In the Shadow of Lincoln's Death

WILFRED FUNK, $3.00

FROM the moment that John Wilkes Booth was alleged to have been shot in Garrett’s barn there has existed in the mind of a large number of Americans a doubt as to the motives and methods of the Administration — which in this instance means that strange, sinister figure, Mr. Stanton, Secretary of War — in the treatment of Booth and in the conduct of the trial of the assassins. Certainly the alleged conspirators involved were railroaded and framed in a shameful manner. Mr. Eisenschmil, who is a recognized authority on the subject of Lincoln’s death, has summed up in this book the evidence on all sides of this sad and discreditable performance. He is inclined to believe that Booth was actually killed — there is a school of thought which believes he escaped and that a third party was killed in his place for the reward. The autopsy, he thinks, was honestly but stupidly carried out. Of the trial of the conspirators he has no good word to say. In the strange case of John Surratt, he indicates the devious manœuvres of the government evidently designed to cover something up. But what? That he cannot answer. Rather he presents in an admirably documented and well-indexed work a clear story of an unsolved, behind-the-scenes mystery in the history of American federal Administration, in which the evidence was destroyed and the mouths of the actors sealed. To what end, nobody knows. It is a sorry record, but in this volume well presented.

R. E. D.