LINCOLN’S AVENGERS

If Lincoln’s assassination was the final shot of the Civil War, the punishment of those responsible was a decisive step in casting the course of Reconstruction.

So argues Leonard (History/Colby Coll.; All the Daring of the Soldier, 1999, etc.), who focuses on Joseph Holt, head of the Union’s Bureau of Military Justice. In early 1865, the 58-year-old Holt, a staunch Union man despite his southern origins, gave thanks for Lee’s surrender and the end of the Confederacy. John Wilkes Booth’s murder of the president came as a complete shock. The machinery of law enforcement went into high gear in search of the assassins; within days, Booth was shot to death in a burning barn near Port Royal, Virginia. His demise meant that questions would forever linger about the fates of his eight alleged co-conspirators, whose military trial was orchestrated by Holt. Leonard carefully and impartially summarizes the tribunal, pointing out the dubious nature of testimony from several key witnesses—notably Louis J. Weichmann, who may have been as guilty as any of the accused—and the exceptional zeal with which Holt prosecuted his case. Four of the defendants were hanged, the rest imprisoned. John Surratt Jr., whose mother was one of those executed, stayed at large for more than a year before being captured, but his trial ended with a hung jury. Meanwhile, President Andrew Johnson pardoned numerous Confederate officials and military officers, vetoed laws meant to expedite full citizenship for ex-slaves, and attempted to fire Holt and his superior, Secretary of War Edwin Stanton. Outraged, the radical Republican Congress responded by impeaching Johnson, falling one vote short of conviction in the Senate. With the election of Ulysses S. Grant to succeed Johnson, the Reconstruction effort faded into a familiar story of apathy, ineptitude, and corruption.

Competent and detailed, yet a curiously bloodless account of an era whose events can still stir violent passions.