Of the three Booth children who became prominent actors—Edwin, John Wilkes, and Junius Jr.—only John adopted their father’s tempestuous style. A Boston reviewer said that John “had more of the native fire and fury of his great father than any of his family.”64 John relished violent stage roles. As a child, he had gotten perverse pleasure out of shooting stray cats—unlike Lincoln, who avoided hunting because he did not want to hurt animals.65 As an actor, John Wilkes Booth struck Whitman “a queer fellow; had strange ways.”66 Whitman didn’t like Booth’s version of the American style, which lacked finesse. For instance, John carried the sword fight scene in Richard III to sadistic lengths. “The Richard of Mr. [John Wilkes] Booth,” commented a reviewer in 1863, “is an impossible personage.” He made Shakespeare’s character someone one “who loved murder for murder’s sake alone.” With an “almost demoniac look,” Booth’s Richard “dabbles in blood; sprinkles it on the stage after the murder of Henry; wipes his sword on his mantle (a very vulgar and disgusting thing for a nobleman to do), and revels in it from beginning to end.”67 Once, when Booth departed from the script by refusing to die in a sword fight, the actor playing his opponent edged close to him and whispered, “For God’s sake, John, die! Die! If you don’t, I shall!”68 In another performance, John wielded his sword so vigorously that his foe fell off the stage into the orchestra pit. A month before he assassinated Lincoln, while playing an evil duke in Richard Lalor Sheil’s tragedy The Apostate, Booth was so realistic when he tortured a woman on the wheel that a spectator was truly frightened by “the hideous, malevolent expression of his distorted countenance, the fierce glare and ugly roll of his eyes,” as he gleefully boasted about his “masterpiece” of cruelty
For John Wilkes Booth, the extreme American acting style led to a merging of stage characters with real life. He often played rebels who rose up against tyrants, such as Major Gough, the Puritan rebel in William Bayle Bernard’s play The Wept of Wish-ton-Wish who signed the death warrant of King Charles I; Brutus, the virtuous nobleman in Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar who joined conspirators against the would-be Roman emperor Caesar; William Tell, the fourteenth-century Swiss huntsman who in Friedrich Schiller’s play of that name killed an oppressive governor; and one of the conspirators involved in the plot to murder Venetian officials in Thomas Otway’s tragedy Venice Preserved.
Booth didn’t just identify with these stage assassins; he became one of them. America itself was now his stage, and Lincoln was the targeted tyrant. When asked shortly before the assassination why he no longer acted, he answered that “the only play he cared to present was Venice Preserved”—an unsubtle reference to the real-life murderous drama he was soon to act out, in imitation of Otway’s play about conspiratorial violence against a government.70 Assassinating the “despot” Lincoln in a theater would be Booth’s ultimate sensational performance. A couple of hours before he shot Lincoln, he recommended to a hotel clerk that he go to Ford’s Theatre that evening, saying, “There is to be some splendid acting there tonight.” The Lincoln assassination was the American acting style taken to the hilt. As a contemporary remarked, “It was so theatrical in plan and performance—the conspiracy—the dagger—the selection of a theater—the brandishing of the weapon—the cry ‘sic semper tyrannis’ to the audience—all was exactly that a madman brought up in the theater might have been expected to conceive.”71
Even Booth’s most private thoughts, as recorded in a diary he kept while he was fleeing south after the assassination, ran to stage roles he had played. While being hunted through the cold swamps and woods, he scribbled these words: “I am here in despair. And why; For doing what Brutus [in Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar] was honored for. What made Tell [in Schiller’s William Tell] a Hero. And yet I for striking down a greater tyrant than they ever knew am looked upon as a common cutthroat. My action was purer than either of theirs.”72
The same cultural factors that led Booth toward right-wing vigilantism carried Lincoln toward democratic openness and dedication to a nation based on justice for all. The example of John Brown impelled Lincoln not toward anarchistic violence but toward a vision of emancipation through infiltration of the Deep South, to be directed by the highest-ranking African American officer, Martin Delany. Lincoln’s higher law was a world apart from Booth’s. Not only was his Second Inaugural Address a religion-saturated demand for black freedom, but two days after Robert E. Lee surrendered, Lincoln, in the same speech in which he called for African American suffrage, declared, “He, from Whom all blessings flow, must not be forgotten. A call for a national thanksgiving is being prepared, and will be duly promulgated.”73 God and civil rights had joined in Lincoln’s mind.
