With all that has already been written about President Abraham Lincoln’s assassination, one of the little known stories is the case of the only successful conspirator, John Harrison Surratt, the son of Mary Surratt, who was hanged for her part in the crime. The Last Lincoln Conspirator is the true story of John Surratt, who became the most wanted man in America after the death of John Wilkes Booth’s and was the only conspirator to escape conviction. The capture and killing of Booth twelve days after he shot Lincoln and the fate of Booth’s other accomplices are familiar history. Four accomplices, including Surratt’s mother, were convicted and hanged, and four were jailed. John Surratt alone managed to evade capture for twenty months and, once put on trial, to evade prison. The first full-length treatment of Surratt’s escape, capture, and trial, this book provides fascinating details about his flight through Canada, England, France, the Papal States, and eventual capture in Egypt. Surratt’s desperate journey and the bitter legal proceedings against him that bizarrely led to his freedom hold the reader’s attention from first to last page.

Blood on the Moon examines the evidence, myths, and lies surrounding the political assassination that dramatically altered the course of American history. Was John Wilkes Booth a crazed loner acting out of revenge, or was he the key player in a wide conspiracy aimed at removing the one man who had crushed the Confederacy's dream of independence? Edward Steers Jr. crafts an intimate, engaging narrative of the events leading to Lincoln's death and the political, judicial, and cultural aftermaths of his assassination.

Lincoln's Last Days is a gripping account of one of the most dramatic nights in American history—of how one gunshot changed the country forever. Adapted from Bill O'Reilly's bestselling historical thriller, Killing Lincoln, this book will have young readers—and grown-ups too—hooked on history. In the spring of 1865, President Abraham Lincoln travels through Washington, D.C., after finally winning America's bloody Civil War. In the midst of celebrations, Lincoln is assassinated at Ford's Theatre by a famous actor named John Wilkes Booth. What follows is a thrilling chase, ending with a fiery shoot-out and swift justice for the perpetrators. With an unforgettable cast of characters, page-turning action, vivid detail, and art on every spread, Lincoln's Last Days is history that reads like a thriller. This is a very special book, irresistible on its own or as a compelling companion to Killing Lincoln.

On April 14, 1965, President Abraham Lincoln was assassinated while attending a play at Ford's Theatre. Historical accounts tell us the murder was committed by a crazed actor named John Wilkes Booth, and no one else. Now, after more than a century, startling new answers are uncovered.

An original member of Booth's conspiracy, Arnold had withdrawn from the plot only three weeks before the president's assassination. Captured, tried, and sentenced to life at hard labor at the infamous Dry Tortugas, Sam Arnold survived to tell his remarkable story in a vivid and compelling style. Based on Arnold's diaries, it is the only full-length account of Booth's conspiracy written by one of the accused. Published as a newspaper series in 1902, it is reproduced here verbatim, along with supplementary notes, appendices, and photographs.

The author of Shooting the Sun blends a spy story with a love story in this tale of the secret mission to find the conspirators in Lincoln’s assassination. The assassination of Abraham Lincoln set off a hysterical burst of international conspiracy theories, with all eyes turning first to Canada—once a hotbed of Confederate plots—and then, as evidence mounted, to the Catholic Church and Rome . . . Now from bestselling author, Max Byrd, comes a long forgotten true story: a confidential mission to track down and capture any Europeans (and fugitive Confederates) who may have aided John Wilkes Booth. Drawn from State Department archives and personal letters and diaries, The Sixth Conspirator recounts the dramatic journey of George H. Sharpe, General Ulysses S. Grant’s real-life spymaster, to three European capitals. Three people travel with him—calculating banker Daniel Keach, Sharpe’s Civil War protegé Quintus Oakes, and former Pinkerton agent Maggie Lawton. One step ahead of them is a mysterious Confederate courier, Sarah Slater, known during the war as “the Veiled Lady,” who may or may not have been Booth’s lover. Behind Sharpe’s team, breathing grimly over their shoulders, are Secretary of State William Seward, brutally mutilated by the knife of one of Booth’s henchmen, and the perversely vengeful, guilt-ridden Secretary of War Edwin Stanton. Along the way Byrd creates a panorama of wonderfully realized characters, great and small, fictional and real. In deeply researched, fascinating historical detail, he carries us back to another reality—the far away mid-nineteenth century world from which our America slowly emerged. Praise for The Sixth Conspirator “From its brilliant and devastating opening scene to its surprising and breakneck conclusion, The Sixth Conspirator takes the last tendril of the Lincoln assassination and weaves it into a compelling, erudite, witty, and wise novel that should secure Max Byrd's place among the premier writers of historical fiction working today. Not to be missed!” —John Lescroart, New York Times–bestselling author of The Rule of Law and The Missing Piece “Taking us through the hideaways and haunts of European capitals in the mid-nineteenth century, this intriguing historical mystery . . . keeps us guessing right up to the last page. As in his highly acclaimed novels, Jefferson, Jackson, and Grant, Max Byrd tells the tale with witty and fast-paced writing that kept me turning pages— eager to know more about the “real” men and women of the era along with the fictional characters of his creation.” —Cokie Roberts, Emmy-winning political commentator and author of Capital Dames: The Civil War and the Women of Washington

Our American Cousin is a three-act play written by English playwright Tom Taylor. The play opened in London in 1858 but quickly made its way to the U.S. and premiered at Laura Keene’s Theatre in New York City later that year. It remained popular in the U.S. and England for the next several decades. Its most notable claim to fame, however, is that it was the play U.S. President Abraham Lincoln was watching on April 14, 1865 when he was assassinated by John Wilkes Booth, who used his knowledge of the script to shoot Lincoln during a more raucous scene. The play is a classic Victorian farce with a whole range of stereotyped characters, business, and many entrances and exits. The plot features a boorish but honest American cousin who travels to the aristocratic English countryside to claim his inheritance, and then quickly becomes swept up in the family’s affairs. An inevitable rescue of the family’s fortunes and of the various damsels in distress ensues. Our American Cousin was originally written as a farce for an English audience, with the laughs coming mostly at the expense of the naive American character. But after it moved to the U.S. it was eventually recast as a comedy where English caricatures like the pompous Lord Dundreary soon became the primary source of hilarity. This early version, published in 1869, contains fewer of that character’s nonsensical adages, which soon came to be known as “Dundrearyisms,” and for which the play eventually gained much of its popular appeal.