This Day in Presidential History (John Wilkes Booth, Actor-Assassin, Born)

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.

Photo of the Day: Ford’s Theatre, Washington DC

The sites of Presidential assassinations, even when they can be recalled, embody a kind of formlessness—even the Texas School Book Depository in Dallas, which, other than providing a sixth-floor perch from which Lee Harvey Oswald could shoot John F. Kennedy, would attract little notice.

Not so Ford’sTheatre, which I have visited twice—once in the late 1980s, the other a year and a half ago, when I took this photo. Even the first time I visited, this Washington DC site was, according to Stephen B. Oates’ Abraham Lincoln: The Man Behind the Myths, “the most authentic Lincoln shrine we have.”

The red brick building in the photo is the remaining outer shell of the theater where Abraham Lincoln was shot. But there’s an adjacent building included under the site’s umbrella after an extensive renovation and expansion six years ago. Though the theater has, after a very long interval, mounted plays again, the real magnet of the site is downstairs, in the basement, where artifacts--gruesome relics--of the assassination are displayed. 

Together with the Petersen House across the street, where Lincoln died the morning after the shooting, 150 years ago today, it all forms part of what might be thought of as an entire “assassination complex,” designed to increase understanding of the life and death of American’s most beloved President.

These days, one word to describe the interest in this traumatic event is “fascination.” But for the longest time, the operative word was “revulsion.” Facing relentless public pressure, John Ford, owner of the theater, was forced to sell the property, which was converted, for several decades, into the Office of Records and Pensions and the Army Medical Museum. 

But the popular entertainment that held sway until the assassination remained off the table. In the 1920s, when Congressman Henry Riggs Rathbone of Illinois—son of the Major Henry Rathbone who, with his fiancée Clara Harris, sat in the Lincoln’s box as their guests—called for converting the building back to a theater, a public outcry quickly helped scuttle the idea.

It was not, in fact, until 1968—103 years after the assassination—that the site returned to its onetime use. Because of all its prior uses, and everything that happened in the intervening century--including a fire--the interior had to be reconstructed, largely with the help of the extensive photos that Matthew Brady took in the mid-1860s.

One would have to think that Lincoln would have been gladdened by that long-overdue change in public sentiment. He loved to attend plays, and especially Ford’s Theatre, and nothing so much as a comedy, which, in the form of Our American Cousin, was on the bill the night of his death.

He could never have foreseen that an actor whose work he had seen and enjoyed immensely would be the one to slip behind the President’s box and put a bullet in his head.

For most of the last century, oddly enough, the aspect of the Lincoln assassination that received the least attention was the professional community in which it took place—not just the 46 stage hands, actors, and theater workers who witnessed the murder and were detained in the dragnet for the President’s killer, but also, believe it or not, John Wilkes Booth himself.

At the Ford's Theatre Center for Education and Leadership, next to the Petersen House, there’s an eye-grabbing "Lincoln Book Tower," a four-story winding staircase with a 34-foot-high tower of books about the President in the center. A good number of these deal specifically with his assassination rather than his life and career.

Considering his notoriety, it is surprising that there was no full-length, comprehensive biography of Lincoln’s assassin until the newly published Fortune's Fool: The Life of John Wilkes Booth, by Terry Alford. But that is not the only surprising fact about the President and his killer. 

Consider this: Lincoln, unlike most assassination victims I can think of, had already seen him on a prior occasion, in November 1863 at Ford’s, in a play called The Marble Heart. He had liked Booth’s performance in the play so much that he had actually asked to meet the actor. Booth, a Confederate sympathizer, made excuses in order to decline the invitation.

Kidnapping the President and bringing him south in an effort to change the course of the war had been Booth’s original plan. The surrender at Appomattox—and with it, the collapse of the Confederacy—ended that scheme. A political trial balloon floated by Lincoln a few days later, however—advocating the right to vote for black soldiers and better-educated blacks—resolved Booth on a crazier crime.

