American Brutus

It was 150 years ago on this date, April 26, that one of the largest man-hunts in the nation's history concluded. Much to the dismay of Edwin Stanton, the Secretary of War, the man would be killed in a shoot out at Garrett's farm near Port Royal, Maryland.  Stanton wanted him alive.  The man, of course has become one of the most famous of Americans, but not for the ply of his trade, but for the assassination of the 16th man to hold the office of the US Presidency.  Booth was an actor who favored Shakespeare.  Shakespeare was also, interestingly, a favorite of President Abraham Lincoln.  Lincoln would be the first American President to be assassinated, and was shot by John Wilkes Booth at 10:20 pm while attending the play "Our American Cousin" at Ford's Theater in Washington D.C. on the night of Good Friday, April 14. Lincoln died the next morning in what was then a boarding house across the street from the theater.  Booth thought Lincoln a tyrant, and he in his action would see himself as a then present day Brutus. For proof of this view of Lincoln one need look no further than the words he proclaimed after he jumped on stage from Lincoln's box at the theater:  "Sic semper tyrannis," or "Thus always to tyrants."

Ford's Theater, April 2007
Author photo

We have all seen information on the world wide web, purporting to show so many coincidences between the Lincoln and Kennedy assassination, that fate, the will of nature, or of God was involved. Such occurrences forget all of the incidents that were not coincidental.  What do we know of John Wilkes Booth?  Most know he took up the family business of being an actor, and that he was a southern sympathizer.  Yet, there is more to the story, and providing some of that information is the intent of this post.  It is often thought that Booth kept a diary, but Lincoln historian, James Swanson, says that is not the case, although there are many works based on the Booth diary.  Booth's thoughts,  while on the run, were written on some blank pages of a 1864 calendar.  For twelve days, Booth eluded capture, for twelve days the nation was on edge, and for twelve days the US government was embarrassed.  Edwin Stanton, the larger than life Secretary of War would, on April 20, put a $100,000 reward for Booth.  It would be paid out.  That may seem little today, but the typical worker in 1865 earned about $1 per day, so it was a substantial sum.

Reward Poster
Source: Google images

Rather than finding praise, as he expected, Booth found derision as a result of his act.  Little did he realize that in assassinating Lincoln, he would turn Lincoln into a national icon, to the point that Lincoln was compared by many not just to Moses, but also to Jesus. Having sent the bullet into the back of Lincoln's head on Good Friday, was not lost on many who consider father Abraham to now be larger in death than he was in life.

Lincoln's box at Ford's Theater, where is life was cut short
April 2007, Author photo

"Now I believe in country right or wrong, but gentlemen the whole union is our country and no particular state."  If one were to have read you that quotation and asked which Civil War era person would have made those comments, who would you have said?  Most likely, Abraham Lincoln.  But no, those words were in a draft of a speech that Booth had given in Philadelphia in late December 1860, less than two months after Lincoln's election as President.  After that comment, Booth gets to the crux of the speech, when he says:  "No gentlemen the whole union is our country and the cry for justice should be heard and heeded from whatever extremity it may come.  The south wants justice, has waited for it long, she will wait no longer"  He goes on to say that the laws which protect the south have no longer been enforced.  What is interesting is that Lincoln, as we know was a Union man as well, and the war came at first not over slavery, but in Lincoln's thoughts to preserve the Union.  It was not until later that ending slavery would become a focus. The Gettysburg Address of November 1863 would be the summation of the goals of the war with the rebellious states.  Booth believed that abolitionist principles had to be fully exterminated from the nation in order for the south to have peace.  For the union to not do so, in his mind, was justification for rebellion and the formation of the Confederate States.  Everything had to be on the terms set forth by the South.  It was the constant effort at appeasement for the South, which occurred over decades that perhaps had given the South confidence that they would be welcomed into a union willing to set aside abolition and now fully accept the peculiar institution.

Garrett's Farm where Booth was killed
Source: Google images

It was the power of the office of the President that J.W. Booth did not like. He saw Lincoln like Caesar.  But this view was based on his dislike of a President who would not yield to the south.  It was not based on Lincoln's having suspended the writ of habeus corpus, or having instituted martial law in some border states.  It was more simply that Lincoln would not appease the desires of a ruling southern aristocracy.  Like Brutus, he saw himself as a man to take down who he believed was the American Caesar.  But, Booth was not simply attacking Lincoln, he was attacking the ideas and spirit for which Lincoln stood.  Booth would say that "It was the spirit and ambition of Caesar that Brutus struck at. Caesar must bleed for it."  He had first planned a kidnapping, and would later plan, and undertake murder.  In his "diary" notation for 21 April he writes:  "Our country owed all her troubles to him, and God simply made me the instrument of his punishment.  In that same document he would later add: "After being hunted like a dog through swamps, woods and last night being chased by gun boats till I was corded to return wet cold and starving, with every mans 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."  Booth thought he could bring about the end to the nation's troubles and as Swanson says, when reading Booth's comments made on the pages of that 1864 calendar "is to encounter the mind of an assassin in all its passion, vanity and delusion."  "Our country owed all her troubles to him," Booth would write, "and God simply made me the instrument of his punishment."

