Author explores parallel stories of Lincoln, Davis

It's almost as if they are shimmering with history.

James Swanson likens the experience of tactile contact with the artifacts of his research in precisely this way. The pages of a diary or memoir are not lifeless sheaves of paper, nor are old photographs merely faded moments captured and forgotten.

"My ambition is to take my readers back in time, and to do that I feel I have to go there first," says Swanson, author of "Bloody Crimes: The Chase for Jefferson Davis and the Death Pageant for Lincoln's Corpse" (William Morrow). "The only way I know to do that, after I've read the newspaper accounts, diaries, memoirs and trial transcripts, is to then handle the original materials and artifacts, rather than mere copies on microfilm.

"There is no substitute. These historical objects have a resonance that still emanates from them 150 years later."

For Swanson, it is the first vital step in making a story come alive. And not just any story.

April 2, 1865. Jefferson Davis, president of the Confederate States of America, receives an urgent telegram from Gen. Robert E. Lee. The end is near. Flee Richmond immediately. Shortly before midnight, Davis boards a train and exits the capital. So begins a dramatic pursuit, with Union cavalry hot on his trail. This, despite the fact that his counterpart and adversary, President Abraham Lincoln does not really want him found.

Two weeks later, Lincoln falls to the assassin John Wilkes Booth. Many are convinced that a conspiracy had been afoot and that Davis was involved. The aftermath of Lincoln's murder transfixes a nation.

His final journey begins with his corpse being placed aboard a special train that will carry him home to Springfield, Ill., 18 days and 1,600 miles distant.

All along the route, more than a million Americans gaze upon the face of a man turned martyr. Millions more simply watch the funeral train go by.

Meanwhile, Davis is a wanted man with a $100,000 bounty on his head. Eventually, he is captured, the start of an odyssey of almost equal drama that will also render him a martyr of the South's Lost Cause.

In "Bloody Crimes," Swanson joins these two parallel tracks and propels them through the landscape of a wounded nation.

The author regards "Bloody Crimes" as the culmination of a saga he set in motion with his 2003 book, "Manhunt," the story of the final journey of Lincoln's assassin.

"By the time I finished that book, I realized the manhunt was one of three great final journeys that were taking place at the end of the war in April and May 1865. Lincoln and Davis were on their final journeys, too: Lincoln from mortal man to American political saint and Davis, though he was still alive, on his final journey to save his country and his cause. When I look back at all three stories, I do see this as a trilogy."

Yet Swanson initially considered writing two separate books, one about the Lincoln funeral and "death pageant" and another about the manhunt for Davis.

"As I began to do my initial research, I came to realize that these two stories had more in common than the mere fact that they were occurring at the same moment in time. Then I began to realize that Lincoln and Davis had a number of individual things in common and a number of similar experiences. Once I saw how many themes were connected, I decided to combine these stories of their final hours into one book.

"The stories became more exciting to me when I could see them in relief against each other, and the book began to take on a deeper resonance for me."

Swanson undertook the book with two principal aims.

"My primary goal was to take the reader back in time to feel what it must have been like to be alive during the fall of Richmond, that night at Ford's Theatre and during Davis' journey of escape. You want to make them come alive.

"The second goal was to remind people how amazing these long-forgotten stories are. I was surprised to learn how forgotten Jefferson Davis had become. We just don't think or read much about him any more. We certainly don't read his own memoirs, nor his letters. I'm happy that one of the things my book has done is to bring back to prominence a whole set of characters that have been forgotten. Davis is just one of them."

Davis is comparatively unknown to contemporary iconography of the war.

While Lincoln's stature grew monumentally in the years after the war, Davis' star soon was eclipsed. The irony, Swanson says, is that before the conflict Davis was very much a leading political figure: a hero of the Mexican War, a former congressman and senator.

"He was also one of best Secretaries of War in American history," Swanson asserts. "In experience, in education and in public service, Jefferson Davis had achieved far more than Lincoln before the Civil War began. Davis didn't suddenly appear out of nowhere to be president of the Confederacy. Yet his backstory has been largely forgotten."

Although Swanson, a thorough researcher, drew on a great wealth of original material -- the papers of Davis and Lincoln; the diaries, letters and memoirs written by the participants -- he wanted the reader to take away from the experience of the book something more elusive.

"I hope I have captured the sense of the personality of each man and hope that I have brought to light a number of characters who were lost to history almost since the war ended. It's from some of these more obscure characters that I obtained some of the best material for the book.

"Sometimes I find that the more fascinating material comes not from the lips of great generals and statesmen, but from the observations of less celebrated people, people on the sidelines of history. There recollections can be exciting. Finding new people is an exciting part of doing histories."