The Assassination of Lincoln

Surely the assassination of President Abraham Lincoln ranks near the top of any list of traumatic events in American history, yet most Americans today know little about it. There is some indication that it was part of a conspiracy to throw the North into confusion by eliminating the entire line of succession to the Presidency with one swift blow by simultaneously assassinating President Abraham Lincoln, Vice President Andrew Johnson, Secretary of State William H. Seward, Secretary of War Edwin M. Stanton, Chief Justice Salmon P. Chase, and General Ulysses S. Grant. Lewis Payne did in fact attack and severely wound Secretary Seward at his home in Washington just as John Wilkes Booth was killing Lincoln at Ford's Theatre; the man assigned to kill Johnson lost his nerve at the last minute, and Grant (who was to have attended the theater with Lincoln that evening) was miraculously spared by being suddenly called away to Baltimore on business on the afternoon of that fateful April 14th. The author of this volume was a member of the military commission which conducted the trial of the conspirators (except for John H. Surrat who was later tried in a civil court). Thus he heard the evidence first hand in addition to having ready access to the printed report of the proceedings. This work also includes an account of the trial of John H. Surratt, and several appendices with supplemental materials.

The Civil War officially ended at Appomattox soon after President Lincoln's second inauguration. During his first term he had been widely viewed by special-interest groups as a good-natured, indecisive bungler, and worse. In the South he was still despised, and many in the North, especially the radicals in the Republican party, distrusted and derided his leniency toward the vanquished. On the evening of April 14, 1865, an assassin's bullet irrevocably altered the way Abraham Lincoln would be viewed by Americans. In life a cunning politician, Lincoln became in death a selfless martyr. Lloyd Lewis explicates the mythology that evolved out of Lincoln's death, the outpouring of national grief, the pursuit of John Wilkes booth and the conspirators, booth's fate, and the frequent moving and reburial of Lincoln's coffin.