“Oh, assassination of public officers is not an American crime,” Abraham Lincoln once cheerfully assured Benjamin Butler.1 This would fit nicely under the category of famous last words, if we could be sure Lincoln actually said them. (Ben Butler was a notoriously unreliable hand at quoting Lincoln.) But the notion that democracies had no need to assassinate leaders, because elections got rid of the undesirable and incompetent in a much less ignoble way, was widely shared in Lincoln’s day. Shared, in fact, by William H. Seward, Lincoln’s secretary of state, who also confidently explained that assassination was simply not in the American grain—and barely escaped becoming the second victim of the plot that killed Lincoln.
Three more presidential assassinations behind us, and we might be expected to have a more guarded expectation of democracies. But part of what makes presidential assassinations such a eerily fascinating topic is the persistent sense that this kind of event really does represent some form of bizarre and unfathomable deviation, a challenge to the very notion of democracy. The orderly sharing of power in American politics, beginning with Adams and Jefferson in 1801, has been the fundamental pivot of American politics. Disrupting it by violence is precisely the one thing which will render democracy itself impossible, unless democracy has planted itself very, very firmly in people’s minds.
This is why two of the four American presidential assassinations—of James Garfield in 1881 and of William McKinley in 1901—have dropped harmlessly off the screen of public curiosity. Garfield was shot by a certifiable lunatic, Charles Guiteau, who could be written off as an isolated aberration. McKinley was shot by Leon Czolgosz, a Polish-born anarchist who, both for being Polish and an anarchist, could be absorbed and forgotten since he was not-American anyway.
But then there remain Lee Harvey Oswald and John Wilkes Booth. Both were American-born, both embraced causes that assaulted their country—and, inconveniently, both were killed by their pursuers (Jack Ruby, Boston Corbett) before the mystery of their motivations could be cross-examined. Booth and Oswald represent a demonic breakdown in democratic forbearance, Americans gone mysteriously and ideologically bad, and the unease this inspires is what turns us back again and again to Dealey Plaza and to Ford’s Theater, and not to Union Station or the Buffalo Exhibition.
Not that we have not tried to salve that unease by squeezing John Wilkes Booth into the same easily dismissed pigeonhole as Czolgosz and Guiteau. Booth was an actor, but he must be a disappointed actor, a critical flop, and that will explain it. He was from a family of actors, and his notoriously poor relations with his father, Junius Brutus Booth, and his envy of a highly successful brother, Edwin Booth, drove him into a murderous rage, and that will explain it. The band of conspirators he drew around him were a collection of losers, which means that Booth was a loser himself, and that explains it. Actually, all of those things were true. But they explain nothing about John Wilkes Booth and why he put a derringer to the head of Abraham Lincoln on the night of April 14, 1865.
Michael W. Kauffman, in his new book on Booth, American Brutus: John Wilkes Booth and the Lincoln Conspiracies, offers Booth as Booth wanted to see himself: a tyrannicide, a noble Roman raising his dagger to strike down a monster, crying (as Booth did) sic semper tyrannis. Kauffman will not allow us to shoo away Booth’s shadow with comfortable assurances that J.W.B. was one of life’s failures who saw no other path to marquee stardom except by an act of sensational political killing. Kauffman firmly reminds us that Booth was the up-and-coming star of the Booth family, bursting with potential at age 27 to become the greatest Shakespearean of his day and the next matinee idol of the American stage. (Picture Matt Damon as a presidential assassin, and you have a fairly good notion of what it meant for Booth to be Lincoln’s assassin.) Even more, Booth was a slow, steady, and careful plotter. While virtually all the rest of the Booth family either sympathized with the North, or else kept their sympathies to themselves, John Wilkes was heart-and-soul a racial bigot and an ideological partisan of the Southern Confederacy—a political system based, as Alexander Stephens so unapologetically put it, on the cornerstone of human slavery.
