Such themes probably came up in Lincoln’s conversation with Colfax on April 14, when Lincoln indicated his firm position on the South. Lincoln rejected the idea of a blanket pardon for ex-Confederates. According to a witness that day, “He believed there could be no restoration of peace or order with the leading rebels in the country, and proposed to have our generals ‘skeer’ them out by intimating to them that they would not be pursued, but would be punished for their crimes if they remained.”28 Lincoln put special emphasis on rights for the oppressed. In the words of the witness, “He spoke with great impressiveness of his determination to secure liberty and justice to all, with full protection for the humblest, and to re-establish on a sure foundation the unity of the Republic after the sacrifices made for its preservation.”
Before parting with Colfax, Lincoln asked the congressman to come back to the White House early in the evening. He invited Colfax to accompany him and Mary to Ford’s Theatre that evening to see the comedy Our American Cousin. He explained that Mary had invited General Grant and his wife, Julia, to go with them, but the Grants were traveling north to New Jersey to see their daughter. (Actually, Julia was avoiding Mary Lincoln because of the first lady’s haughty behavior at City Point in March.) Colfax politely declined the invitation, explaining that he had other plans but that he would stop by briefly at 7:30 p.m.
The president sought out other companions. Ward Hill Lamon, who often served as Lincoln’s bodyguard, was away in Richmond on political matters. Before he left, he had warned the president not to attend public events.
So had Lincoln’s secretary of war, Edwin Stanton. Nonetheless, on the morning of April 14, Lincoln went to the War Department and asked Stanton whether his muscular assistant secretary Thomas T. Eckert would go with him and Mrs. Lincoln to the theater. Hoping to quash the theater plan, Stanton refused the president’s request. Lincoln countered by saying that Eckert was so strong that he once broke five iron pokers over his arm—he was the perfect bodyguard. Continuing to try to discourage Lincoln, Stanton said he had an important job for Eckert to do that evening. Lincoln then approached Eckert himself, who knew of Stanton’s feelings and told the president he was very busy and could not go.29
At the cabinet meeting he held in the afternoon, he reported having had the previous night an oft-recurring dream that he had had at important moments in the war. In it, he found himself “in a singular and indescribable vessel” that was “moving with great rapidity toward a dark and indefinite shore.”30 Those who heard Lincoln describe the dream later considered it a prophecy of the tragedy that occurred that night at Ford’s Theatre.
Union was at the forefront of Lincoln’s mind on April 14. He wrote a letter to General James H. Van Alen in which he said he would try to “restore the Union” in ways that would make it “a Union of hearts and hands as well as of States.”31 He took presidential action on behalf of both the North and the South. He pardoned a soldier who had been condemned to death for desertion. “Well, I think the boy can do us more good above ground than under ground,” he remarked.32 He responded to a Southern soldier’s petition to be released from a Northern prison by scribbling, “Let it be done.”33 When asked whether he agreed with Secretary Stanton that Jacob Thompson, a fleeing Confederate secret service agent, should be arrested before he boarded a ship to England, Lincoln drawled, “Well, I rather guess not. When you have an elephant on your hands, and he wants to run away, better let him run.”34
He was also in the mood that day to relax by reading his favorite humorist, David Ross Locke. In the late afternoon, after returning to the White House from his carriage ride with Mary, he read aloud several chapters of Locke’s The Nasby Papers to two Illinois friends, Governor Richard J. Oglesby and General Isham N. Haynie, who had come for a visit. Doubtless the group laughed often as the president read the words of the whiskey-swigging, racist Petroleum Nasby, with his fulminations against “Linkin! Ape! Goriller!”35 For the moment, Lincoln was too entertained by Nasby to think of anything else. Oglesby recalled, “They kept sending for him to come to dinner. He promised each time to go, but would continue reading the book.” Finally, a “peremptory order” to “come at once” drew him away.
