Civil War History

Who was the man who assassinated President Abraham Lincoln? Since 1865, Americans have grappled with the question. After Boston Corbett's fatal shot into a burning Virginia tobacco barn deprived the country of a chance to hear from John Wilkes Booth himself, historians have grappled with the legacy of this twenty-six-year-old whose one shot did what four years of Confederate military efforts did not: end Lincoln's presidency.

While US Army soldiers only needed twelve days to track down the physical Booth, Terry Alford spent three decades hunting the self-described Brutus's elusive character, culminating in Fortune's Fool, published in time for the Lincoln assassination's sesquicentennial. As Alford discusses, Booth, one of nine children of the renowned British-American actor Junius Brutus Booth and his second wife, Mary Ann, communicated best orally rather than in writing. Alford's diligent effort to track down this man of few written words shines through in Fortune's Fool.

After a chapter discussing Booth's childhood in Maryland as the son of a famous but financially and behaviorally erratic father, Alford presents Booth's life in two vividly written parts. Chapters 2 through 5 focus on Booth's acting career, which took him as far south as Alabama and New Orleans, as far west as St. Louis, and as far north as Portland, Maine. Between 1857 and 1864, the profession brought Booth resounding success. During this time, his politics also became clear. In 1859, while acting in Richmond, he volunteered to accompany a militia company to guard John Brown's execution, an incident Alford examines in ample detail and to which he frequently alludes, showing the impact of Brown's fanatical action—albeit for the opposite cause in which Booth believed—on Booth's own thinking.

Chapter 6, "Life's Fitful Fever," provides a transition. Alford assesses Booth's personality as best he can based on extant sources and analyzes his acting career. The second half focuses on a much shorter but, arguably, more significant (would we remember Booth if he had remained solely an actor?) part of Booth's life: His kidnapping-turned-murder plot against Lincoln. By this time, Booth had largely withdrawn from professional acting. Although oil investments, contrary to what Booth tried to portray (and subsequent historians, Alford argues, have fallen for), did not pan out, Booth increasingly turned his attention to mimicking Brown in taking extraordinary action—while refusing to break his promise to his mother not to engage in military service—to aid the faltering Confederate cause.

Throughout the book, Alford engages head-on with the many legends that have circulated about Booth since 1865, discussing the myths and their origins while presenting, as best he can, more credible versions. He is also transparent about [End Page 400] where sources do not exist or where they contradict each other, and couches his judgments accordingly. Throughout the book, he focuses on how Booth developed his ideas about perceived tyranny and preservation of racial inequality—two interrelated threads that would bring the man to grow more fanatical in his hatred of Lincoln and seek to imitate Brown. He gives proper focus to Lincoln's April 11, 1865, speech—in which he supported limited voting rights for African Americans—as Booth's final tipping point.

Alford is careful to contextualize Booth properly, ultimately showing that he was no more fanatical for his cause than many others—indeed, he cites other plots to murder or even kill the president. As much as later generations have made him out to be, Booth was not an outlier in that sense; this biography gives a glimpse into these wider currents without sacrificing the focus on its subject. Where Alford rightly suggests Booth is exceptional, and ultimately important, is simply that no one else succeeded in actually killing Lincoln.

Even after 340 pages, Booth's character is still hard to know. Alford gives us as...