[On April 26th,
1865, John
Wilkes Booth was killed after a nearly two-week manhunt following his assassination of Abraham
Lincoln. So this week I’ll AmericanStudy a handful of different assassinations
and their contexts!]
On three stages
to the drama of John Wilkes Booth.
I think it’s generally
well-known that John
Wilkes Booth was a professional actor before he became involved in the
Confederate conspiracy that led to him assassinating President Abraham
Lincoln at Ford’s
Theatre on April 14th, 1865. Perhaps our collective memories
also include the detail that John’s brother Edwin Booth was an
even more acclaimed and successful actor, likely the most famous of their
generation. But I’m not sure very many Americans know that their father, Junius Brutus Booth,
was a prominent English actor who ran away to America with his mistress Mary
Ann Holmes to start a family—but was still married to Adelaide Delannoy Booth
for the first three decades of his time in America, making both John and Edwin
(along with their eight siblings) illegitimate (Junius and Adelaide only
finalized their divorce when John was thirteen years old). Illegitimate sons
who go into the same profession in which their father achieved fame, competing
with each other (and their brother Junius
Brutus Booth Jr., another professional actor) as well as that father—I’m
not sure exactly what Dr. Freud would have to say, but I’m quite sure he’d have
some thoughts.
Perhaps such
potential familial and psychological issues go hand-in-hand with his theatrical
training to explain the deeply dramatic nature of John’s assassination of Lincoln.
It’s not just that he was the conspirator assigned to kill the president, nor
that he chose to do so at a theatre where he was a
well-known performer and guest (although yes on both counts). It was also
and especially his actions after he shot Lincoln: jumping down from the
president’s box onto the stage; raising a knife above his head (he had just
stabbed Major
Henry Rathbone, a Union officer present in the box with the Lincolns); and
proclaiming “Sic
semper tyrannis [Thus always to tyrants]” before making his escape. Of all
the political assassinations about which I’ll write this week, and really all
the ones with which I’m familiar at all, it’s only Booth’s of Lincoln that I
would call as much performance art as violence, or for that matter at least as
much about the assassin as about his intended target. None of that lessens the horror
and tragedy of the assassination in the slightest, but it does reflect
another layer to the lifelong drama of John Wilkes Booth’s identity and career.
That drama had
one more particularly prominent stage, but one that was also much less within
Booth’s control: the 12-day
manhunt that concluded with Union
Army Sergeant Boston Corbett shooting Booth as he hid inside a Virginia
barn that soldiers had set on fire. Yet while Booth was more the subject of than
the actor in this final drama, I have to believe he would have enjoyed the nationwide
headlines and attention, the obsession with finding Lincoln’s assassin that
consumed the nation throughout those twelve long days in April. Many late 20th
century assassins or would-be assassins have been described as seeking
celebrity or fame through their acts of political violence (including the young
woman on whom I’ll focus in tomorrow’s post), but I don’t believe that any of
them have come close to the notoriety achieved by John Wilkes Booth. The
manhunt wasn’t a particularly long-running drama, but I would argue that it took
and held center stage in the public consciousness far more fully than any
theatrical production with which the Booths (brothers, father, any of them)
were involved. A bittersweet final victory for our most dramatic assassin.
Last
assassination studying tomorrow,
Ben
PS. What do you
think? Other assassination contexts or connections you’d highlight?
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