| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 96.1

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| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 96.1 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

The Assassin's Accomplice: Mary Surratt and the Plot to Kill Abraham Lincoln. By Kate Clifford Larson. (New York: Basic, 2008. xx, 263 pp. $26.00, ISBN 978-0-465-03815-2.)

Just in time for the 2009 bicentennial of Abraham Lincoln's birth, readers are being treated to a flurry of new books that revisit all aspects of his life. Some promise welcome reconsiderations of topics such as Lincoln's views on race and reconstruction, his depressive personality, and even his stormy marriage to Mary Todd. Some are controversial, and others offer an updated synthesis of familiar terrain. In The Assassin's Accomplice, Kate Clifford Larson's contention that Mary Surratt was no innocent victim but a wise and wily co-conspirator of John Wilkes Booth promises to open a fresh line of inquiry in the well-mined field of Lincolnania. Casual readers will find Larson's introduction to this lesser-known nineteenth-century villain, the only woman to be convicted in the plot to kill the president, accessible and enjoyable. But while Larson does a fine job filling in Surratt's biography and convincingly links her to Booth and those with whom she would ultimately share a scaffold, the book offers period enthusiasts and scholars little that is new.

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