James Swanson's "Bloody Crimes": Cool Title, Cooler Tale

If historians Doris Kearns Goodwin and Douglas Brinkley endorse a book, as they did James Swanson’s latest historical thriller Bloody Crimes, that’s enough for Imus. And it should be enough for you.

Though Imus joked that Swanson, whose previous bestseller Manhunt focused on the 12-day chase for John Wilkes Booth, was “beating this Lincoln horse to death,” he was admittedly fascinated by the story Swanson tells in Bloody Crimes: The Chase for Jefferson Davis and the Death Pageant for Lincoln's Corpse.

Swanson opens the book by detailing Lincoln’s visit to Richmond just a day-and-a-half after Davis evacuated, calling it “one of the greatest of all Lincoln stories.”

“The city had been burned to the ground, abandoned by the Confederate Army,” Swanson said. “Lincoln landed in a little rowboat on a dock, and accompanied by just a handful of marines, he walked through the fallen Confederate capitol. It was the most dangerous thing an American President has ever done. Anyone could have shot him.”

Not only did Lincoln go to Richmond, but he walked to Davis’s house, sat in the chair in his study, and asked for a glass of water. But Swanson insisted the sixteenth President had not gone to Richmond to gloat.

“He went there for some sense of completion, to feel like the Civil War was finally over,” Swanson said. “The Confederate government was gone, they were dispersed, they were running away. It was really an incredibly dramatic moment in Lincoln’s life.”

Bloody Crimes centers on two journeys, Swanson explained: Davis leaving Richmond at the end of the Civil War, and Lincoln’s body traveling by train back to Springfield, Illinois. “I argue in the book that these final journeys of Lincoln and Davis, after they fell from power, is really as significant as the other great American journeys: the exploration of Lewis and Clark; the building of the transcontinental railroad; even the journey to the moon,” Swanson said. “Because what Davis and Lincoln did influences American history to this day.”

After Lincoln was assassinated, Swanson said Davis’s life in great peril. “Prior to Lincoln’s assassination, the hunt for Jefferson Davis was not intense,” Swanson said. Though he had not shot Lincoln, his involvement was widely assumed.

Especially considering that, in the wake of Lincoln’s death, “the North went crazy,” according to Swanson. Davis was not among the more than 200 people who were murdered in the streets, but, as Swanson pointed out, “The mood was for vengeance, and Davis is very lucky that during this incredible six-week chase, he didn’t encounter Union troops, who decided they were going to kill him when they caught him.”

Davis eventually surrendered in Georgia in 1865, but was not executed on the spot, as he feared he would be. Instead, he was imprisoned for two years, until the North decided bringing him to trial was too great a risk. Once free, Davis lived much of the rest of his life in seclusion, though Swanson noted he went on to “a great resurrection,” becoming “the living symbol of a lost cause” for Southerners.

“When old Confederate women dressed in black would lay hands on him, they would collapse at his feet,” Swanson said. “Old soldiers would touch him and begin trembling uncontrollably.”

As for Lincoln’s 1,600-mile funereal train journey from Washington, DC home to Springfield, Swanson called it “a catharsis” at the end of the Civil War. “To the Northern people, every father, every brother, every husband, every lover lost in the war was coming home on that train with Lincoln,” Swanson said.

Though he has no formal training as a writer, Swanson’s ability to lay out first Manhunt and now Bloody Crimes as suspense novels is uncanny, and he told Imus that he aims to make the reader feel like they’re reading a newspaper, having no idea what’s going to happen the next day.

To which Imus, who had conducted himself marvelously until this point, replied, “This is starting to be a little too much information.”

-Julie Kanfer