On this date, April 26, 1865, the
assassin of President Abraham Lincoln, John Wilkes Booth was shot and died. I
will post the information about him from Wikipedia.
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John Wilkes Booth, assassin of U.S. President
Abraham Lincoln. (1865)
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Born
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May 10, 1838
Bel Air, Maryland, U.S. |
Died
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April 26, 1865 (aged 26)
Port Royal, Virginia, U.S. |
Cause of death
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Gunshot wound
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Resting place
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Green Mount Cemetery
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Other names
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J.B. Wilkes
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Education
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Bel Air Academy
Milton Boarding School for Boys St. Timothy's Hall |
Occupation
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Stage actor
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Years active
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1855–1865
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Known for
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1850s and 1860s stage career
Assassination of Abraham Lincoln |
Religion
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Roman Catholic
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Parents
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Junius Brutus Booth
Mary Ann Holmes |
Relatives
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Edwin Booth (brother)
Junius Brutus Booth, Jr. (brother) Asia Booth (sister) |
John Wilkes Booth (May 10, 1838 – April 26, 1865) was an American
stage actor who assassinated President Abraham Lincoln at Ford's Theatre, in
Washington, D.C., on April 14, 1865. Booth was a member of the prominent 19th
century Booth theatrical family from Maryland and, by the 1860s, was a
well-known actor. He was also a Confederate sympathizer, vehement in his denunciation
of Lincoln, and strongly opposed the abolition of slavery in the United States.
Booth
and a group of co-conspirators originally plotted to kidnap Lincoln, but later
planned to kill him, Vice President Andrew Johnson, and Secretary of State
William H. Seward in a bid to help the Confederacy's cause. Although Robert E.
Lee's Army of Northern Virginia had surrendered four days earlier, Booth
believed the American Civil War was not yet over because Confederate General
Joseph E. Johnston's army was still fighting the Union Army. Of the
conspirators, only Booth was completely successful in carrying out his
respective part of the plot. Booth shot Lincoln once in the back of the head.
The President died the next morning. Seward was severely wounded but recovered.
Vice-President Johnson was never attacked at all.
Following
the assassination, Booth fled on horseback to southern Maryland, eventually
making his way to a farm in rural northern Virginia 12 days later, where he was
tracked down. Booth's companion gave himself up, but Booth refused and was shot
by a Union soldier after the barn in which he was hiding was set ablaze. Eight
other conspirators or suspects were tried and convicted, and four were hanged
shortly thereafter.
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Tudor Hall, the home of the Booth
Family (1847–1860s), in an 1865 photograph. The house still stands near Bel
Air, Maryland, U.S.
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Background
and early life
Booth's
parents, the noted British Shakespearean actor Junius Brutus Booth and his
mistress Mary Ann Holmes, came to the United States from England in June 1821.
They purchased a 150-acre (61 ha) farm near Bel Air in Harford County,
Maryland, where John Wilkes Booth was born in a four-room log house on May 10,
1838, the ninth of ten children. He was named after the English radical
politician John Wilkes, a distant relative. Junius Brutus Booth's wife,
Adelaide Delannoy Booth, was granted a divorce in 1851 on grounds of adultery,
and Holmes legally wed John Wilkes Booth's father on May 10, 1851, the youth's
13th birthday.
Nora
Titone, in her book My Thoughts Be Bloody, recounts how the shame and
ambition of Junius Brutus Booth's two illegitimate actor sons, Edwin and John
Wilkes Booth, would eventually spur them to strive, as rivals, for achievement
and acclaim — Edwin, a Unionist, and John Wilkes, the assassin of Abraham
Lincoln.
The
same year that Booth's father married Holmes (1851), he built Tudor Hall on the
Harford County property as the family's summer home, while also maintaining a
winter residence on Exeter Street in Baltimore in the 1840s–1850s.
As
a boy, John Wilkes Booth was athletic and popular, becoming skilled at
horsemanship and fencing. A sometimes indifferent student, he attended the Bel
Air Academy, where the headmaster described him as "[n]ot deficient in
intelligence, but disinclined to take advantage of the educational
opportunities offered him. Each day he rode back and forth from farm to school,
taking more interest in what happened along the way than in reaching his
classes on time". In 1850–1851, he attended the Quaker-run Milton Boarding
School for Boys located in Sparks, Maryland, and later St. Timothy's Hall, an
Episcopal military academy in Catonsville, Maryland, beginning when he was
13 years old. At the Milton school, students recited such classical works
as those by Herodotus, Cicero, and Tacitus. Students at St. Timothy's wore
military uniforms and were subject to a regimen of daily formation drills and
strict discipline. Booth left school at 14, after his father's death.
While
attending the Milton Boarding School, Booth met a Gypsy fortune-teller who read
his palm and pronounced a grim destiny, telling Booth that he would have a
grand but short life, doomed to die young and "meeting a bad end".
His sister recalled that Booth wrote down the palm-reader's prediction and
showed it to his family and others, often discussing its portents in moments of
melancholy in later years.
As
recounted in the editor’s introduction of the 1874 memoir of Booth's sister’s,
Asia Booth Clarke, no one church was preeminent in the Booth household during
her childhood. Booth's mother was Episcopalian and his father was described as
a free spirit, who was open to the great teachings of all religions. On January
23, 1853, the 14-year-old Booth was baptized at St. Timothy's Protestant
Episcopal Church. The Booth family had traditionally been Episcopalian.