The conspiracy he wove around Lincoln took Booth the better part of two years, and the conspirators Booth recruited betrayed his cunning eye for specific talent: Lewis Powell, the Confederate soldier, who could break a poker with his bare hands and was cold-blooded enough for any murderous scheme; David Herold, the pharmacist’s apprentice, who knew the woods and swamps of the Potomac estuary like the back of his hand; George Atzerodt, a waterman who ferried contraband across the Potomac to the Confederacy; Mary Surratt, who ran the boarding-house on H Street that served as a safe house for Confederate spies; and her son, John Surratt, the Confederate courier who slipped back and forth between Richmond and Montreal on cloak-and-dagger business.
Early in the plot, Booth planned to kidnap Lincoln, and had even waited in ambush two times, only to have some unforeseen circumstance unravel it all. Finally, after the fall of Richmond and the surrender of Robert E. Lee’s army, Booth concluded that the blow he must strike was not capture but death. And to the horrified astonishment of the nation, Booth succeeded in walking right into Lincoln’s box at Ford’s Theater without a person scarcely noticing, shooting the president in front of his wife and two guests, vaulting over the rail of the box to the stage, running out the back stage door, hopping onto his horse, and riding away to rendezvous with Herold. Powell, who had repeatedly cased the Seward house on Lafayette Square, nearly made it two that night, bursting into Seward’s bedroom and slashing him within an inch of his life. Like Booth, Powell easily escaped. In fact, every member of Booth’s conspiracy rode out of Washington with what amounts to insolent ease.
Once out of Washington, Booth and Herold struck southwards across the Potomac, following the customary rebel courier routes. Booth may have been looking to link up with other conspirators or Confederate secret service agents—to this day, we are not sure how large the Booth conspiracy was—and make his escape toward Mexico. But Booth had not planned on breaking his leg during the escape. Slowed down for days by his injury, he was finally surrounded in a tobacco barn near Port Royal, Virginia, and shot when he refused to give himself up. Herold, Powell, Atzerodt, and Mary Surratt were finally arrested and hanged in July, after a trial by military commission which makes Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib look like a weekend at the shore.
Kauffman is reasonably well-known among the tight circles of Lincoln assassination buffs. He has long been associated with the Surratt Society, and even published a volume of essays culled from the society’s journal, the Surratt Courier. This is, however, Kauffman’s maiden voyage as a writer of a major book on Booth and the Lincoln assassination. It is certainly an impressive one. American Brutus is heart-poundingly well-written, and the footnotes alone are worth the price of the book, for the sheer entertainment of following Kauffman’s path through the enormous mountains of Lincoln-assassination literature.
The problem is, Kauffman is not content with another once-more-over the crepe-hung terrain of Booth and his conspiracy. “While new versions of the story are regularly published, they are never based on the best sources,” he asserts in the introduction, settling happily into the accusative case he will employ all too frequently for the next four hundred pages. “None have critiqued the conspiracy trial with 1860s criminal law in mind. None have examined Booth’s mental state based exclusively on facts, as opposed to folklore.” All of them, in fact, have “failed to take even the most basic steps to sort out the movements of this criminal conspiracy.” Those movements are so complex, so artfully orchestrated, that Kauffman is half-way to admiring Booth’s cleverness, if not quite his actions. And all this, Kauffman will magisterially set out as though no one has ever done the story justice before.
Alas, though Kauffman blows his trumpets mightily, no walls fall down. His narrative gift, substantial as it is, will not take him further than Lloyd Lewis’ Myths After Lincoln (1929); his command of the sources will not over-embarrass George S. Bryan’s classic The Great American Myth: The True Story of Lincoln’s Murder (1940); and his truculent championing of the unhappy Dr. Samuel Mudd gains no real ground on the case made against Mudd in Edward Steers’ painstakingly thorough Blood on the Moon: The Assassination of Abraham Lincoln (2001). Is it really a novelty to discover that Booth was no parts of a madman? Steers made the point quite well that “Booth was fully rational,” that he did not need to be the “puppet” of the Confederate secret service to take certain cues from it, and that he and his conspirators were “White Supremacists whose greatest fear was the emancipation of the black man.”2 Have we really proved that because Booth had no overt connections to the Confederate secret service, he was a totally independent agent? Not so long as one of his company was John Surratt.
