This is interesting especially to query our lost causes about.
The Number 1 book was Brad Meltzer and Josh Mensch’s new book
The Lincoln Conspiracy: The Secret Plot to Kill America’s 16th President-and Why It Failed. You may ask yourself: “It failed? So why do people visit Ford’s Theater?” This book is not about THAT assassination plot. It is about the 1861 Baltimore Plot. I have not read the book yet, but it has garnered generally good reviews. Here is how the
Washington Post described the book:
Drawing from contemporaneous accounts and biographies of the central characters, Meltzer and Mensch use Lincoln’s two-week journey by train from his home in Illinois to his under-cover-of-darkness arrival in Washington as a gripping narrative to revisit the discovery of the assassination plot and the frantic efforts to prevent its success.
In their briskly paced telling — each of the book’s 81 chapters is just a few pages long — the authors provide a robust historical framework and explain how a figure named Cypriano Ferrandini, a barber to Baltimore’s elite and a staunch supporter of the slaveholding South, would come to be seen as the lead organizer of this murderous plot. While Lincoln is waving to whistle-stop well-wishers in the North, Pinkerton and his detectives operate undercover in proslavery Baltimore and join secret Confederate societies to learn more about the threat.
Also an underappreciated story IMHO.
Number 6 is
Union: The Struggle to Forge the Story of United States Nationhood by Colin Woodard. David Blight reviewed the book in the
Washington Post, writing: