Court for Owls

The son of a Baptist preacher, Lewis Powell joined the Florida Jasper Blues to fight for the Confederacy in 1861. He soon had a fateful encounter with John Wilkes Booth and was drawn into the plot to kidnap Abraham Lincoln. In 1865 he was tried as a conspirator in the assassination of Lincoln, during which Powell attacked and wounded Secretary of State William Seward. From these facts and other scattered details of the life of Lewis Powell (alias Lewis Payne), Richard Adicks has constructed...