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

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. After the trial, many in Washington doubted Weichmann's testimony and some indeed believed that he may have gained immunity by turning state's evidence against fellow conspirators. Weichmann felt the public suspicion profoundly; his entire life came to be dominated by the accident of his sojourn in the Surratt House and by what he witnessed there. In this book, answering his persecutors, he relates the entire story as he would have like to have told it at the trial - and as, with his Victorian attitudes and his sense of mystery, melodrama, and self-justification, he was finally compelled to tell it. A fascinating account, whose extraordinary cast that includes John Wilkes Booth, Mary E. Surratt, John H. Surratt, Michael O'Laughlin, Samuel Arnold, George A. Atzerodt, Lewis Payne, David E. Herold, Dr. Samuel A. Mudd, Edward Spangler, and Louis Weichmann himself. Floyd E. Risvold has annotated this manuscript, which had been in Weichmann's family since his death in 1902, and has added an appendix of important, hitherto unpublished material. Weichmann's story now becomes part of the vast and accumulating historical data on one of the most dramatic and tragic episodes in American history.