Now, America’s first presidential assassination unleashed an emotional upheaval that conflated vengeance with sorrow.īooth’s braggadocio seems delusional now, but it would have appeared less so at the time. Just the previous month they had heard the president plead for “malice toward none” in his Second Inaugural Address.
In shooting Lincoln on Good Friday, 1865, Booth intended to destabilize the United States government, but what he most destabilized was the psyche of the American people. But that recognition did not arrive immediately, or everywhere it took weeks of national mourning, and years of published reminiscences by his familiars, to burnish the legend. By then, Lincoln was almost universally embraced as a national icon-the great emancipator and the preserver of the Union, a martyr to freedom and nationalism alike. Not until years later, after he miraculously “reconstructed” all 11 paragraphs, would it appear in print. The fellow actor to whom Booth had entrusted it, fearful of being charged with complicity in the president’s murder, burned it. He had no way of knowing that the Intelligencer never received his letter. And yet I for striking down a greater tyrant than they ever knew am looked upon as a common cutthroat.” Booth died clinging to the hope that he would be absolved-and lionized. “And why? For doing what Brutus was honored for, what made Tell a hero. “I am here in despair,” he confided to his pocket diary on April 21 or 22. To his horror, they described him not as a hero but as a savage who had slain a beloved leader at the peak of his fame. “‘Caesar must bleed for it.’”Īs he waited to cross the Potomac River into Virginia, Booth finally glimpsed some recent newspapers for the first time since he had fled Ford’s Theatre. “It was the spirit and ambition of Caesar that Brutus struck at,” he boasted. Lincoln had famously loved Shakespeare, and Booth, the Shakespearean actor, considered the president a tyrant and himself the Bard’s most infamous avenger reborn. “Many, I know-the vulgar herd-will blame me for what I am about to do, but posterity, I am sure, will justify me,” he had boasted on April 14, 1865, the morning he determined to kill the president, in a letter to Washington’s National Intelligencer. Even as he hid out in Zekiah Swamp in Southern Maryland, John Wilkes Booth-famished, soaked, shivering, in agony from his fractured fibula and feeling “hunted like a dog”-clung to the belief that his oppressed countrymen had “prayed” for President Abraham Lincoln’s “end.” Surely he would be vindicated when the newspapers printed his letter.
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