On April 14, some seven score and sixteen years ago, John Wilkes Booth, a prominent stage actor, fired a .44 caliber pistol into the back of Abraham Lincoln’s skull. The president died early the next morning, and ever since, we’ve been convincing ourselves that Lincoln still lives—not in body, of course, but in spirit. We’ve made him our national martyr and often find within his words our national benediction.
(Don’t believe me? Look no further than the Biden inauguration. The inaugural ceremony was a nationwide call to unity couched in the rhetoric of Lincoln).
Yet of the many lessons learned from January 6, perhaps the most haunting and historically jarring is the realization that we’ve only ever gotten it half-right—that if Lincoln still lives, so does his assassin, John Wilkes Booth.
For the Capitol Insurrection was, among any number of horrible things, a specter of Booth’s America resurrected, and if we want to celebrate Lincoln, our ideal, we must also reckon with Booth, our odious and hardly suppressed id.
Born to a famous acting family from Baltimore, John Wilkes Booth began plotting to kill Lincoln in 1864. Originally, the plan was to capture, not kill, the president; the idea was to seize Lincoln while he walked through town (presidents could do that then) on a visit to the Old Soldier’s Home and use him as leverage to restart Confederate prisoner exchanges—something the Lincoln administration ceased doing, mostly because the Confederate government refused to exchange prisoners from the United States Colored Troops.
But Booth didn’t kill the president over the administration’s handling of prisoner exchanges. He killed the president because he was an extremist, a dyed-in-the-wool Confederate.
Like many sons of Maryland, the “Old Line State,” Booth sided with the South. He had no problem with slavery, hated abolitionists, and thought that Lincoln’s election in 1860 had illegitimately elevated an illegitimate and entirely sectional candidate.
Even worse in his mind was the election of 1864—a race that pioneered the use of absentee balloting so that soldiers could vote from the front. Booth saw it as a partisan power grab, and he feared Lincoln—or some Republican cabal—would use the president’s war powers as a pretense for undoing the republic.
He wasn’t alone. In his wartime travels from Washington to Baltimore and back Booth imbibed a media ecosystem that routinely villainized the president. Critics couldn’t call Lincoln a “socialist”—the term wasn’t in wide use then. But they could tar him as a tyrant, a Caesar, a Cromwell, or a Bonapartist. He was caricatured “Lincoln Africanus I” for his evolving position on emancipation, and partisan newspapers widely panned him as “King Abraham” for his use of executive action.