Because no other role in his life promised to surpass this one, Booth invested unprecedented preparation in it. Because he had acted at Ford’s Theatre a number of times before, he knew every bit of its layout—a necessity if he wanted to get close to the President and make his getaway quickly. (A very interesting post by Norman Gasbarro on the “Civil War Blog” considers an ancillary question of the night: the likelihood that lead actress Laura Keene could, after the shooting, make her way, amid all the pandemonium that night, into the President’s Box, occupy most of that confined space in her hoop skirt, and hold the President’s lifeless body in her arms until it was transported to the Peterson House. The answer: unlikely.)

In addition, Booth knew just about every member of the cast and crew, enough to know that many were quite sympathetic with his secessionist views. Many knew his ravings enough so that they at least could possibly have heard the actor talk about kidnapping the President, if not kill him 

Likewise, he knew this comedy by heart, enough to know when the stage would contain only one actor and an applause line would muffle the sound of his shot. The 11-foot jump from the President’s Box to the stage was long and high, but he had done similar acrobatic feats before, and he could, with some luck, pull it off again.

His luck didn’t quite hold this time, as Rathbone’s struggle with Booth in the box threw the actor off balance as he fell to the stage, injuring his leg.

Virtually the only person capable of action in the heartbreaking final scenes by Lincoln’s Peterson House deathbed (which, incidentally, was too small to contain his lanky frame) was his Secretary of War, Edwin G. Stanton. Unfortunately, in the case of the Ford’s Theatre employees, many of his actions that night were wrong-headed or unfair, according to Backstage at the Lincoln Assassination: The Untold Story of the Actors and Stagehands at Ford's Theatre, by Thomas A. Bogar. 

While some cast and crew members were not questioned at all about what they knew, others were pursued ruthlessly—most notably, stagehand Edman (Ned) Spangler, who was sent to prison as one of Booth's accomplices. The not-very-bright stagehand might have admired Booth, but seems to have been as stunned as everyone else by what happened that night. It took his boss, Ford, to pay for his defense attorney, and then work to get him pardoned by President Andrew Johnson.

Quote of the Day (Walt Whitman, on Lincoln’s Passing)

“Coffin that passes through lanes and streets,
Through day and night with the great cloud darkening the land,

With the pomp of the inloop'd flags with the cities draped in black,

With the show of the States themselves as of crepe-veil'd women standing,

With processions long and winding and the flambeaus of the night,

With the countless torches lit, with the silent sea of faces and the unbared heads,

With the waiting depot, the arriving coffin, and the sombre faces,

With dirges through the night, with the thousand voices rising strong and solemn,

With all the mournful voices of the dirges pour'd around the coffin,

The dim-lit churches and the shuddering organs - where amid these you journey,

With the tolling bells' perpetual clang,

Here, coffin that slowly passes,

I give you a sprig of lilac.”—Walt Whitman, from “When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom’d” (1865)

John Wilkes Booth’s shooting of Abraham Lincoln on this date in 1865—the first time an American President died from an assassin’s bullet—plunged the nation into an abyss of grief, all the deeper and symbolic because of the date—Good Friday. The extended mourning also inspired this magnificent Walt Whitman elegy, one of the greatest poems in the English language.

As a schoolchild, it’s very likely that you had to read another Whitman poem on the death of Lincoln, “O Captain! My Captain!” Even an otherwise very fine anthology, The American Reader: Words That Moved a Nation, edited by Diane Ravitch, includes “Captain” instead of “Lilacs.” My guess is that you see the former more often than the latter because it is a) shorter and easier to permit many more pieces in the anthology, and b) rhyming, which is easier for young minds to remember.

But “Lilacs” is a far superior poem. Put it this way: almost anyone could have written “Captain,” but only Whitman could have created “Lilacs.” It is the tribute of one distinctly American literary voice to another.

“Lilacs” bears comparison to the most famous Lincoln speech, the Gettysburg Address, because both:

* honor those who died as a result of the war (Lincoln speaking of the Union dead, Whitman of a President felled by a fanatical Southern sympathizer);

* derive from ancient forms (Lincoln, as Garry Wills noted in Lincoln at Gettysburg, from Greek Revival oratory; Whitman, from the pastoral elegy, used by poets as diverse as Virgil, Milton and Shelley);

* achieve their great symbolic power through the movement from death to rebirth (Lincoln, going from the carnage of the battlefield to the “new birth of freedom” he hoped for the reunited nation; Whitman, progressing from the “black murk” surrounding the martyred President to the lilac, which blossoms with the return of spring);

* use parallel clauses to create their hypnotic rhythms (Lincoln preferred short phrases, most famously “government of the people, by the people, for the people”; Whitman employed enormously long but grammatically correct phrases beginning with “With”); and

* progress from anguish and loss to reconciliation (Lincoln, toward a national reunion of North and South; Whitman, to renewed joy in life).