It was tragically ironic that Lincoln was reading Petroleum Nasby only hours before he was shot by a real-life Petroleum Nasby—a pro-Southern Lincoln hater with a low opinion of black people and a penchant for strong liquor.
THE ASSASSIN AND THE PRESIDENT
Lincoln had long faced the threat of assassination. He received so many written death threats that he had a file in his desk marked “Assassination Letters.”37 In late summer 1864, someone fired at him while he was riding between the White House and the Soldiers’ Home. The bullet missed high, making a hole in his top hat. Lincoln often had a cavalry guard when riding about, but he was known to be lax even about taking that precaution. John Wilkes Booth banked on his negligence; on March 7, 1865, he and his coconspirators planned to intercept the president when he was riding outside of town, kidnap him, take him south, and ransom him for Confederate prisoners who were held in the North. The plot was foiled by Lincoln’s change of his plans for the evening.
A famous actor, Booth had virtually abandoned his stage career in August 1864. He devoted much of his time from then until the next April to scheming against Lincoln.
What accounts for Booth’s unusual persistence?
At a young age, Booth declared, “I must have fame! fame!”38 In worldly terms, he achieved it. By the early 1860s, he was a popular leading man whose acting engagements brought in a substantial income. But as the South’s prospects sank during the war, Booth dreamed of a different kind of fame. In the months leading up to the assassination, he told several people he would do “something which the world would remember for all time.”39
In physique and temperament, the actor and the president were very different. Lincoln, commonly considered homely, joked about his own appearance. By April 1865, the cragged face of the fifty-six-year-old president had a pallid look, with sunken, furrowed cheeks and dark circles under the deep-set eyes. Booth, in contrast, was outwardly attractive but inwardly warped. Five feet eight and physically fit, Booth had dark hair, regular features, perfect teeth, and soulful eyes. Star-struck women flocked to his performances, and men found his personal magnetism irresistible. On the morning of the assassination, the brother of the manager of Ford’s Theatre saw the nattily dressed Booth approach and remarked, “Here comes the handsomest man in America.”40
“[I] have loved the Union beyond expression,” wrote John Wilkes Booth in a letter of 1864.41 The Union he worshipped, however, was the one that had existed before the Civil War, when slavery was in place. He held Northern abolitionists and Southern secessionists responsible for destroying the Union and causing a horrible war. The abolition “fanatics,” he declared, were especially culpable.42
Booth professed to love blacks. He had grown up among enslaved people, some of whom worked on his father’s farm near Bel Air, Maryland. He claimed, “Heaven knows no one would be willing to do more for the negro race than I.”43 But racial bias governed Booth’s feelings toward African Americans, who, he insisted, were luckiest when they were held in slavery. He wrote of enslaved people, “Witness their elevation and happiness and enlightenment above the race, elsewhere.”44 Booth saw slavery as a marvelous gift from the founding fathers. He intoned, “[L]ooking upon African slavery from the same stand-point held by those noble framers of our Constitution, I for one have ever considered it one of the greatest blessings (both for themselves [that is, blacks] and us) that God ever bestowed upon a favored nation.” Black people, he believed, had no place in mainstream society. He was repulsed when he saw Southern soldiers being guarded by black troops. “We are all slaves now,” he declared. “If a man were to go out and insult a nigger now, he would be knocked down by the nigger, and nothing would be done to the nigger.”45 He wrote, “This country was formed for the white not for the black man.”46 If blacks were set free, as Lincoln and the Republicans wanted, they would inevitably die out. “Lincoln’s policy is only preparing the way for their total annihilation,” he argued, because free blacks were incapable of surviving on their own.
