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Garfield's Copy of First Edition of "Madame Surratt", a Drama about the Suffering of the Nation after Lincoln's Assassination, Rare!
Garfield's Copy of First Edition of "Madame Surratt", a Drama about the Suffering of the Nation after Lincoln's Assassination, Rare!
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Garfield James



Garfield’s Copy of First Edition of “Madame Surratt,” a Drama about the Suffering of the Nation after Lincoln’s Assassination, Rare!


“Madame Surratt; A Drama in Five Acts” by J.W. Rogers, soft cover, 148 pages, 4.5” x 7”. Washington, D.C.: Thomas J. Brashears, 1879. From President Garfield’s Library, inscribed by the author on the cover, “Compliments of the Author / Hon James A Garfield.” First eight leaves dog-eared at the lower right. Minor cover creases.


The first Presidential memorial library, completed at the Lawnfield estate in Ohio by the widow of James Garfield four years after his assassination, houses almost 3,000 books that were used and treasured by the 20th president. Books were a scarce commodity to young James, who lost his father before the age of two, and was raised by his mother who struggled to maintain a humble existence. Both James Garfield and his wife Lucretia were voracious readers and amassed a large collection of books. Some twenty years ago, several dozen of his books were de-accessioned, and one of these books is described below:



From Blair Whitney’s “Lincoln’s Life as Dramatic Art,” in the “Journal of the Illinois State Historical Society,” Vol. 61 No. 3, Autumn 1968: “The first Lincoln play to be more than a propaganda piece was written by a southerner, James Webb Rogers, a lawyer and poet who was born in North Carolina in 1822 and served in the Confederate army. His play ‘Madame Surratt,’ published in 1879, but never performed, bore this message on the title page: ‘If my work should live, it will stand as a beacon, over a bloody sea, top warn our children, when we, who fought upon it, shall have passed away.’ Rogers’s aim – to write a play which would help to end the bitterness of division – was a worthy one, but his dramatic ability was not equal to the job. His play is constructed like an Elizabethan tragedy, with John Wilkes Booth as a combination Hamlet-Iago who skulks through the play declaiming soliloquies about the moral justice of the assassination while Lincoln sits in the White House telling frontier stories. In an attempt to give his play historical relevance, Rogers has a series of ghosts troop across the stage to comment on the tragic events. The ghosts of Powhatan, Washington, John Brown, and Francis Scott Key all speak pages of wooden blank verse in an attempt to elevate a sordid plot to the level of great tragedy. To Rogers’s credit, however, the play does give some sense of the terrible suffering of a nation divided against itself.”



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