Booknotes: Lincoln's Assassination

New Arrival:

• Lincoln's Assassination by Edward Steers, Jr. (SIU Press, 2025).

Reader and writer interest in many important Civil War-period topics tends to wax and wane. While these days we don't hear much about new books or new information related to the Lincoln assassination (or at least it seems that way to me), there was certainly a lot of that going on around the time that Edward Steers's popular and influential study Blood on the Moon: The Assassination of Abraham Lincoln was first published back in 2001. In 2014, Steers's Lincoln's Assassination was published as part of SIU Press's Concise Lincoln Library series, and today (or rather last month) marks the release of that same title in paperback format.

Steers's work addresses numerous myths and controversies surrounding the assassination, and he's always been a leading opponent of those who have fought to drum up sympathy for Mary Surratt and Dr. Mudd. From the description: "Over time, the traditional story of the assassination has become littered with myths, from the innocence of Mary Surratt and Samuel Mudd to John Wilkes Booth’s escape to Oklahoma or India, where he died by suicide several years later. In this succinct volume, Edward Steers, Jr. sets the record straight, expertly analyzing the historical evidence to explain Lincoln’s assassination."

The author has also resolutely rejected some of the more popular conspiracy theories that have developed over time. "As Steers explains, public perception about Lincoln’s death has been shaped by limited but popular histories that assert, alternately, that Secretary of War Edwin Stanton engineered the assassination or that John Wilkes Booth was a mad actor fueled by delusional revenge. In his detailed chronicle of the planning and execution of Booth’s plot, Steers demonstrates that neither Stanton nor anyone else in Lincoln’s sphere of political confidants participated in Lincoln’s death, and Booth remained a fully rational person whose original plan to capture Lincoln was both reasonable and capable of success." Lincoln's Assassination again "implicates both Mary Surratt and Samuel Mudd, as well as other conspirators, clarifying their parts in the scheme."

This volume's intended audience is "anyone seeking a straightforward, authoritative analysis of one of the most dramatic events in American history."