Clergyman Charles Chiniquy, however, stated that John Wilkes Booth was really a
Roman Catholic convert, later in life. A historian, Constance Head, also
declared that Booth was of this religion. Head, who wrote the 1982 paper
"Insights on John Wilkes Booth from His Sister Asia's
Correspondence," published in the Lincoln Herald, quoted from a letter of
Booth’s sister, Asia Booth Clarke, in which she wrote that her brother was a
Roman Catholic. Booth Clarke's memoir was published after her death. Terry
Alford, a college history professor and a leading authority on the life of John
Wilkes Booth, has stated, "Asia Booth Clarke's memoir of her brother John
Wilkes Booth has been recognized as the single most important document
available for understanding the personality of the assassin of President
Abraham Lincoln", and "no outsider could give such insights into the
turbulent Booth‘s childhood or share such unique personal knowledge of the
gifted actor". Testimony given at the trial of John Surratt showed that at
his death, Booth had a Catholic medal on his person. Court evidence showed his
attending a Roman Catholic church service on at least two occasions. Like his
sister Asia, he received education at a school established by an official of
the Catholic Church. As to Lincoln's assassin being seen an Episcopalian during
his life, and in death, while really being a Roman Catholic, Constance Head
stated: "In any case, it seems certain that Booth did not publicize his
conversion during his lifetime. And while there is no reasonable cause to
connect Booth's religious preference and his 'mad act', the few who knew of his
conversion must have decided after the assassination that for the good of the
church, it was best never to mention it. Thus the secret remained so well
guarded that even the most rabidly anti-Catholic writers who tried to depict
the assassination of Lincoln as a Jesuit or Papist plot were puzzled by the
seemingly accurate information that John Wilkes Booth was an
Episcopalian."
By
the age of 16, Booth was interested in the theatre and in politics, becoming a
delegate from Bel Air to a rally by the Know Nothing Party for Henry Winter
Davis, the anti-immigrant party's candidate for Congress in the 1854 elections.
Aspiring to follow in the footsteps of his father and his actor brothers, Edwin
and Junius Brutus, Jr., Booth began practicing elocution daily in the woods
around Tudor Hall and studying Shakespeare.
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The Richmond Theatre, Richmond, Virginia, at
the time John Wilkes Booth made his first acting appearance there.
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Theatrical
career
1850s
At
age 17, Booth made his stage debut on August 14, 1855, in the supporting role
of the Earl of Richmond in Richard III at Baltimore's Charles Street
Theatre. The audience hissed at the inexperienced actor when he missed some of
his lines. He also began acting at Baltimore's Holliday Street Theater, owned
by John T. Ford, where the Booths had performed frequently. In 1857, Booth
joined the stock company of the Arch Street Theatre in Philadelphia,
Pennsylvania, where he played for a full season. At his request he was billed
as "J.B. Wilkes", a pseudonym meant to avoid comparison with other
members of his famous thespian family. Author Jim Bishop wrote that Booth
"developed into an outrageous scene stealer, but he played his parts with
such heightened enthusiasm that the audiences idolized him." In February
1858, he played in Lucrezia Borgia at the Arch Street Theatre. On
opening night, he experienced stage fright and stumbled over his line. Instead
of introducing himself by saying, "Madame, I am Petruchio Pandolfo",
he stammered, "Madame, I am Pondolfio Pet—Pedolfio Pat—Pantuchio
Ped—dammit! Who am I?", causing the audience to roar with laughter.
Later
that year, Booth played the part of an Indian, Uncas, in a play staged in
Petersburg, Virginia, and then became a stock company actor at the Richmond
Theatre in Virginia, where he became increasingly popular with audiences for
his energetic performances. On October 5, 1858, Booth played the part of
Horatio in Hamlet, with his older brother Edwin having the title role.
Afterward, Edwin led the younger Booth to the theatre's footlights and said to
the audience, "I think he's done well, don't you?" In response, the
audience applauded loudly and cried "Yes! Yes!" In all, John Wilkes
performed in 83 plays in 1858. Among them were William Wallace and Brutus,
having as their theme the killing or overthrow of an unjust ruler. Booth said
that of all Shakespearean characters, his favorite role was Brutus – the
slayer of a tyrant.
Some
critics called Booth "the handsomest man in America" and a
"natural genius" and noted his having an "astonishing
memory"; others were mixed in their estimation of his acting. He stood
5 feet 8 inches (1.73 m) tall, had jet-black hair, and was lean
and athletic. Noted Civil War reporter George Alfred Townsend described him as
a "muscular, perfect man", with "curling hair, like a Corinthian
capital".
Booth's
stage performances were often characterized by his contemporaries as acrobatic
and intensely physical, leaping upon the stage and gesturing with passion. He
was an excellent swordsman, although a fellow actor once recalled that he
occasionally cut himself with his own sword.
Historian
Benjamin Platt Thomas wrote that Booth "won celebrity with theater-goers
by his romantic personal attraction", but that he was "too impatient
for hard study" and his "brilliant talents had failed of full
development. Author Gene Smith wrote that Booth's acting may not have been as
precise as his brother Edwin's, but his strikingly handsome appearance
enthralled women. As the 1850s drew to a close, Booth was becoming wealthy as
an actor, earning $20,000 a year (equivalent to about $525,000 today).
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Playbill advertising John Wilkes Booth,
starring as Romeo in Romeo and Juliet at the Boston Museum in Boston, on
May 3, 1864.
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John Wilkes Booth, Edwin Booth and Junius
Booth, Jr. (from left to right) in Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar in 1864.
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1860s
After
finishing the 1859–1860 theatre season in Richmond, Virginia, Booth embarked on
his first national tour as a leading actor. He engaged a Philadelphia attorney,
Matthew Canning, to serve as his agent. By mid-1860, he was playing in such
cities as New York; Boston; Chicago; Cleveland; St. Louis; Columbus, Georgia;
Montgomery, Alabama; and New Orleans. Poet and journalist Walt Whitman said of
Booth's acting, "He would have flashes, passages, I thought of real
genius." The Philadelphia Press drama critic said, "Without
having [his brother] Edwin's culture and grace, Mr. Booth has far more action,
more life, and, we are inclined to think, more natural genius."
When
the Civil War began on April 12, 1861, Booth was starring in Albany, New York.
His outspoken admiration for the South's secession, publicly calling it
"heroic", so enraged local citizens that they demanded his banning
from the stage for making "treasonable statements". Albany's drama
critics were kinder, however, giving him rave reviews. One called him a genius,
praising his acting for "never fail[ing] to delight with his masterly
impressions." As the Civil War raged across the divided land in 1862,
Booth appeared mostly in Union and border states. In January, he played the
title role in Richard III in St. Louis and then made his Chicago debut.
