Manhunt: The 12-Day Chase for Lincoln’s Killer (2006) by James L. Swanson

“Manhunt: The 12-Day Chase for Lincoln’s Killer” was a commercial and critical smash hit from the moment it was released in 2007, and rightfully so. Author James Swanson weaves a detailed and enthralling narrative from first-hand accounts and documentary evidence. It’s trite to say that a popular work of historical non-fiction reads like a novel, but this one really does.

I loved the details — some macabre, others humorous — that Swanson uses to provide a complete and arresting picture of the events of late April 1865. Such as Laura Keene, leading-lady in the production of “Our American Cousin” at Ford’s Theater on the night of the assassination, who gently craddled Lincoln’s head in her lap in the moments before the stricken president was moved across the street the Petersen House. The narcissistic thespian and trigger-man, John Wilkes Booth, hungrily pouring over the news of the assassination in newspapers as though he were reading reviews of his latest stage performance. The pious, dim-witted, and self-castrated Union cavalry soldier, Boston Corbett, who shot the cornered Booth through the neck, rendering the assassin a quadriplegic for the final few hours of his life. Major Henry Rathbone and his fiance, Clara Harris, who accompanied the president and Mrs. Lincoln to the theater that night after General and Mrs. Ulysses S. Grant (and several others) had to turn down the request, only to provide minimal assistance during and after the attack (18-years later Rathbone would murder his wife in Germany). The authoritarian curmudgeon, Edwin Stanton, who created a virtual command center in the room next to Lincoln’s deathbed at the Petersen House to track down and capture the assassins, which were, he was convinced, part of a wicked conspiracy orchestrated by the Confederate high command. The diminutive, but courageous Fanny Seward, who valiantly fought to save her father, secretary of state Willam Seward, from the vicious bowie knife blows of Lewis Powell.

It is important to note that Swanson’s narrative never touches on the controversial questions of the military tribunal that sent four men and one woman to the gallows in July 1865. The sole focus is the day of the assassination and the days that followed. You can almost hear the hiss of the gaslights and smell the acrid tobacco smoke in the air as Swanson recreates scene after scene. “Manhunt” is popular history at its absolute finest.