John Wilkes Booth Totally Explained

Everything about John Wilkes Booth totally explained

John Wilkes Booth (May 10 1838 – April 26 1865) was an American stage actor who, as part of a conspiracy plot, assassinated Abraham Lincoln, the 16th President of the United States, at Ford's Theatre in Washington, D.C. on April 14, 1865. Lincoln died the next day from the single gunshot wound to the back of the head, becoming the first American president to be assassinated.
   Booth was a member of the prominent 19th century Booth family of actors from Maryland. He was also a Confederate sympathizer and expressed vehement dissatisfaction with the South's defeat in the Civil War. He opposed Lincoln's proposal to extend voting rights to recently emancipated slaves.
   Booth and a group of co-conspirators led by him planned to kill Abraham Lincoln, Vice President Andrew Johnson, Secretary of State William Seward, and Secretary of War Edwin Stanton in a desperate bid to help the tottering Confederacy's cause. Although Robert E. Lee's Army of Northern Virginia had surrendered four days earlier, Booth believed the war wasn't yet over since Confederate General Joseph Johnston's army was still fighting the Union Army under General William Tecumseh Sherman. Of the conspirators, only Booth was successful in carrying out his part of the plot.
   Following the shooting, Booth fled by horseback to southern Maryland and eventually to a farm in rural northern Virginia, where he was tracked down and killed by Union soldiers twelve days later. Several of the other conspirators were tried and hanged shortly thereafter. In later years, some have suggested that Booth escaped his pursuers and subsequently died many years later under a pseudonym.

Background and early life

His parents, the noted British Shakespearean actor Junius Brutus Booth and his actress wife Mary Ann Holmes, emigrated to the United States from England in 1821, purchasing a farm known as "Tudor Hall" near Bel Air, Maryland, where John Wilkes Booth was born in 1838. He was named after the British revolutionary John Wilkes, who the family claimed was a distant relative.
Booth was educated in the classic literature, particularly Shakespeare. He attended the Bel Air Academy, where his headmaster described him as "Not 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 Milton Boarding School for Boys located in Sparks, Maryland. As recounted by Booth's sister, Asia Booth Clarke, in her book entitled "The Unlocked Book," the future actor met an old Gypsy woman in the woods near the school who gave him a grim assessment of his life and said he'd die young. In 1851, at age 13, Booth attended St. Timothy's Hall, a military academy in Catonsville, Maryland. Following in the footsteps of their father (who had died in 1852), Booth and his brothers Edwin and Junius Brutus, Jr. would become well-known actors in mid-nineteenth century America.

Theatrical career and Civil War

At the age of 17, Booth played the Earl of Richmond in Shakespeare's Richard III, but didn't act again until 1857, when he joined the stock company of the Arch Street Theatre in Philadelphia. At his request he was billed as "J.B. Wilkes", a pseudonym meant to divert attention away from his famous thespian family. In 1858 he was accepted as a member of the Richmond Theatre, Virginia, stock company, and became increasingly popular, called "the handsomest man in America" by reviewers. He stood tall, had jet-black hair, and was lean and athletic. He was also an excellent swordsman. His performances were often characterized by his contemporaries as acrobatic and intensely physical. A fellow actress once recalled that he occasionally cut himself with his own sword.
   On December 2, 1859, Booth attended the hanging of militant abolitionist John Brown, who was executed for leading a raid on the Federal armory at Harpers Ferry (in present-day West Virginia).
   Although Booth was pro-Confederate, his family, like many Marylanders, was divided, and to preserve harmony among his brothers, Booth promised his mother that he wouldn't enlist in the Confederate Army. As a popular actor in the 1860s, he travelled extensively to perform in both North and South, and as far west as New Orleans.
   In the summer of 1864, Booth met with several well-known Confederate sympathizers at The Parker House in Boston, Massachusetts. In October 1864, he made an unexplained trip to Montreal. At the time, Montreal was a well-known center of clandestine Confederate activities. He spent ten days in the city and stayed for a time at St. Lawrence Hall, a meeting place for the Confederate Secret Service, and 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 as well as George Nicholas Sanders, a one-time U.S. ambassador to Britain. Booth is believed to have been active in the "Knights of the Golden Circle", described as a "nest of 'Secesh' spies" (that is, pro-secessionist).
   On the morning of Good Friday, April 14, 1865, Booth learned that the President and Mrs. Lincoln would be attending the play Our American Cousin at Ford's Theatre. He immediately set about making plans for the assassination, which included a getaway horse waiting outside, and an escape route. Booth informed Powell, Herold and Atzerodt of his intention to kill Lincoln. He assigned Powell to assassinate Secretary of State Seward and Atzerodt to assassinate Vice-President Johnson. Herold would assist in their escape into Virginia. Witnesses said he shouted "Sic semper tyrannis" (Latin for "Thus always to tyrants", the Virginia state motto) from the stage, while others said he added, "The South is avenged."

