PAUL SEVERANCE
presents
"Trail of the Lincoln Assassination Conspirators"
About the Topic:
The extensive and complex (and frequently misunderstood) narrative surrounding the military tribunal assembled to try the eight primary conspirators associated with the assassination of President Abraham Lincoln in April 1865 largely occupies a veritable “dead space” between studies of the American Civil War, post Civil War Reconstruction, and the much broader fabric of American political history post-Civil War. For whatever reasons, the trial, the verdicts, and the sentences just don’t seem to fit comfortably into long-established categories of American historical studies. As a consequence, many of the many fascinating facets of the Lincoln assassination conspirator’s trial -- both legal and human interest -- remain shrouded in the mists of historical inquiry and beyond the capacity of serious students of history to inquire into the specifics. In other words, the Lincoln assassination conspirators trial remains largely unexplored territory for many historians of the Civil War/Post Civil War period.
Paul Severance’s presentation will seek to shed some light into many of the legal, military, political and social dimensions of the trial and its outcomes. Paul -- in the finest traditions of John Batchelder serving as a volunteer historian at Gettysburg -- took it upon himself to serve as a volunteer docent, and later historian, for the Lincoln Assassination Conspirators Trial courtroom in Grant Hall, Building 20, at Fort Lesley J. McNair in Washington DC.
Since February 2013, Dr. Severance has conducted more than 500 tours, seminars, and lectures focusing on the Lincoln Assassination, the manhunt for the assassins, their apprehension and incarceration, their trial and verdicts, and their interments.
About the Speaker:
Paul Severance is a 30-year veteran of service in the US Army as an infantry officer and Army aviator. He recently retired from the National Defense University in Washington, D.C., where he served 25 years as a Professor of Military Strategy and, subsequently, as a Professor of Military Science, educating senior military, civilian, and international students in the areas of national, military, and homeland strategy, defense, military and joint warfare, political and military geography, and maritime security strategy. He is currently a visiting professor of military history at the National War College in Washington, DC.
Dr. Severance holds a B.S.in Social Studies from Northeastern University in Boston, a Masters degree in Systems Management from the Florida Institute of Technology, and a Ph.D. in Adult Learning from Virginia Tech. He is also a faculty member of the Blue-Gray Education Society where he conducts multi-day, "deep-dive” field studies of Civil War battlefields, to include Gettysburg, Antietam, First Manassas, the Peninsula Campaign, and the Seven Days Battle.
Dr. Severance is also an adjunct instructor at the Osher Institute at the College of William and Mary in Williamsburg, as well as a visiting lecturer at Christopher Newport University in Newport News, Virginia. He has previously presented at our Round Table as well as the Williamsburg Civli War Round Table where he presented on the Lincoln Assassination Conspiracies.