Though the assassination occurred on April 14, Lincoln’s funeral procession only began its 1,600-mile journey by rail a week later, finally ending with the President’s interment back home in Springfield, Ill., on May 4.

Like just about every American, Whitman could recall, in Specimen Days, where he was when he learned of Lincoln’s death: "The day of the murder we heard the news very early in the morning. Mother prepared breakfast—and other meals afterward—as usual; but not a mouthful was eaten all day by either of us. We each drank half a cup of coffee; that was all. Little was said. We got every newspaper morning and evening, and the frequent extras of that period, and pass'd them silently to each other."

Whitman, a longtime supporter of the President, had also volunteered as a nurse during the war, so the phrase “bind up the nation’s wounds” held literal as well as symbolic meaning as he listened to Lincoln’s Second Inaugural Address. (Another listener in the audience that day, ironically, was Booth.)

An enthusiastic but subpar balladeer, Lincoln established a new standard in American oratory by putting aside florid, allusive rhetoric in favor of concise, sinewy language that—like the Old Testament verses he knew by heart but probably did not believe—built to moments of stunning power. Whitman’s poems—especially this one—were every bit as revolutionary and liberating in impact as Lincoln’s speeches.

Both men, devout believers in what Whitman called Democratic Vistas, also freed Americans of their thralldom to borrowed, foreign literary forms. They left listeners and readers changed, moved, blinking in astonishment at what they had just experienced—voices that sounded like themselves, but grander, summoning what Lincoln termed “the better angels of our nature.”

This Day in Civil War History (Lincoln’s 2nd Inaugural Sums Up Conflict Masterfully)

March 4, 1865—As the fanatic who would kill him a month later stared from the crowd, Abraham Lincoln reached out to the wounded South by resolving in his Second Inaugural Address to “bind up the nation’s wounds”—but also explained, in terms that had to have set John Wilkes Booth’s teeth on edge, what caused the remorseless Civil War in the first place.

Lincoln’s address can be read in several ways: a) as a longtime religious skeptic’s hard-won understanding of theodicy, or the justice of God; b) as a reflection of the compassion of one of America’s most deeply humane Presidents; or c) especially in its “with malice toward none, with charity for all” peroration, as a masterpiece of political prose ranking with Thucydides’ recapping of Pericles’ Funeral Oration.

But there’s another way to look at the speech, one that I don’t think has gained much traction, partly because it is rendered in the kind of deeply analytical, prosaic tone that Lincoln used throughout his Cooper Union address (one that a post of mine discussed earlier this week.)

As in the Gettysburg Address, the President was trying to make Americans understand why a war that cost hundreds of thousands of lives had to occur and must be won. Here’s how Lincoln used the Second Inaugural Address to discuss the state of affairs on the brink of the Civil Wart:

“One-eighth of the whole population were colored slaves, not distributed generally over the Union, but localized in the southern part of it. These slaves constituted a peculiar and powerful interest. All knew that this interest was somehow the cause of the war. To strengthen, perpetuate, and extend this interest was the object for which the insurgents would rend the Union even by war, while the Government claimed no right to do more than to restrict the territorial enlargement of it. Neither party expected for the war the magnitude or the duration which it has already attained. Neither anticipated that the cause of the conflict might cease with or even before the conflict itself should cease.”

What Lincoln was talking about was and is of more than academic interest for both historians and the general public: Was this a war about saving the Union, or eradicating slavery? It mattered also to Lincoln himself, as his own thinking on the subject had evolved in four years. At the beginning of the conflict, he was careful not to interfere with slavery where it already existed, lest he lose the border states as well as the 11 that had already seceded. But as he saw how the South was using slaves to keep their economy afloat and sustain the war effort, he issued the Emancipation Proclamation, serving notice that, as the North regained territory, the "peculiar institution" would be in tatters.

