George Alfred Townsend

From the hour the author stood by the dead face of Abraham Lincoln, in the Executive Mansion at Washington, he has had the idea of writing a romance upon the conspiracy of Booth. Like many such literary projects nursed by a journalist, this one had not only to be postponed, but finally to become a portion of a broader story, because too many of the actors in the tragedy still lived, and the mere crime presented no elevated moral to justify its embellishment. Considering it, however, as one of a series of cumulative acts of violence committed upon or from the soil of Maryland during the conflict of Emancipation, the author felt not only an epic propriety to be in the theme. -- George Alfred Townsend Gapland, Md., 1886