Actors - John Wilkes Booth

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	Actors - John Wilkes Booth

John Wilkes Booth (May 10, 1838 – April 26, 1865) was an American stage actor and assassin of President Abraham Lincoln.

Background and early life

John Wilkes Booth was born into a family steeped in acting tradition. Born in Bel Air, Harford County, Maryland in 1838 to Junius Brutus Booth and Mary Ann Holmes, who were both British Roman Catholics who had emigrated to the United States in 1821.

Booth was named after the British revolutionary John Wilkes, who the family claimed was a distant relative. In the Booth family, there is historical precedent for children being named after statesmen and assassins. Junius Booth was named after Marcus Junius Brutus, one of the assassins of Julius Caesar. Junius Booth had a reputation for being both a respected actor and a drunken eccentric. It is also quite likely that he was insane. The poet Walt Whitman eulogized Junius Booth in 1852 as thus: "There went the greatest and by far the most noble Roman of them all."

Junius' brother, Edwin, was, arguably, the most influential "Shakespearean" actor of his day, and another brother, Junius Brutus Booth, Jr. followed his father and uncles into acting. He was married to the former Marion Agnes Land Rookes, a native Australian.

John Wilkes Booth appears to have had a happy childhood. He received an education in the classics — Shakespeare, in particular. In 1851, at age 13, Booth attended St. Timothy's Military Academy in Catonsville, near Baltimore, Maryland. It was there that Booth met two men named Samuel Arnold and Michael O'Laughlen, both of whom would later become his co-conspirators.

Theatrical career

John Wilkes Booth made his stage debut in August, 1855, at the age of 17, when he played the Earl of Richmond in Shakespeare's Richard III. At his insistence, Booth was billed as "J.B. Wilkes," a pseudonym of his creation. Booth, although likely proud of his family's achievements in the acting profession, probably wanted to be judged as an actor on his own merits.

In 1858 he became a member of the Richmond Theatre, and his career started to flourish. He was once referred to in reviews as "the handsomest man in America." John Wilkes Booth stood about five feet, eight inches tall, had jet-black hair, and was lean and athletic and was an adept swordsman; these abilities led him to become a very physical actor. A fellow actress once recalled that on occasion Booth accidentally cut himself with his own sword. A common treatment Booth used to treat his many injuries was to sleep covered in steaks.

In 1859, John Wilkes Booth was preparing for a theatrical engagement in Richmond, Virginia a few weeks before the scheduled execution of abolitionist John Brown. In October, Brown had unsuccessfully raided the federal armory at Harpers Ferry, Virginia (now a part of present-day West Virginia) in an attempt to start a state-wide slave insurrection. Booth purchased a Richmond Gray militia uniform from state officers and proudly stood guard alongside the gallows as Brown was hanged.

Abraham Lincoln

When Abraham Lincoln was elected president on November 6, 1860, Booth wrote a long speech that denounced what he saw as northern abolitionism, and made clear his strong support of the south and slavery.

On April 12, 1861, the Civil War began in earnest. Eventually, eleven southern states seceded from the Union. Although he was a native of Maryland, a border state whose government was pro-Union, it also had a large slaveholding population that was strongly sympathetic to the Confederacy. This fact appalled and angered John Wilkes Booth. Not helping Lincoln's reputation among pro-Confederacy Marylanders such as Booth was Lincoln's declaration of martial law throughout the state as well as bordering Washington, D.C. Many saw this as an unconstitutional act and an abuse of executive power.

Booth, like many Marylanders, came from a divided family. Most of his family were staunch Unionists, but Booth considered himself a southerner first and foremost. However, this did not stop him from promising his mother that he would not enlist in the Confederate Army. Instead, he lived out the war mostly in Washington D.C., traveling to locales in both Union-controlled and Confederacy-controlled states — and even as far west as Indiana. Booth was outspoken in his love for the south, and almost equally vociferous in his dislike for Abraham Lincoln. In fact, Booth was arrested in early 1862 in St. Louis, Missouri for making public statements against the Union and the president and was taken before a Provost Marshal. The actual outcome of his case is not known, but we can determine with a likely high degree of accuracy that Booth was likely acquitted or found not guilty, as no record of his imprisonment there exists.

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Actors - John Wilkes Booth

Background and early life

Theatrical career

Abraham Lincoln

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