John Wilkes Booth

From Free net encyclopedia

Image:John w booth.jpg

John Wilkes Booth (May 10, 1838 – April 26, 1865) was an American stage actor. He is best known today as the assassin of President Abraham Lincoln.

Contents

[edit]

Background and early life

John Wilkes Booth was born to a family steeped in acting tradition in Bel Air, Harford County, Maryland in 1838 to Junius Brutus Booth and Mary Ann Holmes, both British Roman Catholics emigrants who arrived in 1821.

Booth was named after the British revolutionary John Wilkes, who the family claimed was a distant relative. In the Booth family, there is historical precedent for children being named after statesmen and assassins. Junius Booth was named after Marcus Junius Brutus, one of the assassins of Julius Caesar. Junius Booth had a reputation for being both a respected actor and a drunken eccentric. It is also quite likely that he was insane. The poet Walt Whitman eulogized Junius Booth in 1852 as thus: "There went the greatest and by far the most noble Roman of them all."

John's brother, Edwin, was, arguably, the most influential Shakespearean actor of his day; Lincoln saw him in four plays in eight weeks in 1864. Another brother, Junius Brutus Booth, Jr. followed his father and uncles into acting. He was married to the former Marion Agnes Land Rookes, a native Australian.

John Wilkes Booth appears to have had a happy childhood. He received an education in the classics and particularly in Shakespeare. In 1851, at age 13, Booth attended St. Timothy's Military Academy in Catonsville, near Baltimore, Maryland. It was there that Booth met two men named Samuel Arnold and Michael O'Laughlen, both of whom would later become his co-conspirators.

[edit]

Theatrical career

John Wilkes Booth made his stage debut in August, 1855, at the age of 17, when he played the Earl of Richmond in Shakespeare's Richard III. At his insistence, Booth was billed as "J.B. Wilkes," a pseudonym of his creation. Booth, although likely proud of his family's achievements in the acting profession, probably wanted to be judged as an actor on his own merits.

In 1858 he became a member of the Richmond Theatre, and his career started to flourish. He was once referred to in reviews as "the handsomest man in America." John Wilkes Booth stood about five feet, eight inches (1.73 m) tall, had jet-black hair, and was lean and athletic and was an adept swordsman; these abilities led him to become a very physical actor. A fellow actress once recalled that on occasion Booth accidentally cut himself with his own sword.

In 1859, John Wilkes Booth was preparing for a theatrical engagement in Richmond, Virginia a few weeks before the scheduled execution of abolitionist John Brown. In October, Brown had unsuccessfully raided the federal armory at Harpers Ferry, Virginia (now a part of present-day West Virginia) in an attempt to start a state-wide slave insurrection. Booth purchased a Richmond Gray militia uniform from state officers and proudly stood guard alongside the gallows as Brown was hanged.

[edit]

Abraham Lincoln

When Abraham Lincoln was elected president on November 6, 1860, Booth wrote a long speech that denounced what he saw as northern abolitionism, and made clear his strong support of the south and slavery.

On April 12, 1861, the Civil War began in earnest. Eventually, eleven southern states seceded from the Union. Booth was a native of Maryland, a border state whose government was pro-Union but also had a large slaveholding population that was strongly sympathetic to the Confederacy. Not helping Lincoln's reputation among pro-Confederacy Marylanders such as Booth was Lincoln's declaration of martial law throughout the state as well as bordering Washington, D.C. Many saw this as an unconstitutional act and an abuse of executive power.

Booth, like many Marylanders, came from a divided family. Most of his family were staunch Unionists, but Booth considered himself a southerner first and foremost. However, this did not stop him from promising his mother that he would not enlist in the Confederate Army. Instead, he lived out the war mostly in Washington D.C., traveling to locales in both Union-controlled and Confederacy-controlled states — and even as far west as Indiana. Booth was outspoken in his love for the south, and almost equally vociferous in his dislike for Abraham Lincoln. In fact, Booth was arrested in early 1862 in St. Louis, Missouri for making public statements against the Union and the president and was taken before a Provost Marshal. The actual outcome of his case is not known, but Booth was likely acquitted, as no record of his imprisonment there exists.

John Wilkes Booth and Abraham Lincoln once crossed paths, but there is no record that the men actually met face to face. On the evening of November 9, 1863, Booth was playing Raphael in Charles Selby's play, The Marble Heart at Ford's Theatre in Washington, D.C. Lincoln, an avid theater-goer, (with a fondness for Shakespeare), sat in the same presidential box where he would be murdered seventeen months later.