John Wilkes Booth took immense pride in the fact that he had participated in the execution of John Brown. On November 19, 1859, he left an acting engagement in Richmond, joined a militia company, and traveled west to Charles Town, Virginia, to help guard the jail where John Brown and six followers were being held.47 For two weeks, Booth took on quartermaster duties, distributing food and supplies to his militia unit. On December 2, as a member of the troops overseeing Brown’s execution, he was only feet away from Brown, who stood above him on the scaffold. Booth stared at Brown with combined contempt for the old man’s antislavery convictions and admiration for his unflappable courage. Awed, Booth got a piece of wood from the box that contained Brown’s coffin and later gave pieces of it to friends and associates.
For Booth, John Brown showed the capacity of a powerfully motivated individual to change society. Booth wrote, “John Brown was a man inspired, the grandest character of the century!”48 It might seem strange that Booth, who detested abolitionists, would praise Brown, the most fervent abolitionist of all. But Brown’s courage under pressure impressed his Southern foes, such as Virginia governor Henry Wise, who called him “a bundle of the best nerves I ever saw, . . . cool, collected, and indomitable.”49 One of Brown’s slaveholding hostages at Harpers Ferry, Lewis Washington, a descendant of the nation’s first president, testified that Brown “was the coolest and firmest man he ever saw in defying danger and death.”50 Another descendant of the first president, the Virginia militia officer B. B. “Bird” Washington, gave Booth one of the knife-pointed pikes that Brown had distributed among enslaved people as he liberated them. On the pike’s handle were the words, scrawled in ink, “Major Washington to J. Wilkes Booth.”51
Although Booth, at his mother’s request, never volunteered for the Confederate army, he prided himself on his courage. In youth, he had been, for a time, a typical b’hoy, given to street brawls and running with fire engines. As he matured, he became an athlete, skilled at fencing, shooting, boxing, and other sports. As an actor, he was known for his physical feats. His twelve-foot leap to the Ford’s Theatre stage after he shot Lincoln was not unusual for someone who enjoyed doing daring entrances into Shakespearean scenes, such as his leap from a tall rock ledge in the witches’ scene in Macbeth.
Booth saw himself as a soldier for justice who would single-handedly alter history. If John Brown proclaimed, “No man sent me here; it was my own prompting and that of my Maker,” Booth called himself “A Confederate doing duty on his own responsibility.”52 If Brown said that to die fighting against slavery was “the greatest service a man can render to God,” Booth told his mother that he was ready to sacrifice his life in “struggling for such holy rights” as the South’s “sacred” cause.53 After the assassination, he reportedly wrote of Lincoln, “Our country owed all its troubles to him, and God simply made me the instrument of his punishment.”54 When he was cornered at the end by federal troops near Port Royal, Virginia, in Richard Garrett’s barn, Booth declared that he would fight to the death rather than surrender, which led to his being shot by Thomas H. “Boston” Corbett. To the bitter end, he wanted to exhibit courage with single-minded intensity like John Brown’s.
But he badly misinterpreted the man he called “that rugged old hero.”55 Booth wrote, “If Brown were living I doubt whether he himself, would set slavery, against the Union.” In other words, he thought that Brown, had he lived, would not have supported Lincoln’s aggressive war against slavery if it meant destroying the Union. Here, as in other matters, Booth was exactly wrong. Brown, just before he was hanged, had written a note saying that the crime of slavery would be purged away only with very much bloodshed.56 He had declared several times that a whole generation of Americans might have to die in order for slavery to be uprooted. Booth regarded Lincoln with sneering condescension: “This man’s appearance, his pedigree, his low coarse jokes and anecdotes, his vulgar similes, his frivolity, are a disgrace to the seat he holds. He is standing in the footprints of old John Brown, but no more fit to stand with that rugged old hero—Great God! No.”57 Lincoln, Booth continued, was merely “the tool of the North to crush out, or try to crush out slavery, by robbery, rapine, slaughter, and bought armies.” He was “overturning this blind Republic and making himself a king”; his new term “will be a reign.”
