The Legend of John Wilkes Booth: Myth, Memory, and a Mummy

by C. Wyatt Evans

A deformed thumb, a neck scar from a stage accident, and a broken left leg, the result of a dramatic leap. These were the telltale markings that for decades identified a sideshow attraction as the supposed body of John Wilkes Booth. They persuaded onlookers that Lincoln's assassin was not killed in 1865 but survived the assault on Garrett's barn to live on as a fugitive for thirty years afterwards. As Wyatt Evans shows, some popular stories, no matter how weird and improbable, simply refuse to die.

Evans recounts how a mummified corpse came to embody the romantic image of the assassin and the legend of his survival. He traces the legend's development in the weeks following the assassination to the appearance of the "Booth Mummy," the remains of an Oklahoma drifter embalmed in 1903 and displayed in carnival sideshows throughout the West. He assesses the political and ideological motivations in both Southern and Northern cultures that made proliferation of the legend possible as well as profitable. He concludes by examining the legend's persistence in present-day America, the mummy's ironic fate, and the recent efforts to exhume Booth's real remains.

Weaving a "vernacular intellectual history," Evans shows how the legend emerged from a tangle of cultural and historical events including white Americans' quest for a suitable racial pre-history, collective memories of the Civil War, and even incipient suspicions of conspiracy, since belief in Booth's escape automatically implied a government cover-up of Booth's capture and death. More than a sop to Confederate diehards for whom Booth's escape symbolized Southern vindication, the legend exemplified Americans' inability and unwillingness to enact closure over the tragedy of Lincoln's death.

The Legend of John Wilkes Booth is a compelling story of how collective memories and popular histories collide with, clash, and sometimes overcome mainstream accounts of the past. It offers an alternate venue for studying the workings of Civil War memory in American culture and demonstrates how (and why) culture produced at the grassroots level can challenge the official version of events. Through his meticulous account, Evans sheds new light on our complex attitudes toward heroes and villains, our need to mythologize tragedies, and our unwillingness to let go of myths, however absurd.

Genres: History, Nonfiction

224 pages, Hardcover

First published October 1, 2004

About the author

C. Wyatt Evans is assistant professor of history at Drew University. He has contributed to the Journal of Southern Religion, Dictionary of American History, Encyclopedia of Modern American Conspiracies, and the volume Alcohol and Temperance in Modern History.

Reviews

[Drew Martin · Rating 1 out of 5]

If you are looking for a book that deals directly with any aspect of the Lincoln assassination, the events surrounding the days leading up to it, after it,or the trial of the co-conspirators you need to look elsewhere. There are quite a few books that do a very good job in detailing all of above. If you are looking for a book that details all of the different theories regarding the assassination conspiracy, or the theories of how Booth escaped and what became of him, once again, this is not the book for you. If you are looking for a book that covers John Wilkes Booth, be it a complete biography,or just covering the assassination, once again you will need to look elsewhere. Even if you are looking for a book that sheds more light on the mummy of David E. George, this might not be the book for you. The start of the book contains some information covering the final days of George and the first days of the mummy. The rest of the book, however, barely mentions the mummy in passing.

This book was written by a professor, and it reads as a very long, drawn out academic paper or dissertation. It is loaded down with footnotes that take away from the flow of the narrative, which is weak to begin with. There are some of the footnotes that reference old newspaper articles from the Enid area at the time of the mummy's origin that might be useful for independent study on the topic. The book does contain a few pictures of Booth's likeness, along with two very good pictures of the mummy in different stages of being. The main focus point is on the version of the escape put forth by Finis L. Bates in his 1907 book 'The Escape and Suicide of John Wilkes Booth'. There are mentions of other such books regarding an escape by Booth, but everything is brought back to Bates and the mummy.

The author does his best to discredit not only the mummy theory but any other theory of escape that he mentions alongside of it. He offers forth no proof of his own; he only says that proof exists, or the history or accounts listed were wrong, or something along these lines while not saying precisely what is wrong nor giving the proof for what the correct sequence should be. The author repeats himself several times over the course of the text. The author also allows his own personal views to interfere with his presentation. He states that conspiracy theorists are paranoid, while making it appear that those who would subscribe to the idea that Booth escaped is a white supremacist from the South, and that Booth was a symbol of "white beauty". He offers that the reason the "myth" as he says took root in the South was that the Booth mummy symbolized a white supremacist view back to the days of slavery. He also states that civil war was all about slavery and had nothing to do with states rights, and any one who disagrees with that is a Southern racist.

[Gigi · Rating 4 out of 5]

My second time through this excellent study of the history of the John Wilkes Booth escape conspiracies that brilliantly captures how the legend forms almost immediately after the death of Booth, if not before, and moves right along through history serving as a tool for deeper [conservative] ideological concerns of each decade. Through this study, we also get a great sense of how Booth himself, as well as his motivation for killing Lincoln, was remembered by the wider public outside of the legend, though throughout much of the past 160 years its often been extremely difficult to extract the legend and the man, as most biographical descriptions of Booth until very recent scholarship seem right out of the American mythology even while staying "mostly factual." Towards the end of this, we get an effective description of the development of modern American conspiracy theory mindset, and "Booth's" not insubstantial part in that, while at the beginning there is a very evocative history of the US 19th century mummy fad as something that became a weird pathological justification for US racism and white supremacy in a way that was both benign and very sinister, and provided the contextual infrastructure for Booth's mummy. It is very revealing of certain unsavory aspects of the American character. Other than that, the Booth legends are a hoot (I love that he's always rich! Like, what? How?), the different theories are all so far fetched that it often seems like Booth himself must have thought of them. Lastly, I just want to say, as a general rule, academics can't write very well. Professor Evans can really write. The prose has a precision, the ideas are clear, and the sections don't feel overburdened. Much fun to be had for even a casual reader.

The only other review on here is one star, and although I do agree that Prof. Evans could be more explicit as to why the legend is BS (for instance, David George had different colored eyes than Booth and was shorter, I mean that's probably a dealbreaker) I just want to point out how funny it is that my man complains that the book (published by a university press) reads like an academic paper, and one which is not a biography of Booth, or an overview of the assassination, or about the trial of the co-conspirators, and also how everything is brought back to the mummy when the book literally is called The Legend of John Wilkes Booth: Myth, Memory, and a Mummy. Respect.