination consisted of 1) The Vice-President, 2) the President Pro Tempore of the Senate (then Lafayette S. Foster), 3) the Speaker of the House of Representatives (then vacant), in that order. The Cabinet wasn't in it, and wasn't put in until 1885-6, when all three posts in the previous line of succession were vacant at once.
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