Immediately after the assassination of Abraham Lincoln, suspicion naturally fell on Confederate leaders as being responsible for the great crime. The belief in their complicity faded when the case against Jefferson Davis and other unindicted co-conspirators collapsed at the trial of John Wilkes Booth's action team (Booth was dead) in May and June, 1865. The belief then hibernated for 123 years, during which period the prevailing wisdom was that Booth had in fact acted with the help of no one other than his team, with the possible exception of Dr. Samuel Mudd and Mary Surratt.

In 1988, however, assassination historians James O. Hall, William A. Tidwell and David Gaddy thoroughly discredited the simple conspiracy theory in their seminal work Come Retribution, holding that the original suspicions were right after all. In 1995, Tidwell followed with a solo titled April '65 in which he strengthened the case against Confederate leaders. The authors' conclusions quickly gained acceptance by many experts in the field, including the author of this work, which is intended to remove any remaining doubt as to the validity of the theory. It does so by describing in detail four subplots in the overall plot to murder the President, subplots that demonstrate unequivocally that Booth was merely a pawn in the hands of far more powerful, influential and purposeful men than he, men whose backs were to the wall and who would therefore stop at nothing to avert the catastrophe that they had fought four long years to prevent and that was now upon them.