The Assassination of Abraham Lincoln

Four Smoking Guns

John Fazio

• Publisher: Pen & Sword History
• Year: 2025
• eBook ISBN: 9781399046831
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: American Civil War History
• Index: History

Covering one of the most defining moment of America's history, The Assassination of Abraham Lincoln aims to lay the multitude of theories surrounding Lincoln's assassination to rest. Immediately after the assassination of Abraham Lincoln, suspicion naturally fell on Confederate leaders as being responsible for the great crime. The belief in their complicity faded when the case against Jefferson Davis and other unindicted co-conspirators collapsed at the trial of John Wilkes Booth's action team (Booth was dead) in May and June, 1865. The belief then hibernated for 123 years, during which period the prevailing wisdom was that Booth had in fact acted with the help of no one other than his team, with the possible exception of Dr. Samuel Mudd and Mary Surratt. In 1988, however, assassination historians James O. Hall, William A. Tidwell and David Gaddy thoroughly discredited the simple conspiracy theory in their seminal work Come Retribution, holding that the original suspicions were right after all. In 1995, Tidwell followed with a solo titled April '65 in which he strengthened the case against Confederate leaders. The authors' conclusions quickly gained acceptance by many experts in the field, including the author of this work, which is intended to remove any remaining doubt as to the validity of the theory. It does so by describing in detail four subplots in the overall plot to murder the President, subplots that demonstrate unequivocally that Booth was merely a pawn in the hands of far more powerful, influential and purposeful men than he, men whose backs were to the wall and who would therefore stop at nothing to avert the catastrophe that they had fought four long years to prevent and that was now upon them.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Foreword Smoking Guns
• Preface The Assassination of Abraham Lincoln
• Introduction The Confederate Government, the Confederate Secret Service and John Wilkes Booth
• Chapter One The First Smoking Gun: Godfrey Joseph Hyams and His Counsellors
• Chapter Two The Second Smoking Gun: Lewis Thornton Powell and His Svengali
• Chapter Three The Third Smoking Gun: The Thomas Francis Harney Mission and Plan B
• Chapter Four The Fourth Smoking Gun: John Harrison Surratt, Judah Philip Benjamin and Henri Beaumont de Sainte-Marie
• Summary and Conclusions
• References
• Bibliography
• Plates