America's Original Sin

"This unique book combines Rhodehamel's intriguing insights with the excellent characterizations and top-tier research that have always distinguished his work."

"By emphasizing John Wilkes Booth's devotion to white supremacy and the depth of his rage at Abraham Lincoln's public call for black voting rights, Rhodehamel shows why the sixteenth president should be regarded as a martyr to African American civil rights."

"America's Original Sin offers an engaging and (unfortunately) very timely review of the life of John Wilkes Booth and his assassination of Abraham Lincoln. By emphasizing Booth's racism and devotion to white supremacist politics as the keys to his murderous deed, the author challenges the widespread notion that Booth was either simply a madman or an overzealous Southern partisan. Presenting this argument in an engagingly well-written narrative history, Rhodehamel has done a great service by bringing this point to a wide audience. An important and powerful book."

"Driven by a love of the South and a zealous belief in slavery and white supremacy, John Wilkes Booth proceeds on a collision course with the Union commander-in-chief and author of the Emancipation Proclamation in the pages of this gripping dual biography of the president and his assassin."

"John Rhodehamel has been responsible for much scrupulous, evocatively crafted scholarship on the Lincoln assassination and its aftermath, and America's Original Sin is yet another hypnotic, thought-provoking, and elegant look at that fraught period of American history. Rhodehamel not only transports us back to the dramatic period leading up to and following the president's murder, but he also presents mesmerizing character portraits of John Wilkes Booth and his complicated family, friends, and accomplices. Most important of all, this book presents the Lincoln murder plot as it should be remembered: not a theatricalized act of madness, but as a sinful effort to sustain white supremacy and prevent or postpone the march toward equal rights in America. This page-turner is destined to occupy an essential place on the history bookshelf."