Opponents were not consoled. New York Democrat Gaylord J. Clarke bemoaned “the gross usurpation and blundering incompetency of the vulgar joker who disgraces the chair once occupied by the immortal Washington. Abraham Lincoln [can say] with as much truth as the Roman monster Caligula, ‘I have power in all things and over all persons.’ ”7 Adversaries north and south joined in comparing Lincoln to Bonaparte, to Louis XIV, to Cromwell, to Caesar, or to the pharaohs. In this vein Josephine Seaton, daughter of the founding editor of the National Intelligencer, wrote to former president James Buchanan during the war that he had been the nation’s last constitutional president. The future belonged to despotism. “We will never have another presidential election,” lamented an Indiana Democratic Party leader, W. P. Davis, in 1864. “Lincoln will be proclaimed Emperor long before his term expires.”8
A contemporary expression of the hatred of tyranny was the Latin motto “Sic semper tyrannis,” meaning “ever thus to tyrants,” adopted by Virginia in 1776 and placed on the obverse of the state’s great seal. The motto appeared below a prostrate tyrant, his crown fallen away and his despotic chains broken, as he lay vanquished at the foot of Virtus. As an element of the great seal, the phrase could be seen on state commissions, grants of land, letters of credential, and the like. It appeared on the flag of the Richmond Grays at the John Brown execution in 1859 and then on the official state flag as the struggle for Southern independence opened. With the war, the words appeared widely, incorporated into the masthead design of the Richmond Whig and, shortened to “Sic semper,” in the lyrics of the pro-Southern anthem “Maryland, My Maryland.”9 A search of the Surratt house turned up a souvenir card depicting the arms of the state of Virginia, two Confederate flags and the lines “Thus will it ever be with tyrants/Virginia the mighty/Sic semper tyrannis.” The card lay openly on a mantelpiece.10
Charles Lobdell of the La Crosse, Wisconsin, Democrat thought Lincoln deserved the full sic-semper treatment. Denouncing the president as a traitor and murderer, Lobdell wrote in August 1864, at about the time Booth got his abduction plot under way, that “if [Lincoln] is elected to misgovern for another four years, we trust some bold hand will pierce his heart with dagger point for the public good.”11
This was an extreme statement even for a Copperhead newspaper, but it highlights a critical point: Lobdell himself did not attempt such a deed, nor did countless others. It was one thing for the disaffected and the rebellious to complain about arbitrary power and to employ phrases evocative of the struggle against George III, America’s last king. It was quite another to put the doctrine of tyrannicide into practice. Lincoln was the duly elected president of a democratic nation. His survival through four years of war indicated that even his enemies understood this meant something. There was a line not to be crossed. Whether from motives of morality or prudence or fear, it stayed the hand of the assassin. William Seward’s observation that “assassination is not an American practice or habit, and one so vicious and so desperate cannot be engrafted into our political system” seemed true—unless a hotheaded young Marylander of limited prudence, little fear, heroic instincts, and the certitude of a fanatic was handy.12
One will always wonder to what extent life imitated art that night at Ford’s Theatre. Weichmann suggested it when he asked Booth shortly before the assassination why he was not playing. “He answered that the only play he cared to present was Venice Preserved.” The reply meant nothing to Weichmann until years later when he read the work, the story of a plot to murder members of the Venetian senate for their betrayal of the people’s liberty.13
The actor John M. Barron, an early friend of Booth’s, was convinced that the plays in which Booth appeared were a disastrous influence on him. Barron referred to the unreality of the stage’s idealized characters and gratifying endings. Contemporary plays were a fountain of inspiration for anyone wishing to give evil its due. Villains were always punished on the nineteenth-century stage, and heroes rewarded. Barron thought “the characters he assumed, all breathing death to tyrants, impelled him to do the deed.”14
A previously unrecognized example of this is found in Wept of Wish-ton-Wish, dramatized from the 1829 novel by James Fenimore Cooper. This historical romance of the seventeenth-century frontier was a set piece for Maggie Mitchell, and Booth played it with her during his years in Richmond. As the Mohegan warrior Uncas, he put Conanchet, the leader of his enemies, to death. Central to the play was the mysterious Major Gough, one of the fugitive regicides who had condemned Charles I to death. Gough was sympathetically presented as a virtuous man who acted on his conscience. “What said I, in the judgment I pronounced, but that you were an enemy to England’s liberty and peace, and so should die,” Gough tells the king in a reverie.15 Gough was inspired by the true story of William Goffe, one of the regicides who, tradition asserts, sought refuge in Judges’ Cave on West Rock in New Haven. It was said that Goffe put the words “Sic semper tyrannis” at the cave’s entrance.16 “Heaven knows, I spoke but for my country, not myself,” Gough says in the play.
