John Wilkes Booth
John Wilkes Booth was one of America’s most famous actors in 1865, having established a reputation as both a Shakespearean and a performer of popular comedic and dramatic roles. Far more popular with women than men, he was a frequent performer in Washington DC theaters, and had performed before President Lincoln, directing some of his lines to the President’s private box. During the Civil War Booth performed in cities of the North and South, including New Orleans and Richmond in the Confederacy, and New York, Philadelphia, and Washington in the Union. He once claimed to use his favored status to smuggle medicines to the South during the war.
In 1863 Booth was arrested in St. Louis for making statements described as treasonous. He was vocal in his hatred of Abraham Lincoln and his support of the South, which caused a break with his equally famous brother Edwin. Alienated from his family and deeply resentful of Lincoln’s emancipation of southern slaves, Booth derived a scheme to kidnap the President and send him to Richmond as a hostage, forcing the Union to recognize the Confederacy as an independent nation. As part of his plot Booth met secretly with southern sympathizers and agents in the northern cities and in Canada. When Lincoln was re-elected Booth attended his inauguration.
It was the surrender of Robert E. Lee which ended Booth’s scheme of kidnapping the President and planning instead to murder Lincoln. Booth planned the murder of Lincoln, Vice President Andrew Johnson, and Secretary of State William Seward, to be carried out by co-conspirators, at the same time. When he learned from the owner of Ford’s Theater that Lincoln would be attending a play the night of Good Friday in the company of Ulysses Grant, he considered the opportunity to kill the leading Union General as well as too good to pass up. Booth assigned conspirators to their targets, and prepared to kill Lincoln and Grant himself.
Grant did not attend that night (Mrs. Grant despised Mrs. Lincoln) and Booth had no difficulty entering the President’s box and shooting him in the back of the head, escaping by leaping to the stage, emoting in full throat to the shocked audience. Booth fractured his leg in the process, which slowed his escape to Virginia along with co-conspirator David Herold. George Atzerodt, assigned to kill Johnson, spent the night getting drunk instead. Lewis Paine attacked Seward in his home with knife and pistol; the pistol misfired and despite Seward being savagely slashed with the knife he survived, his body protected by braces he had worn since a carriage accident a few days earlier.
Booth and Herold were run to ground in a Virginia tobacco barn, and Booth was killed. Four of his co-conspirators were tried and hanged, including the first woman hanged by the federal government, Mary Surratt. Others were imprisoned, including the doctor who set Booth’s leg as he fled through Maryland. Booth was the first to assassinate an American President, though his was not the first attempt to kill the Chief Magistrate. Richard Hamilton attempted to kill Andrew Jackson in 1835 by shooting him. His gun misfired and several witnessing congressmen, as well as Jackson, overpowered him. Jackson beat the miscreant with his cane. Hamilton spent the rest of his life in an insane asylum, dying in 1861.