One sentence leaps out in the paragraph I just quoted: “All knew that this interest [slaveholding] was somehow the cause of the war.” One word throws the whole thing off kilter, reflecting a situation of greater flux and ambivalence than we recognize today: “somehow.”

Lincoln was recognizing individual choice, of a kind, with that single word. There were, of course, members of the Northern Army who were slaveholders, such as the great general George H. Thomas. On the other side, the Confederate Army included poor whites who did not own slaves, and others up the ranks who abominated “the peculiar institution.”

And yet, there is that loaded phrase, “all knew.” It was perfectly self-evident, Lincoln was saying, that slaveowners were represented disproportionately among those calling for secession. John Wilkes Booth—who, at this time, was only planning to kidnap the President, not murder him—could only fume when Lincoln assigned the primary responsibility for bringing on the war: “To strengthen, perpetuate, and extend this interest was the object for which the insurgents would rend the Union even by war.”

Lincoln was being blunt in a way that those gathered to honor his memory (including son Robert) at the dedication of the Lincoln Memorial six decades later could not be. He was being honored by the people “for whom he saved the Union,” the inscription in the memorial read--not for extending freedom to slaves. It would take the civil-rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s--and the changing historiography that followed--before Lincoln's revolutionary assault on slavery could be understood in all its dimensions.

Among the myths that have grown about Lincoln is that he would have taken a far gentler line toward the beaten South than the Radical Republicans. For nearly a century, this was the argument espoused by those who held that Reconstruction was a hopelessly corrupt process.

To be sure, Lincoln did differ with the Radicals on some points throughout the war, and his “Ten Percent Plan” (i.e., a state could be readmitted to the Union with just 10% swearing allegiance) was easier than the “Ironclad Oath” demanded by the Radicals. But in Abraham Lincoln: The Man Behind the Myths, biographer Stephen B. Oates takes effective issue with the old Reconstruction historiography. Among the points he makes:

* Lincoln was on good personal terms with several key Radical Republicans;

* Once Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation, he refused to go back on his promise to free the slaves—and in fact, what he had issued as a matter of military necessity, he later decided to make a permanent law of the land through passage of the Thirteenth Amendment.

* He disenfranchised former officeholders in the Confederacy.

* He acknowledged that an army might need to be kept in the South for awhile after the war to help freed slaves maintain their freedom.

* By the end of his life, Lincoln was talking, in an admittedly tentative way, about extending legal rights and at least some voting rights, to African-American soldiers.

Oates might also have mentioned these other points that would have prevented Lincoln from throwing in his lot with the racists:

First, while willing to accommodate people, most of his positions were non-negotiable. Thus, before the war, while willing to pass legislation that slavery would not be touched where slavery also existed, he refused to compromise on the Republican ban on extending slavery into the territories.

Second, Lincoln was willing to go to extraordinary lengths—including continuing the conflict at all when it was wildly unpopular—to achieve his policy objectives. I doubt he would let his Reconstruction policy go down in flames after he had waged such unrelenting war.

Finally, though Lincoln had, in his debates seven years before with Stephen A. Douglas, been careful to say he was not for full-fledged equality for blacks, he also noted that when it came to earning what they had worked for, they were the equal of himself or any man. It is inconceivable, then, that he would permit the steady economic deprivation that the South sought to impose on blacks after the war.

This Day in Theater History (John Wilkes Booth Appears With Brothers for Only Time on Stage)

November 25, 1864—In their first and only performance together, three members of America’s first great family of tragedians—Edwin, John Wilkes, and Junius Booth Jr.—appeared in a benefit at New York’s Winter Garden Theater. Outside city streets on that night, eight agents of the Confederate Secret Service (CSS) spread mayhem by setting fires in several Broadway hotels—just a small portent of the chaos that John Wilkes Booth would unleash six months later.

Most visitors who pass by the statue of William Shakespeare on Literary Walk in Lower Central Park are unaware that at least one source of the funds for this work by John Quincy Adams Ward derived from the Booth brothers’ benefit--an estimated $3,500 to $4,000, by later accounts. And still fewer realize that the play in which they appeared was about assassination: Julius Caesar.