While such examples might be multiplied, no play held higher pride of place in this grim genre than Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar. The work seems uncannily apt as a template for Booth. Lincoln starred as Caesar, a leader seduced by power, with Booth as Brutus, a lover of tradition and of the old Republic that Caesar threatened. The casting seems eerily complete, down to the spiritualist Colchester, who warned Lincoln and thus reprised the role of the Soothsayer who gave warning to Caesar.
Shakespeare provided the would-be assassin with a flattering role model in Brutus.17 The humanity and high motives of Caesar’s assailant were compelling. His patriotism and decency were beyond question. An individual as noble as Caesar himself, Brutus furnished a ready symbol of legitimacy for the political murder that Booth had in mind. Importantly, however, Booth seems less like Shakespeare’s Brutus than his Cassius, the play’s principal supporting conspirator. Brutus loved Caesar. He was conflicted and “with himself at war” over his course of action. Cassius hated Caesar from the outset. It was he who drew Brutus into conspiracy, much as Booth drew others in with him. “Cassius symbolizes eternal justice,” Booth said of his favorite character in the play.18
That Shakespeare’s Brutus, and not history’s, inspired Booth is plain. Asia wrote that her brother read Plutarch, the classical author who was Shakespeare’s principal historical source for the play. But Booth’s writings and conversations reveal no knowledge of the actual historical assassination. A letter he wrote justifying the Lincoln assassination illustrated this. When Booth quoted Brutus on the necessity of assassination, he employed lines from act 2 of Shakespeare’s play.19
“There is no doubt that his study of and meditation upon those characters had much to do with shaping [his] mental condition,” thought his Richmond friend E. A. Alfriend. That was simply because, “in the ‘book and volume of [an actor’s] brain,’ there live all the characters he has impersonated. And ever and anon they rise up and salute him.”20
One could misinterpret the significance of the stage influence, however. Chester, Mathews, and McCullough were actors. They often took the same roles as Booth, but none of them attacked the president. Nor did his actor-brothers, who shared not only the identical parts but the same parents and family environment. Clearly, to the framework of theatrical imagery and rationalization a further factor must be added. Critical in importance yet incalculable of measure, it was the element of Booth’s unique personality. As Barron observed, the stage influence became destructive only when steeped in “the terribly earnest and emotional temperament” that his friend possessed.
One such element was the way that great men and women owned Booth’s imagination. He worshipped figures of heroic mold, according to Harry Langdon. While he and Booth roomed together in Richmond, the latter read excerpts from John S. C. Abbott’s biography of Napoleon I published in Harper’s Magazine and grew enraptured with the French emperor. “It so excited him that he would go an
d kiss a picture or bust of Napoleon if he saw it anywhere, in a shop window, or a saloon, or among the properties of a theater,” Langdon recalled.21 His mother gave him a set of the Abbott volumes as a present.22 The fact that Napoleon was a dictator was an inconsistency lost on Booth in his respect for the magnitude of the emperor’s accomplishments.