In March, he made his first acting appearance in New York City. In May 1862, he
made his Boston debut, playing nightly at the Boston Museum in Richard III
(May 12, 15, and 23), Romeo and Juliet (May 13), The Robbers (May
14 and 21), Hamlet (May 16), The Apostate (May 19), The
Stranger (May 20), and The Lady of Lyons (May 22). Following his
performance of Richard III on May 12, the Boston Transcript's
review the next day called Booth "the most promising young actor on the
American stage".
Starting
in January 1863, he returned to the Boston Museum for a series of plays,
including the role of the villain Duke Pescara in The Apostate that won
acclaim from audiences and critics. Back in Washington in April, he played the
title roles in Hamlet and Richard III, one of his favorites. He
was billed as "The Pride of the American People, A Star of the First
Magnitude," and the critics were equally enthusiastic. The National
Republican drama critic said Booth "took the hearts of the audience by
storm" and termed his performance "a complete triumph". At the
beginning of July 1863, Booth finished the acting season at Cleveland's Academy
of Music, as the Battle of Gettysburg raged in Pennsylvania. Between
September–November 1863, Booth played a hectic schedule in the northeast,
appearing in Boston, Providence, Rhode Island, and Hartford, Connecticut. Each
day he received fan mail from infatuated women.
When
family friend John T. Ford opened 1,500-seat Ford's Theatre on November 9
in Washington, D.C., Booth was one of the first leading men to appear there,
playing in Charles Selby's The Marble Heart. In this play, Booth
portrayed a Greek sculptor in costume, making marble statues come to life.
Lincoln watched the play from his box. At one point during the performance,
Booth was said to have shaken his finger in Lincoln's direction as he delivered
a line of dialogue. Lincoln's sister-in-law, sitting with him in the same
presidential box where he would later be slain, turned to him and said,
"Mr. Lincoln, he looks as if he meant that for you." The President
replied, "He does look pretty sharp at me, doesn't he?" On another
occasion when Lincoln's son Tad saw Booth perform, he said the actor thrilled
him, prompting Booth to give the President's youngest son a rose. Booth ignored
an invitation to visit Lincoln between acts, however.
On
November 25, 1864, Booth performed for the only time with his two brothers,
Edwin and Junius, in a single engagement production of Julius Caesar at
the Winter Garden Theatre in New York. He played Mark Antony and his brother
Edwin had the larger role of Brutus in a performance acclaimed as "the
greatest theatrical event in New York history." The proceeds went towards
a statue of William Shakespeare for Central Park, which still stands today. In
January 1865, he acted in Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet in Washington,
again garnering rave reviews. The National Intelligencer enthused of
Booth's Romeo, "the most satisfactory of all renderings of that fine
character," especially praising the death scene. Booth made the final
appearance of his acting career at Ford's on March 18, 1865, when he again
played Duke Pescara in The Apostate.
Business
ventures
Booth
invested some of his growing wealth in various enterprises during the early
1860s, including land speculation in Boston's Back Bay section. He also started
a business partnership with John A. Ellsler, manager of the Cleveland Academy
of Music, and another friend, Thomas Mears, to develop oil wells in
northwestern Pennsylvania, where an oil boom had started in August 1859,
following Edwin Drake's discovery of oil there. Initially calling their venture
Dramatic Oil (later renaming it Fuller Farm Oil), the partners invested in a
31.5-acre (12.7 ha) site along the Allegheny River at Franklin,
Pennsylvania, in late 1863 for drilling. By early 1864, they had a producing
1,900-foot (579 m) deep oil well, named Wilhelmina for Mears' wife,
yielding 25 barrels (4 kL) of crude oil daily, then considered a good
yield. The Fuller Farm Oil company was selling shares with a prospectus
featuring the well-known actor's celebrity status as "Mr. J. Wilkes Booth,
a successful and intelligent operator in oil lands", it said. The
partners, impatient to increase the well's output, attempted the use of
explosives, which wrecked the well and ended production. Booth, already growing
more obsessed with the South's worsening situation in the Civil War and angered
at Lincoln's re-election, withdrew from the oil business on November 27, 1864,
with a substantial loss of his $6,000 ($81,400 in 2010 dollars)
investment.
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Photo of Lucy Hale, the daughter of
U.S. Senator John P. Hale and the secret fiancee of John Wilkes Booth (the
assassin of U.S. Pres. Abraham Lincoln in 1865). The photo was found on Booth's
body after he was killed by pursuing Federal troops on 26 April 1865.
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Civil
War years
Strongly
opposed to the abolitionists who sought to end slavery in the U.S., Booth
attended the hanging on December 2, 1859, of abolitionist leader John Brown,
who was executed for leading a raid on the Federal armory at Harpers Ferry (in
present-day West Virginia). Booth had been rehearsing at the Richmond Theatre
when he abruptly decided to join the Richmond Grays, a volunteer militia of
1,500 men travelling to Charles Town for Brown's hanging, to guard against
an attempt by abolitionists to rescue Brown from the gallows by force. When
Brown was hanged without incident, Booth stood in uniform near the scaffold and
afterwards expressed great satisfaction with Brown's fate, although he admired
the condemned man's bravery in facing death stoically.
Lincoln
was elected president on November 6, 1860, and the following month Booth
drafted a long speech, apparently undelivered, that decried Northern
abolitionism and made clear his strong support of the South and the institution
of slavery. On April 12, 1861, the Civil War began, and eventually 11 Southern
states seceded from the Union. In Booth's native Maryland, the slaveholding
portion of the population favored joining the Confederate States of America.
Because the threatened secession of Maryland would leave the Federal capital of
Washington, D.C., an indefensible enclave within the Confederacy, Lincoln
suspended the writ of habeas corpus and imposed martial law in Baltimore
and portions of the state, ordering the imprisonment of pro-secession Maryland
political leaders at Ft. McHenry and the stationing of Federal troops in
Baltimore. Although Maryland remained in the Union, newspaper editorials and
many Marylanders, including Booth, agreed with Supreme Court Chief Justice
Roger B. Taney's decision in Ex parte Merryman that Lincoln's actions
were unconstitutional.
