May 10, 1838—John Wilkes Booth, better known to posterity as a Presidential assassin than as
a member of a major American theatrical family, was born in a log house on a
farm near Bel Air, Md. The ninth of 10 children, he was a joyous, much-loved
child who exhibited little of the hatred that led him to murder Abraham Lincoln.
In a post from nine years ago, I used the occasion of a benefit performance by John
and brothers Edwin and Junius Booth Jr.—the only time the brothers appeared
together onstage—to touch briefly on the dynamics of this family. But a greater
more can be explored on this subject.
Inevitably and endlessly, as with other assassins,
Booth’s motives and psychology have invited questioning and speculation. In
Stephen Sondheim’s musical on the cavalcade of figures who attempted to take
the lives of Presidents, Assassins, the
character called “Balladeer” voices this incredulity:
Why did you do it, Johnny?
Nobody agrees.
You who had everything,
What made you bring
A nation to its knees?
At first glance, Booth’s relationship with his
father, Junius Brutus Booth—who, in
1835, wrote to Andrew Jackson, threatening to cut his throat while he slept—offers particular
fodder for psycho-biography.
Indeed, before that night at Ford’s Theater, if any
member of the Booth family could be said to exhibit consistent, long-standing
trouble signs that he might murder an American President, it would have been
John’s father. In fact, John’s brother, Junius Jr., lamented that “a crack runs
thro’ the male part of our family, myself included.”
John could, as his poet friend Thomas Bailey Aldrich
observed, empty a barroom when he had become drunken and belligerent enough.
But Junius Sr.’s drinking was far more advanced than John’s, and he engaged in
constant alarming incidents—including shooting a man in the face, assaulting
others, and attempting suicide several times—that John did not match.
Booth biographer Terry Alford takes issue with the
notion that the Lincoln assassination was the pathetic last act of a lost, lone gunman.
His Fortune's Fool sees the assassin as athletic, sexy (female fans tried to tear at
his clothes when he passed by), well-liked not just by fellow actors but lowly
stagehands, and intelligent enough to direct a conspiracy that might have not
only killed Lincoln, but also Vice-President Andrew Johnson and Secretary of
State William H. Seward.
Instead of bizarre personal behavior, Alford
suggests, the pre-assassination Booth evinced political extremism—a hatred of
abolitionism so extreme that the actor changed his plans from merely kidnapping
Lincoln to killing him after the President suggested in a speech that, for the
first time in Presidential history, he would consider supporting the right to
vote for some freedmen.
In contrast, Nora Titone describes John as being
locked in a contest for recognition with his father and brother Edwin that he
could not win. In My Thoughts Be Bloody, she relates how John’s over-the-top
acting style did not win the level of critical or popular recognition achieved
by Edwin’s more naturalistic one.
Even the brothers’ agreement to stake out their own
sphere of influence—Edwin in the North, John in the South—proved unintentionally
disastrous, as war and privation thinned
out audiences in the Confederacy after Fort Sumter. This only fed Johns’s
growing alienation not only from his family, but also from the America emerging
from the ashes of the Civil War—one that no longer permitted even the small
number of slaves on the Booth farm in Maryland in John’s childhood.
An actor himself, Booth might have been chagrined at
the thought that he would inspire other thespians to play him on stage and
screen as a wide-eyed fanatic. Notable examples include director Raoul Walsh
(uncredited) in D. W. Griffith’s Birth of
a Nation; John Derek in the 1955 biopic about brother Edwin, Prince of Players; Toby Kebbell in the
Robert Redford-directed The Conspirator;
and Victor Garber, in Sondheim’s Assassins.
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