Volume 49, Number 16 · October 24, 2002
Anatomy of a Murder
By Bertram Wyatt-Brown
Blood on the Moon: The Assassination of Abraham Lincoln
by Edward Steers Jr.
University Press of Kentucky, 360 pp., $29.95
Lincoln's Assassins: Their Trial and Execution
by James L. Swanson and Daniel R. Weinberg
Arena Editions, 151 pp., $45.00
Contrary to popular understanding, John Wilkes Booth's assassination of Abraham Lincoln was not the handiwork of a half-mad crank and a handful of misfits. The President's slaying 'was clearly a sequel of the war,' as Allan Nevins put it, 'product of its senseless hatreds, fears, and cruelties.'[1] Yet too often historians, some of them offering only a few lines to the tragedy, have not acknowledged just how calamitous it was in changing the divided, agonized nation's destiny.[2] The consequences of Lincoln's death disappeared in the maelstrom of post-war confusions and political strife.
Review, 3496 words
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