Who Killed Abraham Lincoln

Book & CD. Born in Quebec, Charles Chiniquy gained great fame as a crusading priest for temperance who also established French-Canadian communities in Illinois. It was there that the celebrated priest first made Abraham Lincoln's acquaintance when the popular Springfield lawyer defended him in the most high profile libel case in Lincoln's career. Not long after this, because of the great shortcomings he saw in its teachings and practice, Chiniquy left the Catholic Church and became a Protestant. In his extremely popular autobiography, "Fifty Years in The Church of Rome", Chiniquy reported that after the murder of his close friend, the President, he travelled to Washington to conduct his own inquiry. He met with high ranking government officials who told him that they had no doubt that the Jesuits were behind Lincoln's slaying but they wanted to keep this from the public to avoid giving new life to the broken rebellion and to avert possible bloodshed between Catholics and Protestants. For their role in the plot to assassinate Abraham Lincoln and other high government officials, eight people were put on trial before a military commission. Evidently, one of those officials who believed that the assassination was a Catholic plot was a dominant member of Lincoln's cabinet, the man who was, in reality, in charge of the United States government in the hours and weeks after the murder and who also headed the official investigation into the assassination, Secretary of War, Edwin Stanton. This is part of the evidence that clearly points to Roman Catholic complicity in the murder of the President as well as general hostility to America and its democratic institution. Also included: The New York City Draft Riots. Ten days after the battle of Gettysburg, with the army essentially gone from the city, huge blood-thirsty mobs, lynching people, torching buildings, looting and destroying property, opposed only by a vastly outnumbered police force, threatened not only the existence of New York but the whole nation as well. These ferocious mobs that, among other things, fought and killed police and soldiers, beat black people to death and burned buildings with the inhabitants still in them, were essentially all Roman Catholic. Mary Surratt: A devout Roman Catholic, she was the first woman ever executed by the American government for her part in the assassination plot headquartered in her boarding-house. A majority of the conspirators were Catholic, including, the assassin, John Wilkes Booth, at a time when Romanists made up a small fraction of the U.S. population. St Joseph: The assassination was spoken in this solidly Catholic town in Minnesota hours before it occurred . . . and much more. A CD of over 3,300 pages of supporting documentation, including the court records of those put on trial for conspiring to assassinate Lincoln and other officials is also part of this work.

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.

The assassination of President Abraham Lincoln remains one of the most prominent events in U.S. history. It continues to attract enormous and intense interest from scholars, writers, and armchair historians alike, ranging from painstaking new research to wild-eyed speculation. At the end of the Lincoln bicentennial year, and the onset of the Civil War sesquicentennial, the leading scholars of Lincoln and his murder offer in one volume their latest studies and arguments about the assassination, its aftermath, the extraordinary public reaction (which was more complex than has been previously believed), and the iconography that Lincoln’s murder and deification inspired. Contributors also offer the most up-to-date accounts of the parallel legal event of the summer of 1865—the relentless pursuit, prosecution, and punishment of the conspirators. Everything from graphic tributes to religious sermons, to spontaneous outbursts on the streets of the nation’s cities, to emotional mass-mourning at carefully organized funerals, as well as the imposition of military jurisprudence to try the conspirators, is examined in the light of fresh evidence and insightful analysis. The contributors are among the finest scholars who are studying Lincoln’s assassination. All have earned well-deserved reputations for the quality of their research, their thoroughness, their originality, and their writing. In addition to the editors, contributors include Thomas R. Turner, Edward Steers Jr., Michael W. Kauffman, Thomas P. Lowry, Richard E. Sloan, Elizabeth D. Leonard, and Richard Nelson Current.

On April 14, 1965, President Abraham Lincoln was assassinated while attending a play at Ford's Theatre. Historical accounts tell us the murder was committed by a crazed actor named John Wilkes Booth, and no one else. Now, after more than a century, startling new answers are uncovered.

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.

Taking place during the most critical period of our nation’s birth, The First Conspiracy tells a remarkable and previously untold piece of American history that not only reveals George Washington’s character, but also illuminates the origins of America’s counterintelligence movement that led to the modern day CIA. In 1776, an elite group of soldiers were handpicked to serve as George Washington’s bodyguards. Washington trusted them; relied on them. But unbeknownst to Washington, some of them were part of a treasonous plan. In the months leading up to the Revolutionary War, these traitorous soldiers, along with the Governor of New York, William Tryon, and Mayor David Mathews, launched a deadly plot against the most important member of the military: George Washington himself. This is the story of the secret plot and how it was revealed. It is a story of leaders, liars, counterfeiters, and jailhouse confessors. It also shows just how hard the battle was for George Washington and how close America was to losing the Revolutionary War. In this historical page-turner, New York Times bestselling author Brad Meltzer teams up with American history writer and documentary television producer, Josh Mensch to unravel the shocking true story behind what has previously been a footnote in the pages of history. Drawing on extensive research, Meltzer and Mensch capture in riveting detail how George Washington not only defeated the most powerful military force in the world, but also uncovered the secret plot against him in the tumultuous days leading up to July 4, 1776. Praise for The First Conspiracy: "This is American history at its finest, a gripping story of spies, killers, counterfeiters, traitors?and a mysterious prostitute who may or may not have even existed. Anyone with an interest in American history will love this book." —Douglas Preston, #1 bestselling author of The Lost City of the Monkey God “A wonderful book about leadership?and it shows why George Washington and his moral lessons are just as vital today. What a book. You’ll love it.” —President George H.W. Bush “This is an important book: a fascinating largely unknown chapter of our hazardous beginning, a reminder of why counterintelligence matters, and a great read.” —President Bill Clinton

Examines the many theories that have led to speculation that Lincoln's assassination was a conspiracy.

This book describes the people, events, and the conspiracy that led to the assassination of President Abraham Lincoln in 1865. It traces the lives of both Lincoln and the man who killed him, John Wilkes Booth. Highlighting the tensions and political divisions of the Civil War era, the story of the first United States presidential assassination is told in great detail.