The author says he isn't sure the full story of Lincoln’s assassination will ever come out. New take on Lincoln's assassination

We know who killed Abraham Lincoln, but is there more to the story of John Wilkes Booth?

To explore that idea, David Stewart put aside the world of nonfiction that served him well on such books as “The Summer of 1787,” “Impeached” and “American Emperor” and entered the world of fiction in “ The Lincoln Deception.”


The novel explores the Lincoln assassination with a focus on a secret Rep. John Bingham took to his grave concerning a conspiracy to kill Lincoln to find out if there were others — and who? — behind Booth’s actions in 1865.

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Stewart says, “I walked around thinking about Bingham’s secret in my head for a couple of years, really intrigued by it, and I tried to figure out a way to write a book about it and the only way I could figure out how to do it was as a fictional treatment. … So I had to fabricate some of that, but a lot of the book is based on history and is true to it.”

Stewart doesn’t want to reveal exactly what that secret was. “If I just flat out and say it, people won’t want to read the book.” But he will say that “the standard view that John Wilkes Booth was the semi-deranged actor who thought it all up is silly. He had a conspiracy.”

He’s not sure the full story of Lincoln’s assassination will ever come out. “It’s one of the beauties of history — you never know. There are papers tucked away in people’s attics that turn up every now and then, so something could come to light.” Still, Stewart has a good idea why Lincoln remains in the American conscience.

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“First of all, he comes from nothing. He’s the classic American success story. Then he faces this impossible crisis, so it’s a great challenge on many levels and he’s victorious. The North wins. The Union is preserved. Then there are his words. We have had no other president who could speak with such compassion and with such power — and he didn’t have speechwriters. Those were his own words. And then finally, you have the martyrdom, the death.”

As for Stewart’s switch to the fiction world, he says that “there was a liberating quality to it that was just a tremendous amount of fun.”

Not that he could make everything up.

“There’s a saying in historical fiction: You can make a lot of stuff up, but Lincoln has to be tall.”

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Abraham Lincoln