John Wilkes Booth: America’s Most Infamous Assassin

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It’s a story that has become legendary, one that every American is taught at a young age. Less than a week after the long and bloody Civil War effectively came to an end, Abraham Lincoln, perhaps America’s most beloved president, was shot while watching a play. The man who shot him was not a Confederate soldier or a politician, but rather an actor who became enamored with the Southern cause. The group he assembled hoped to plunge the North into chaos and revive Southern hopes for independence. In this, they failed, but in killing Lincoln, they irrevocably changed the course of American history, and the nation is still dealing with the fallout from the assassination today.

So who was John Wilkes Booth? What would cause this young man from Maryland, who had already built a prosperous career for himself on the stage, to become so devoted to the cause of Southern nationhood that he would attempt to topple the federal government? How did he get close enough to Lincoln to shoot him? What happened after he did? And could his infamous act have been prevented?

When Junius Brutus Booth immigrated to the United States in 1821, he was already a famous stage actor in London. He brought scandal with him to America, having abandoned his wife and young son and instead brought his mistress, Marianne Holmes. He introduced her to everyone as his wife, and the scandal was soon forgotten as Junius Booth went on to become one of America’s most famous actors, specializing in Shakespearean tragedies.

John Wilkes Booth was born on May 10, 1838, at the Booth family home in Bel Air, Maryland. His father, Junius, was never home, constantly touring, and when he was, his alcoholism and erratic behavior made life difficult for his large family. He was sent to well-regarded boarding schools but was an indifferent student, much to the chagrin of his instructors. Junius Booth died in 1852 when John was only 14. He decided soon afterward to become an actor himself, following in the footsteps of his older brothers, Junius Jr. and Edwin. Edwin Booth was becoming a household name himself and was able to help his brother break into the theater. His first performance was in 1855 in Baltimore, and after an initial rocky start, he settled into a career as an actor. He became just as famous as his brother and father, gaining a reputation for stealing scenes and becoming enormously popular with the nation’s young women. By the end of the 1850s, he was a wealthy man, earning over $20,000 a year (over half a million dollars in today’s terms) and touring all over the nation as a leading man.

Just as Booth was coming into his own as an actor, the country was on the verge of tearing itself apart. The election of Abraham Lincoln in 1860 sparked fears throughout the Southern states that their right to own slaves would be infringed upon by the new administration. They announced their intention to secede and form their own nation, which they called the Confederate States of America. Lincoln held that the Southern states had no right to leave the Union, and he called for the raising of an army to stop them. In April 1861, the first shots of the American Civil War were fired at Fort Sumter in South Carolina.

Booth’s home state of Maryland found itself in a difficult position. Maryland was one of the four slave-holding states that didn’t join the Confederacy, known as border states. Public opinion among Marylanders was sharply divided, even among families. Edwin Booth was a staunch Unionist, while John Wilkes Booth was a passionate advocate for the Southern cause. The Maryland state government tried to hedge its bets by voting to remain in the Union but also to prohibit federal troops from passing through the state or being based there. This would have made prosecution of the war impossible for the North and left the federal capital of Washington, D.C., exposed to Confederate troops across the river in Virginia. Lincoln wasn’t having it. He suspended the writ of habeas corpus and jailed many Maryland state leaders at Fort McHenry and Baltimore Harbor. He also imposed martial law on the city of Baltimore and other parts of the state, effectively occupying Maryland with federal troops for the duration of the war. This outraged many pro-Southern Marylanders, including Booth, who called Lincoln a tyrant.

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John Wilkes Booth had been involved in politics since 1854 when he campaigned for the Know Nothing Party, an early nativist movement whose major campaign plans were anti-Catholic and anti-immigrant. He was a passionate supporter of both the institution of slavery and the Confederacy and spoke to everyone he knew about his views. By contrast, his brother Edwin refused to tour in the South and spoke out against the Confederacy. The two brothers argued with each other on the subject so viciously that they eventually stopped speaking to each other. Booth had promised his mother when the war began that he would not enlist as a soldier, so he continued to tour across both the North and the South as a celebrated actor, though he increasingly began to hate himself for his decision, writing in a letter to his mother that he felt like a coward and despised his own existence.

In 1864, the war began to turn badly against the Confederacy in Virginia. Robert E. Lee’s army was pinned down in Petersburg, losing men that it couldn’t afford to replace, while in Georgia, William T. Sherman’s army had captured the city of Atlanta and begun a campaign of destruction in the Deep South. It seemed increasingly likely that Lincoln would be re-elected, and if so, it was only a matter of time until the South was defeated and slavery was abolished. Booth felt increasingly frustrated at his own helplessness to prevent this from happening and began to channel his rage towards the person of Abraham Lincoln himself. In a conversation with his sister Asia, he said of Lincoln, “That man’s appearance, his pedigree, his coarse low jokes and anecdotes, his vulgar smiles and his policy are a disgrace to the seat he holds. He has made the tool of the North to crush out slavery.” Something snapped within him, and he decided that he was going to do something about it.

