John Wilkes Booth

John Wilkes Booth
Booth, c. 1865
Born	May 10, 1838 Bel Air, Harford County, Maryland, U.S.
Died	April 26, 1865 (aged 26) Port Royal, Virginia, U.S. 38.1385°N 77.2302°W
Cause of death	Gunshot wound
Resting place	Green Mount Cemetery
Other names	J.B. Wilkes
Education	Bel Air Academy Milton Boarding School for Boys St. Timothy's Hall
Occupation	Stage actor
Years active	1855–1865
Known for	1850s and 1860s stage career Assassination of Abraham Lincoln
Religion	Episcopalianism
Parent(s)	Junius Brutus Booth Mary Ann Holmes
Relatives	Edwin Booth (brother) Junius Brutus Booth, Jr. (brother) Asia Booth (sister)
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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.^[1] He was also a Confederate sympathizer, vehement in his denunciation of Lincoln, and was strongly opposed to the abolition of slavery in the United States.^[2]

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.^[3] 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.

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.^[4] 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.^[5] He was named after the English radical politician John Wilkes, a distant relative.^[6][7] 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.^[8]

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.^[9]

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.^[10][11][12]

As a boy, John Wilkes Booth was athletic and popular, becoming skilled at horsemanship and fencing.^[13] A sometimes indifferent student, he attended the Bel Air Academy (now Bel Air High School), 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".^[14] 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.^[15] At the Milton school, students recited such classical works as those by Herodotus, Cicero, and Tacitus.^[16][17] Students at St. Timothy's wore military uniforms and were subject to a regimen of daily formation drills and strict discipline.^[18] Booth left school at 14, after his father's death.^[19]

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".^[20] 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.^[20][21]

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.^[22] On January 23, 1853, the 14-year-old Booth was baptized at St. Timothy's Protestant Episcopal Church.^[20] 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,^[23] 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."^[20][24][25]

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.^[26] 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.^{[27]
  
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