During the play, an angry Booth delivered a line of dialogue while simultaneously looking at the president and shaking a finger at him. Lincoln, for whatever reason, requested a meeting with Booth. Reportedly, Booth contemptuously declined.

Despite Booth and Ford's Theatre becoming inextricably linked in history, the actor would actually perform there only twice during his lifetime. The second performance was as Duke Pescara in The Apostate on March 18, 1865. Booth was not in the play Our American Cousin that Lincoln was watching when he was assassinated. The Apostate would become Booth's final performance. Even though Booth performed there only twice, he was a common presence at Ford's Theatre, particularly during the war. Owner John T. Ford and the Booth family were longtime close friends, and Booth's mail was often sent to the theater. Thus, to see the actor John Wilkes Booth there at any given time, even as a non-participant in a production, would not be unusual.

[edit]

Booth's ties to the Confederacy

In the summer of 1864, Booth met with several well-known Confederate sympathizers at Parker House in Boston, Massachusetts. In October, 1864 he made an unexplained trip to Montréal. At the time, Montréal was a hotbed of clandestine Confederate activities. Booth spent ten days in the city and stayed for a time at St. Lawrence Hall, a meeting place for the Confederate Secret Service, and he met at least one blockade runner there. It is possible that it was here that he also met Confederate Secret Service director James D. Bulloch (later an uncle to future president Theodore Roosevelt), as well as George Nicholas Sanders, a one-time United States ambassador to England and revolutionist who had once called for the assassination of French ruler Napoleon III.

There has been much scholarly attention and debate devoted to Booth being in Montréal at this particular time and his reasons for being there. No concrete evidence has ever been unearthed to link Booth's plots against Abraham Lincoln to a conspiracy involving any member of the actual Confederate government. However, this theory has been explored at length in two books: Nathan Miller's "Spying for America" and William Tidwell's "Come Retribution: The Confederate Secret Service and the Assassination of Lincoln".

Disputing the theory is a claim by John Wilkes Booth's sister, Asia Booth Clarke, in her memoirs, "The Unlocked Book", that Booth had told her that he was a civilian blockade runner for the Confederacy who also smuggled the drug quinine into Virginia.

[edit]

The plot to kidnap Lincoln

By 1864, the tide of the war had shifted heavily in the Union's favor. They had discontinued prisoner exchanges in an attempt to reduce the size of the Confederate army, and as retaliation for the summary executions of captured Afro-American soldiers. John Wilkes Booth began devising a plan to kidnap President Abraham Lincoln from his summer residence at the Soldiers' Home outside of Washington, D.C., smuggle him across the Potomac River and into Richmond, Virginia. According to Booth's plan, Lincoln would then be exchanged for Confederate soldiers held captive in Union prisons. He recruited his old friends Samuel Arnold and Michael O'Laughlin as accomplices. At this time, Booth had been also speculating in oil in Pennsylvania.

Booth began to devote more and more of his energies and finances to the kidnapping plot after President Lincoln's re-election in early November, 1864. He assembled a looseknit band of sympathizers which included David Herold, George Atzerodt, John Surratt, and Lewis Payne. They began to meet routinely at the boarding house of Surratt's mother, Mary.

On November 25, 1864, John Wilkes Booth performed for the first and only time with his two brothers, Edwin and Junius, in a single-engagement production of Julius Caesar at the Winter Garden Theater in New York City. It was a charity play; the proceeds went towards the creation and erection of a statue of William Shakespeare in Central Park that still stands today. However, the performance was interrupted by a failed attempt by clandestine Confederate forces to burn down several hotels in hopes they would lead to the destruction of the entire city using a method called "Greek fire". One of the hotels was next door to the theater, but the fire was quickly extinguished. The following morning, Booth argued bitterly with Edwin about Lincoln and the war.

Three months later, John Wilkes Booth attended Lincoln's second inauguration on March 4, 1865 as an invited guest of his secret fiancée Lucy Hale, whose father, John P. Hale, was Lincoln's ambassador to the nation of Spain. In the crowds below were Powell, Atzerodt, and Herold. There seems to have been no attempt to kidnap or assassinate Lincoln during the inauguration. Later, however, Booth remarked about "what a wonderful chance" he had to shoot Lincoln had he so chosen.

On March 17, Booth learned at the last minute that Lincoln would be attending a performance of the play ""Still Waters Run Deep"" at a hospital near the Soldier's Home. Booth ordered the band of conspirators to lie in wait on a stretch of road near the Soldier's Home in an attempt to kidnap Lincoln en route to the hospital. But the president never appeared. Booth later learned that Lincoln had changed plans at the last moment to attend a reception at the National Hotel in Washington, D.C., which, in yet another case of irony, was the residence of the actor John Wilkes Booth.

