Lincoln's Last Trial: The Murder Case That Propelled Him to the Presidency

[David Lockmiller]

(08-15-2018 10:06 AM)David Lockmiller Wrote:  I got the book from the San Francisco Public Library by going on a waiting list for the first copies (I think that they ordered 11.)

I tried reading from the beginning and I thought it tedious.

There is only one good section that I found in the book.

I now believe that I may have been premature in my negative assessment of this book. I had been busy lately doing other things. I tried yesterday to renew the book and found I could not because of a waiting list to read the book. Accordingly, yesterday, I was going through the index and the book itself at random and found three very interesting story lines.

I found Blackstone Commentaries references in the index with about five entries and followed the story line which ran from Lincoln's "necessary" defense of the attack by his client based on the facts (which was not a good factual basis according to Blackstone) to the winning jury strategy of the court's instruction to the jury admitting hearsay evidence regarding the deceased man's final words of forgiveness for the defendant.

Stenographer Hitt's discussions with an intelligent man from the South regarding the "unkown" Lincoln in the South were extensive. This was really good. He was a man who "had grown up with servants in the big house, [but] he was perhaps intentionally unclear about whether they were paid help or slaves." He worked as an accountant for Wells Fargo and he was in Illinois at the time of the trial to explore the financial consequences of a proposed merger with the Butterfield Overland Company.

At the time, Lincoln was a still a dark horse for the presidency. Questions discussed very intelligently were: Was Lincoln a candidate the South could accept if not embrace? How far would a "country lawyer" be willing to go to keep the Union? If it came to it, would he fight?

And, Hitt's 12 term career in the U. S. House of Representatives may have been the result of his very personal relationship with Lincoln many years earlier.

I have to return the book tomorrow, but I am again going to put my name on the waiting list in order to read the book at a later date.