Bloody Crimes: The Chase for Jefferson Davis and the Death Pageant for Lincoln's Corpse

On the morning of April 2, 1865, Jefferson Davis, president of the Confederacy, received a telegram from General Robert E. Lee. There is no more time—the Yankees are coming, it warned. Shortly before midnight, Davis fled the capital, setting off an intense and thrilling chase in which Union cavalry hunted the Confederate president.

Two weeks later, President Lincoln was assassinated, and the nation was convinced that Davis was involved in the conspiracy that led to the crime. To the Union, Davis was no longer merely a traitor. He became a murderer, a wanted man with a one-hundred-thousand-dollar bounty on his head. Davis was hunted down and placed in captivity, the beginning of an intense and dramatic odyssey that would transform him into a martyr of the South's Lost Cause. Meanwhile, Lincoln's final journey began when soldiers placed his corpse aboard a special train that would carry the fallen president through the largest and most magnificent funeral pageant in American history.

The saga that began with Manhunt continues with the suspenseful and electrifying Bloody Crimes. James Swanson masterfully weaves together the stories of two fallen leaders as they made their last expeditions through the bloody landscape of a wounded nation.

The Washington Post - John C. Waugh

This marvelous book is the story of President Abraham Lincoln's long journey home to Illinois following his assassination at Ford's Theater. And it is the parallel story of Confederate President Jefferson Davis's sorrowful journey into captivity after the war…these two journeys are rivetingly told, in absorbing, meticulous detail. Bloody Crimes is a book about death, but it exudes life. Drawing liberally on firsthand accounts, Swanson covers these dramatic parallel journeys day by day, shifting from one to the other in gripping counterpoint.