Author evaluates motives behind Lincoln's assassination

It is a forgotten line from "Our American Cousin," a forgotten play. But when John Wilkes Booth heard the phrase "you sockdologizing old mantrap," which caused the audience at Ford's Theatre to explode into laughter, it was his cue. He squeezed the trigger of his .44-caliber single-shot Deringer pistol, and the fortunes of the United States were irrevocably changed.

On April 14, 1865, after Booth assassinated President Abraham Lincoln and stabbed Maj. Henry Rathbone, he leapt from the presidential box to the stage, breaking his leg. But before he exited, Booth took time to shout the infamous line Sic semper tyrannis -- thus always to tryants -- to the shocked audience that had been buoyed by the surrender of Robert E. Lee and the Army of Northern Virginia at Appomattox five days earlier. Then Booth added, "The South is avenged."

Booth fled the theater and disappeared for 12 days, despite thousands of men trying to capture him. According to James L. Swanson, author of "Manhunt: The 12-Day Chase for Lincoln's Killer," Booth's actions were more than just a hideous act. Booth, one of the most popular actors of his day, had carefully plotted his assassination, from the time he entered the theater to the precise moment in the play when he fired his gun.

"He actually wanted to read newspaper reviews of his act, as though the critics would rate him with a fine performance or a 'well done,' " says Swanson, a legal scholar at the Heritage Foundation in Washington, D.C. "And yet, the fact that the papers condemned him shows how deluded he was to believe that newspapers would praise what he had done."

The assassination of Lincoln threw the nation into a period of mourning that was, up to then, unprecedented. But while the dark cloud cast by the president's premature death was carried in newspapers across the country and around the world, few living then were aware of the true story of Booth's flight from Washington, D.C., into rural areas of Maryland and Virginia.

"Much of the manhunt was secret for several generations after the Civil War," Swanson says. "No one knew where Booth had spent that lost week with Thomas Jones in the pine thicket (in rural Maryland), and no one knew all the stories that Asia Booth Clarke had recorded in her secret book."

Jones, a Confederate agent and boatmen, hid Booth and his partner, Davey Herold, near his farm. His story was not told until he gave an interview 18 years after the assassination. Clarke, Booth's sister, wrote a memoir that wasn't published until 1938.

"She had wonderful stories about their childhood, and there is no other source for those stories," Swanson says. "And secondly, she was solely responsible for helping to create the myth of her brother; perpetuating the myth that he was a Southern patriot, that his fate and Lincoln's fate were intertwined, and that somehow, together, they brought a close to the war, sealing it with some kind of coda and somehow, in a twisted way, reconciling North and South."

Swanson does not buy into this mythologizing. In "Manhunt" he describes Booth as a rakish sort who was one of the top five actors of his era.

"He had incredible charisma," Swanson says. "Men and women would stop in their tracks when they saw him on the street."

Despite being the Civil War equivalent of a Johnny Depp or a Matthew McConaughey, the fame Booth derived from acting was not enough. He was an ardent supporter of slavery and thought the South should have been left alone. Booth hated Lincoln and what he stood for, and was distraught by the destruction the war wreaked on the South. Before Lee surrendered, Booth had planned to kidnap Lincoln, hoping he could be exchanged for Confederate prisoners or even end the conflict.

But when Lee surrendered, Booth's thoughts turned to vengeance and dreams of glory that were expressed in a diary he kept that was recovered after his death.

"He thought he was destined for great things," Swanson says. "He compared himself to William Tell, to Brutus and to others. I don't think any one motive explains why Booth killed Lincoln, but I think a combination of personal glory, his hatred of Lincoln, his love of the South and the desire to help the South, his racism, his support of slavery -- all these things combined compelled Booth to act."

Often forgotten is that Booth's assassination of Lincoln was part of a three-pronged attack. In addition to Lincoln, Booth and his co-conspirators planned to kill Vice President Andrew Johnson and Secretary of State William Henry Seward, but those plots failed, although Lewis Powell did inflict knife wounds on Seward and assaulted Seward's son, Frederick.

After 12 days, Booth and Herold were found on a farm in rural Virginia. Herold surrendered, but Booth refused to give up. He was greatly outnumbered by 26 U.S. cavalrymen and a couple of detectives, but they failed to charge the barn in which Booth was hiding, a decision that exasperates Swanson. Instead, they set fire to the barn, and a sergeant, Boston Corbett, shot Booth instead of trying to take him alive.

Equally perplexing to Swanson is how Booth is remembered. At the Abraham Lincoln Museum in Springfield, Ill., among the displays devoted to the life of the 16th president, a life-sized wax replica of Booth stands near similar renderings of generals Ulysses S. Grant and William Tecumseh Sherman. The museum's gift shop sells toy replicas of the Deringer that Booth used to kill Lincoln.

"I find that scandalous, and even outrageous," Swanson says. "Would you have a life-sized wax mannequin of Lee Harvey Oswald in the John F. Kennedy Library• I don't think so. Would you have a James Earl Ray wax figure at the King Center in Atlanta or at the Lorraine Motel (where the Rev. Martin Luther King was killed ) in Memphis• The fact that we have street banners luring tourists to Ford's Theatre, the fact that the Lincoln museum has a wax figure of Booth standing near Lincoln's family, demonstrates how the memory of Booth has somehow morphed over time."

Capsule Review

The bare-bones story of the assassination of Abraham Lincoln by John Wilkes Booth is part of the curriculum of every American history class. But many of the details of the heinous act are less known. James L. Swanson's "Manhunt; The 12-Day Chase for Lincoln's Killer" fills in forgotten and lesser known aspects of the assassination, including simultaneous plots to kill secretary of state Henry Seward and vice president Andrew Johnson. The strength of the book is Swanson's ability to recreate the troubled flight of Booth with co-conspirator Davey Herold through Maryland and Virginia. Their interactions with sympathizers and those who would hold them at arm's length are vividly rendered and will have readers on edge, although the ultimate outcome is known. Additional Information:

Details

'Manhunt: The 12-Day Chase for Lincoln's Killer'

Author: James L. Swanson

Publisher: Morrow, $26.95, 448 pages