Killing Lincoln: The Shocking Assassination that Changed America Forever

In reference to the search for Lincoln's killers as it took to the Maryland swamps: "The method of searching the swamps is simple yet arduous. First, the troops assemble on the edge of bogs with names like Allen’s Creek, Scrub Swamp, and Atchall’s Swamp, standing at loose attention in the shade of a thick forest of beech, dogwood, and gum trees. Then they form two lines and march straight forward, from one side to the other. As absurd as it seems to the soldiers, marching headlong into cold mucky water, there is no other way of locating Booth and Herold. Incredibly, eighty-seven of these brave men will drown in their painstaking weeklong search for the killers.

Put down your guns and go home. Let’s rebuild the nation together. This was President Lincoln’s vision, to which Grant subscribed.

If I am killed I can die but once,” he is fond of saying, “but to live in constant dread is to die over and over again.

Lincoln has become so addicted to the telegraph’s instant news from the front that he still can’t let go of the need for just one more bit of information, even though the prospect of another great battle is slim.

Starvation, literal starvation, was doing its deadly work. So depleted and poisoned was the blood of many of Lee’s men from insufficient and unsound food that a slight wound which would probably not have been reported at the beginning of the war would often cause blood poison, gangrene, and death,” one Confederate general will later write.

With malice toward none, with charity for all, with firmness in the right as God gives us to see the right, let us strive on to finish the work we are in, to bind up the nation’s wounds, to care for him who shall have borne the battle and for his widow and his orphan, to do all which may achieve and cherish a just and lasting peace among ourselves and with all nations,

but to live in constant dread is to die over and over again.

No drunken, saddened, addled, enraged citizens of Richmond so much as attacks Lincoln with their fists.

and shocking, I kept on until I arrived in the East Room, which I entered. There I was met with a sickening surprise. Before me was a catafalque, on which rested a corpse wrapped in funeral vestments. Around it were stationed soldiers who were acting as guards. And there were a throng of people, some gazing mournfully upon the corpse, whose face was covered, others weeping pitifully. ‘Who is dead in the White House?’ I

Lincoln telegraphs his heartfelt reply: 'Let the thing be pressed.