Chasing Lincoln's Killer: Prologue–Chapter 4

Fondly do we hope — fervently do we pray — that this mighty scourge of war may speedily pass away.

With malice toward none; with charity for all; with firmness in the right, as God gives us to see the right, let us strive on to finish the work we are in; to bind up the nation’s wounds; to care for him who shall have borne the battle, and for his widow, and his orphan — to do all which may achieve and cherish a just and lasting peace, among ourselves, and with all nations.

Our adversaries...attempted to appropriate it, but I insisted yesterday we fairly captured it.

In one notorious plot of 1861, local rebels schemed to assassinate the president-elect when his railroad train passed through Baltimore on the way to Washington for his first inauguration.

Other Lincoln haters threatened to assassinate him on the east front of the Capitol the moment he began to read his inaugural address.

Tonight, at exactly 10:00 P.M., Booth and his henchmen would throw into chaos the Union government by killing its top leaders. That would, they hoped, incite the Confederacy to continue the war against the Union.

None of Booth’s conspirators knew it, but Booth had already implicated all of them! He had entrusted a sealed envelope to a friend and fellow actor, who was to see that the letter it contained was published tomorrow in the newspaper.

None of Booth’s conspirators knew it, but Booth had already implicated all of them! He had entrusted a sealed envelope to a friend and fellow actor, who was to see that the letter it contained was published tomorrow in the newspaper.

Another theater employee, named John Peanut for the snack he sold to theater patrons, held the reins of Booth’s restless horse while the actor went inside.

Booth could see the door of the vestibule that led directly into the president’s box.

During the war, Lincoln and Seward had become good friends and trusted confidants.

Leale’s fingers probed for the source of the blood and found it behind the left ear: a neat, round hole, about the diameter of a man’s fingertip, clotted with a plug of coagulated blood.

Other great actresses from the nineteenth-century American theater have faded into oblivion while Laura Keene is remembered for a single unscripted act that took place over a few minutes in the box at Ford’s on April 14, 1865.

In daylight, it was simple to find the place, but nightfall had obscured the hills.

Maryland, although it did not secede from the Union and join the Confederacy at the start of the Civil War, remained a hotbed of secessionists. Maryland was as Confederate as a state could be without actually seceding.