On the darker side, Booth admired Charlotte Corday, who stabbed Jean-Paul Marat, the French revolutionary leader, in 1793.23 And the more contemporary name of Felice Orsini worked magic on him. Orsini was an Italian nationalist who attempted unsuccessfully to assassinate Napoleon III in 1858, when Booth was in his first acting season in Philadelphia. Orsini was captured and beheaded. When news of his execution reached New York City, a nighttime procession in his honor through the principal streets of the city was given by two thousand people carrying torches and red flags. His memory so inspired Maryland’s rebels that Cipriano Ferrandini, head barber at the Barnum City Hotel, Booth’s Baltimore home away from home, offered himself in 1861 as his state’s Orisini to kill Lincoln. Booth also admired Orsini but boasted immodestly that if he had undertaken such a job, he would not have bungled it.24
Booth had in his makeup the same “elements of character that have made or marred the fortunes of [these] heroes and adventurers,” thought Michael F. Tiernan, who knew the actor in St. Joseph, Missouri, in 1864. Tiernan never knew a man more completely under the influence of such forces. It manifested itself in a desperate preoccupation with Lincoln. And there was that disquieting look familiar to anyone who has ever locked eyes with a fanatic. Tiernan called it “the kindling eye, full of emotion, which reflected the intensity of his feelings and sympathies.”25
The price for such distinction was hefty, but Booth seemed ready to pay it. Several weeks before the assassination he told a friend that he would do “something which the world would remember for all time.”26 He said the same thing to a half-dozen other people. This craving was not comparable to any professional ambition. It was a longing for a renown that would outlive the grave and make him an ornament in the history of his country. The desire intensified as history swept past, leaving Booth to witness the greatness others achieved. Fueled by this ambition and fired by guilt over his failure to become a soldier, Booth burned to effect some defining act of heroism.27 As he told friends in Baltimore, “he was going to do something that would bring his name forward in history.”28
Asia noticed a curious childhood trait in her brother. Just as he had read in Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress, where virtues and vices were embodied by human characters, Booth imagined inanimate challenges as physical opponents. A list of difficult spelling words, for example, John might imagine as a battalion of enemy soldiers. Her brother, personalizing a problem into a human adversary, would then attack it with a military spirit. “I always come out in victory,” he told her. Pretending something is a reality in form and life, as he put it, “I lay my demon.”29
Ralph Waldo Emerson noted that times of crisis push forward an individual from leader to symbol to icon.30 Events had hurried Lincoln along this road, and Booth held him responsible for every wreck along the way. “Our country owed all our troubles to him,” he wrote in his diary after the assassination.31 A. W. Smiley, Booth’s oil country friend, was one of many people struck by the actor’s focus on Lincoln’s person. While ferocious battles were being waged in the early summer of 1864, Booth said little on military matters, but he constantly expressed a hatred of Lincoln as bitter as if the president were a personal foe. Booth fixed the depth of his antagonism in Smiley’s mind by offering the vivid statement “I would rather have my right arm cut off at the shoulder than see Lincoln made president again.”32
It is hardly surprising that Booth daydreamed about attacking the president long before he gathered the courage to do it. At a rehearsal in Chicago in 1863, Booth exclaimed, “What a glorious opportunity there is for a man to immortalize himself by killing Lincoln!”
The remark ignited a debate. “What good would that do?” McVicker, the theater’s manager, asked.
Booth responded with a quotation. “ ‘Fame not more survives from good than evil deeds./The ambitious youth who fired the Ephesian Dome/Outlives in fame the pious fool who reared it.’ ” The lines referred to Herostratus, who set fire to the Artemision at Ephesus in 356 bce in order to gain renown. The quotation was widely familiar from act 3 of Colley Cibber’s adaptation of Richard III.
“Well, who was that ambitious youth?” McVicker continued. “What was his name, John?”
“That I don’t know,” sputtered Booth.
“Then where’s the fame you speak of?”
