Dr. Charles A. Leale’s Report on the Assassination of Abraham Lincoln
In May 2012, Helena Iles Papaioannou, a research assistant with the Papers of Abraham Lincoln, was systematically searching the Letters Received series of the Records of the Office of the Surgeon General at the National Archives in Washington, D.C. Proceeding through correspondence filed under the letter “L,†she located a twenty-two-page report by army surgeon Dr. Charles A. Leale about his role as the first physician to tend the wounded Lincoln after the president’s shooting at Ford’s Theatre on April 14, 1865. Papaioannou brought the document to the attention of the director of the Papers of Abraham Lincoln, Daniel W. Stowell. After consulting several scholars who specialize in the events surrounding the Lincoln assassination, Papaioannou and Stowell concluded that the 1865 report from Dr. Leale was generally unknown. Certainly no such report has been presented in its entirety or compared with Leale’s later account from 1867.[1]
This 1865 report is significant because it gives us a window into Leale’s experience that is immediate and untarnished by the passage of time. In a cover letter for his 1867 written account of Lincoln’s assassination to a congressional committee, Leale stated that he had “principally copied it from (a never-published) one written by me a few hours after leaving his death bed.†We believe this 1865 report to be a copy of the account Leale wrote immediately after leaving Abraham Lincoln’s bedside. Leale rarely spoke of his actions on the night of April 14, but in 1909, the centennial of Abraham Lincoln’s birth, the Military Order of the Loyal Legion of the United States prevailed upon him to give them his memories. By then, Leale’s account was rich in sentimentality, and he had an acute sense of his own importance in the Lincoln story. His 1865 report offers a first draft of history by a man who had little time to ponder the life-changing events he had just experienced.[2]
https://quod.lib.umich.edu/j/jala/2629860.0034.105/--dr-charles-a-leales-report-on-the-assassination-of-abraham?rgn=main;view=fulltext
