What if John Wilkes Booth were tried for assassinating Abraham Lincoln? Fleeing south after shooting President Lincoln, John Wilkes Booth was cornered in a barn in Virginia and mortally wounded when he refused to surrender to pursuing federal cavalrymen. His death some hours later denied the nation a trial that might have revealed his motives and possible links to the Confederate government. In this riveting tale, historian William L. Richter continues his study of what Booth believed he was accomplishing in figuratively firing the last shot of what the South called the War for Southern Independence. The reader is taken through a trial where Booth is prevented from testifying on his own behalf under the rules of law in that time. Never one to take second billing, the actor turned avenger manages to smuggle his version of events out of the Washington Arsenal prison and into the pages of the national press before the trap on the scaffold drops to put an end to this "what if" episode in American History.