The Assassination Of Abraham Lincoln

Blood on the Moon examines the evidence, myths, and lies surrounding the political assassination that dramatically altered the course of American history. Was John Wilkes Booth a crazed loner acting out of revenge, or was he the key player in a wide conspiracy aimed at removing the one man who had crushed the Confederacy's dream of independence? Edward Steers Jr. crafts an intimate, engaging narrative of the events leading to Lincoln's death and the political, judicial, and cultural aftermaths of his assassination.

Louis J. Weichmann, one of the principal witnesses at the trial of the conspirators in the assassination of President Lincoln, tells the story of the plotting that took place in the boarding house where Weichmann lived.

For the 150th anniversary, Harold Holzer (The Civil War in 150 Objects) presents an unprecedented firsthand chronicle of one of the most pivotal moments in American history. On April 14, 1865, Good Friday, the Civil War claimed its ultimate sacrifice. President Lincoln Assassinated!! recaptures the dramatic immediacy of Lincoln’s assassination, the hunt for the conspirators and their military trial, and the nation’s mourning for the martyred president. The fateful story is told in more than eighty original documents—eyewitness reports, medical records, trial transcripts, newspaper articles, speeches, letters, diary entries, and poems—by more than seventy-five participants and observers, including the assassin John Wilkes Booth and Boston Corbett, the soldier who shot him. Courtroom testimony exposes the intricacies of the plot to kill the president; eulogies by Ralph Waldo Emerson, Wendell Phillips, and Benjamin Disraeli and poetry by Walt Whitman, Herman Melville and Julia Ward Howe give eloquent voice to grief; two emotional speeches by Frederick Douglass—one of them never before published—reveal his evolving perspective on Lincoln’s legacy. Together these voices combine to reveal the full panorama of one the most shocking and tragic events in our history.

Explores why Booth killed Lincoln and how the assassination transformed Lincoln from man to myth.

Our American Cousin is a three-act play written by English playwright Tom Taylor. The play opened in London in 1858 but quickly made its way to the U.S. and premiered at Laura Keene’s Theatre in New York City later that year. It remained popular in the U.S. and England for the next several decades. Its most notable claim to fame, however, is that it was the play U.S. President Abraham Lincoln was watching on April 14, 1865 when he was assassinated by John Wilkes Booth, who used his knowledge of the script to shoot Lincoln during a more raucous scene. The play is a classic Victorian farce with a whole range of stereotyped characters, business, and many entrances and exits. The plot features a boorish but honest American cousin who travels to the aristocratic English countryside to claim his inheritance, and then quickly becomes swept up in the family’s affairs. An inevitable rescue of the family’s fortunes and of the various damsels in distress ensues. Our American Cousin was originally written as a farce for an English audience, with the laughs coming mostly at the expense of the naive American character. But after it moved to the U.S. it was eventually recast as a comedy where English caricatures like the pompous Lord Dundreary soon became the primary source of hilarity. This early version, published in 1869, contains fewer of that character’s nonsensical adages, which soon came to be known as “Dundrearyisms,” and for which the play eventually gained much of its popular appeal.

The first killing of a president in American history, the assassination of Abraham Lincoln shook the nation to its foundations with grief and rage. With one bullet the brief period of good feeling at the end of the Civil War was over. By 1867 the initial belief that the Confederate leadership had engineered the assassination had given way to speculation that Andrew Johnson had been behind the conspiracy. This was followed by bitter attacks on the military trial and on the defense of its two most prominent “victims,” Mrs. Surratt and Dr. Mudd. Most recently, there have been attempts to show that it was the radical faction of Lincoln’s own party that arranged his death. In Beware the People Weeping, Thomas Reed Turner pushes away the elaborate conspiracy theories that have always surrounded Lincoln’s death and uncovers exactly what can be known about the murder and its aftermath. Finding that many historians have worked in ignorance of the context of the events, or distorted the evidence to suit their own ideas about political assassination, Turner looks instead to public opinion of the time—as reflected in newspapers, diaries, letters, sermons, and transcripts of the pretrial investigation and the trial itself—to understand how and why the public and the military reacted as they did. Probing the aftermath of the assassination, Turner tells of the spontaneous outpouring of rage and despair, the reaction in the defeated South, the almost universal conviction that the South was behind the plot, the actions of the authorities in tracking the conspirators, and the trials of the suspects, including that of John Surratt in 1867. A close look at these confused events and an untangling of the controversies that arose in their wake, Beware the People Weeping strips away more than a century of speculation to retell with hard facts the history of Abraham Lincoln’s death.

On the evening of April 14,1865, when President Abraham Lincoln was assassinated in Ford's Theatre, an entire audience was witness to the tragedy. From diaries, letters, depositions, affidavits, and periodicals, here is a collection of accounts from a variety of theatergoers—who by chance saw one of the truly pivotal events in US history. Providing minute firsthand details recorded over a span of ninety years, We Saw Lincoln Shot explores a subject that will forever be debated. With a sharp focus upon the circumstances reported by one hundred actual witnesses, We Saw Lincoln Shot provides vivid documentation of a momentous evening and exposes errors that have been perpetuated as the assassination has been rendered into written histories.

1922 Written & Compiled by Burke McCarty, Ex-Romanist. the author spent years in public and private libraries gathering facts from books, magazines, newspapers and court records to compile all the information into this book. it is Mr. McCarty's view t.