This is an unusual old book. This is not a reproduction. The original manuscript was not published until nearly 100 years after the death of the author. This book was published in 1975 Alfred A. Knopf, New York. The book measures 6 ½ inches by 9 ½ inches and contains xxxii, 492 plus xvi pages. The dust jacket is in very good condition. The book cover consists of paper covered hard boards and cloth covered spine. The title is in gilt on the spine and the name of the author is in gilt on the front. The cover shows no signs of wear to speak of. The pages show no signs of rips. Exceptions noted, the overall condition of the book is very good.

Excerpt - Dust Jacket:
Published now for the first time, almost seventy-five years after the author’s death, the extraordinary eye witness account by the young friend of John Surratt who was a border at Mary Surratt’s rooming house in Washington during the months when Mrs. Surrratt, John Wilkes Booth, and the others shaped their plot. Weichmann, then twenty-two, 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. “From the day I gave testimony,” he writes, “I have been subjected to an infamous persecution.” 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 On the other hand, many distinguished people who were close to the events supported young Weichmann and years later commented enthusiastically on his then unpublished manuscript.

Although not a professional historian, Weichmann as a storyteller is irresistible. In this book, answering his persecutors, he relates the entire story as he would have liked to have told 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 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.

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.
End excerpt

John Wilkes Booth, from a carte de visite

Top Left: A.C. Richards, 1865 & Louis J. Weichmann, 1865
Bottom Left: The Navy Yard Bridge, Washington, D.C., on Booth’s escape route
Right: Booth’s escape route, as illustrated in Pitman

Booth himself stated that he had attended Lincoln’s second inaugural on March 4, 1865: “What an elegant chance I had to kill the President on Inauguration Day if I wished.” Some scholars find the other conspirators there too: (1) Herold; (2) Atzerodt; (3) Spangler; (4) Payne, in Stetson-like hat; (5) Surratt, in gray suit; (6) Booth.

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