While Booth aimed to sow discord and chaos, Lincoln was thinking of cultural and social unity. While visiting General Grant’s headquarters at City Point, Virginia, he surprised a military band by calling for “Dixie.” The South’s signature song, he said, was now federal property, and people of either section could enjoy it unabashedly.74 He called for it again when he delivered his last speech on April 11.
Lincoln shared Booth’s interest in literature about death or murder, but for different reasons. One might think that after having visited the fallen Confederate capital of Richmond and sitting in Jefferson Davis’s vacated chair, he would gloat over the North’s victory. Not so. On the boat trip from City Point back to Washington on April 9—the day of Lee’s surrender to Grant—Lincoln ignored Charles Sumner’s pleas to discuss the war or Reconstruction and focused instead on literature. According to the Marquis de Chambrun, a French ambassador who was traveling with the president, “That whole day the conversation dwelt upon literary subjects.”75 Lincoln recited from memory Longfellow’s “Resignation,” a poem about the universality of death, with brief references to heaven. Doubtless Lincoln had on his mind his own lost loved ones and those of hundreds of thousands in the war-ravaged nation when he recited Longfellow’s words, “The air is full of farewells to the dying, / And mournings for the dead.” And surely he found comfort in the poet’s assurance that this life “is but a suburb of the life elysian, / Whose portal we call Death.
Besides poetry, Chambrun wrote, “Mr. Lincoln read to us for several hours passages taken from Shakespeare,” among them Macbeth’s speech about one of his murder victims, Duncan (Macbeth, act 3, scene 2).77 Obsessed by the passage, Lincoln read it several times. In the speech, Macbeth meditates on the fact that his murdered victim is fortunate because he has escaped the ills of this world. Duncan “after life’s fitful fever sleeps well,” and neither “steel, nor poison, / Malice domestic, foreign levy, nothing,” can now touch him. Macbeth, in contrast, is left with a devastating sense of guilt.
In his reaction to literary culture, we see a key difference between Lincoln and Booth. The difference becomes clear if we consider Herman Melville’s distinction between a thoughtful response to Shakespeare and that of the mere thrill seeker. Melville contrasted “those mistaken souls, who dream of Shakespeare as a mere man of Richard-the-Third humps, and Macbeth daggers,” with the contemplative reader, who was unconcerned with “blood-besmeared tragedy” for its own sake and attended instead to “those deep far-away things” in the Bard of Avon, “those occasional flashings-forth of the intuitive Truth in him; those short, quick probings at the very axis of reality . . . that make Shakespeare, Shakespeare.”78 John Wilkes Booth responded to the “blood-besmeared tragedy” and “Macbeth daggers” in Shakespeare; Lincoln responded to the playwright’s deeper, universal meanings. For Booth, Shakespeare and other dramatists provided a recipe for spectacular murder in support of a political agenda. For Lincoln, literature told truths about the human condition that bound all people together.
THE CLIMAX
The Lincolns were about an hour late in leaving for the theater that night. After dinner, Lincoln had met with George Ashmun and Schuyler Colfax—his political past and future, so to speak, because Ashmun, a former congressman from Massachusetts, had chaired the Chicago Wigwam convention that had nominated him in 1860 and Colfax would go on to carry his message of civil rights into Reconstruction. Neither Mary nor Lincoln wanted to go out. She had had a headache all day, he was weary, and the weather was raw and gusty. Rain threatened. But the Lincolns felt obliged to go. The papers had announced their attendance, and the people were expecting them. Tad was sent with a chaperone to see Aladdin and the Wonderful Lamp, which was playing at Grover’s Theatre, while they set off to Ford’s to catch the famous Laura Keene in Tom Taylor’s Our American Cousin, a costume drama involving a boorish but good-natured American who creates havoc in stuffy British drawing rooms.
