Product Description

The murder of Abraham Lincoln set off the greatest manhunt in American history. From April 14 to April 26, 1865, the assassin, John Wilkes Booth, led Union cavalry and detectives on a wild twelve-day chase through the streets of Washington, D.C., across the swamps of Maryland, and into the forests of Virginia, while the nation, still reeling from the just-ended Civil War, watched in horror and sadness.

James L. Swanson's Manhunt is a fascinating tale of murder, intrigue, and betrayal. A gripping hour-by-hour account told through the eyes of the hunted and the hunters, this is history as you've never read it before.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #4234 in Books
• Published on: 2007-02-01
• Released on: 2007-02-06
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 496 pages

Amazon.com

The Greatest Manhunt in American History

For 12 days after his brazen assassination of Abraham Lincoln, John Wilkes Booth was at large, and in Manhunt, historian James L. Swanson tells the vivid, fully documented tale of his escape and the wild, massive pursuit. Get a taste of the daily drama from this timeline of the desperate search.

April 14, 1865 Around noon, Booth learns that Lincoln is coming to Ford's Theatre that night. He has eight hours to prepare his plan. 10:15 pm: Booth shoots the president, leaps to the stage, and escapes on a waiting horse. Secretary of War Edwin Stanton orders the manhunt to begin. April 15 About 4:00 am: Booth seeks treatment for a broken leg at Dr. Samuel Mudd's farm near Beantown, Maryland. Cavalry patrol heads south toward Mudd farm. Confederate operative Thomas Jones hides Booth in a remote pine thicket for five days, frustrating the manhunters. April 19 Tens of thousands watch the procession to the U.S. Capitol, where President Lincoln lies in state. Wild rumors and stories of false sightings of Booth spread.
April 20 Stanton offers a $100,000 reward for the assassins, and threatens death to any citizen who helps them. After hiding Booth in Maryland, Jones puts him in a rowboat on the Potomac River, bound for Virginia. More than a thousand manhunters are still searching in Maryland. In the dark, Booth rows the wrong way and first ends up back in Maryland. April 20-24 Booth lands in the northern neck of Virginia, and Confederate agents and sympathizers guide him to Port Conway, Virginia. April 24 Booth befriends three Confederate soldiers who help him cross the Rappahannock River to Port Royal and then guide him further southwest to the Garrett farm. Union troops in Washington receive a report of a Booth sighting. They board a U.S. Navy tug and steam south, right past Booth's hideout at the Garrett farm. April 25 The 16th New York Calvary, realizing their error, turns around and surrounds the Garrett farm after midnight that night.
April 26 When Booth refuses to surrender, troops set the barn on fire, and Boston Corbett shoots the assassin. Booth dies a few hours later, at sunrise. April 26-27 Booth's body is brought back to Washington, where it is autopsied, photographed, and buried in a secret grave.

From Publishers Weekly
Starred Review. In the early days of April 1865, with the bloody war to preserve the union finished, Swanson tells us, Abraham Lincoln was "jubilant." Elsewhere in Washington, the other player in the coming drama of the president's assassination was miserable. Hearing Lincoln's April 10 victory speech, famed actor and Confederate die-hard John Wilkes Booth turned to a friend and remarked with seething hatred, "That means nigger citizenship. Now, by God, I'll put him through." On April 14, Booth did just that. With great power, passion and at a thrilling, breakneck pace, Swanson (Lincoln's Assassins: Their Trial and Execution) conjures up an exhausted yet jubilant nation ruptured by grief, stunned by tragedy and hell-bent on revenge. For 12 days, assisted by family and some women smitten by his legendary physical beauty, Booth relied on smarts, stealth and luck to elude the best detectives, military officers and local police the federal government could muster. Taking the reader into the action, the story is shot through with breathless, vivid, even gory detail. With a deft, probing style and no small amount of swagger, Swanson, a member of the Lincoln Bicentennial Commission, has crafted pure narrative pleasure, sure to satisfy the casual reader and Civil War aficionado alike. 11 b&w photos not seen by PW. (Feb. 7)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From Bookmarks Magazine
James L. Swanson's Web site includes a glowing review quotation from Patricia Cornwell. The correlation is apt since critics find this nonfiction account of Booth's getaway as compelling as the best thrillers. Swanson, a legal scholar with the Cato Institute and a Lincoln historian, knows the assassination inside and out; he's been studying Lincoln since he was a child, and his previous book (with Daniel R. Weinberg), Lincoln's Assassins, was a photographic and archival study of Booth and his co-conspirators. With a surfeit of detail at his disposal, Swanson weaves an absorbing tale in unadorned prose that critics greeted with unanimous approval.

Copyright © 2004 Phillips & Nelson Media, Inc.

Customer Reviews

Great, in depth!
This book really is as good as it says it is. This book really provides an in depth overview of the murder and the chase. It offers the view through those searching and JWB. It really is amazing to realize how Booth hid for so long when he was the most wanted man in the country. This is a very in depth, well written and interesting book. Highly reccommended to anyone interested in American history.

Manhunt
This book is spellbjnding. the author takes the reader on a wild ride through the backwoods and city of early Washington. The author describes in detail what was going through boothes mind when he snuffed out the life of one of America's greatest presidents. It is a must read.

Certainly the "best show" in writing on Lincoln's assassination
Keep in mind that "Manhunt" is mostly written as a narrative story. The reader will be free of 50-caliber footnotes that grace just about every written piece on history topics. Those footnotes and those pieces are necessary and important, but "Manhunt" only makes the claim of being quite readable. This is why the book is interesting, and for the most part, hard to put down. If there were a category of "beach-book nonfiction," then this one should be at the top of the list.

The reader all along will be asking herself, "how on earth can we know what individual people were thinking, doing, and saying to each other (and to themselves!) a century and a half ago?" The answer is, "we can't." The author does a splendid job of making these mental leaps for this very engaging book, knowing that the worldly reader (all of us, of course!) will suspend his belief that all the dialog, facial expressions, etc., actually happened exactly as described. We readers will also be well-sensitized to checking the story details as they tend to pop up in our lives, for the rest of our lives. This is truly an inspiring work in that respect.

Exactly true or not, every person reading this will find some part of the Lincoln assassination story which they have not known before, perhaps about certain characters that show up in the story. As some reviewers say, sometimes there are too many, too quickly showing up. Fair enough. The tale proceeds well anyway. Get the book!