UBC: Kauffman, American Brutus

American Brutus: John Wilkes Booth and the Lincoln Conspiracies by Michael W. Kauffman

My rating: 5 of 5 stars



This is an excellent and thought-provoking book, not a biography of John Wilkes Booth so much as it is a dissection of Lincoln's assassination: everything that can be reconstructed about the events that led up to it and the events that followed. Kauffman works intensively with primary sources, collating and correlating affidavits and testimony and letters and diaries and memoirs, talking carefully about discrepancies and contradictions, talking about the primary sources that did exist but are now lost, talking about why people said the things they did.

I learned a great deal about John Wilkes Booth, the most important thing being that Booth was a liar. Nothing he said and nothing he wrote is remotely trustworthy. He lied to everyone around him and I'm pretty sure he spent most of his life lying to himself. Kauffman is particularly interested in the way that Booth implicated innocent people in his plotting. For example, he took one friend out riding around Washington, loudly pointing out what good escape routes would be. The friend didn't realize until much later that Booth was making it look like they were discussing a plot against Lincoln. Booth did this routinely to people whom he felt were a threat to him, giving himself blackmail material against them should they discover his plans. That more than anything, that premeditated and carefully executed cruelty, makes me unable to feel any charity towards John Wilkes Booth.

Kauffman talks a lot about tyrannicide, which is what Booth thought he was doing, pointing out that a lot of pro-Confederate newspapers in both North and South were talking about Marcus Junius Brutus and William Tell, about the justified killing of out-of-control tyrants. (And given the way Lincoln's administration was dancing a vigorous can-can on the US Constitution and given the fact that many people--not just John Wilkes Booth--thought that Lincoln had had the 1864 election rigged, so that there was no legal way to get him out of office, although it's in stark contrast to the way Lincoln is now viewed, I can see how Booth came to think of him as a tyrant and to think of murdering him as tyrannicide, not something more base.) The most incisive sentence in this book, to me, is: "The irony was inescapable: Booth had hoped to kill Lincoln on the Ides and highlight his resemblance to Caesar; but instead, he shot him on Good Friday, and the world compared him to Christ" (251). This, in a beautiful nutshell, both explains Booth's lofty sense of self-importance and the way that his plan crashed down around his ears.

There's also a certain poetic justice to it. Booth seems to have been a man without any sense of irony whatsoever. The best example is one that also gets used in Manhunt: The 12-Day Chase for Lincoln's Killer, where Booth, writing to his mother, describes himself as a slave because he had to work in the North. Any white American male who was capable, as Booth was capable in the 1860s, of making $30,000 a year ($421,348.16 today if you adjust for inflation) . . . the mere comparison is ludicrous. But Booth is absolutely serious; that is genuinely how wronged and oppressed he felt he was.

That lack of irony also explains one of the things that I find most interesting about Booth and his evolving scheme. He started out with a plan to kidnap Lincoln--this was in the days before the Secret Service or any sense that the President needed to be guarded (murdering the President of the United States wasn't even made a federal crime until 1965) and Lincoln was known for riding out of town completely by himself, so the idea itself was not inherently implausible, and Booth was not the only one who came up with it--but that plan metamorphosed as he failed to carry it out and the Confederate position became worse and worse. He went from kidnapping the President in an isolated place out in the country to kidnapping the President in a theater. (He had an elaborate scheme about who would lift Lincoln down from the box to the stage which is blackly hilarious; Lincoln was 6'4", and even though he was 56, they discovered at his autopsy that he still had the upper body of a powerful athlete--I would like to have seen Booth and Surratt and Powell trying it.) And then, after Appomattox, his plan metamorphosed again, from kidnap to murder. But, and this is the interesting thing to me, why a theater? It seems, as Booth's co-conspirators argued vehemently, the worst possible location for a kidnapping; even for murder, it's highly counterintuitive, although Booth made it work. But why would a professional actor from a family of professional actors, who had played theaters across the US and had theatrical friends everywhere, choose his professional home as the perfect place for assassination/tyrannicide?

There are two different ways to answer that question. One is to point out that Booth, being both a professional actor and an inveterate liar, and being also a person with an vastly inflated sense of his own importance, someone who essentially saw himself as being on stage in front of a rapt audience all the time, inevitably thought about his plot as a play. After all, he remembered to declare Sic semper tyrannis as he jumped from the box to the stage--and Kauffman notes that Booth , in actual performance of actual plays, liked to make dramatic entrances, and was in fact known for jumping down to the stage from as much as 12 feet. And on the run in Maryland, he was most interested in discovering--and most crushed by--popular opinion about what he'd done. Moreover, he understood instinctively how to use the theater to his advantage. It let him creep up behind Lincoln without anyone (including his victim) noticing, and the detectives who later made the cast of Our American Cousin perform the play again--and that has to have been the worst experience of any of their professional lives, performing a comedy in an empty theater while everyone involved is mentally counting down to the gunshot--proved that Booth picked his moment with precision to ensure that the stage would be clear for him to cross. And that--a clear escape route--is something that he could only have guaranteed by committing murder during a play. Only during the performance of a play can you predict exactly where the people involved are going to be at the moment of your choice. In that light, his choice seems so self-evident that you may be wondering why I even think it's worth commenting on.

But then there's the other side. Booth knew he was destroying himself in destroying Lincoln; he wanted public adulation (much as he claimed he didn't care at all), but he knew the government would hunt him down. So again why would he choose, deliberately and with intense premeditation, to commit the most destructive act of his life, both against his victim and against himself, in a theater, when he, his father, and two of his brothers were all famous actors--probably the most famous and adulated actors of their day? The Freudian line is tempting here, since Booth was assassinating the pre-eminent patriarch of the United States, a stern and unyielding father to the rebellious South, a father who Booth believed was playing favorites, cossetting the North and punishing the South. It is also obviously a blow against Booth's own (deceased) father, though Kauffman doesn't go into enough detail for me to make a strong case that Booth resented Junius Brutus Booth (although Junius Brutus did try to keep his sons from following him into acting as a career, with notably poor success). John Wilkes Booth did however most certainly resent his brother Edwin, who was a staunch supporter of the Union and even more successful an actor than John Wilkes himself. And if you think of Lincoln's assassination as a play, with John Wilkes Booth as both director and leading man in the ultimate performance of his career . . . to me, that kind of self-immolation, using the tools of his own trade to destroy himself, talks about a kind of self-hatred that goes well beyond Freud. And Booth, being as he was almost completely un-self-aware, I don't think ever recognized or even could have recognized the impulse to self-destruction underlying the moment when he put his .44 caliber Deringer against Lincoln's skull and fired.

(The only grim and bitterly cold comfort I can find is that Lincoln would never have known what happened to him. The bullet that tore through his brain didn't kill him instantly, but he was brain-dead from the moment Booth fired. I only hope he was enjoying the play.)

American Brutus isn't only about John Wilkes Booth. It's also about Abraham Lincoln and Edwin Stanton and William Seward, about Lewis Powell and George Atzerodt and John Surratt. Kauffman traces out the long domino paths of cause-and-effect from the assassination of Lincoln and the near assassination of William Seward, the terrible damage Booth caused, all the people ensnared in his webs who fell with him when he fell. It's a book that I've been thinking about a lot since I finished it, which is maybe the highest praise I can offer.



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