As
a popular actor in the 1860s, he continued to travel extensively to perform in
the North and South, and as far west as New Orleans, Louisiana. According to
his sister Asia, Booth confided to her that he also used his position to
smuggle quinine to the South during his travels there, helping the Confederacy
obtain the needed drug despite the Northern blockade.
Although
Booth was pro-Confederate, his family, like many Marylanders, was divided. He
was outspoken in his love of the South, and equally outspoken in his hatred of
Lincoln. As the Civil War went on, Booth increasingly quarreled with his
brother Edwin, who declined to make stage appearances in the South and refused
to listen to John Wilkes' fiercely partisan denunciations of the North and
Lincoln. In early 1863, Booth was arrested in St. Louis while on a theatre
tour, when he was heard saying he "wished the President and the whole
damned government would go to hell." Charged with making
"treasonous" remarks against the government, he was released when he
took an oath of allegiance to the Union and paid a substantial fine.
In
February 1865, Booth became infatuated with Lucy Lambert Hale, the daughter of
U.S. Senator John P. Hale of New Hampshire, and they became secretly engaged
when Booth received his mother's blessing for their marriage plans. "You
have so often been dead in love," his mother counseled Booth in a letter,
"be well assured she is really and truly devoted to you." Booth
composed a handwritten Valentine card for his fiancée on February 13,
expressing his "adoration". She was unaware of Booth's deep antipathy
towards President Lincoln.
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The Old Soldiers Home, where Booth planned to
kidnap Lincoln
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Plot
to kidnap Lincoln
As
the 1864 Presidential election drew near, the Confederacy's prospects for
victory were ebbing and the tide of war increasingly favored the North. The
likelihood of Lincoln's re-election filled Booth with rage towards the
President, whom Booth blamed for the war and all the South's troubles. Booth,
who had promised his mother at the outbreak of war that he would not enlist as
a soldier, increasingly chafed at not fighting for the South, writing in a letter
to her, "I have begun to deem myself a coward and to despise my own
existence." He began to formulate plans to kidnap Lincoln from his summer
residence at the Old Soldiers Home, three miles (5 km) from the White
House, and to smuggle him across the Potomac River into Richmond. Once in
Confederate hands, Lincoln would be exchanged for the release of Confederate
Army prisoners of war held captive in Northern prisons and, Booth reasoned,
bring the war to an end by emboldening opposition to the war in the North or
forcing Union recognition of the Confederate government.
Throughout
the Civil War, the Confederacy maintained a network of underground operators in
southern Maryland, particularly Charles and St. Mary's counties, smuggling
recruits across the Potomac River into Virginia and relaying messages for
Confederate agents as far north as Canada. Booth recruited his friends Samuel
Arnold and Michael O'Laughlen as accomplices. They met often at the house of
Maggie Branson, a known Confederate sympathizer, at 16 North Eutaw Street
in Baltimore. He also met with several well-known Confederate sympathizers at
The Parker House in Boston.
In
October, Booth made an unexplained trip to Montreal, which was then a
well-known center of clandestine Confederate activity. He spent ten days in the
city, staying for a time at St. Lawrence Hall, a rendezvous for the Confederate
Secret Service, and meeting several Confederate agents there. No conclusive
proof has linked Booth's kidnapping or assassination plots to a conspiracy
involving the leadership of the Confederate government, although historians
such as David Herbert Donald have said, "It is clear that, at least at the
lower levels of the Southern secret service, the abduction of the Union
President was under consideration." Historian Thomas Goodrich concluded
that Booth entered the Confederate Secret Service as a spy and courier. Other
writers exploring possible connections between Booth's planning and Confederate
agents include Nathan Miller's Spying For America and William Tidwell's Come
Retribution: the Confederate Secret Service and the Assassination of Lincoln.
After
Lincoln's landslide re-election in early November 1864 on a platform advocating
passage of the 13th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution to abolish slavery
altogether, Booth devoted increasing energy and money to his kidnap plot. He
assembled a loose-knit band of Southern sympathizers, including David Herold,
George Atzerodt, Lewis Powell (also known as Lewis Payne or Paine), and John
Surratt, a rebel agent. They began to meet routinely at the boarding house of
Surratt's mother, Mrs. Mary Surratt.
By
this time, Booth was arguing so vehemently with his older, pro-Union brother
Edwin about Lincoln and the war that Edwin finally told him he was no longer
welcome at his New York home. Booth also railed against Lincoln in
conversations with his sister Asia, saying, "That man's appearance, his
pedigree, his coarse low jokes and anecdotes, his vulgar similes, and his
policy are a disgrace to the seat he holds. He is made the tool of the North,
to crush out slavery." As the Confederacy's defeat became more certain in
1865, Booth decried the end of slavery and Lincoln's election to a second term,
"making himself a king", the actor fumed, in "wild
tirades", his sister recalled.
Booth
attended Lincoln's second inauguration on March 4 as the invited guest of his
secret fiancée, Lucy Hale. In the crowd below were Powell, Atzerodt, and
Herold. There was no attempt to assassinate Lincoln during the inauguration.
Later, however, Booth remarked about his "excellent chance ... to kill the
President, if I had wished."
On
March 17, Booth learned that Lincoln would be attending a performance of the
play Still Waters Run Deep at a hospital near the Soldier's Home. Booth
assembled his team on a stretch of road near the Soldier's Home in the attempt
to kidnap Lincoln en route to the hospital, but the president did not appear.
Booth later learned that Lincoln had changed his plans at the last moment to
attend a reception at the National Hotel in Washington where, coincidentally,
Booth was then staying.
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The playbill advertising John Wilkes Booth as
Pescara in The Apostate at Ford's Theatre, Washington, D.C., on March 18, 1865
– Booth's final acting appearance and where he would assassinate Abraham
Lincoln the following month.
