So Mad A Thought - Winfield Taylor - A Short Summary and Review
So Mad A Thought - Winfield Taylor - A Short Summary and Review
By: a.d. elliott | Take the Back Roads - Art and Other Odd Adventures
A Rite of Fancy Book Recommendation and Review
A Short Summary:
In So Mad a Thought by Winfield Taylor, the Civil War has effectively ended, and Washington is celebrating Lee's surrender at Appomattox. President Abraham Lincoln plans an evening at Ford's Theatre and invites Ulysses S. Grant and his wife Julia to join him. Unlike in history, the Grants accept. What should have been an evening of comedy becomes something far more dangerous when John Wilkes Booth and a larger group of conspirators descend on the theatre with plans that extend well beyond the assassination of a single president.
As Grant fights to protect Lincoln and their wives inside Ford's Theatre, other historical figures become entangled in the conspiracy spreading across Washington. James Longstreet arrives with information about the plot, while Union spy Abraham Galloway attempts to uncover what is happening before the conspirators can seize control of the capital. The result is a sprawling alternate-history adventure populated by familiar historical figures whose lives suddenly depart from the stories we already know.
At its heart, So Mad a Thought asks one enormous historical question: what if Grant had gone to Ford's Theatre that night? Instead of Lincoln's assassination becoming the defining event of April 14, 1865, the night becomes a battle for Lincoln, Grant, Washington, and potentially the future of the reunited country.
My Favorite Quote from the Book:
Questions to ponder while reading:
My Review:
So Mad a Thought is a fun alternate-history adventure built around one of those irresistible historical "what ifs": What would have happened if Ulysses S. Grant had gone to Ford's Theatre with Abraham Lincoln on April 14, 1865? From there, Winfield Taylor takes familiar people, places, and events and lets history tumble in an entirely different direction.
What I especially enjoyed was seeing historical figures become characters without losing the people we recognize. Grant remains quiet, practical, and decidedly more comfortable solving a military problem than attending a Washington social event. Lincoln retains his melancholy humor. James Longstreet, John Wilkes Booth, Mary Lincoln, Julia Grant, Abraham Galloway, and others become part of an increasingly wild adventure involving assassination plots, espionage, gunfire, political maneuvering, and more than a little theatrical chaos.
One of the things I especially appreciated about So Mad a Thought is that Taylor remembers something often lost in the simplified version of Lincoln's assassination: Booth was not acting as part of an isolated plan to kill Lincoln alone. Historically, the assassination was part of a broader conspiracy that also targeted Vice President Andrew Johnson and Secretary of State William H. Seward in an effort to throw the federal government into chaos. Taylor takes that very real conspiracy and expands it into a much larger alternate-history plot unfolding across Washington. Booth’s attack at Ford’s Theatre becomes only one piece of the action, while characters such as Abraham Galloway and Charles Douglass work to uncover what is happening before the conspiracy succeeds.
That historical foundation makes Taylor's changes especially interesting. In real life, Seward survived a brutal attack, and the attempt on Johnson never happened. In Taylor's version, the conspiracy unfolds differently, including the death of Johnson. That single change has enormous consequences: Lincoln not only survives, but the vice president who historically succeeded him, and whose presidency became central to the battles over Reconstruction, is removed from the story altogether. The alternate-history question therefore becomes much larger than whether Lincoln lived. It becomes a question of who would have shaped Reconstruction, and what that might have meant for the millions of newly freed Black Americans whose citizenship and political future were still unsettled.
There is plenty of action, but the idea that stayed with me was much larger than the adventure itself. Lincoln's assassination did not merely remove one president; it changed who controlled the presidency at precisely the moment the country had to decide what reunion, emancipation, citizenship, and freedom would actually mean. So Mad a Thought gives us permission to wonder how much one altered evening could change, not simply whether Lincoln lived or died, but who held power afterward and what kind of country might have emerged from the Civil War.
That is ultimately what makes alternate history so entertaining. We already know what happened. So Mad a Thought asks us to consider what might have happened instead, and whether one changed decision, one altered evening, or one additional person in a theatre box could have changed the direction of an entire country.
If you liked So Mad A Thought, you may also like:
And There Was Light - Jon Meacham
She shares her journeys at Take the Back Roads, explores new reads at Rite of Fancy, and highlights U.S. military biographies at Everyday Patriot.
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