The Lincoln Conspiracy: The Secret Plot to Kill America's 16th President--and Why It Failed

Brad Meltzer and Josh Mensch, authors of The First Conspiracy about a plot against George Washington, examine a lesser-known assassination attempt on Abraham Lincoln in The Lincoln Conspiracy. While Lincoln's 1865 assassination is widely known, few are aware of an earlier conspiracy in 1861 to kill him as he traveled to Washington, D.C., for his first inauguration. Members of a white supremacist secret society opposed to an abolitionist president planned to assassinate the President-elect in Baltimore as his inauguration train passed through the city. Detective Allan Pinkerton investigated the plot by infiltrating the group with undercover agents, including Kate Warne, one of the first female private detectives in America. Had the assassination succeeded, Lincoln would never have become president, and the course of the Civil War and American history would have been fundamentally different.