The eight people charged with conspiring to assassinate President Abraham Lincoln were tried by a military commission under military law. The author contends that this was illegal, since the civilian legal system was fully functioning. The many ways in which the defendants' rights were violated are described, as are the ways in which the trial testimony was either not accurate or not legally obtained. The trial is also compared with other incidents in which the U.S. military was used in police and judicial functions, with questionable results. The book is a warning against unchecked power by the executive branch of the government.

Louis J. Weichmann, one of the principal witnesses at the trial of the conspirators in the assassination of President Lincoln, tells the story of the plotting that took place in the boarding house where Weichmann lived.

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.

For the 150th anniversary, Harold Holzer (The Civil War in 150 Objects) presents an unprecedented firsthand chronicle of one of the most pivotal moments in American history. On April 14, 1865, Good Friday, the Civil War claimed its ultimate sacrifice. President Lincoln Assassinated!! recaptures the dramatic immediacy of Lincoln’s assassination, the hunt for the conspirators and their military trial, and the nation’s mourning for the martyred president. The fateful story is told in more than eighty original documents—eyewitness reports, medical records, trial transcripts, newspaper articles, speeches, letters, diary entries, and poems—by more than seventy-five participants and observers, including the assassin John Wilkes Booth and Boston Corbett, the soldier who shot him. Courtroom testimony exposes the intricacies of the plot to kill the president; eulogies by Ralph Waldo Emerson, Wendell Phillips, and Benjamin Disraeli and poetry by Walt Whitman, Herman Melville and Julia Ward Howe give eloquent voice to grief; two emotional speeches by Frederick Douglass—one of them never before published—reveal his evolving perspective on Lincoln’s legacy. Together these voices combine to reveal the full panorama of one the most shocking and tragic events in our history.

This definitive illustrated history of Abraham Lincoln's assassination follows the shocking events from the tragic scene at Ford's Theatre to the trial and execution of John Wilkes Booth's coconspirators. Few remember them today, but once the names Mary Surratt, Lewis Powell, David Herold, George Atzerodt, Edman Spangler, Samuel Arnold, Michael O'Laughlin, and Dr. Samuel Mudd were the most reviled and notorious in America. In Lincoln's Assassins, James L. Swanson and Daniel R. Weinberg present an unprecedented visual record of almost three hundred contemporary photographs, letters, documents, prints, woodcuts, newspapers, pamphlets, books, and artifacts, many hitherto unpublished. These rare materials evoke the popular culture of the time, record the origins of the Lincoln myth, take the reader into the courtroom and the cells of the accused, document the beginning of American photojournalism, and memorialize the fates of the eight conspirators.