Bloody Crimes

Includes the stories of two fallen leaders counterpoised, their final journeys shaping their legends among a wounded nation and throughout a bloody landscape.

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On the morning of April 2, 1865, Jefferson Davis, president of the Confederacy, received the telegram from General Robert E. Lee. There is no more time - the Yankees are coming. That evening, shortly before midnight, Davis boarded a train from Richmond and fled the capital. But in two weeks time, John Wilkes Booth would assassinate the president, and the nation was convinced that Davis was the mastermind of the crime. No longer merely a traitor, Davis became a murderer, a wanted man with a one-hundred-thousand-dollar bounty on his head. Over the course of several weeks, Union cavalry led an intense and thrilling chase through the Carolinas and Georgia. Davis' final journey into captivity, with its moments of great suffering and intense drama, transformed him into a martyr of the South's Lost Cause. Another man was also undergoing his last journey. Abraham Lincoln's final sojourn began on April 19 after the White House funeral. From there a solemn procession escorted him to the Capitol rotunda, where tens of thousands of mourners viewed him in death. This was just the beginning.
On April 21, one week after he was shot, four-hundred soldiers escorted him to the Baltimore and Ohio railroad depot and placed him aboard the special train that would carry him home on the nearly 1,700 mile trip to Springfield. By the time it was over, Lincoln's corpse had been unloaded from the train 10 times and placed on public view in all the great cities of the North between Washington and Springfield, making it the largest, most elaborate, and magnificent funeral pageant in American history. The saga that began with Manhunt continues with the exciting and suspenseful "Bloody Crimes" and with the stories of two fallen leaders counterpoised, their final journeys shaping their legends among a wounded nation and throughout a bloody landscape.