Estimated read time: 3-4 minutes
This archived news story is available only for your personal, non-commercial use. Information in the story may be outdated or superseded by additional information. Reading or replaying the story in its archived form does not constitute a republication of the story.
Where's Oliver Stone when you really need him?
Turns out that there was a conspiracy to shoot the president.
President Lincoln, that is.
In the past few years, at least five books have been devoted, in whole or in part, to explaining how and why the actor John Wilkes Booth in April 1865 murdered perhaps America's greatest president. The accounts also talk of those who helped Booth.
Now comes veteran Lincoln hand James L. Swanson with a fresh angle: how Booth and his cronies were detected, chased down and caught in the furious 12-day aftermath of America's first presidential assassination. And he looks at how Booth was shot dead in a Virginia tobacco barn that had been set afire by pursuing soldiers.
Swanson labors under some handicaps.
The narrative's most interesting character -- Lincoln himself -- is gone after the first act.
Its most controversial figure -- Samuel Mudd, the Maryland physician who set Booth's broken leg and was sentenced to life in prison for it -- takes center stage for only a few hours after the killing. (Swanson concludes that Mudd, part of an earlier, never-consummated plot to help Booth kidnap Lincoln, was not involved in the assassination, though he did help Booth escape.)
So Swanson lets Booth's flawed, flamboyant character push the tale along. The result is a diabolically fascinating Booth, neither a cat's-paw in a Confederate government plot, as Lincoln's contemporaries believed, nor the ego-driven loner he often seems when viewed in the light cast by 20th-century assassins such as Lee Harvey Oswald.
Swanson's Booth is a dyed-in-the-wool racist, to be sure, whose fears of citizenship for blacks in the post-Civil War era lead him to kill the freedman's best friend.
But Booth himself believed he was striking down a despotic American Caesar who had conducted a ruthless Civil War by trampling on the Constitution, suspending the right of habeas corpus, trying thousands of civilians before military tribunals, and ending slavery in Booth's beloved South.
On the run after the murder, Booth reads local newspapers and is shocked to learn that he is not viewed as a patriot.
"I think I have done well, though I am abandoned, with the curse of Cain upon me," Booth wrote in his pocket diary, hiding in the Potomac River's flood plain in southern Maryland.
"When if the world knew my heart, that one blow would have made me great, though I did desire no greatness."
Like Booth himself, Swanson is not beyond the occasional bit of scenery-chewing. As in: "No more dreams came to Abraham Lincoln during the night of his deep, last sleep. ... His brain was dead and beyond the reach of any nocturnal imaginings. His soul would soon embark."
On balance, though, Manhunt is a rattling good read. And it's a surprisingly suspenseful one.
After Booth's death, four Confederate sympathizers were tried and hanged as accomplices while four others, including Mudd, received prison sentences.
But as Swanson amply demonstrates, at least a half dozen more who either were part of the kidnap plot or who helped Booth while he was on the run were never brought to justice.
Others known only by aliases are still waiting to be tripped up by future historians.
"All I can say about this is, you have not got the one-half of them," Lewis Powell, a Booth co-conspirator, told an investigator after being captured.
Sounds like a sequel.
Manhunt: The 12-Day Chase
for Lincoln's Killer
By James L. Swanson
William Morrow, 448 pp., $26.95
To see more of USAToday.com, or to subscribe, go to http://www.usatoday.com
© Copyright 2006 USA TODAY, a division of Gannett Co. Inc.
