John Wilkes Booth awoke depressed. It was Good Friday morning, April 14, 1865. The Confederacy was dead. His cause was lost and his dreams of glory over.
The book is titled Chasing Lincoln’s Killer and for every American except those who slept through all their history classes, don’t go to the movies and never owned a television, it is immediately apparent that this is not going to be a mystery. Everybody knows how the story goes and just in case anyone doesn’t, the opening lines of the first chapter provide the reader with the name and motivation of the killer.
He would not have to hunt Lincoln. The President was coming to him.
To borrow a severely overused phrase one more time, the elements which converged to allow the assassination of Abraham Lincoln was a perfect storm. Looked back on in retrospect, the odds against the President living to see the next day were overwhelming; for the last time he managed to buck the odds, but only barely. The meeting of assassin with the target to be assassinated could only have benefited from one more aspect to make it absolutely perfectly calculated to ensure murder and that component would have required Lincoln to be on a suicide mission. Booth possessed so much information about the target of his murderous rage--where he would be, how to get to him, when to get to him and how to get away from the scene of the crime--that he must have felt like he was acting out a script already knowing how it ended.
He and Herold could not bathe or wash clothes and, unshaven, they looked and smelled worse each day. They looked like the fugitives they were. Their looks might even jeopardize their ability to receive a proper reception at the fine Virginia households they planned to call on across the river.
The plan for what to do after he got away from the Ford’s Theater, on the other hand, was more like tossing a classically trained actor into an improv group. Booth’s plans for getting away with murdering the President was not nearly as fortunate nor as calculated; too much was left to chance. Booth was counting on one thing above all else and it in his racist-fueled, hate-filled, revenge-minded consciousness he simply did not possess the capacity to imagine that his act would be seen as anything other than a melodramatic trope: the hero rushing in to preserve the Confederacy at literally the last moment before it was extinguished forever. Failing to see that he would not be viewed as a hero, the fact that he did not even have a Plan B doomed him to a final performance with no chance to take his final bow.
The shameful death of a common criminal was not for him. It was far better to perish here.
John Wilkes Booth is a textbook case for the study of a mind absolutely deluded beyond the capacity to recognize reality yet still so fully in possession of its faculties that it could easily move about through daily life without drawing attention to his condition. Booth not only actually thought he would be hailed as a hero for the ages by murdering the President, but in his moments on earth, he still viewed himself as something special and worthy of superior treatment. The final tragedy is that Booth was not captured and forced to face the reality that far from being special, he was not even common. He was just a draft-dodging racist actor who managed to stumble not the greatest streak of luck in the history of one-time killers.
