As the Civil War ends, journalist Harlan Pomeroy has not accomplished the purpose upon which he has been obsessing: to assassinate Abraham Lincoln. So he tries instead to ruin him in the press when a letter is found, signed by Karl Marx on behalf ot the Workingmen's Association of Europe, inside the stovepipe hat that is blown from Lincoln's head during a failed assasination attempt. The letter congratulates Lincoln on his re-election, and upon freeing the slaves. Pomeroy bases his published claim that Lincoln is a “socialist” who is using the Civil War to start a class war in America on this letter, arguing that the President is destroying States Rights, the rights of individuals to own property sanctifiedin the Constitution, and the rights of large businesses, just as he destroyed the rights of habea corpus and free speech, to further his own power grasping ends during the war.. Not a racist, Pomeroy is married to a free Black woman, but the results of his ideological campaign against Lincoln through a political movement Pomeroy has launched hold dire consequences for him that he could not have predicted. These occur as the reconstruction of the South is failing, after Lincoln's actual assassination by John Wilkes Booth; after Pomeroy is forced to go on the run because of his efforts to kill and then discredit Lincoln; and after the impeachment of Lincoln's successor, the alcoholic Andrew Johnson.l
