Moonlight: Abraham Lincoln and the Almanac Trial (Hardcover)

~ (Author) "It was a few minutes before midnight, the last curved sliver of a three-quarters moon about to slip below the horizon, when Press Metzger arrived..." (more)
Key Phrases: wagon hammer, pardon files, travel vouchers, New Salem, Charles Allen, Mason County (more...)

Editorial Reviews

From 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 yearAhe 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.
Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From 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
Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 192 pages
• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan; First Edition edition (June 3, 2000)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0312229224
• ISBN-13: 978-0312229221
• Product Dimensions: 8.6 x 5.6 x 0.8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 14.4 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 2.8 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (8 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #397,865 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

11 of 13 people found the following review helpful:

1.0 out of 5 stars An embarassment to Lincoln scholarship, October 3, 2000

By A Customer

"Moonlight" by John Walsh is an embarassment to honest Lincoln scholarship. It is a book with enormous potential to illustrate one of Abraham Lincoln's most famous legal cases, but instead it weaves a narrative feculent with specious logic; the factual assertions of unknown, unknowable and unproveable theories; and assumption after assumption after assumption. Walsh proves some important points, and makes good use of some primary and secondary sources. He offers a detailed account of the murder, the trial and the outcome that cannot be found elsewhere. However, the positive attributes of the book become overshadowed by Walsh's outrageous assertions of supposition as fact, his assertions without qualification or citation, and his complete reliance, as unassailable proof and fact, on the second-hand interview of a trial juror 50 years after the trial. More than once Walsh makes unknowable and unproveable assertions, then admits he can't prove them, then dismisses this serious circumstance as unimportant. For example: "That the charge was levelled during Lincoln's senatorial campaign of 1858 is stated in many sources but I have not been able to document it." (p 155) "Moonlight" is a lost opportunity. The frighteningly childish writing quality, the fanciful indulgences, suppositions, specious logic, appearance of questionable sources and Walsh's own obvious insularity in his investigative objective, make this book a sham, and an insult to the field of historical research.

7 of 8 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Walsh overreaches, but provides a lively read, September 23, 2000

By	John Q. Murray (Elk Crossing Lodge, Montana) - See all my reviews

Walsh provides a great service by re-examining the best-known case in Lincoln's law career, and shows how it has often been misunderstood. But his thin book draws conclusions far beyond his ability to support them. And Walsh doesn't help his criticism of historians by misspelling every occurrence of the victim's name as Metzger (it appears as Metzker in his reproductions of the original handwritten documents).

In the almanac trial, Lincoln supposedly showed that a key witness could not have witnessed an assault by moonlight because the moon had already set. Walsh corrects the record: the bright moon was simply lower in the sky at the time of the attack. By having the witness confidently repeat, a dozen times, that the moon was directly overhead, Lincoln "floored" the witness when the almanac showed that the moon was on the horizon.

Walsh is at his best here, showing Lincoln's skill in taking a fact that actually helped the prosecution and making it appear that it helped the defense. But beyond discrediting the main witness, Walsh shows that Lincoln had two other important arguments. A doctor testified that another man's blow to the back of the head could have caused the frontal fracture, attributed to Lincoln's client. (The judge thought Lincoln won the case with this testimony.)

Lincoln's other defense involved the weapon, and this is where Walsh falls into his most specious reasoning. Walsh's claims are based on a letter from a juror some 50 years after the event. The juror had by then himself forgotten the gist of the moonlight argument and in the letter also gets it wrong (p.113-114). Walsh ignores this part of the letter, but extrapolates wildly from another sentence in the letter to claim that Lincoln suborned perjury. It is not persuasive.

Just to give you a flavor of his standard of proof: Walsh claims that he can prove that Lincoln *never* talked about the almanac case with law partner Billy Herndon. He then analyzes the few sentences about the case in Herndon's Life of Lincoln, where Herndon makes the common mistake, and from this Walsh concludes that his own assertion is "sufficiently proved" (p 79).

This would be a better book without the chip on Walsh's shoulder, criticizing historians and accusing Lincoln of nefarious wrong-doing. But just ignore the occasional shrillness. This book is well worth reading for the wealth of detail on a fascinating case that ties Lincoln, on the brink of national celebrity, with his humble Illinois beginnings with Jack Armstrong and the Clary Grove boys.

5 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Moonlight - Abraham Lincoln and the Almanac Trial, July 27, 2000

By A Customer

If John Walsh had set out to write historical fiction he would have been most successful. Mr. Walsh narration of the trial in the third chapter is superb and most believable.

However, as Mr. Walsh repeatedly points out himself, few other historians agree with him. According to Mr. Walsh, all other Lincoln scholars are either wrong or have been too lazy to gather the evidence that he has. What is more likely is that they refrain from the same wild conjecture that is put forth in Moonlight.

Moonlight is a worthwhile read on a topic of Lincolnia that is obscure indeed. Read it, but read is with a skeptical mind.