Life, Crime, and Capture of John Wilkes Booth

The assassination of Abraham Lincoln was the first presidential killing in American history, and journalist George Alfred Townsend was there from the moment the shots rang out at Ford's Theatre. This book is his electrifying firsthand account of the murder, the manhunt, and Booth's desperate thirteen-day flight through Maryland and Virginia. Townsend interviewed witnesses, tracked the investigation, and pieced together the conspiracy that stretched to the highest levels of the Confederate South. He gives us Booth not as the legend he would become, but as the man his contemporaries knew: a celebrated actor, a secessionist fanatic, and a murderer convinced he would be hailed as a patriot. Some of Townsend's details have been corrected by later historians, but what remains is an invaluable window into how America processed its greatest trauma in real time. For anyone who wants to understand not just what happened, but what it felt like to live through it.