The Trial: the Assassination of President Lincoln and the Trial of the Conspirators.

The Trial: The Assassination of President Lincoln and the Trial of the Conspirators. Edited by Edward Steers Jr. (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, c. 2003. Pp. cvi, 421. $55.00, ISBN 0-8131-2277-5.)

This book does not make exciting reading. Only Lincoln assassination buffs will find it truly fascinating. The Trial is, however, a valuable resource. In it the University Press of Kentucky has reprinted the entire record of the military tribunal that convicted seven men and one woman of conspiring with John Wilkes Booth to murder Abraham Lincoln. The document was originally published in 1865 by Benn Pitman, the official recorder for the commission. Here, the trial record is supplemented with the "Lost Confession" of defendant George A. Atzerodt, something the tribunal never saw.

To these records editor Edward Steers Jr. has added twelve short essays by himself and other students of the assassination. One reviews the development of the case up to the taking of evidence. A second looks at the debate concerning the legality and propriety of using a military commission to try the defendants. A third examines the evidence supporting the prosecution's theory that the assassination was the product of a "general conspiracy" involving Confederate agents and top leaders of the Confederacy. There are also essays on General Order Number 100, which gave the military commission its jurisdiction and provided the basis for charging the defendants with violating the laws of war, and on John H. Surratt Jr., the eighth member of the conspiracy, who was a fugitive at the time of the 1865 trial and who was tried later in a civilian court.

Other essays examine the cases against each of the defendants in the military trial and against Booth himself. They contain parenthetical citations to the places in the record where evidence and arguments pertaining to those individuals can be found. Thus, these essays provide introductions that will guide anyone interested in evaluating the strength of the case against, for example, Mary Elizabeth Surratt or Samuel Alexander Mudd, to the relevant material in the record.

What they do not provide is a great deal of scholarship. This book does not include a bibliography embracing all of the writing on the Lincoln conspiracy. Nor, despite adding Atzerodt's confession to the trial record and thereby strengthening the prosecution's case, has Steers supplemented the record either with the clemency petition submitted by five members of the commission on behalf of Mary Surratt or with Booth's diary, both of which would raise doubts about the tribunal's decisions. Yet, strangely, few of the introductory essays forthrightly reach conclusions about the guilt or innocence of their subjects. The only ones to do so are Steers's piece on Atzerodt that maintains his guilt and Percy E. Martin's chapter on Samuel Arnold and Michael O'Laughlen, which contends that they plotted only to kidnap Lincoln, not to kill him. The evidence that Martin lays out indicates that Arnold might have had a withdrawal defense even to that charge, although probably an unsuccessful one because he did not communicate his wish to abandon the plot to all of the other participants. The proof offered by Steers and Laurie Verge leaves little room for doubt that Mudd and Mary Surratt, the two defendants whose cases have inspired the most historical controversy, were guilty as charged. The strength of the evidence against them makes it difficult to understand why Steers and Verge so studiously avoid pronouncing them guilty.

Also perplexing are Steers's discussions of the law of conspiracy. He expresses agreement with the assertion of prosecutor John A. Bingham that it does not matter whether Booth's original plot was to assassinate Lincoln and other top government officials or only to kidnap the president; in any event, Bingham contended, all of those involved would be guilty of conspiracy. It does matter, however, because the presidential proclamation that created the commission to hear the case gave it jurisdiction only over conspiracies of the former type. If Martin is right about Arnold and O'Laughlen, the commission had no authority to try them for plotting to kidnap the president. Since that activity was not in furtherance of an agreement to kill Lincoln, the commission also had no basis on which to convict them of that offense.

Besides its legal weaknesses, The Trial also lacks impressive historical scholarship. Still, it is an invaluable reference work and a book that anyone with a serious interest in the Lincoln conspiracy ought to own.

University of California, San Diego 

MICHAL R. BELKNAP