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Contrary to what many people think, Booth did not start out intending to assassinate the president. He had an even more ambitious plan in mind: he would kidnap Lincoln and take him to Richmond. Once there, he would ransom the president back to the North in exchange for Confederate prisoners held in Northern prison camps, demoralizing the North and providing the South with desperately needed manpower to continue the war. Booth gathered around him a group of Confederate sympathizers to help with the kidnapping plot. Prominent among them were John Surratt, a former postmaster and Confederate spy; George, a Prussian immigrant who ran a carriage repair business; Lewis Powell, a Confederate army deserter; and David Herald, a pharmacist’s assistant. The conspirators frequently met at the boarding house owned by John Surratt’s mother, Mary, whose level of knowledge of and participation in the conspiracy is still debated by historians today.

On March 17, 1865, Booth assembled his fellow conspirators on the road outside of Washington, anticipating Lincoln passing through there on his way to a function, planning to seize him and secretly transport him across the Potomac River into Virginia. But Lincoln never turned up; it turned out that he had changed his plans at the last minute and instead attended a reception at the National Hotel in Washington, ironically the same hotel that Booth himself was staying at. A few weeks later, it seemed all over. Richmond, the capital of the Confederacy, had been captured, and after attempting to escape, Robert E. Lee’s army was forced to surrender at Appomattox on April 9. For all intents and purposes, the Civil War was over. The plot to kidnap Lincoln no longer had any point to it, and Booth was despondent and filled with rage. His thoughts immediately took a darker turn towards assassination.

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No one is really sure what Booth’s exact motives were in killing Lincoln. It is clear that he hated the president, viewing him as the cause of all the South’s misfortunes. But did he plot to murder Lincoln based on dedication to the cause of the South? Perhaps he believed that taking out the head of the federal government would allow the remnants of the Confederacy to reorganize and fight on since there were still armies in the field. Or were the motivations more personal? He could have hoped to make himself a hero to the South, the man who slew the tyrant, as Brutus killed Julius Caesar. He could have wanted to do it merely to spite the North, maybe even despite his Lincoln-supporting brother Edwin. Or it could have been a combination of all of them. What is known is that on the morning of April 14, Booth stopped in at Ford’s Theater in Washington to pick up his mail. Ford’s was a popular theater that had opened two years earlier to replace a theater that burned down. Booth himself performed there regularly. He learned that President and Mrs. Lincoln were to attend a play there that night, accompanied by the commander of the Union Army, Ulysses S. Grant, and his wife. Booth decided immediately this was a perfect time and place to kill both the president and the general if he could manage it.

Booth gathered together his conspirators to lay out his plan. Lewis Powell was to murder Secretary of State William Seward at his home; George Atzerodt would go to the hotel where Vice President Andrew Johnson was staying and assassinate him; and Booth would slip into the presidential box at Ford’s Theater during the play, shoot Lincoln with the single-shot derringer pistol he had, and then stab Grant with a dagger that he would also be carrying. Booth probably assumed the presidential box would be guarded and thought he could talk his way into an audience with Lincoln by leveraging his fame as an actor. For his part, Lincoln was a fan of Booth’s performances and had sent invitations to meet him at the White House several times in the past, which Booth had turned down. It seems amazing to us now, but in 1865, security precautions for the president were almost non-existent. The Secret Service didn’t yet exist, and it wouldn’t be until 1902 that they were assigned the duty of protecting the president’s life. The White House was open to practically anyone who wanted to petition the president, and even in the middle of a Civil War, Lincoln had few, if any, bodyguards around him when he went anywhere. Palace guards were thought to be the province of European monarchs, not elected servants of the people. Thus, on the night that Lincoln went to the theater, he had only one bodyguard, a police officer named John Frederick Parker. General Grant and his wife decided not to go with Lincoln to the play, instead traveling to Philadelphia to spend time with their children. It has been widely reported that Mary Todd Lincoln and Julia Grant didn’t like each other, and that was why the Grants didn’t go. Whatever the case, the decision likely saved the future president’s life.