Besides, Kauffman has howlers of his own to explain. Charles Forbes was Lincoln’s footman, not a White House “messenger,” and the first man Forbes admitted to the presidential box at Ford’s Theater, Simon Hanscom, was not a reporter, but the editor of the pro-administration Washington Daily National Republican. The provost officer who supervised the clearing of Ford’s Theater and the moving of Lincoln from the box was John L. Bolton, not John T. Bolton.3 The hole in the door of the box was not drilled by Booth, but by the Ford’s Theater crew, as a convenience for Lincoln’s bodyguard, the hapless metropolitan policeman John F. Parker, to allow him to check on Lincoln.4 The idea that Lincoln “always deferred” to William Henry Seward would have made Seward chuckle, but not as mirthfully as Horace Greeley would over Kauffman’s comment that the New York Tribune was “an anti-administration paper.”
Rather than scything some new path through the thicket, Kauffman settles back almost at once into the free flow of his narrative, while the sulfur of the introduction drifts away harmlessly. So intent is he on telling a remarkably fine story that in fact he cannot quite keep his eye on his protagonist. Secretary of War Stanton strides onstage to take a major role; the trackers and bounty-hunters pursuing Booth take on lives of their own; and the final quarter of the book, on the trial and execution of the conspirators, actually has nothing to do with Booth at all.
It would help anyone’s case for Booth’s “rationality” if it could become clear just what Booth hoped to gain by murdering Lincoln. Kidnapping, yes, since Lincoln could then become a hostage. But murder? Steers is certainly right to suggest that Lincoln’s April 11th speech, promising voting rights to Louisiana freedmen, tipped Booth over into a murderous racial frenzy. But that goes no distance toward explaining the other targets Booth selected. If the plot of April 14th had succeeded as it was designed, it would have killed vice president Andrew Johnson and General Ulysses Grant, as well as Lincoln and Seward. Cui bono? Kauffman, oddly, gives this question short shrift. Seward was Lincoln’s Marc Antony, Kauffman briefly explains, and Booth had learned from the assassination of Julius Caesar to leave no Antonys around afterward.
But it is hard to believe that Booth would have also struck at Johnson and Grant unless he had bigger game in mind. After four years of bloody civil war, of political cock-fighting of the most vicious sort in American history, and with Congress not scheduled to assemble again until December, an assassination conspiracy of the breadth Booth planned had, at least on paper, all the possibilities it needed to pull the entire structure of the government down in confusion and political chaos. Power, that old enemy of liberty, would rise rampant and unchained, and the experiment in liberal democracy that Lincoln believed was the fundamental issue of the war would collapse like the cardboard Booth and the pro-slavery apologists had always said it was.
For Booth’s ultimate target was democracy itself, just as it had been the ultimate target of Calhoun and Hammond and Fitzhugh and all the other apostles of power who concluded that power rather than liberty was the only reality in this world. It came as a terrible shock to Booth, hiding in the Potomac swamps, that both North and South had nothing but burning-hot execration to pour on his deed. And the passage of presidential authority proceeded the morning after Ford’s Theater without a grain of sand falling into the cogs. Lincoln had struggled to prove Booth wrong in his life. Booth killed him, and Lincoln proved him wrong again, in his death.
Allen C. Guelzo is Henry R. Luce Professor of the Civil War Era and director of Civil War Era Studies at Gettysburg College. He is the author of Abraham Lincoln: Redeemer President (Eerdmans) and Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation: The End of Slavery in America (Simon & Schuster).
1. Butler in Allen Thorndike Rice, ed., Reminiscences of Abraham Lincoln by Distinguished Men of His Time (North American Publishing Co., 1886), p. 144.
2. Edward Steers, Blood on the Moon: The Assassination of Abraham Lincoln (Univ. Press of Kentucky, 2001), pp. 4-7.
3. Bolton’s testimony is in We Saw Lincoln Shot: One Hundred Eyewitness Accounts, ed. Timothy S. Good (Univ. Press of Mississippi, 1995), pp. 135-138.
4. George J. Olszewski, Historic Structures Report: Restoration of Ford’s Theater (U.S. Government Printing Office, 1963), p. 62.
Copyright © 2004 by the author or Christianity Today/Books & Culture magazine. Click here for reprint information on Books & Culture.
