At intervals in his abbreviated life, John Wilkes Booth (1838-1865) apparently pictured himself as a man of destiny—although when, on one occasion, he exclaimed, “I must have fame,” he was presumably thinking of the family craft (acting) and not murder. But like so many of the memories that crowd this “comprehensive” biography, Booth’s sense of fate is unverifiable. He had once been told by a fortune-teller that he had a “bad hand” and would die early; but such predictions are routine stock-in-trade for charlatans.
Booth grew up in rural Maryland, near Baltimore, the son and brother of distinguished Shakespearean actors. During the Civil War, he pursued acting jobs in the north and west, eluding service in the cause about which he claimed to be passionate. He had earlier attached himself to a Virginia militia, the Richmond Grays, for the chase, arrest, and execution of John Brown. In 1864, after quitting his brief professional career on the stage, he assembled his first band of conspirators. Their aim was to kidnap Abraham Lincoln as he rode, sometimes alone, between the White House and the Soldiers’ Home, and spirit him to Richmond as a hostage for the release of thousands of Confederate prisoners of war whose exchange had fallen afoul of North-South differences over the classification of Union troopers. Booth was then in his mid-20s.
Just when he abandoned the kidnapping plot and yielded to darker personal impulses, it is difficult to say—although he had begun stalking Lincoln around the time of his Second Inaugural, increasingly obsessed with the president’s racial policies and his “tyrannical” direction of the war. For his final act, Booth recruited two co-conspirators, who were simultaneously to attack Secretary of State William Seward and Vice President Andrew Johnson. The latter assailant got cold feet and ran away, while the first succeeded in wounding (but not killing) the bedridden Seward, who was recovering from a carriage accident.
In many personal aspects, this dark story is necessarily speculative, recollections jarred from fading or fallacious memories by Booth’s stunning crime. That, in fact, is the major historiographical handicap of this otherwise interesting and well-documented book, a substantial portion of which would have to be classed as hearsay. And of course, when Sergeant “Boston” Corbett’s impulsive shot into a burning barn on the Garrett farm in Virginia killed Booth, it removed the prime witness from interrogation.
Nonetheless, Booth’s stage career, in particular, offers tempting matter for speculation. He enjoyed the advantages of a family tradition, along with celebrated good looks and voice, although some dyslexia (as it would now be called) handicapped his handwriting and powers of memorization. His most suggestive theatrical experiences were in Shakespearean roles, as Richard III (a specialty), Hamlet (he stole the show as the prince of Denmark in St. Louis), and, most crucially, as Marc Antony in Julius Caesar. These roles raise intriguing questions: Both Hamlet and Julius Caesar hinge on assassination, and Shakespeare’s Richard III is a byword for cynical viciousness.
Terry Alford is aware of these collateral but, finally, unanswerable questions. Who, indeed, has ever persuasively explored the mind of an assassin? Perhaps the issue boils down to this: Might an impressionable young actor of turbulent temperament, with madness and alcoholism in the family background, set stage identities aside for a “real” identity when the footlights fade? There is, notes Alford, a phenomenon in stagecraft known as the “empty vessel” syndrome; maybe Booth had more than his share of filling.
Unquestionably, the manner and staging of Lincoln’s murder were, in notable particulars, theatrical. It took place on Good Friday, the mythic day of crucifixion. After firing the fatal shot, Booth leapt from the presidential box to the stage of Ford’s Theatre—where, at least once, he had played before Lincoln—brandishing a knife and shouting “Sic semper tyrannis!” (“Thus ever to tyrants!”) to color his act with imagined patriotic purpose. One also wonders, though the author overlooks, what subliminal suggestion the fiery lyrics of the Maryland state anthem (Avenge the patriotic gore / that flecked the streets of Baltimore. . . . The tyrant’s heel is on thy shore) might have had on the assassin’s state of mind. As usual in the face of an atrocious act, associates, family, and friends professed themselves stunned that such a nice young man would do such a cruel thing—a cliché that lives on whenever television reporters speculate on motive after some mad act of mass murder.
Alford’s perceptive book reaches more solid ground in its account of the sequel to the murder. Booth bluffed his way through military checkpoints across the Potomac into southern Maryland, where Dr. Samuel Mudd set his broken leg. He hid in swampy woodlands for some 10 days with a single companion while sounds of the intense manhunt were often heard in the distance. Finally, he managed to cross the Potomac River to the Garrett farm in nearby Virginia, where a cavalry unit found him. Corbett’s gunshot—God, he explained, told him to fire—severed Booth’s spine at the neck and condemned him to painful suffocation. His corpse was taken to Washington and buried unceremoniously beneath the storeroom floor of the Old Penitentiary building, where his co-conspirators were tried and hanged. Four years later his family was allowed to rebury him in Baltimore.
The elaborate mourning ritual for the martyred president is a matter of familiar legend a century-and-a-half later. The larger historical echoes of Booth’s act were, from his perspective, entirely perverse, earning him not fame but infamy, even in parts of the South. He saw a few out-of-date newspapers before his death, and all echoed that verdict. He had, moreover, done the dying Confederacy no favor; to the contrary, the most drastic effects were on the pending work of peacemaking and reunion.
Lincoln’s inept successor initially exacerbated the national rage by giving credence to the canard that Confederate officials had connived in, if not indeed plotted, the president’s murder. Johnson, who loathed the Southern planter and professional classes, also harped on charges of “treason.” Those allegations enjoyed the usual vogue among the parlor soldiers in Congress but were denied any judicial test.
Johnson soon receded from his accusations and tried to ensure some due process. But he lacked the force or finesse to follow Lincoln’s generous mandate to “let ’em up easy.” His clumsy try at rapid reconstruction brought leading Confederates temporarily back to prominence, infuriating the congressional radicals and inspiring them to try to purge Johnson from office by a political impeachment. Meanwhile, in 1868, the same congressional faction commenced the punishment of the seceded states as “conquered provinces,” and this vindictive treatment inflicted more lasting resentment than defeat itself. The horrors of “Radical Reconstruction,” substantially exaggerated notwithstanding some solid revisionist history, remain lodged in popular myth—a dark memory yet to be expunged.
Constitutionally speaking, John Wilkes Booth’s act had the effect of largely confining the postwar examination of Lincoln’s official stewardship of the Constitution to scholarly literature. Only there, and only in scattered instances, was there any searching evaluation of Lincoln’s huge expansion of presidential powers. Lincoln the agile lawyer adroitly rationalized quite extraordinary executive measures as essential exercises of war powers, identifying what Booth viewed as “tyrannical” as mere normal precedent. Succeeding wartime presidents have not been slow to follow. This was, perhaps, the crowning irony of Booth’s heinous and destructive crime.
Edwin M. Yoder Jr. is a former editor and columnist in Washington.