President and Mrs. Lincoln and their guests, Major Henry Rathbone and his fiancée, arrived at the theater late, situating themselves in the presidential box with John Frederick Parker guarding the door. The play was stopped as the audience of 1,700, a full house, gave a standing ovation, and the orchestra played “Hail to the Chief.” The play was a popular comedy, “Our American Cousin,” that Booth knew by heart. The plan was for all three would-be assassins to strike at the same time. At 10 PM, while he waited, Booth stopped next door at the Star Saloon, taking a drink of whiskey, perhaps to calm his nerves. Around 10:15, the play was in the middle of its third act. Lincoln had been seen to be enjoying the play, and nobody was paying attention to what was happening behind the presidential box. Booth had gone into the theater and up the stairs and found nobody outside the door to the presidential box. The policeman, John F. Parker, left during the intermission to go drinking and wasn’t at his post. Booth went into the small lantern room that separated the box from the hallway and barred the door behind him. Now only one door separated him from the president. He looked through a peephole in the door, ultimately described as being cut by Booth himself or by the owner of the theater sometime earlier for an unrelated purpose, and waited. He knew from experience that the line in the play that caused the biggest audience reaction was coming up, and he would strike then. On stage, the actor Harry Hawk said the line that Booth was waiting for: “Don’t know the man is a good society, eh? Well, I guess I know enough to turn you inside out, old gal, you sockdollar, you.” As the whole audience, including President Lincoln, laughed, Booth opened the door to the box, aimed his pistol at the back of Lincoln’s head, and fired from point-blank range. The president slumped forward in his chair. Major Rathbone leapt to his feet and made to grab Booth, who dropped his gun and pulled out his dagger, slicing open Rathbone’s arm almost to the bone. Undeterred, Rathbone grabbed again at Booth’s coat as the assassin attempted to jump from the box to the stage 12 feet below. Booth had to twist away from Rathbone, and in the process, his spur caught on the bunting draped over the front of the presidential box. He awkwardly fell to the stage, breaking his leg. Probably running high on adrenaline, Booth ignored the pain and, with an actor’s flair for the dramatic, held his bloody knife up to the audience and yelled, “Sic semper tyrannis,” which is Latin for “Thus always to tyrants.” It’s also the state motto of Virginia. Some witnesses also reportedly heard, “The South is avenged!” Then he limped behind the stage and out the back door, stabbing someone that tried to stop him, mounted his horse, and galloped away. Many in the audience initially thought Booth was part of the play until the first lady screamed just as Booth was fleeing the scene.

As word spread that the president had been shot, the city of Washington fell into chaos. Things got even worse when reports that Secretary Seward had been attacked as well came in. Lewis Powell had arrived at Seward’s house in Lafayette Park around the same time as Booth was entering Ford’s Theater. He bluffed his way past the doorman but not one of Seward’s sons, who tried to intercept him. Powell pulled a gun on him, but the gun misfired, so Powell bludgeoned him unconscious with the butt. Then he ran into the Secretary of State’s bedroom, wielding a large Bowie knife. Seward was in bed recovering from a carriage accident 10 days earlier, which had left him with a broken jaw and arm. Powell slashed repeatedly at the secretary’s face and neck with a knife, but the splint that the doctor had fixed onto Seward’s head to hold his broken jaw in place saved his life, preventing Powell from slicing his jugular vein. Another of Seward’s sons, his daughter, and a soldier who served as an attendant struggled with the attacker, and all were stabbed in turn before Powell ran out of the house, cackling and screaming, “I’m mad! I’m mad!” He stabbed another passerby before escaping. Everyone Powell attacked would eventually recover, although William Seward would carry the scars from the attack on his face for the rest of his life. As for George Atzerodt, he never even tried to assassinate Vice President Johnson. He made it to the hotel where Johnson was staying but lost his nerve and got drunk at the bar instead, wandering around the streets of Washington before disposing of his knife in a storm drain.

Lincoln was carried from the theater across the street to the home of William Peterson, where he was attended to by a brigade of doctors, including the Surgeon General. But there was nothing they could do. It is likely that even today, with modern medicine, the wound would have been mortal. Abraham Lincoln died at 7:22 AM on April 15, surrounded by much of his cabinet. The news spread quickly across the country, causing an outpouring of grief. Vice President Johnson was sworn in as President of the United States at 11 AM, but the reins of government were now in the hands of Secretary of War Edwin Stanton. He began the investigation into the plot before Lincoln had died, essentially running the government from Peterson House. John Wilkes Booth was quickly fingered as the assassin by multiple witnesses in the theater, and he became the most wanted man in America.

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Booth had bluffed his way out of Washington before the city was put into lockdown and escaped into Southern Maryland along with his accomplice David Harold. He hoped that the relatively rural area, full of Confederate sympathizers, would be the perfect place to hide out while slipping into Virginia, where he expected to be fêted as a hero. He and Harold picked up guns and supplies from Mary Surratt’s tavern outside the city and then stopped at the home of Dr. Samuel Mudd, an acquaintance of Booth’s who set his broken leg and gave him a place to sleep. Mudd would later be arrested and sentenced to prison for assisting Booth, though his role in the conspiracy, like Mary Surratt’s, is hotly debated. Booth and Harold then went to ground, hiding in the swamps on the Virginia-Maryland border. It was there that Booth seemed to grasp