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Lithograph of the Assassination of Abraham
Lincoln. From left to right: Henry Rathbone, Clara Harris, Mary Todd
Lincoln, Abraham Lincoln, and John Wilkes Booth. Rathbone is depicted as
spotting Booth before he shot Lincoln and trying to stop him as Booth fired his
weapon. Rathbone actually was unaware of Booth’s approach, and reacted after
the shot was fired. While Lincoln is depicted clutching the flag after being
shot, it is also possible that he just simply pushed the flag aside to watch
the performance.
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Assassination
of Lincoln
On
April 12, 1865, after hearing the news that Robert E. Lee had surrendered at
Appomattox Court House, Booth told Louis J. Weichmann, a friend of John Surratt,
and a boarder at Mary Surratt's house, that he was done with the stage and that
the only play he wanted to present henceforth was Venice Preserv'd.
Weichmann did not understand the reference: Venice Preserv'd is about an
assassination plot. With the Union Army's capture of Richmond and Lee's
surrender, Booth's scheme to kidnap Lincoln was no longer feasible, and he
changed his goal to assassination.
The
previous day, Booth was in the crowd outside the White House when Lincoln gave
an impromptu speech from his window. When Lincoln stated that he was in favor
of granting suffrage to the former slaves, Booth declared that it would be the
last speech Lincoln would ever make.
On
the morning of Good Friday, April 14, 1865, Booth went to Ford's Theatre to get
his mail; while there he was told by John Ford's brother that President and
Mrs. Lincoln accompanied by Gen. and Mrs. Ulysses S. Grant would be attending
the play Our American Cousin at Ford's Theatre that evening. He
immediately set about making plans for the assassination, which included making
arrangements with livery stable owner James W. Pumphrey for a getaway horse,
and an escape route. Booth informed Powell, Herold, and Atzerodt of his
intention to kill Lincoln. He assigned Powell to assassinate Secretary of State
William H. Seward and Atzerodt to assassinate Vice President Andrew Johnson.
Herold would assist in their escape into Virginia.
By
targeting Lincoln and his two immediate successors to the presidency, Booth
seems to have intended to decapitate the Union government and throw it into a
state of panic and confusion. The possibility of assassinating the Union Army's
commanding general as well was foiled when Grant declined the theatre
invitation at his wife's insistence. Instead, the Grants departed Washington by
train that evening for a visit to relatives in New Jersey. Booth had hoped that
the assassinations would create sufficient chaos within the Union that the
Confederate government could reorganize and continue the war if one Confederate
army remained in the field or, that failing, to avenge the South's defeat. In
his 2005 analysis of Lincoln's assassination, Thomas Goodrich wrote, "All
the elements in Booth's nature came together at once – his hatred of
tyranny, his love of liberty, his passion for the stage, his sense of drama,
and his lifelong quest to become immortal."
As
a famous and popular actor who had frequently performed at Ford's Theatre, and
who was well known to its owner, John T. Ford, Booth had free access to all
parts of the theater, even having his mail sent there. By boring a spyhole into
the door of the presidential box earlier that day, the assassin could check
that his intended victim had made it to the play and observe the box's
occupants. That evening, at around 10 p.m., as the play progressed, John Wilkes
Booth slipped into Lincoln's box and shot him in the back of the head with a
.44 caliber Derringer. Booth's escape was almost thwarted by Major Henry
Rathbone, who was present in the Presidential box with Mrs. Mary Todd Lincoln.
Booth stabbed Rathbone when the startled officer lunged at him. Rathbone's
fiancée, Clara Harris, who was also present in the box, was unhurt.
Booth
then jumped from the President's box to the stage, where he raised his knife
and shouted "Sic semper tyrannis" (Latin for "Thus always
to tyrants," attributed to Brutus at Caesar's assassination and the
Virginia state motto), while others said he added, "I have done it, the
South is avenged!" Various accounts state that Booth injured his leg when
his spur snagged a decorative U.S. Treasury Guard flag while leaping to the
stage. Historian Michael W. Kauffman questioned this legend in his book, American
Brutus: John Wilkes Booth and the Lincoln Conspiracies, writing in 2004
that eyewitness accounts of Booth's hurried stage exit made it unlikely that
his leg was broken then. Kauffman contends that Booth was injured later that
night during his flight to escape when his horse tripped and fell on him,
calling Booth's claim to the contrary an exaggeration to portray his own
actions as heroic.
Booth
was the only one of the assassins to succeed. Powell was able to stab Seward,
who was bedridden as a result of an earlier carriage accident; although badly
wounded, Seward survived. Atzerodt lost his nerve and spent the evening
drinking; he never made an attempt on Johnson's life.
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John Wilkes Booth's escape route
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Reaction
and pursuit
In
the ensuing pandemonium inside Ford's Theatre, Booth fled by a stage door to
the alley, where his getaway horse was held for him by Joseph
"Peanuts" Burroughs. The owner of the horse had warned Booth that the
horse was high spirited and would break halter if left unattended. Booth left
the horse with Edmund Spangler and Spangler arranged for Burroughs to hold the
horse.
The
fleeing assassin galloped into southern Maryland, accompanied by David Herold,
having planned his escape route to take advantage of the sparsely settled
area's lack of telegraphs and railroads, along with its predominantly
Confederate sympathies. He thought that the area's dense forests and swampy
terrain of Zekiah Swamp made it ideal for an escape route into rural Virginia.
At midnight, Booth and Herold arrived at Surratt's Tavern on the Brandywine
Pike, 9 miles (14 km) from Washington, where they had stored guns and
equipment earlier in the year as part of the kidnap plot.
