A True History of the Assassination of Abraham Lincoln and of the Conspiracy of 1865

Plot

This extraordinary eyewitness account by the young friend of John Surratt who was a boarder at Mary Surrat's rooming house in Washington 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.