Aftermath — pursuit and death

In the ensuing pandemonium inside Ford's Theatre, Booth fled by a stage door to the alley, where he'd a horse waiting, and galloped into southern Maryland, arriving before dawn on April 15 at the home of Dr. Samuel Mudd, who treated the injured leg. A detachment of 25 Union soldiers from the 16th New York Cavalry Regiment, led by Lieutenant Edward P. Doherty and accompanied by Lieutenant Colonel Everton Conger, pursued Booth through Southern Maryland and across the Potomac and Rappahannock rivers to Richard H. Garrett's farm, just south of Port Royal, Caroline County, Virginia. Booth and his companion, David E. Herold, had been led to the farm by William S. Jett, formerly a private in the 9th Virginia Cavalry, whom they'd met before crossing the Rappahannock.
   Booth was surprised when he found little sympathy for his action, and wrote of his dismay in a journal entry on April 21, just before crossing the Potomac River into Virginia (see map, left), "[W]ith every man's hand against me, I'm 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".
   Conger tracked down Jett and interrogated him, learning of Booth's location at the Garrett farm. Early in the morning of April 26, 1865, the soldiers caught up with Booth there. Trapped in a tobacco barn, David Herold surrendered. Booth refused to surrender and the soldiers then set the barn ablaze.
   Booth's body was taken to the ironclad USS Montauk at the Washington Navy Yard for identification and an autopsy. The body was then buried in a storage room at the Old Penitentiary at the Washington Arsenal. When the prison was razed in 1867, the body was moved to a warehouse on the Arsenal grounds. In 1869, the remains were once again identified before being released to the Booth family, where they were buried in the family plot at Greenmount Cemetery in Baltimore.

"Booth escaped" theories

Some individuals and writers have advanced theories that Booth escaped his pursuers and died years later under a pseudonym. An early popularizer of these "Booth Escape" theories was Finis L. Bates who claimed to have met Booth in Granbury, Texas in the 1870s and later to have taken possession of Booth's body after his suicide in Enid, Oklahoma in 1903. He toured the mummified body in carnival sideshows and wrote The Escape and Suicide of John Wilkes Booth (1907) in order to authenticate the mummy. The Lincoln Conspiracy details the assassination, the Boyd plot, and Booth's escape to the swamps. The Curse of Cain: The Untold Story of John Wilkes Booth. continues with the claim that Booth escaped, sought refuge in Japan and eventually returned to the United States where he died in Enid, Oklahoma in 1903. Another is that a man claiming to be Booth lived into the 1900s in Missouri. In the mid-1990s, an attempt was mounted to force the exhumation of Booth's presumed remains in order to conduct a photo-superimposition study. This was blocked 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. Records made public by the FBI give no information to support the escape theory.

Booth in Film and Pop Culture

Booth's story, along with those of 8 other presidential assassins and would-be assassins, was the basis of Sondheim's and Weidman's Broadway musical Assassins. His story is told in the song The Ballad of Booth, and he's one of the main characters in the musical.
John Wilkes Booth is portrayed by Christian Camargo in .

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