The
fugitives then continued southward, stopping before dawn on April 15 at the
home of Dr. Samuel Mudd, St. Catharine, 25 miles (40 km) from Washington,
for treatment of Booth's injured leg. Mudd later said that Booth told him the
injury occurred when his horse fell. The next day, Booth and Herold arrived at
the home of Samuel Cox around 4 a.m. As the two fugitives hid in the woods
nearby, Cox contacted Thomas A. Jones, his foster brother and a Confederate
agent in charge of spy operations in the southern Maryland area since 1862. By
order of Secretary of War Edwin M. Stanton, the War Department advertised a $100,000 reward
($1.54 million in 2014 USD) for information leading to the arrest of Booth
and his accomplices, and Federal troops were dispatched to search southern
Maryland extensively, following tips reported by Federal intelligence agents to
Col. Lafayette Baker.
While
Federal troops combed the rural area's woods and swamps for Booth in the days
following the assassination, the nation experienced an outpouring of grief. On
April 18, mourners waited seven abreast in a mile-long line outside the White
House for the public viewing of the slain president, reposing in his open
walnut casket in the black-draped East Room. A cross of lilies was at the head
and roses covered the coffin's lower half. Thousands of mourners arriving on
special trains jammed Washington for the next day's funeral, sleeping on hotel
floors and even resorting to blankets spread outdoors on the capital's lawn.
Prominent abolitionist leader and orator Frederick Douglass called the
assassination an "unspeakable calamity" for African Americans. Great
indignation was directed towards Booth as the assassin's identity was
telegraphed across the nation. Newspapers called him an "accursed
devil," "monster," "madman," and a "wretched
fiend." Historian Dorothy Kunhardt wrote: "Almost every family who
kept a photograph album on the parlor table owned a likeness of John Wilkes
Booth of the famous Booth family of actors. After the assassination Northerners
slid the Booth card out of their albums: some threw it away, some burned it,
some crumpled it angrily." Even
in the South, sorrow was expressed in some quarters. In Savannah, Georgia,
where the mayor and city council addressed a vast throng at an outdoor
gathering to express their indignation, many in the crowd wept. Confederate
Gen. Joseph E. Johnston called Booth's act "a disgrace to the age".
Robert E. Lee also expressed regret at Lincoln's death by Booth's hand.
Not
all were grief-stricken, however. In New York City, a man was attacked by an
enraged crowd when he shouted, "It served Old Abe right!" after
hearing the news of Lincoln's death. Elsewhere in the South, Lincoln was hated
in death as in life, and Booth was viewed as a hero as many rejoiced at news of
his deed. Other Southerners feared that a vengeful North would exact a terrible
retribution upon the defeated former Confederate states. "Instead of being
a great Southern hero, his deed was considered the worst possible tragedy that
could have befallen the South as well as the North," wrote Kunhardt.
While
hiding in the Maryland woods as he waited for an opportunity to cross the
Potomac River into Virginia, Booth read the accounts of national mourning
reported in the newspapers brought to him by Jones each day. By April 20, he
was aware that some of his co-conspirators were already arrested: Mary Surratt,
Powell (or Paine), Arnold, and O'Laughlen. Booth was surprised to find little
public sympathy for his action, especially from those anti-Lincoln newspapers that
had previously excoriated the President in life. As news of the assassination
reached the far corners of the nation, indignation was aroused against
Lincoln's critics, whom many blamed for encouraging Booth to act. The San
Francisco Chronicle editorialized: "Booth has simply carried out what
... secession politicians and journalists have been for years expressing in
words ... who have denounced the President as a 'tyrant,' a 'despot,' a
'usurper,' hinted at, and virtually recommended." Booth wrote of his dismay
in a journal entry on April 21, as he awaited nightfall before crossing the
Potomac River into Virginia (see map):
"For six months we had worked to capture. But our cause being almost lost, something decisive and great must be done. I struck boldly, and not as the papers say. I can never repent it, though we hated to kill."
That
same day, the nine-car funeral train bearing Lincoln's body departed Washington
on the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad, arriving at Baltimore's Camden Station at
10 a.m., the first stop on a 13-day journey to Springfield, Illinois, its
final destination. As the funeral train slowly made its way westward through
seven states, stopping en route at Harrisburg; Philadelphia; Trenton; New York;
Albany; Buffalo; Cleveland; Columbus, Ohio; Cincinnati; and Indianapolis during
the following days, about 7 million people lined the railroad tracks along
the 1,662-mile (2,675 km) route, holding aloft signs with legends such as
"We mourn our loss," "He lives in the hearts of his
people," and "The darkest hour in history."
In
the cities where the train stopped, 1.5 million people viewed Lincoln in
his coffin. Aboard the train was Clarence Depew, president of the New York
Central Railroad, who said, "As we sped over the rails at night, the scene
was the most pathetic ever witnessed. At every crossroads the glare of
innumerable torches illuminated the whole population, kneeling on the
ground." Dorothy Kunhardt called the funeral train's journey "the
mightiest outpouring of national grief the world had yet seen."
Meanwhile,
as mourners were viewing Lincoln's remains when the funeral train steamed into
Harrisburg at 8:20 p.m., Booth and Herold were provided with a boat and
compass by Jones, to cross the Potomac at night on April 21. Instead of reaching
Virginia, however, they mistakenly navigated upriver to a bend in the broad
Potomac River, coming ashore again in Maryland on April 22. The 23-year-old
Herold knew the area well, having frequently hunted there, and recognized a
nearby farm as belonging to a Confederate sympathizer. The farmer led them to
his son-in-law, Col. John J. Hughes, who provided the fugitives with food and a
hideout until nightfall, for a second attempt to row across the river to
Virginia. Booth wrote in his diary, "With every man's hand against me, I
am here in despair. And why; For doing what Brutus was honored for ... And yet
I for striking down a greater tyrant than they ever knew am looked upon as a
common cutthroat." The pair finally reached the Virginia shore near Machodoc
Creek before dawn on April 23. There, they made contact with Thomas Harbin,
whom Booth had previously brought into his erstwhile kidnapping plot. Harbin
took Booth and Herold to another Confederate agent in the area, William Bryant,
who supplied them with horses.
While
Lincoln's funeral train was in New York City on April 24, Lieutenant Edward P.
