Manhunt (Swanson)

Manhunt: The 12-Day Chase for Lincoln's Killer
James L. Swanson, 2005
HarperCollins
448 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780060518509


Summary
The murder of Abraham Lincoln set off the greatest manhunt in American history—the pursuit and capture of John Wilkes Booth. From April 14 to April 26, 1865, the assassin led Union cavalry and detectives on a wild twelve-day chase through the streets of Washington, D.C., across the swamps of Maryland, and into the forests of Virginia, while the nation, still reeling from the just-ended Civil War, watched in horror and sadness.

At the very center of this story is John Wilkes Booth, America's notorious villain. A Confederate sympathizer and a member of a celebrated acting family, Booth threw away his fame and wealth for a chance to avenge the South's defeat. For almost two weeks, he confounded the manhunters, slipping away from their every move and denying them the justice they sought.

Based on rare archival materials, obscure trial transcripts, and Lincoln's own blood relics, Manhunt is a fully documented work, but it is also a fascinating tale of murder, intrigue, and betrayal. A gripping hour-by-hour account told through the eyes of the hunted and the hunters, this is history as you've never read it before. (From the publisher.)

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Author Bio 
James L. Swanson is an attorney who has written about history, the Constitution, popular culture, and other subjects for a variety of publications, including the Wall Street Journal, American Heritage, Smithsonian, and the Los Angeles Times. Mr. Swanson serves on the advisory council of the Ford's Theatre Abraham Lincoln Bicentennial Campaign and is a member of the advisory committee of the Abraham Lincoln Bicentennial Commission. (From the publisher.)

His own words
From an interview with the Washingtonian (Feb. 2006):

Q: You say a mythology has elevated Lincoln's assassin, the actor John Wilkes Booth, to a "fascinating antihero" and that a similar reverence toward Lee Harvey Oswald would be deemed obscene. How do you explain that?

First, Lincoln's assassination happened 140 years ago, and a lot of the emotional impact has withered. Second, it's partly due to Booth's excellence as an actor. He performed the assassination in such a dramatic way that we perceive it not just as a horrible crime but as theater. In part, we've bought what he was selling.

Q: Does your style of storytelling, largely from Booth's point of view, risk perpetuating that myth?

I certainly didn't want the reader to sympathize with Booth. He was a racist, and he was a murderer. It was very important to me to write in the epilogue what I think his legacy really was.

Q: What does Lincoln mean to you?

One of the great things about Lincoln is that he truly empathized with other people. He once said, "I shall do nothing through malice; what I deal with is too vast for malice." He had an uncanny ability to see problems through the eyes of others. When you came to him and wanted something, he already knew what you wanted, he knew why you wanted it, he knew what he could give and what he couldn't.

He saw it all when he was a lawyer—divorce, murder, property disputes, slander. He saw the heights and depths to which people could go, how they could tell the truth and how they could lie. In many ways, he was an amateur psychologist.

Q: Movie rights to your book have been sold, with Harrison Ford slated to play one of Booth's hunters. If it were up to you, who would play Booth?

Johnny Depp would make a terrific Booth. There's a trick in casting, because Booth was considered one of the handsomest, most popular men of his time. You'd have to cast a Booth-like person who would exude the same characteristics. (Interview found on author's website.)

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Book Reviews 
Nearly 141 years later, the body of literature about Lincoln's death is immense and seemingly exhaustive. Yet James L. Swanson's Manhunt has found a reasonably new angle from which to approach its material.... He has successfully streamlined the assassination's aftermath into an action-adventure version of these events. He makes Manhunt very accessible and infuses it with high drama.
Janet Maslin - New York Times

Told expertly...Swanson’s moment by moment account of the 12-day chase is compulsively readable.
Wall Street Journal

Extraordinary.... Brilliant.... As gripping as any tightly scripted crime drama.
Boston Globe

