Murder - General & Miscellaneous, Presidents of the United States - Biography, 19th Century American History - Politics & Government - Presidents, Union - Civil War History

Moonlight

Name: Moonlight
Author: John Evangelist Walsh
ISBN: 9780312229221

by John Evangelist Walsh, John Walsh

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Overview

On August 29, 1857, in the light of a three-quarter moon, James Metzger was savagely beaten by two assailants in a grove not far from his home. Two days later he died and his assailants, James Norris and William Armstrong, were arrested and charged with his murder. Norris was tried and convicted first. As William "Duff" Armstrong waited for his trial, his own father died. James Armstrong's deathbed wish was that Duff's mother, Hannah, engage the best lawyer possible to defend Duff. The best person Hannah could think of was a friend, a young lawyer from Springfield by the name of Abraham Lincoln. Lincoln took the case and with that begins one of the oddest journeys Lincoln took on his trek towards immortality. What really happened? How much did the moon reveal? What did Lincoln really know? Walsh makes a strong case for viewing Honest Abe in a different light in this tale of murder and moonlight. Moonlight is a 2001 Edgar Award Nominee for Best Fact Crime.

Synopsis

Walsh makes a strong case for viewing Honest Abe in a different light in this tale of murder and moonlight.

Publishers Weekly

In Mason Country, Ill., in 1857, two young men, James Norris and William "Duff" Armstrong, waylaid a drunken older man with a big stick and a "slung-shot" (a form of blackjack). Days later he died, and the pair was charged with murder: Norris was swiftly convicted of manslaughter; Armstrong's trial was postponed for a change of venue. On his deathbed, Armstrong's father, Jack, committed his wife to secure the area's best lawyer for his son: a close friend from Jack's youth named Abraham Lincoln. Thus was Lincoln drawn into the biggest and strangest criminal trial of his career. Already quite famous inside Illinois, Honest Abe had built his courtroom reputation largely on civil practice, notably avoiding criminal defendants he thought were guilty; this trial was likely the major exception, and Walsh's painstaking dissection of it tries to provide both a surprising look at Lincoln and a brief piece of courtroom theater. The book largely succeeds as the latter; witness by witness, argument by argument, independent historian and biographer Walsh (Darkling I Listen: The Last Days and Death of John Keats) shows how Lincoln won an unlikely acquittal. One of his tactics was a masterful cross-examination. Another amounted to witness tampering, and arguably to suborning perjury. A key argument had to do with the time the moon set on the night of the beating: here Lincoln used an almanac (misleadingly) to discredit the prosecution's star witness. Otherwise assiduous biographers and historians, Walsh maintains, got nearly all the facts about the "almanac trial" at least slightly wrong: Lincoln didn't (as was later charged) doctor the almanac or use one from the wrong year--he didn't have to: his masterful, "glib, insinuating," tactics alone succeeded in getting his client cleared. Walsh ably shows how and why. Illus. not seen by PW. (June) Copyright 2000 Cahners Business Information.|

About the Author, John Evangelist Walsh

John Evangelist Walsh is the author of more than a dozen books of history and biography, including Midnight Dreary: The Mysterios Death of Edgar Allen Poe ; Unraveling Piltdown: The Science Fraud of the Century and Its Solution ; and The Shadows Rise: Abraham Licoln and the Ann Rutledge Legend.

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Editorials

From the Publisher

“A fascinating study of an intriguing case.” —Kirkus Reviews

“It is closely argued, painstakingly documented and nicely written. A slim volume, it nevertheless packs a lot of intriguing information...” —Arkansas Democrat-Gazette

“Although absolute proof is elusive after the dust of more than 140 years, Walsh's book is still fascinating reading since it proves that history is never as cut and dried as we might think and that all of our greatest heroes - such as Lincoln - were human and not without flaws.” —Arizona Daily Star

Publishers Weekly - Publisher's Weekly

Library Journal

The story of how Abraham Lincoln secured the acquittal of murder suspect William "Duff" Armstrong, the son of an old New Salem friend, by making use of an almanac to discredit a witness's description of the position of the moon on the night in question is part of Lincoln lore. The victim, James Metzger, had died from a beating suffered the night of August 29, 1857. Two men were charged in the beating death, and one, James Norris, was separately convicted before Duff Armstrong came to trial. The trial's story has gone through so many changes and twists that while readers think they know the history, they don't. So suggests Walsh (Midnight Dreary: The Mysterious Death of Edgar Allan Poe), who has made something of a career of probing legendary stories in search of their basis in fact. In the instance, Walsh debunks certain variations of the tale (including claims that Lincoln deceived the jury with a forged or altered almanac) while presenting a persuasive case that Lincoln may have been aware of his client's guilt. The result is a fascinating story that deserves retelling. For general and academic libraries.-Brooks D. Simpson, Arizona State Univ., Tempe

Kirkus Reviews

The true significance of the "Almanac Trial" is revealed by historical detective and novelist Walsh (Midnight Dreary, 1998, etc.) in this engrossing account of how history is made and lost. In November 1857, less than a year before the Lincoln-Douglas debates, the lawyer and would-be senator from Springfield, Illinois, received a request he felt he had to honor. It was the dying wish of an old friend, James Armstrong, that Lincoln represent his son, who was on trial for murder. Lincoln was not, in fact, an especially good criminal defense attorney: Walsh documents that, prior to the Armstrong case, when faced with a client's certain guilt, Honest Abe would either pull out of the defense or end up doing such a half-hearted job that the accused would get convicted anyway. One defense witness in the Armstrong case hinted broadly at the guilt of the defendant by stating that "he knew too much" to be of much use and, after the trial, told a juror that he had seen the defendant commit the crime. (This last delicious tidbit was uncovered by an amateur historian 50 years later, but it has been hitherto ignored.) No one knows if Lincoln thought his client was guilty, but if he did, it didn't show. He gave his client a tough, artful defense, which included consulting an almanac to discredit a prosecution witness who claimed that he saw the murder clearly because the moon was high in the sky. (The almanac showed that the moon was lower on the horizon.) In considering what Lincoln might have known about the case, Walsh wonders, "which is more in order for what he did, censure or sympathy?" But his telling of the conflict between honesty and loyalty thatLincolnlikely faced is clearly sympathetic. Perhaps it is simply the contemporary climate that leads Walsh to ask this question—as if the story he has told is not interesting enough. A fascinating study of an intriguing case. (15 pages of photos)