Doherty was dispatched from Washington at 2 p.m. with a detachment of
26 Union soldiers from the 16th New York Cavalry Regiment to capture Booth
in Virginia. Accompanied by Lieutenant Colonel Everton Conger, an intelligence
officer assigned by Lafayette Baker, the detachment steamed 70 miles
(113 km) down the Potomac River on a boat, the John S. Ide, landing
at Belle Plain, Virginia, at 10 p.m. The pursuers crossed the Rappahannock
River and tracked Booth and Herold to Richard H. Garrett's farm, just south of
Port Royal, Caroline County, Virginia. Booth and Herold had been led to the
farm on April 24 by William S. Jett, a former private in the 9th Virginia Cavalry
whom they had met before crossing the Rappahannock. The Garretts were unaware
of Lincoln's assassination; Booth was introduced to them as "James W.
Boyd", a Confederate soldier who, they were told, had been wounded in the
battle of Petersburg and was returning home.
Garrett's
11-year-old son, Richard, was an eyewitness. In later years, he became a
Baptist minister and widely lectured on the events of Booth's demise at his
family's farm. In 1921, Garrett's lecture was published in the Confederate
Veteran as the "True Story of the Capture of John Wilkes Booth."
According to his account, Booth and Herold arrived at the Garretts' farm,
located on the road to Bowling Green, around 3 p.m. on Monday afternoon.
Because Confederate mail delivery had ceased with the collapse of the
Confederate government, he explained, the Garretts were unaware of Lincoln's
assassination. After having dinner with the Garretts that evening, Booth
learned of the surrender of Johnston's army. The last Confederate armed force
of any size, its capitulation meant that the Civil War was unquestionably over
and Booth's attempt to save the Confederacy by Lincoln's assassination had
failed. The Garretts also finally learned of Lincoln's death and the
substantial reward for Booth's capture. Booth, said Garrett, displayed no
reaction, other than to ask if the family would turn in the fugitive should
they have the opportunity. Still not aware of their guest's true identity, one
of the older Garrett sons averred that they might, if only because they needed
the money. The next day, Booth told the Garretts he intended to reach Mexico,
drawing a route on a map of theirs. However, biographer Theodore Roscoe said of
Garrett's account, "Almost nothing written or testified in respect to the
doings of the fugitives at Garrett's farm can be taken at face value. Nobody
knows exactly what Booth said to the Garretts, or they to him."
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Broadside advertising reward for capture of
Lincoln assassination conspirators, illustrated with photographic prints of
John H. Surratt, John Wilkes Booth, and David E. Herold.
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Photo of the Garrett Farm near Port
Royal, Virginia, where John Wilkes Booth, the assassin of U.S. President
Abraham Lincoln, died.
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Death
Conger
tracked down Jett and interrogated him, learning of Booth's location at the
Garrett farm. Before dawn on April 26, the soldiers caught up with the
fugitives, who were hiding in Garrett's tobacco barn. David Herold surrendered,
but Booth refused Conger's demand to surrender, saying "I prefer to come
out and fight"; the soldiers then set the barn on fire. As Booth moved
about inside the blazing barn, Sergeant Boston Corbett shot him. According to
Corbett's later account, he fired at Booth because the fugitive "raised
his pistol to shoot" at them. Conger's report to Stanton, however, stated
that Corbett shot Booth "without order, pretext or excuse," and
recommended that Corbett be punished for disobeying orders to take Booth alive.
Booth, fatally wounded in the neck, was dragged from the barn to the porch of
Garrett's farmhouse, where he died three hours later, aged 26. The bullet had
pierced three vertebrae and partially severed his spinal cord, paralyzing him.
In his dying moments, he reportedly whispered, "Tell my mother I died for
my country." Asking that his hands be raised to his face so he could see
them, Booth uttered his last words, "Useless, useless," and died as
dawn was breaking. In Booth's pockets were found a compass, a candle, pictures
of five women (actresses Alice Grey, Helen Western, Effie Germon, Fannie Brown,
and Booth's fiancée Lucy Hale), and his diary, where he had written of
Lincoln's death, "Our country owed all her troubles to him, and God simply
made me the instrument of his punishment."
Shortly
after Booth's death, his brother Edwin wrote to his sister Asia, "Think no
more of him as your brother; he is dead to us now, as he soon must be to all
the world, but imagine the boy you loved to be in that better part of his
spirit, in another world." Asia also had in her possession a sealed letter
Booth had given her in January 1865 for safekeeping, only to be opened upon his
death. In the letter, Booth had written:
"I know how foolish I shall be deemed for undertaking such a step as this, where, on one side, I have many friends and everything to make me happy ... to give up all ... seems insane; but God is my judge. I love justice more than I do a country that disowns it, more than fame or wealth."
Booth's
letter, seized along with other family papers at Asia's house by Federal troops
and published by The New York Times while the manhunt was underway, explained
his reasons for plotting against Lincoln. In it he said, "I have ever held
the South was right. The very nomination of Abraham Lincoln, four years ago,
spoke plainly war upon Southern rights and institutions." The institution
of "African slavery," he had written, "is one of the greatest
blessings that God has ever bestowed upon a favored nation" and Lincoln's
policy was one of "total annihilation."
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Guns carried by John Wilkes Booth when he was
captured/killed, on display at Ford's Theatre museum in Washington, D.C.
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Aftermath
Booth's
body was shrouded in a blanket and tied to the side of an old farm wagon for the
trip back to Belle Plain. There, his corpse was taken aboard the ironclad USS Montauk
and brought to the Washington Navy Yard for identification and an autopsy. The
body was identified there as Booth's by more than ten people who knew him.
Among the identifying features used to make sure that the man that was killed
was Booth was a tattoo on his left hand with his initials J.W.B., and a
distinct scar on the back of his neck. The third, fourth, and fifth vertebrae
were removed during the autopsy to allow access to the bullet. These bones are
still on display at the National Museum of Health and Medicine in Washington,
D.C. The body was then buried in a storage room at the Old Penitentiary, later
moved to a warehouse at the Washington Arsenal on October 1, 1867. In 1869, the
remains were once again identified before being released to the Booth family,
where they were buried in the family plot at Green Mount Cemetery in Baltimore,
after a burial ceremony conducted by Fleming James, minister of Christ Episcopal
Church, in the presence of more than 40 people. By then, wrote scholar
Russell Conwell after visiting homes in the vanquished former Confederate
states, hatred of Lincoln still smoldered and "Photographs of Wilkes
Booth, with the last words of great martyrs printed upon its borders ... adorn
their drawing rooms".