John Wilkes Booth had planned for this moment. As an actor, he received his mail at Ford’s Theatre, and when he appeared there on the morning of the fourteenth, he learned that the Lincolns and the Grants would be attending the play there in the evening. At noon, Booth went to a livery stable and rented a spirited bay mare. He gave the horse a test run, then returned it to the stable, saying he would call for it at around 3:00 p.m. After lunch, he set his plan in motion. Over several months, he had gathered a circle of at least eight conspirators, all of whom shared his love for the South and loathing for Lincoln. One of them, Lewis Powell, was a big, muscular man who was deeply embittered because he had lost two Confederate brothers in the war. He responded enthusiastically when Booth met with him in the early afternoon and gave him the task of going that evening to William Seward’s home to kill the secretary of state. Later on, Booth encountered another conspirator, George Atzerodt, a boozy, German-born ferryman who had joined Booth’s team reluctantly. Booth assigned him to kill Vice President Andrew Johnson in his room at the Kirkwood House. Shocked at the idea, Atzerodt told Booth he had prepared for kidnapping, not murder. After a heated back-and-forth, Booth threatened to kill him if he didn’t follow orders. Atzerodt glumly fell into line.
In Booth’s mind, a new, updated version of Julius Caesar or Venice Preserved was about to appear on the grandest stage of all: America. And he would be the star.
After picking up his horse at the stable, Booth met a fellow actor, John Matthews, who asked him if he had seen the group of Confederate troops that had just passed by under the guard of Northern soldiers. Booth had indeed seen them and was stunned. He put his hand to his forehead and exclaimed, “Great God! I have no longer a country!”79 He gave Matthews a letter he had written, asking him to send it for publication in a Washington newspaper. The letter never appeared; Matthews, who apparently destroyed it, later described it as a typical Copperhead editorial.
Matthews pointed to a carriage passing by and said to Booth, “Why, Johnny, there goes Grant. I thought he was going to the theater this evening with the president.” Booth galloped after the carriage and approached it, to the irritation of Julia Grant, who recognized Booth as one of a group of men who had looked menacingly at them that day at lunch from across a hotel dining room.80
Booth circled back to Ford’s, where he left the horse in a stable behind the theater. With some theater employees he went to the nearby Taltavull’s Star Saloon and had drinks. Returning to Ford’s, Booth traced his route up to the presidential box, above stage left. He apparently went into the vestibule behind the box, boring a peephole through its door and putting on the floor a board to be used as a door brace to prevent intrusion once he had attacked Lincoln.
Booth returned to his hotel and armed himself with a small .44 caliber pistol, made by Henry Deringer of Philadelphia, and a large Bowie knife, which he stuck in his boot. He went to another hotel and met with Powell, Atzerodt, and David Herold, coordinating the murders for 10:15 p.m. and instructing them to meet up with him at the Navy Yard Bridge. Herold would lead Powell to Seward’s home, and Atzerodt would finish off Johnson at Kirkwood House.
By 9:30 p.m. Booth was back at Ford’s Theatre. He got his horse from the stable and asked Ned Spangler, a stagehand, to hold it for him in the alley behind the theater. Busy changing sets, Spangler turned the task over to the young Joseph “Peanuts” Burroughs. Booth went next door to Taltavull’s Star Saloon and ordered a bottle of whiskey and some water.
The Lincolns had arrived at Ford’s at around 9:00 p.m. On the way, they had picked up their last-minute invitees, Major Henry R. Rathbone, a government disbursement officer, and his fiancée Clara Harris, the daughter of New York senator Ira Harris.
As was usual when Lincoln went to the theater, the security detail was light. He was accompanied by a White House valet, Charles Forbes. The president’s guard for the night, the Washington policeman John F. Parker, walked in the drizzle to the theater because there was no room for him in the carriage, and he greeted the Lincolns there. Parker escorted the Lincoln party to the presidential box and then left, either to watch the play or to have drinks. Charles Forbes sat alone in the hall outside the president’s box
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