Perplexed, Booth responded only that “though the name was lost, the record of the deed would live throughout all time.” There was immortality in such acts, he felt assured.33 Returning to the topic on a subsequent occasion in Cleveland, he insisted to a friend that “the man who killed Abraham Lincoln would occupy a higher niche of fame than George Washington.”34
as the year of 1865 got well under way, Booth seemed more unsettled than ever. He was moodier, edgier, and increasingly erratic. He slapped away the hand of a federal officer whom Stuart Robson wished to introduce. He snubbed Jacob Cuyler of Albany, with whom he once had been intimate. He threatened George Wren of Marshall Theatre days and then smiled and spoke sweetly to him the following day.35 “I hardly know what to make of you this winter,” wrote Joe Simonds, “so different from your usual self. What is the matter?”36
Even the devoted Simonds fell victim to reproach. When Chester remarked over drinks at a chophouse that he heard Booth had made eighty to one hundred thousand dollars in oil, Booth lashed out at his former partner. If it had not been for Simonds, Booth snapped, he could have made twice that sum.37 Similarly, he grew angry with Harry Ford, a younger brother of John T. Ford whose admiration for Booth was boundless. No more was heard of Booth’s promise to celebrate Harry’s twenty-first birthday with a benefit performance after the two quarreled over politics in Mathews’s room at the Petersen house.38 Booth was snarling at his best friends.
Chester touched a nerve mentioning money. “My beloved precious money,” Booth once said.39 Most people thought he was rich, and it flattered him to let them believe it, but he had much less than anyone knew. Recently Booth had suffered a financial blow so severe even family members could hardly drag the truth out of him. The theatrical wardrobe he left in Montreal for shipment to Richmond was consigned to the Canadian schooner Marie Victoria. En route to Nassau, the ship wrecked near Bic on the Lower St. Lawrence River. The captain abandoned ship, and salvers helped themselves to the waterlogged residue. What had been a magnificent theatrical wardrobe was left a molder of ruined costumes, boots, caps, doublets, gloves, and piles of playbooks with Booth’s own carefully written-out stage directions. The product of years of work and accumulation disappeared overnight. An authority stated that the original value of the cargo ran into the thousands.40
If one adds to this sum the six thousand dollars spent in the oil fields and the cost of the abduction effort, estimated to total between six and ten thousand dollars, it can be seen that Booth lost most of his fortune in the final months of his life.41 In a manifesto penned at the outset of the abduction effort, Booth stated that when he finally went south, he was willing to “go penniless to her side.” Intended as a literary flourish, the words had become a hard truth.42
Not surprisingly he was drinking more than ever. Powell and Weichmann, Harbin and Mathews, Mudd and the Fords—all of them commented on it. Jeannie Gourlay of Ford’s was right to say that Booth was no barroom loafer, but, seen over the course of years, the change in his habits from the relatively abstemious Richmond days was troubling. The billiards champ John Deery saw Booth tipple brand freely at his bar and billiards hall above the National Theatre. Deery observed, “It was more than a spree.” Unfortunately, Booth never seemed to get drunk. Liquor energized him. It worked like an accelerator, not a brake. It fired his volatility. McCullough believ
ed it brought out the bandit in him.43
when the express train finally crossed the international border into Canada, James Gordon lost all restraint. “Hurrah for Jeff Davis and the Southern Confederacy!” the lanky Confederate colonel cried aloud. He turned to face the federal detective who had followed him from New York City and said, “The next time you come around close to me, I will stab you to the heart.” So ended an exhausting six weeks that commenced when Gordon, returning from a secret mission in Europe, was captured on a blockade-runner at Fort Fisher, North Carolina, on January 25, 1865. Posing as a Scottish traveler, he got loose in the North and commenced a cat-and-mouse game with federal agents. Safely out of their reach at last, Gordon made his way to Montreal. He checked into the St. Lawrence Hall and reported to his fellow Mississippian Jacob Thompson, who was his wife’s uncle, for orders.44
Fortune's Fool: The Life of John Wilkes Booth Page 33