John Wilkes Booth
Source:  Google images

Booth was believed to something of a miser.  He lived rather simply, he was a dutiful son, writing every week to his mother, and he often would deny himself common pleasures.  It was almost like he was holier than any one else, living a self-imposed difficult life, his own type of exile.  This weird type of self-aggrandizement would come through later in that same 21 April entry when he writes "I hoped for no gain.  I knew no private wrong.  I struck for my country and that alone.  A country groaned beneath this tyranny and prayed for an end.  Yet now behold the cold hand they extend to me."  In his mind, the assassination was not for his glory, but for that of the nation.  Yet, as shown in the passages quoted earlier, Booth had expected to be highly thought of due to his act.  It was not a mind thinking clearly.  In the end, Booth had  become derided, and not only in the north, but also from some in that part of the country he thought so grand--the south.  There were of course places, both north and south that did not mind Lincoln having been murdered.  One only need to look at some southern papers.  For example, the Demoplis (Alabama) Herald would have a headline reading: "Glorious News.  Lincoln and Seward Assassinated!"  There were also comments from some Copperheads in the north were also pleased with the news.

Peterson Boarding House where Lincoln died
April 2007, Author photo

In their search for Booth, detectives and the War Department would hunt down his family members and acquaintances.  One of his sisters, Asia, was struggling through a difficult pregnancy and placed under house arrest, while her husband was sent from Philadelphia to Washington D.C.  Her husband, John Sleeper Clark, was a fervent Unionist.  "Strange men," she would later write, "called at late hours, some whose voices I knew, but who would not answer to their names."  Junius Booth, also an actor, and a brother, was also arrested.  Along with the arrests, many of J.W. Booth's writings would be confiscated and destroyed.  Asia would later write a biography of her infamous brother. In the end, this is the only manuscript to provide any "insightful detail" as noted in Smithsonian Magazine on her brother.  His, she says, was a tenacious rather than a intuitive intelligence, although he had amazing power of concentration.  As noted in an article in Smithsonian, she would write in the biography of her brother of his action being predestined:

His mother, when he was a babe of six months old, had a vision, in answer to a fervent prayer, in which she imagined that the foreshadowing of his fate had been revealed to her....  This is one of the numerous coincidences which tend to lead one to believe that human lives are swayed by the supernatural.

Adding to that, the article also recounts her narrative of Booth, while attending a Quaker boarding school in Maryland, came across a fortuneteller who would say to him "Ah, you've had a bad hand....It's full enough of of sorrow.  Full of trouble."  In addition, the article, in its recollection of her biography goes on to say that "He had been 'born under an unlucky star' and had a 'thundering crowd of enemies'; he would 'make a bad end" and 'die young.'"  Perhaps, such statements can help a grieving family member, by thinking that the act was predestined, and in so being there was nothing that could be done to stop it.  It was his fate.  Such belief may assuage Asia's guilt over the actions of her brother.  When she had heard of her brother's actions, she quickly opened up some documents he asked her to save for him, in case anything happened to him.  With bonds, and an oil transfer she found a letter to their mother which explained the reasoning for what he intents.  There was also a document in which he had written about his desire to kidnap Lincoln.

Lincoln Memorial, Washington D.C.
April 2007, Author photo

While the press did not publish the letter to his mother right away, the manifesto of the kidnapping was quickly published.  Interestingly, Booth wrote a lengthy letter on April 14, 1865 which he gave to a friend to have delivered to a newspaper, so as to publish his account of why he took action.  The person never delivered the letter, and when questioned by authorities could not recall its contents.  However, eleven years later, he supposedly recalled the 1500 words of the letter in almost perfect detail and it was published. Yet, but for the first and concluding paragraphs, the other paragraphs replicate the account in Booth's manifesto authorities acquired from his sister.  Even though older brother Edwin, a famous actor in his own right, would write to  Asia and say "He is dead to us now" she could not forget.  The handwritten biography she wrote had not title, and was only 132 pages.  She had placed on its cover sheet simply the initials J.W.B.  It would be published in 1946.

Lincoln's Tomb, Springfield, IL
March 2003, Author photo

The South viewed an end to a way of life with the election of the rail-splitter from Illinois.  Change came difficult to the south, and to the nation, as it would struggle with reconstruction.  While a Republican, Lincoln did not originally fit in the radical Republican camp of whole-hearted abolitionists.  To some in the south, Booth has become the American Brutus.  But, he now lives in derision and not in celebration.  Lincoln has become larger in death, and historians often push aside some of the actions that Lincoln put in play that are still used to justify presidential power to this day. In his mind, and the time of the day perhaps such actions are understandable.   After his death the Republicans would push for additional reforms and voting rights, only to be undone by an electorate not ready for such advanced change.  The world of the mid-to-late 19th century was changing fast.  The Civil War, was emblematic of the coming changes to the nation.  The nation would move from slave to free, it would settle the wide open spaces of the plains (and in so doing create and break treaties with Native Americans), it would start to move from rural to urban.  Advances in medicine and public health would start to eradicate diseases once commonplace in the 19th century, and extend life spans.  Reconstruction would prove difficult for the nation, and Booth had taken the life of the one man who had proposed "malice toward none."  It is only appropriate that Lincoln take his place as among our nation's most important leaders.

Sources:  Smithsonian Magazine, March 2015
                2001, Rhodenhamel, John and Louise Taper, ed.,  "Right or Wrong God Judge Me: The Writings of John Wilkes Booth"  University of Illinois Press, Urbana and Chicago