Historical Heartthrobs: 50 Timeless Crushes from Cleopatra to Camus

John Wilkes Booth: Excerpt

John Wilkes Booth was a moderately successful Shakespearean actor in the 1850s and ’60s whose name lives on as a result of his infamous assassination of America’s most beloved president: Abraham Lincoln. He was a seriously handsome devil and a seriously devilish dude.

Booth’s Life Story

John Wilkes Booth was born into an acting family, but from an early age, he was desperate to set himself apart. (This would prove to be difficult, despite some level of natural talent.) He was raised, along with his nine brothers and sisters, on a farm in Bel Air—not the paradise portrayed in The Fresh Prince, but rather a suburb of Baltimore. The Booth’s summer home, however, showed how influential the family had become through their stagecraft. The estate was called Tudor Hall and sold in 1999 for almost half a million dollars. Both John and his brother Edwin (a fellow thespian) were born out of wedlock, and even though their father, Junius Brutus Booth, eventually married his mistress and John’s mother, Mary Ann Holmes, both brothers probably would have endured a significant amount of public shaming.

Booth first made a name for himself as a teenager in his onstage debut in Richard III at a Baltimore theater. He quickly turned his rave reviews into a thriving career that took him around the country playing a variety of Shakespearean roles. The only downside of this was that his skills were constantly pitted against and compared to those of his brother, Edwin. Still, it was a successful career, and at his peak, John Wilkes Booth earned an annual salary of $20,000 per year—approximately sixty-six times what the average family earned annually at that time.

In the midst of his acting career, the eventual asassin decided to apply his zeal to a new endeavor as well: politics. A radical libertarian, Booth first joined what was referred to as the Know-Nothing Party, an organization dedicated to mitigating the number of Irish and German immigrants moving to the United States. Along with other conservatives, he came to believe that Lincoln’s ultimate goal was to become king of America. In 1859, Booth demonstrated his aggressive support of slavery by aiding in the capture of John Brown, an abolitionist who had led a major slave revolt. This action was a gateway to Booth’s time as a secret agent for the Confederate Army during the Civil War.

In 1864, Booth began to develop more conventional criminal plans: He wanted to kidnap President Lincoln and bring him to Richmond, Virginia, where he could be ransomed for Confederate soldiers. Several cronies were drafted into the plot, including Lewis Powell, George Atzerodt, David Herold, Samuel Arnold, Michael O’Laughlen, and John Surratt. Booth put aside acting and reallocated his personal funds in order to purchase supplies for the developing kidnapping plot. But due to the financial expense and lack of concerted organization, coconspirators soon began dropping from the effort left and right.

Perhaps pushed to his breaking point after hearing what was to be Lincoln’s last White House speech (in which Lincoln discussed the Emancipation Proclamation and teased a future announcement on the topic of African American citizenship), Booth determined to kill, rather than kidnap, the president, no matter what. In under seventy-two hours, Booth hatched a plan to draw on his connections at Ford’s Theatre and obtain access to the box where Lincoln, his wife, and commanding general Ulysses S. Grant were

planning to see Our American Cousin. The assassin would take care of Lincoln and Grant, while his henchmen would eliminate Secretary of State William Seward and VP Andrew Johnson, thereby setting the stage they hoped for the Confederates to reverse the trends of the time. Though the other three victims were not murdered, President Lincoln died at the hands of Booth, who cried, “Sic semper tyrranis,” or “Thus always to tyrants,” into the crowd before disappearing into the night.

Tracked down by investigators at a farm in Virginia, the assassin supposedly declared, “Tell mother I die for my country,” before the barn he was hiding in was set on fire. He was shot upon exiting the blazing structure.

The Story of His Sex Life

Though he never wed, Booth was rumored to be secretly engaged to Lucy Lambert Hale, the daughter of a U.S. Senator from New Hampshire. He was found with a snapshot of her in his pocket when he died. It would be romantic if the circumstances weren’t so awful.

Why He Matters

John Wilkes Booth set the template for political assassination in the modern age. There was plotting, intrigue, mystery, a solitary gunman, and a public venue. It also forced the government to evaluate how it would handle such tragedies in the future. Booth remains a profound symbol of the intense antipathy that subsisted between North and South at the time.

Best Features: Nothing but his pretty face.

“His figure is slender, but compact and well made. He has a small, finely formed head, with cold, classic features, a bright eye, and a face capable of great expression,” wrote the Philadelphia Press in a review of one of his plays. Much like countless great and terrible orators of history, Booth had a charisma that carried him a little too far. He was easy on the eyes but a hard man to be around for too long.

Heat Factor: 1 (scale of 1-5)

Colder than an assassin’s blade.

Don’t judge a book by its cover and certainly don’t judge Booth by his (unnervingly) attractive appearance. Booth had a nice moustache and a lot of swagger, but his profound racism, his delusions of grandeur, and his fondness for murder on a world-historical scale turn the scales against him. He was an insecure, unstable man who appeared to have some difficulty distinguishing between the actions on the stage and the reality of the world in front of him.

IN HIS OWN WORDS

“The South is avenged!” - John Wilkes Booth, after shooting Lincoln but before breaking his leg

 “I am abandoned, with the curse of Cain upon me.” - John Wilkes Booth, writing in his pocket diary while on the run 

**Excerpted from Historical Heartthrobs: 50 Timeless Crushes – from Cleopatra to Camus (ISBN: 9781936976102) with permission of the publisher, Zest Books. Text copyright (c) Kelly Murphy 2014.**