Given his subsequent act of madness, you’d think that John would have taken on the role of assassin—but instead, he played Marc Antony. To his way of thinking, though, this might have made sense—Antony not only was a major character with that “Friends, Romans, Countrymen” speech, but he’d managed to alter the course of events seemingly tilted against him through charm, eloquence and guile—something that Booth hoped to do now, a growing number of historians believe, as an agent employed by the CSS.

Instead, the role of assassins fell to the brothers at odds with John for his Confederate sympathies. It fell to Edwin Booth to play the conscience-stricken conspirator Brutus. You might argue that his character’s inner torment had echoed in his own life the last few years. He was still sorrowing over the death of his wife, actress Mary Devlin, the prior year; in a way, he would never really get over it.

The role of Cassius, assumed by Junius Jr., would have really suited John. You remember why Caesar disliked Cassius, right? He "has a lean and hungry look; he thinks too much; such men are dangerous."

Junius, though the least talented, might also have been the least conflicted of the three Booth brothers. He would eventually not only leave acting by becoming a theater manager, but even get into another business entirely—hotels.

The political differences separating Antony from the two conspirators mirrored the divided loyalties of the trio of brothers. John was an increasingly loud Confederate sympathizer; Junius exhibited merely Democratic leanings; while Edwin would have nothing to do with John’s views. As it happened, Edwin had become a particular favorite of Abraham Lincoln’s, as the theater-loving President saw him in four plays in eight weeks in 1864.

Subsequent correspondence shows that Edwin had tried unsuccessfully to secure John during the summer. Besides the usual itinerant schedule that many actors maintained then, another factor unknown to Edwin might have limited John’s availability: his increasingly strenuous efforts to aid the CSS.

John by this time had already formulated plans to kidnap the President. It would only be in the new year that he would change his mind and decide to kill Lincoln instead.

The Booth brothers were reviving, in their own fashion, the tumultuous life of their father. Junius Brutus Booth, considered the first great tragedian to appear over a prolonged period in the U.S., fled England as a 25-year-old in 1821, deserting his wife and two-year-old child to run away with a Bow Street flower-seller, Mary Ann Holmes, already pregnant with Junius Jr. The couple claimed to have wed shortly after coming to the U.S., because it was not recognized. Because the wife he left behind did not learn of his second family until 1846, then would not grant him a divorce for another five, all nine children he had with Mary Ann were conceived out of wedlock.

Junius Sr. possessed a reverence for life, teaching his children not even to hurt a fly. But he was also mad for much of his adult life, a weakness exacerbated by drinking bouts. While performing Othello, he aroused the fires of others in his company that he would really smother Desdemona with a pillow. He could disappear for days on end and even be found on city streets naked.

Decades later, as his sons rose to prominence, it was natural for some to compare their styles of performance. Edwin was striving for a more naturalistic style, while John imitated the grandiloquence of his father. One Cleveland theater manager wrote that John “has more of the old man’s power in one performance than Edwin can show in a year. He has the fire, the dash, the touch of strangeness.”

Ah, strangeness—the quality that can win multiple awards from fellow thespians—and turn you into someone with a dangerous political monomania. That fall, Booth was meeting up in Montreal with representatives from the CSS. In October, a ciphered letter was sent from Richmond to Booth: His "friends would be set to work as directed."

CSS agents were already at large in New York that night. In the aftermath of the multiple fires, more than 200 people were rounded up and the newspapers were filled with talk about how the government had to be more careful about restricting Southerners in the North.

Of course, the eight real saboteurs escaped.

Oh, one other thing: one fire was set at the LaFarge House, adjacent to the Winter Garden, around 9:20 pm. Though quickly extinguished, it set off tremendous consternation next door at the Winter Garden. It took Edwin Booth, a police inspector, and a local judge to soothe everyone’s nerves at the packed audience.

When John murdered the President months later, Edwin withdrew in shock and sorrow from the stage for months. It was not until January 1866, when he returned to the Winter Garden, in the role he had begun immediately after his benefit performance with his brothers—Hamlet—that he was able to resume his career.