[edit]

The assassination

Coincidentally, Lincoln had visited Richmond, Virginia, the Confederate capitol, only seven days earlier (April 4), the day after it fell to Union troops. Lincoln traveled there, walked the streets with a small company of soldiers, accompanied by his 12-year-old son, Tad Lincoln. Lincoln visited the Confederate White House and sat in the chair of Confederate President Jefferson Davis. Lincoln did not return to Washington until April 8, after waiting four days for Robert E. Lee's army to surrender.

On April 10, 1865, after hearing the news that Gen. Robert E. Lee had surrendered at Appomattox Court House outside Appomattox, Virginia, a morose John Wilkes Booth told a man named Louis J. Weichmann, a boarder of Mary Surratt's he'd met through her son, John, that he was giving up acting and wanted to retire with a play called Venice Preserv'd, a play about an assassination plot.

On April 11, Booth was in the crowd outside the White House when President Lincoln gave an impromptu speech from his window. When Lincoln stated that he was in favor of granting suffrage to Negroes, an outraged Booth turned to a man named Lewis Powell and urged Powell to shoot the president on the spot. Powell refused. Booth vowed that it would be the final speech Lincoln would ever make.

On the morning of Good Friday, April 14, 1865, Booth heard that the president and the First Lady, Mary Todd Lincoln, along with General Ulysses S. Grant and his wife, Julia Grant would be attending the play Our American Cousin at Ford's Theatre.

John Wilkes Booth conceived of a plan to assassinate Lincoln and then make his escape. Also conceived at the time were plans for Lewis Powell to assassinate Secretary of State William Seward and for George Atzerodt to do likewise to Lincoln's vice president, Andrew Johnson.

Booth's plan was to make his way up to the presidential box armed with a handgun, and after the line of dialogue in the play, "well, I guess I know enough to turn you inside out, old gal, you sockdologizing old man-trap," was spoken, fire point-blank at the back of Lincoln's head.

David Herold's role was to assist in their escape into the now-former Confederacy.

By targeting not only the president, but his Constitutional successor and the most prominent anti-slavery member of Lincoln's cabinet as well, Booth's intent was to throw the Union government into a state of confusion, if not outright panic, thereby allowing the Confederacy to reconstitute and re-engage in warfare.

As stated previously, John Wilkes Booth's presence at Ford's Theatre, even though he was not a member of the cast of Our American Cousin, was not seen as unusual. Earlier in the day, Booth bored a spyhole into the presidential box, which would give him a view of the occupants.

That evening, a little past 10:00 p.m., John Wilkes Booth, armed with a .44 caliber Derringer, surreptitiously entered the presidential box and fired once at the back of Abraham Lincoln's head. A stunned guest of the president, Major Henry Rathbone, attempted to wrestle Booth to the floor, but Booth slashed at him with a dagger, and escaped.

The planned attempt on Andrew Johnson's life at Kirkwood House never came to fruition. However, it did on William Seward. Although Seward suffered multiple stab wounds, he survived due to a neck brace he was wearing while recuperating from a carriage accident that occurred on April 5. The accident left him with numerous serious bruises and other injuries, including a broken right arm and, most seriously, a concussion. Seward's jaw was also broken in two places. It is believed that the awkward neck brace protected his neck while the body support covered the upper part of his chest, thus protecting his heart.

According to legend, John Wilkes Booth jumped out of the presidential box and fell to the stage below, breaking his leg after it became entangled in an American flag which it snagged while Booth was airborne. However, this part of the assassination is disputed by researcher Michael Kauffman, who believes the broken leg story, which came from a diary entry attributed to Booth, is a fanciful dramatization concocted by Booth to save himself from historical embarrassment. Kauffman's belief is that the broken leg was due to Booth's horse falling over onto him during the escape.

As legendary as the broken leg story is, equally legendary is the confusion over what statements, if any, Booth made after shooting President Lincoln. Some witnesses claimed that Booth shouted "Sic semper tyrannis!" from the stage; others claim he said "The South is avenged!"

However, it is a historical fact that accomplice David Herold assisted the hobbled Booth to the home of Dr. Samuel Mudd, who set and splinted the fractured leg.

Pursued by twenty-six Union cavalrymen, Booth and Herold made their way through southern Maryland and across both the Potomac and Rappahannock rivers to the farm of Richard Garrett located near Bowling Green, Caroline County, Virginia.

