Lee had surrendered, but strong Confederate armies remained at large in parts of the South, and their leaders had not taken their cues from Lee.
Instead he casts the actor as a passionate white supremacist who saw Lincoln as a tyrant and was enraged by the president’s recent call for limited black suffrage. So he leaves unanswered many questions about Booth’s mental stability. Swanson hasn’t written a biography or a character study of Booth but a true-crime story about what happened between the actor’s escape from Ford’s Theatre after the assassination and his arrest at a barn in Virginia 12 days later. One of the chief virtues of this fascinating book is that it reminds us how little we know about some of the most familiar events in American history. I couldn’t have answered before I read Manhunt and, no doubt, many people still can’t. “Why did John Wilkes Booth kill Lincoln, anyway?” my friend asked. Over Thanksgiving dinner I told one of the smartest people I know that I had just finished Manhunt, the true story of the attempt to capture the man who killed Abraham Lincoln. Manhunt: The Twelve-Day Chase for Lincoln’s Killer. A taut true-crime story about the search for Lincoln’s assassin
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