Risen from Ruins: The United States at the End of the Civil War
Photo: Apple TV+
If we don’t draw a line against the president’s murderers, then… Or should we admit that there’s no line being drawn at all?” With this sentence, Defense Minister Edwin Stanton (Tobias Menzies) makes a violent affront to his President Andrew Johnson (Glenn Morshower) at an evening party in the Apple TV+ series “After the Assassination”. Because he assumes that Abraham Lincoln’s successor did not want to arrest his predecessor’s murderers.
President Johnson is duped, but hardly shows it and fires Stanton a few months later, which leads to a dispute with Congress and the first impeachment trial against a president in the USA. “After the Assassination” offers a lot of exciting tutoring on US history just in time for the presidential election campaign in the USA. The confrontation quoted at the beginning runs like a red thread through this series and turns the search and hunt for Lincoln’s murderer into a very fundamental debate about the question of how democratic America deals with racist perpetrators – a topic that is still relevant today in times of… Black Lives Matter is highly topical.
In this respect, the historical true crime thriller series “After the Assassination” is very political because, in addition to the murder of Lincoln and the search for his murderer, it also tells of the time of “Reconstruction,” when enslaved people were freed after the Civil War and in some cases parcels of land were distributed to them. President Andrew Johnson soon put a stop to this, and people who had lived in slavery and had just established themselves as independent farmers were dispossessed again. The series tells about this, as well as about the daily and violent racism against black people in the USA, not only in the southern states, but also in Washington.
At the center of the story is the search for the actor John Wilkes Booth (Anthony Boyle), who shot Abraham Lincoln in the back of the head during a performance in a Washington theater on April 14, 1865, then jumped onto the stage, injuring his leg broke and shouted “Sic semper tyrannis!” (This is how it should be for all tyrants!), which is what Brutus is said to have said to Caesar when he murdered him. Was Booth, the offspring of a well-known acting family who was often hailed in magazines as the “most handsome man in America,” acting alone? Or was he part of a conspiracy that was perhaps even carried out on the orders of Southern President Jefferson Davis, who was on the run at the time?
It is not really clear whether Booth was a crazy lone perpetrator who styled himself as a freedom-loving tyrant murderer and had no political support whatsoever, or whether he was the executive organ of a final military-intelligence rebellion by the already defeated South. It is clear that he relied on secret service structures in the southern states. But the series also addresses the question of how much Lincoln’s political legacy of freeing enslaved people was buried by his successor Andrew Johnson.
Johnson explains very clearly in the series that economic prosperity, including that of entrepreneurs in the South, meaning plantation owners, is more important to him than civil rights. In the series, Edwin Stanton becomes the keeper of Lincoln’s legacy and relentlessly hunts down the racist murderer, who was on the run for twelve days and then shot dead upon capture. The series, which was originally based on the non-fiction book “Manhunt” by historian James L. Swanson, also deals with legal proceedings before a military tribunal. In addition to the hunt for the murderer, Monica Beletsky, the creator and scriptwriter of “After the Assassination,” also opens up a whole panorama of the USA after the Civil War and tells a lot about the legal uncertainty for people who were still enslaved. For her, this is also a personal issue, as she explained to Vanity Fair magazine. Her great-great-grandmother was also freed from slavery in Georgia, where the series was filmed.
Available on Apple TV+
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