Booth’s hatred of Lincoln and his party resembled that of Lincoln’s favorite humor character, Petroleum Nasby, the quintessential Copperhead. Though Southern-born, Booth spent most of his time from 1860 to 1865 in the North, where most acting opportunities were. Though the North made Booth a stage star, he was wretched there. In the summer of 1864 he wrote his mother, “For four years I have lived (I may say) a slave in the north—a favored slave, it’s true, but no less hateful to me on that account.”58 Every principle he believed in was considered treasonous by those around him. He argued furiously with Lincoln supporters like his brother Edwin. A theater manager remarked that John Wilkes Booth “was very vitriol in his talk as to Pres’t Lincoln, and called the Union soldiers all manner of evil names.” At a social gathering, he performed a Copperhead song, “Then and Now,” which lamented the decline of liberty and the unnatural rise of black people that Booth thought Lincoln had brought about. One of the song’s verses went:
Ab’rm wants to free the nigger,
And we let him have his way;
Our chance for Liberty
Is hardly worth a d—n,
But there’s a nigger kingdom coming.
And the king is Abraham!
The charge that Lincoln was a horrid, Negro-loving despot was common among Copperheads and Southerners. Booth, a journalist noted, was “a good sample of Copperheadism” who wanted only “to curse the nigger and curse the Lincoln Government.”59 Booth’s anxiety spiked after Lincoln won reelection. Because there were no presidential term limits at the time (they came with the passage of the Twenty-second Amendment in 1947), it seemed possible that Lincoln’s presidency would continue indefinitely—a nightmare for Booth, who asked a friend, “He can be president as long as he lives, do you suppose?” When the friend replied, “Yes,” Booth said, “There is no help that I can see as long as Lincoln lives.”60
It was not just Lincoln who must die. As Booth’s anger grew, he planned the deaths of officials around the president. Just as Petroleum Nasby envisaged killing Abe’s cabinet members along with Abe himself, Booth, a real-life Nasby, targeted not just Lincoln but other leaders as well. The plan, as finalized on April 14, was that he would kill Lincoln and General Grant (who was reportedly scheduled to attended Ford’s Theatre with the president), while one coconspirator, Lewis Powell (aka Payne), would murder Secretary of State William Seward at his home on Lafayette Square and another one, George Atzerodt, would assassinate Vice President Johnson in his room at the Kirkwood House.
What was it about Booth that drove him to commit the act that others only contemplated? After all, assassination plots were common, and there were plenty of Nasbys around.
Booth alone among would-be assassins had long been immersed in an identifiably American style of intense acting—what today might be called exaggerated method acting. The complete identification with the role one plays was a technique Booth inherited from his father, Junius Brutus Booth. Walt Whitman said of Junius Booth, “His genius was to me one of the grandest revelations of my life, a lesson of artistic expression.”61 Junius Booth did not just inhabit a role; he took it to emotional limits. Whitman said of Junius Booth, “The words fire, energy, abandon, found in him unprecedented meanings. . . . When he was in a passion, face, neck, hands, would be suffused, his eye would be frightful—his whole mien enough to scare audience, actors; often the actors were afraid of him.”
They had reason to be, for Junius Booth often carried his acting too far.62 One night he became so overwrought as Othello that he had to be pulled away when he nearly suffocated Desdemona with a pillow. In a swordfight scene, Booth once drove his opponent out of the theater and continued the fight on the streets. Another time, he nearly killed the actor playing his rival, who said, “It seemed as if all hell was raging in his heart; his eyes displayed the fierceness of a tiger’s, and his thrust at me, I verily believe, would have been fatal had I not stepped aside to avoid it.”63 Junius Booth’s disfigured nose came from an incident in a hotel room where he was rehearsing Othello with an actor who became so terrified by Booth’s vehement emotions that he smashed Booth’s face with an iron poker in self-defense. Junius Booth carried theatrical roles into daily life. Known as “the Mad Tragedian,” he would walk the streets in costume as Shylock or Richard or Cardinal Richelieu, distributing coins to strangers.
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