Bloody Crimes

On April 2, 1865, Jefferson Davis, president of the Confederacy, gets a telegram from General Robert E. Lee: there is no more time, and the Yankees are coming. Before midnight he boards a train out of Richmond. Union cavalry set out to track him down.

Two weeks later Abraham Lincoln is assassinated, and the North becomes convinced that Davis had a hand in the plot. Davis is now a wanted man with a $100,000 bounty on his head, branded a murderer where before he had been called a traitor.

The book runs two stories side by side. One follows the pursuit and capture of the fugitive Confederate leader. The other follows Lincoln's death, his autopsy and his White House funeral.

Lincoln's body then travels by special train on a 1,600-mile route to Springfield. More than a million Americans view his face along the way, and several million more watch the train pass. It is the largest funeral pageant in American history.

The narrative moves between a manhunt and a national funeral. It follows Davis through captivity, where he begins to be turned into a martyr of the South's Lost Cause.