Early on the morning of April 26, 1865, the soldiers caught up to them on Garrett's property. They had hidden themselves in his tobacco barn. A frightened David Herold surrendered, but Booth adamantly refused. Everton Conger, the man in charge of the pursuers, ordered the barn set afire. After a time, John Wilkes Booth exited the barn. However, the assassin would not survive the incident, for Sergeant Boston Corbett fired at Booth against orders. John Wilkes Booth was fatally struck in the neck. Soldiers dragged him to Richard Garrett's porch where he died, reportedly staring at his hands and muttering, "Useless! Useless!" The autopsy on Booth's body revealed that Corbett's shot had, in actuality, struck Booth's spinal cord.

Corbett was then himself arrested for disobeying a direct order. However, Secretary of War Edwin M. Stanton quickly dismissed the charges, saying: "The rebel is dead. The patriot lives." Boston Corbett received $1,653.85, his share of the reward.

[edit]

Aftermath

Several people were tried for their roles in the conspiracy to assassinate President Abraham Lincoln.

On May 1, 1865, new president Andrew Johnson ordered the formation of a nine-man military commission to try alleged conspirators Samuel Arnold, George Atzerodt, David Herold, Dr. Samuel Mudd, Michael O'Laughlin, Lewis Powell, Edman Spangler, and Mary Surratt. The trial began on May 10, 1865 with the boarder Louis J. Weichmann as the star witness for the prosecution.

The verdicts and the sentences:

• Samuel Arnold: guilty; imprisonment
• George Atzerodt: guilty; death by hanging
• David Herold: guilty; death by hanging
• Dr. Samuel Mudd: guilty; imprisonment
• Michael O'Laughlin: guilty; imprisonment
• Lewis Powell (tried as "Lewis Payne"): guilty; death by hanging
• Edman Spangler: guilty; imprisonment, 6 years
• Mary Surratt: guilty; death by hanging

Reportedly, Lewis Powell, as he was being led up to the gallows, pleaded for Mary Surratt to be spared. Many historians now believe her conviction and execution were a result of "guilt by association" and retribution stemming from a failed attempt to force her son, John Surratt, Jr. into surrendering to authorities to stand trial for his comparatively minor role in the assassination conspiracy. After several years on the run throughout North America and Europe under various aliases, Surratt was captured in Alexandria, Egypt. His trial ended in a mistrial, but before he could be tried again, the statute of limitations expired, forcing the government to free him. John Surratt, Jr. lived until 1916. Mary Surratt's daughter pleaded for commutation, and even the tribunal recommended such, but nonetheless, President Andrew Johnson signed her death warrant. She was hanged with Atzerodt, Herold and Powell.

Another, arguably, plausible theory for hanging Mary Surratt was due to discrimination against Catholics, which was, arguably, almost as pervasive as discrimination against Jews.

Less than two years later, Fort Jefferson, Florida, where Dr. Mudd was imprisoned, was struck by an outbreak of yellow fever, which also claimed the life of the fort's regular physician. Mudd stepped into the role and helped stem the spread — even saving the life of co-conspirator Samuel Arnold.

For this, Dr. Samuel Mudd was granted a pardon by Andrew Johnson on February 8, 1869. Johnson would also pardon Ford's Theater stagehand Edman Spangler, who promised to not reveal which way Booth and Herold went, a month later. Upon his pardon, Dr. Mudd gave Edman Spangler a five acre plot of land on his Maryland property. Spangler lived there until his death in 1875.

Incidentally, the origin of the phrase, "my name is mud," or alternately, "my name is Mudd," a lament of doom one directs at themselves that is usually attributed to Dr. Samuel Mudd is generally viewed as incorrect by linguists, who believe that the phrase preceded Dr. Mudd as a variation of the colloquial insult, "lower than dirt."

[edit]

Disposition of Booth's body

The corpse of John Wilkes Booth was taken first to the ironclad USS Montauk at the Washington Navy Yard for identification and autopsy. The body was then buried in a cell in the Old Penitentiary at the Washington Arsenal. In 1867, the body was exhumed, placed in a pine box, and locked in a warehouse at the prison. In 1869, the body was once again identified before being released to the Booth family, who buried it in an unmarked grave in the family plot at Greenmount Cemetery in Baltimore, Maryland.

Grave pictures at Maryland Ghosts

[edit]

Booth escape theories

Some believe that John Wilkes Booth escaped the tobacco barn at Garrett's farm, with a Booth double named James William Boyd dying in his place.

