Posts Tagged ‘Abraham Lincoln’

Prisoner of Shark Island and Ninja Vengeance

Thursday, August 7th, 2008

Racially questionable double feature:
John Ford’s PRISONER OF SHARK ISLAND

and

Karl Armstrong’s NINJA VENGEANCE
(bear with me here)

After my recent Lincoln assassination phase (which mostly just consisted of reading Manhunt by James L. Swanson) I found out about this PRISONER OF SHARK ISLAND movie. It’s about Samuel Mudd, the doctor who treated the leg John Wilkes Booth broke by jumping out of the balcony after shooting Lincoln (fuckin ham). Mudd was convicted as part of the conspiracy but instead of being hung he was sent to Fort Jefferson in the Dry Tortugas. He tried to escape once, but failed, and had to stay in a dungeon for a while. But when a brutal yellow fever outbreak killed the prison doctor, Mudd agreed to take over and won the approval of 300 soldiers in the fort, who signed a petition for him to be pardoned. Sure enough he was later pardoned by Andrew Johnson. (more…)

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The Day Lincoln Was Shot

Wednesday, July 23rd, 2008

I am not a history buff. I am not highly educated. I don’t necessarily have what you would call “a curious mind” when it comes to history. And I don’t really dig on civil war movies. It all just seems like a bunch of dudes running around in muddy fields yelling and stabbing. But for some reason lately I caught a weird case of interest in that era. I don’t know man, I understand that slavery was a way of life for those people and they were raised to be racist, but I have a hard time wrapping my head around that whole concept. How can somebody be willing to die to take away somebody’s freedom? How can that be the thing you really believe in?

I just don’t get it. But so much of that conflict still echoes in our lives today: in race relations, class relations, politics, institutionalized racism, relations between different regions of the country. So it’s important shit.

My interest started with John Brown. He was a white dude but he was an abolitionist, and you could say a terrorist. He was real religious and at a certain point in his life he decided that if he really believed in God he couldn’t stand for slavery and would dedicate his life to ending it. He led an attack on an armory, hoping to spark a slave uprising. He probaly could’ve gotten away but he let himself be arrested because he thought going on trial and being executed would do more for the cause. And he was right: many (including Frederick Douglass) credit his raid as the incident that led to the Civil War. So his sacrifice led to the end of slavery. (more…)

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