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The Hunt for John Wilkes Booth Goes On: Manhunt,” a new television miniseries, depicts the pursuit of Lincoln’s killer. But the public appetite for tales about the chase began even as it was happening.

“Manhunt,” a new television miniseries, depicts the pursuit of Lincoln’s killer. But the public appetite for tales about the chase began even as it was happening.

A War Department handbill headed “Appeal to the Colored People” announced, “The pistol from which he met his death, though held by Booth, was fired by the hands of treason and slavery.” Lincoln’s assassination, as Townsend reported, was part of a wider plot to decapitate and incapacitate the federal government. Nor has there been a film of Geraldine Brooks’s Pulitzer Prize-winning 2005 Civil War novel, “ March,” an exquisitely unsettling upending of “Little Women.” And there doesn’t appear to be any upcoming adaptation of Karen Joy Fowler’s 2022 novel, “ Booth,” long-listed for the Booker Prize, a book that is to Swanson’s “Manhunt” what “Little Dorrit” is to an episode of “Law & Order: Special Victims Unit.” On bloody actions, the rude scene may end, / And darkness be the burier of the dead!” Long after Lincoln’s death, as one tale has it, Edwin Booth opened his brother’s trunk and found inside theatrical costumes that had belonged to John Wilkes and their father, many stitched by his mother.

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