He died, 159 years ago today.
Twelve days before he died, on April 14, 1865, Booth shot US President Abraham Lincoln in the back of the head: Lincoln died the next morning. An intensive manhunt discovered Booth hiding in a barn on a Virginia tobacco farm, and–under threat from the detectives that they would torch the building if Booth didn’t surrender, he tried the following ploy:
Booth refused to come out…citing the leg injury he’d recently sustained: “I am a cripple. I have got but one leg. If you will withdraw your men in line 100 yards from the door, I will come out and fight you.”
Told that the men who surrounded him hadn’t come to do battle but simply to arrest him, Booth tried again, this time asking for just 50 yards. Again, his request was rebuffed.
“Well, my brave boys, prepare a stretcher for me!” Booth replied, in what the second detective, Everton Conger, remembered as a “singularly theatrical voice.”
Booth’s accomplice then surrendered. On Booth’s failing to surrender himself, someone set fire to the barn in the early evening and Booth was shot, presumably while attempting to escape the flames. (Later investigation revealed that the sniper was a Union soldier in the cohort, who said he fired because he feared that Booth–who was heavily armed–would be a danger to the group.)
“I put my ear down close to his mouth,” Conger recalled, “and finally I understood him to say, ‘Tell mother, I die for my country.’”
His death, however, was neither quick nor easy. It took hours, during which he sometimes begged his captors to kill him, and he finally expired at about 7AM the following morning, April 26, 1865.
Or so the story goes.
In a twist worthy of twenty-first century conspiracy theories (and we all know how those turn out), a series of legends built themselves up, speculating that John Wilkes Booth hadn’t really died on that day. (Proof that he had, indeed left us was offered following an autopsy aboard the USS Montauk, based on several instances of physical evidence.) But:
Conspiracy theorists maintained that Booth, a professional actor and master of disguise, had actually eluded his captors before the tobacco barn standoff and that some unfortunate dupe had taken the fatal shot to the neck.
Before long, newspaper stories had Booth in Mexico, India, Cuba, Brazil, Italy, Germany, Turkey, China and the Pelew Islands, to name but a few. By one account he had gone into the mining business in South America. In another, he’d become the leading actor in Australia under the name of Senor Enos. In yet another, he was in the service of a sultan in Egypt and owned more than 100 camels.
Still other accounts found him still in the US, living under any number of disguises, in any number of places, and at one point–decades after his supposed death–“his” mummified body made several tours as part of a traveling carnival. (Supposedly the man confessed–while still alive–his real identity as John Wilkes Booth and said that the man killed in the Virginia tobacco farm was an innocent dupe.) The story gets even more complicated. Read all about it here.
In what might be an early twentieth-century depiction of karma as the proverbial bitch, the travelling carnival incarnation of JWB wasn’t all that successful:
The mummy “scattered ill luck around almost as freely as Tutankhamen is supposed to have done,” reported the Saturday Evening Post in 1938. The magazine reported that nearly every showman who had exhibited the specimen had been financially ruined. In 1920 a circus train carrying the mummy wrecked en route to San Diego and killed eight people. Soon after, the mummy was kidnapped and held for ransom. Union veterans even threatened to lynch it—apparently in a desire to kill Booth twice.
After [carny man] Bates died in 1923, his widow sold the mummy to William Evans, the “Carnival King of the Southwest.” After Evans quit the carnival business, he took the oddity back to his Idaho potato farm and opened his doors to curious tourists who drove by the sign posted outside: “SEE THE MAN WHO MURDERED LINCOLN.” A Lincoln assassination buff convinced Evans to resume the mummy’s tour of America, but the re-launch fizzled. The Saturday Evening Post reported that Evans was ordered out of Salt Lake City for “teaching false history,” and fined $50 in Big Spring, Texas, for transporting a corpse without a license.
But it gets even weirder. Another carnival man and his wife bought the mummy somewhere around 1930 for $5000 (about $94,000 today), and took it on the road, daring viewers to “prove it wasn’t Booth. The mummy hasn’t been seen in public since the 1970s, and no-one seems to know where it is today.
And while Booth’s family has generally been supportive of requests to exhume the body that’s buried in John Wilkes Booth’s tomb for DNA testing, those requests have so far been denied by the courts.
The failure to capture John Wilkes Booth (or whoever that was in the tobacco barn) alive and take him in for questioning was a source of great frustration to investigators, who’d hoped to identify the leaders of the plot to assassinate Lincoln from the trigger-puller himself.
Some of this stuff I knew before I disappeared down the rabbit hole this morning. Some of it I didn’t.
One of the things I didn’t know or expect was this:
John Wilkes Booth was just twenty-six years old when he died. (He was born exactly 100 years before the late Mr. Right, on May 10, 1838).
Probably not all that much older than many of the “protestors” disrupting college campuses in the US today on behalf of the Palestinians, and making open threats against Israel and the Jews.
I believe they’re being manipulated by an as-yet unknown party. After all, and as it relates to the recent campus protests: All those tents (largely identical) have to have come from somewhere. All those signs (often identical) have to have come from somewhere. The provisions (apparently generous) have to have come from somewhere. The megaphones, the scripts, and the orchestrated responsorial chants, have to have come from somewhere. I think it’s highly likely that many of the “protestors” have also come from somewhere (else). Someone is organizing and paying for all this. And these ignorant children, steeped in victimology, self-absorption, intersectionality, and the belief that there’s nothing they want that they shouldn’t have–and right quick–are that “someone’s” useful idiots.
I wonder whose “useful idiot” John Wilkes Booth was. Or was he–as is generally thought–at that very young age–the sole mastermind of the plot to assassinate the President?
It’s a period of history I’d love to know more about.
Have at it.