A few speculate that a cabal within the government concocted the assassination plot and supported Booth. However, most "conspiracy theorists" point to a group of angry bankers who were rebuffed by Abraham Lincoln when they offered to aid the Union's war efforts. When these bankers attempted to surreptitiously usurp the government's traditional duty of minting and circulating currency with the goal of selling the government their currency with exorbitant interest rates attached, Lincoln ordered the minting of non-interest-bearing notes. The angry bankers retaliated and saw an ideal assassin in John Wilkes Booth and plotted with him to kill the president. "Conspiracy theorists" claim that eventually, the bankers did gain control of minting United States currency with the signing of the Federal Reserve Act of 1913 by conspiring, at Jekyll Island, Georgia in 1910 to create a European-style banking system. Many supporters also claim that the reason President John F. Kennedy was himself assassinated ninety-eight years later was that he was going to abolish the Federal Reserve.

By and large, however, historians tend to regard these theories as having no substance.

The Lincoln Conspiracy (ISBN 1568495315) details the assassination, the Boyd plot, and Booth's escape to the swamps. "The Curse of Cain: The Untold Story of John Wilkes Booth" (ISBN 1580060218) continues with the claim that Booth survived his wounds, escaped to Japan, and eventually returned to the United States where he died in Enid, Oklahoma in 1903, a story that was begun by Finis L. Bates.

Many residents of Guntown, Mississippi still hold to an urban legend that John Wilkes Booth is buried in their town.

[edit]

Booth in popular culture

  • Booth is the star of the musical Assassins by Stephen Sondheim and John Weidman. He is referred to as "the pioneer" of presidential assassinations. He is portrayed as being more sane and composed than the other Assassins, and he successfully leads them against the Balladeer in Another National Anthem. His own song, the Ballad of Booth, is a traditional Civil War song, a slow and almost saddening rendition that contrasts sharply with the later ballad which the Balladeer sings for Booth's friend Czolgosz. He argues with the Balladeer (who refers to him as "Johnny" throughout the song) until the folk singer agrees with his ideas; but after he kills himself, the Balladeer returns to mocking Booth.
  • He is also referenced in the comedy film Zoolander as the first "actor/model" in a line of noted assassins, part of an ongoing conspiracy to keep clothing manufacture prices low.
  • Rob Morrow stars as John Wilkes Booth in the 1998 made-for-television movie The Day Lincoln Was Shot while President Lincoln is played by Lance Henriksen. This movie, based on the book of the same title by Jim Bishop, also shows Powell's stabbing of Secretary of State William Seward and Atzerodt's abortive attempt to kill Vice-President Andrew Johnson during that same fateful night, as well as Lincoln's final few hours and Booth's own end, more than a week later, at the burning barn.
  • In the popular sitcom Seinfeld, the character "Crazy" Joe Davola shouts "Sic semper tyrannis!" before attempting to attack Jerry Seinfeld (although it is incorrectly translated by Jerry as, "Death to Tyrants!")
  • An anonymous, would-be presidential assassin played by John Malkovich in the 1993 Wolfgang Petersen film, In the Line of Fire calls himself Booth because John Wilkes Booth, in the assassin's estimation, "had style." The film starred Clint Eastwood as an aging Secret Service agent named Frank Horrigan, who's lived thirty years with the guilt that he might have been able to stop the assassination of President John F. Kennedy and vows that when "Booth" threatens the current president, that a repeat will not happen.
  • In the upcoming film Manhunt, (2007), Harrison Ford will play Everton Conger, the man who led the hunt for John Wilkes Booth.
  • Rock band Clutch have a song titled I Have the Body of John Wilkes Booth on their 1995 self-titled album.
  • The Vampire Papers, a novel by Michael Romkey, features Booth as one of the main protagonists. In the novel he was turned into a vampire after Lincoln's assasination and survived until the present.
[edit]

Trivia

  • Booth's uncle Algernon Sydney Booth is the great-great-great-grandfather of Cherie Booth, Q.C, wife of the current British Prime Minister, Tony Blair.
  • Edwin Booth, John Wilkes Booth's brother, saved Abraham Lincoln's son a few years before the assassination.
  • During Edwin Booth's funeral, the interior of Ford's Theater collapsed.
[edit]

References

  • Kauffman, Michael W. (2004), American Brutus: John Wilkes Booth and the Lincoln Conspiracies, New York: Random House. ISBN 037550785X
[edit]

External links

Retrieved from "http://www.netipedia.com/index.php/John_Wilkes_Booth"