A true history of the assassination of Abraham Lincoln and of the conspiracy of 1865 Book

Published almost 75 years after the author's death, the extraordinary eyewitness account by the young friend of John Surratt who was a boarder at Mary Surratt's rooming house in Washington, DC during the months when Mrs. Surratt, John Wilkes Booth, and the others shaped their plot. Weichmann, then 22, saw the furtive meetings, the midnight rides, the strange happenings whose full and terrible meaning was to elude him until the fateful night at Ford's Theater. And in his astonishing manuscript Weichmann tells his story and defends his role as the chief Government witness against the conspirators in a military trial whose legality was dubious and whose findings created intense controversy. After the trial, many in Washington doubted Weichmann's testimony, and some indeed believed that he may have gained immunity by turning state's evidence against fellow conspirators. Weichmann felt the public suspicion profoundly; his entire life came to be dominated by the accident of his sojourn in the Surratt house and by what he witnessed there. Although not a professional historian, Weichmann relates the entire story as he would have liked to have told it at the trial...and as, with his Victorian attitudes and his sense of mystery, melodrama, and self-justification, he was finally compelled to tell it.Read More