(Starred review.) In the early days of April 1865, with the bloody war to preserve the union finished, Swanson tells us, Abraham Lincoln was "jubilant." Elsewhere in Washington, the other player in the coming drama of the president's assassination was miserable. Hearing Lincoln's April 10 victory speech, famed actor and Confederate die-hard John Wilkes Booth turned to a friend and remarked with seething hatred, "That means nigger citizenship. Now, by God, I'll put him through." On April 14, Booth did just that. With great power, passion and at a thrilling, breakneck pace, Swanson (Lincoln's Assassins: Their Trial and Execution) conjures up an exhausted yet jubilant nation ruptured by grief, stunned by tragedy and hell-bent on revenge. For 12 days, assisted by family and some women smitten by his legendary physical beauty, Booth relied on smarts, stealth and luck to elude the best detectives, military officers and local police the federal government could muster. Taking the reader into the action, the story is shot through with breathless, vivid, even gory detail. With a deft, probing style and no small amount of swagger, Swanson, a member of the Lincoln Bicentennial Commission, has crafted pure narrative pleasure, sure to satisfy the casual reader and Civil War aficionado alike. (Includes 11 b&w photos.)
Publishers Weekly

Small wonder that Manhunt has been optioned as a major motion picture. In this fast-paced, hour-by-hour account of the 12 days following Lincoln's assassination at Ford's Theatre on April 14, 1865, Swanson (coauthor, with Daniel R. Weinberg, of Lincoln's Assassins: Their Trial and Execution) allows the reader to ride along with the Union cavalry and federal agents through the streets of the nation's capital and the wilds of Maryland and Virginia in pursuit of John Wilkes Booth, his coconspirators, and the host of rebel enablers who constituted a viable Confederate underground railroad. Swanson's eye for detail and his excellent thumbnail sketches of the figures involved bring the chronicle alive. There was the simultaneous assassination attempt on Secretary of State William Seward, and Secretary of War Stanton's pivotal role in keeping the nation together during the unrest, stoked by an irresponsible press, following Lincoln's death. Swanson details the conditions endured by Booth while on the run and the foolish mistakes committed by him and his pursuers during the long chase until the last stand at a farm near Port Royal, VA, on April 26. Swanson concludes with discussions of the trial and execution of the four secondary conspirators, the subsequent squabbling over reward money, and the unfolding of the post-assassination lives of the drama's major personalities. Ably researched and seamlessly written, this engrossing book is recommended for all Civil War and Lincoln collections—and all libraries. —John Carver Edwards, Univ. of Georgia Libs.
Library Journal

[T]his nonfiction account of Booth's getaway as compelling as the best thrillers.... With a surfeit of detail at his disposal, Swanson weaves an absorbing tale in unadorned prose that critics greeted with unanimous approval.
Bookmarks Magazine

One of the more kinetic renderings of the Lincoln assassination, Swanson's synthesis of the sources is bound to be a cover-to-cover reading hit with history lovers.... Artfully arranging Booth's flight with the frantic federal dragnet that sought him, Swanson so tensely dramatizes the chase, capture, and killing of Booth that serious shelf-life (plus a movie version) awaits his account of the assassination. —Gilbert Taylor
Booklist

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Discussion Questions 
Use our LitLovers Book Club Resources; they can help with discussions for any book:

• How to Discuss a Book (helpful discussion tips)
• Generic Discussion Questions—Fiction and Nonfiction
• Read-Think-Talk (a guided reading chart)

Also consider these LitLovers talking points to help get a discussion started for Manhunt: 

1. Swanson tells part of his story through Booth's voice, which as a novelistic technique encourages readers to identify with a character. Do you think that Swanson makes Booth a sympathetic antihero?

2. In the above interview (under Author Bio), Swanson suggests that we have gained enough distance from Lincoln's assasination to create a certain "myth" surrounding Booth. Will that ever be true for Lee Harvey Oswald...or the 9/11 perpetrators? Does distance from an event create a certain mythology? Does it create a more objective lens through which to view an event?

(Questions by LitLovers. Please feel free to use them, online or off, with attribution. Thanks.)

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