Killing Lincoln: The Real Story

By Steven Hager

Why was President Lincoln left unguarded when the War Department knew of serious plots against his life?

Why was John Wilkes Booth killed when he was trapped in a tobacco barn surrounded by 25 soldiers?

Why were two innocent people swiftly hanged by a military tribunal and not allowed to testify in their own defense?

The files on the conspiracy trial were sealed in the name of national security. But there was a glaring problem: the star witness, Sanford Conover, had been exposed as a serial perjurer whose testimony on almost anything could be had for the right fee. Now the House of Representatives was demanding to see the evidence used to hang four people.

Instead of rubber-stamping the government's story, Representative Andrew Rogers, the lone Democrat on the Judiciary Committee, put the witnesses under serious cross-examination. They began to crack. A shady physician, Dr. Merritt, admitted to taking a $6,000 bribe for his testimony. Another witness was caught understating his payoff. Five witnesses had testified under false names, including Conover, his wife and his sister-in-law. Instead of being arrested, Conover was sent back to New York under guard to find more witnesses, where he promptly gave his escort the slip and vanished.

The majority report, written by War Secretary Edwin Stanton's close friend George S. Boutwell, ignored every exposed perjury and bribe and never mentioned Conover at all. The files stayed sealed for another 80 years.

Only a handful of scholars have looked at this Congressional investigation, which sheds so much light on the plot. In Killing Lincoln: The Real Story, Steven Hager follows the evidence the official story buried. Military tribunals for civilians were soon declared illegal by the U.S. courts, but by then Mary Surratt had been dead for 17 months.

"The cool turpitude of the whole crew sickened me with shame," Rogers wrote in his dissent, "and made me sorrow over the fact that such people could claim the name American."

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1503270262
• ISBN13: 9781503270268
• Release Date: November 2014
• Publisher: Createspace Independent Publishing Platform
• Length: 182 Pages
• Weight: 0.63 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.4" x 6.0" x 9.0"