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

Lincoln's Last Trial: The Murder Case That Propelled Him to the Presidency: The Murder Case That Propelled Him to the Presidency by Dan Abrams
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

You can see how this book was put together. The author did a prodigious amount of research to put this together. He had a good place to start. The trial in focus was one of the first in downstate Illinois that had a trial transcript. It wasn’t complete in our sense of modern court transcripts – the closing arguments weren’t captured – but the trial, with teams of lawyers on both sides, was captured in detail. The authors then researched the people involved in the trial, from the judge to the witnesses to the court crier, if I heard that right (sounded like a court bailiff to me). The author researched to a deep level. We learn that the crier used a different, somewhat unique call to order for court. We learn of some of the other travelers in town that could have met up with the principals in the story. We learn about the times – a townsman suggests a visitor tour Springfield’s top tourist attraction, the town stables, from where the Donner party departed. And you get Lincoln, a towering presence in the book, in the trial and in the many anecdotes that are included to give life to the story.

The author took this research and created a story that included the trial, but also included background and tangential anecdotes, all added to the story. It becomes a whole story, but with a few odd tangential bits that added to the flavor but detracted from the flow. You end up with a very readable book, cinematic in description. Lincoln really stands out. As presented, his character would make an excellent lawyer in a legal drama on TV. -smart and pithy. You get these interesting characters, but you also get the legal dual. At one point, you see Lincoln’s side pulls recent relevant case law, then you see the opposition finding older case law to cite. Quite a bit of the story turns on the ability of Lincoln to think ahead of his opponents and to use what we would now call “persuasion techniques” to sway the judge and jury.

I listened to this audiobook, and found it very easy to listen to and to follow. But given this was a history book with plenty of conjectured events and conversations, I would have appreciated the paper version if it had plentiful footnotes to call out those conjectures from the record. Given the base story and how the author made it interesting, I look forward to more by this author.


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