Chasing Lincoln's Killer Imagery

“Darkness cannot drive out darkness; only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate; only love can do that,” Martin Luther Kink Jr. once said. This applies to the Civil War especially. The three works, Chasing Lincoln’s Killer by James L. Swanson, Killing Lincoln produced by National Geographic, and the excerpt from The Plot to Kill Lincoln by Karen Zeinhert all use the imagery of light and darkness when talking about Abraham Lincoln, John Wilkes Booth, and the Civil War in general, though they do not all elaborate on all of the conspirators involved. The three texts all use the imagery of light to display the good side and the bad side of people. In Chasing Lincoln’s Killer, on Lincoln’s second inauguration day, Swanson uses imagery of light, saying “Abraham Lincoln

Though the novel Chasing Lincoln’s Killer includes lots of information about the entire conspiracy, including many pictures of the suspects involved, the other two works do not. In the excerpt from The Plot to Kill Lincoln, the author chooses to talk mainly about Booth and Lincoln. She includes very little about Lewis Powell and nothing at all about either David Harold, Mary Surratt, nor George Atzerodt. The producers of Killing Lincoln also mainly revolved the movie around Booth. However, they also included lots of staging where David Herold was with Booth and give plenty of information about Herold, too. They give very little facts about Adzerodt and the plot to kill vice president Andrew Johnson, and they do not give very much knowledge on Mary Surratt, either. The only time they have Lewis Powell being filmed is when he is trying to assassinate Lincoln. They rarely, if at all, film the faces of the conspirators. The exception, of course, is Booth. They do this because most people only want to hear about when Booth killed Lincoln and when he was running