Eight
others implicated in Lincoln's assassination were tried by a military tribunal
in Washington, D.C., and found guilty on June 30, 1865. Mary Surratt, Lewis
Powell, David Herold, and George Atzerodt were hanged in the Old Arsenal
Penitentiary on July 7, 1865. Samuel Mudd, Samuel Arnold, and Michael
O'Laughlen were sentenced to life imprisonment at Fort Jefferson in Florida's
Dry Tortugas; Edmund Spangler was given a six-year term in prison. O' Laughlen
died in a yellow fever epidemic there in 1867. The others were eventually
pardoned in February 1869 by President Andrew Johnson.
Forty
years later, when the centenary of Lincoln's birth was celebrated in 1909, a
border state official reflected on Booth's assassination of Lincoln,
"Confederate veterans held public services and gave public expression to
the sentiment, that 'had Lincoln lived' the days of reconstruction might have
been softened and the era of good feeling ushered in earlier". A century
later, Goodrich concluded in 2005, "For millions of people, particularly
in the South, it would be decades before the impact of the Lincoln
assassination began to release its terrible hold on their lives". The
majority of Northerners viewed Booth as a madman or monster who murdered the
savior of the Union, while in the South, many cursed Booth for bringing upon
them the harsh revenge of an incensed North instead of the reconciliation
promised by Lincoln.
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Marker at Site of John Wilkes Booth's capture
in 1865, on U.S. Rt. 301 near Port Royal, Virginia.
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Theories
of Booth's escape
Main
article: James William Boyd
In
1907, Finis L. Bates wrote Escape and Suicide of John Wilkes Booth,
contending that a Booth look-alike was mistakenly killed at the Garrett farm
while Booth eluded his pursuers. Booth, said Bates, assumed the pseudonym
"John St. Helen" and settled on the Paluxy River near Glen Rose,
Texas, and later moved to Granbury, Texas. After falling gravely ill and making
a deathbed confession that he was the fugitive assassin, he recovered and fled,
eventually committing suicide in 1903 in Enid, Oklahoma, under the alias
"David E. George". By 1913, more than 70,000 copies of the book
had been sold, and Bates exhibited St. Helen's mummified body in carnival
sideshows.
In
response, the Maryland Historical Society published an account in 1913 by
then-Baltimore mayor William M. Pegram, who had viewed Booth's remains upon the
casket's arrival at the Weaver funeral home in Baltimore on February 18, 1869,
for burial at Green Mount Cemetery. Pegram, who had known Booth well as a young
man, submitted a sworn statement that the body he had seen in 1869 was Booth's.
Others positively identifying this body as Booth at the funeral home included
Booth's mother, brother, and sister, along with his dentist and other Baltimore
acquaintances. Earlier, The New York Times had published an account by
their reporter in 1911 detailing the burial of Booth's body at the cemetery and
those who were witnesses. The rumor periodically revived, as in the 1920s, when
a corpse advertised as the "Man Who Shot Lincoln" was exhibited on a
national tour by a carnival promoter. According to a 1938 article in the Saturday
Evening Post, the exhibitor said he obtained St. Helen's corpse from Bates'
widow.
The Lincoln Conspiracy, a book published in 1977, contended there was a
government plot to conceal Booth's escape, reviving interest in the story and
prompting the display of St. Helen's mummified body in Chicago that year. The
book sold more than one million copies and was made into a feature film called The
Lincoln Conspiracy, which was theatrically released in 1977. A 1998 book, The
Curse of Cain: The Untold Story of John Wilkes Booth, contended that Booth
had escaped, sought refuge in Japan and eventually returned to the United
States. In 1994 two historians, together with several descendants, sought a
court order for the exhumation of Booth's body at Green Mount Cemetery, which
was, according to their lawyer, "intended to prove or disprove longstanding
theories on Booth's escape" by conducting a photo-superimposition
analysis. The application was blocked, however, by Baltimore Circuit Court
Judge Joseph H. H. Kaplan, who cited, among other things, "the
unreliability of petitioners' less-than-convincing escape/cover-up theory"
as a major factor in his decision. The Maryland Court of Special Appeals upheld
the ruling. No gravestone marks the precise location where Booth is buried in
the family's gravesite. Author Francis Wilson, 11 years old at the time of
Lincoln's assassination, wrote an epitaph of Booth in his 1929 book John
Wilkes Booth: "In the terrible deed he committed, he was actuated by
no thought of monetary gain, but by a self-sacrificing, albeit wholly fanatical
devotion to a cause he thought supreme."
In
December 2010, descendants of Edwin Booth reported that they obtained
permission to exhume the Shakespearean actor's body to obtain DNA samples.
However, Bree Harvey, a spokesperson from the Mount Auburn Cemetery in
Cambridge, Massachusetts, where Edwin Booth is buried, refuted reports that the
family had contacted them and requested to exhume Edwin's body. The family
hopes to obtain DNA samples from artifacts belonging to John Wilkes, or from
remains such as vertebrae stored at the National Museum of Health and Medicine
in Maryland. On March 30, 2013, museum spokesperson Carol Johnson announced the
family's request to exhume DNA from the vertebrae had been rejected.
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Gravesite of the Booth
family of 19th century actors at Green Mount Cemetery in Baltimore,
Maryland (U.S.), where Junius Brutus Booth and several other family members are
buried, notably Asia (Booth) Clarke and John Wilkes Booth (unmarked), the
assassin of U.S. President Abraham Lincoln.
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In
film
In
2011, Booth was portrayed by Toby Kebbell in
the Robert Redford film The Conspirator.
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