In popular lore, John Wilkes Booth, the assassin of Abraham Lincoln, was the first lone deranged gunman—preceding Lee Harvey Oswald.
A stage actor from a famous theatrical family from Maryland and Confederate sympathizer who was as “handsome as a Greek God,” Booth shot Lincoln in the back of the head while Lincoln and his wife, Mary Todd Lincoln, were watching the play “Our American Cousin” at Ford’s Theatre on April 14, 1865, a few nights after the surrender of Confederate General Robert E. Lee.
After shooting Lincoln, Booth jumped to the stage, breaking his leg, while proclaiming “sic semper tyrannis” (“thus always to tyrants”). He stabbed orchestra leader William Withers, Jr., before escaping the theater through a side door to a waiting carriage. Booth then escaped the city, eventually winding his way to a farmhouse in Northern Virginia where he was tracked down and supposedly killed 12 days later.
Booth, who was 26 at the time, allegedly conceived of his plot to kill Lincoln after he heard Lincoln give a speech expressing support for Black suffrage in the waning days of the Civil War. Allegedly, Booth said of Lincoln’s speech: “That means n*gger citizenship. Now, by God, I’ll put him through.”
This story told to schoolchildren for generations, like so many other fables about the American past, is simply not true.
Booth, like Oswald, was not a deranged lone assassin who conceived of the plot in reaction to a particular speech. Rather, Booth appears to have acted as part of a much wider conspiracy involving Lincoln’s Secretary of War, Edwin Stanton, eight other co-conspirators, and more than 70 government officials and businessmen, some of them connected to the Confederate secret service whom Booth was in contact with when he traveled before the assassination to Montreal, Canada. (more...)
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