'Our President! Our President is shot! Catch him!' On April 14, 1865, Good Friday, the Civil War claimed its ultimate sacrifice when Abraham Lincoln was fatally shot at Ford's Theatre. President Lincoln Assassinated!! recaptures the dramatic and terrifying immediacy of Lincoln's murder and the coordinated attack on Secretary of State William H. Seward, the hunt for the conspirators, their military trial, and the unprecedented national mourning for our first martyred president. The story is told through more than eighty original documents - eyewitness reports, newspaper articles, medical records, trial transcripts, speeches, letters, diary entries, and poems - by more than seventy-five participants and observers, including the assassin John Wilkes Booth, Everton Conger, the detective who tracked him down, and Boston Corbett, the soldier who shot him. Courtroom testimony exposes the chilling details of the plot to kill the president; diary entries by Sarah Morgan, Emma LeConte, and Mary Chesnut record the conflicted response of white Southerners; poems by Walt Whitman, Herman Melville, and Julia Ward Howe give eloquent voice to fear and grief; and two insightful speeches by Frederick Douglass - one of them never before published - reveal his evolving assessment of Lincoln's legacy. Masterfully orchestrated by historian Harold Holzer, these perspectives combine to reveal the full panorama of one the most stunning and tragic events in our history. An unprecedented firsthand chronicle of the crime that changed American history. 'With the deft mastery we have come to expect from him, Harold Holzer compiles a vivid, riveting, and at times profoundly moving narrative of the immediate reaction to perhaps the greatest cataclysm in American history, and of the sudden and unexpected need to come to terms with the death of the complicated man at the center of it, Abraham Lincoln.

' Ken Burns, Filmmaker 'As it moves between Washington and the American heartland, from the crime itself to all the mourning and retribution it engendered, this gathering of essential documents and eye-popping curiosities recreates Lincoln's murder with an extraordinary you-are-there vividness. I cannot think of another anthology - on any subject - that has been assembled with such narrative power and urgency.' Thomas Mallon, author of Henry and Clara 'The national tragedy that brought the Civil War to its appalling climax takes on new life and meaning in this remarkable compilation.' Stephen W. Sears, author of Landscape Turned Red.