John Wilkes Booth (10 May 1838-26 April 1865) was an American actor and Confederate sympathizer who assassinated President Abraham Lincoln at Ford's Theatre on 14 April 1865 before being tracked down and killed 12 days later.
Biography[]
John Wilkes Booth was born in Bel Air, Maryland on 10 May 1838, the son of English immigrant parents. His father Junius Brutus Booth was an actor, his mother was Booth's mistress, and his brother Edwin (a Unionist) was a renowned actor. John became involved in politics by the age of 16 and became a Bel Air delegate to a Know Nothings congressional campaign rally in 1854, and he made his stage debut a year later. He continued his political involvement as a member of a pro-slavery militia which attended John Brown's hanging. After 1860, he became a leading Shakespearean actor in Richmond, playing Horatio in Hamlet while his brother Edwin played the title role. Of all of his theater roles, his favorite was Marcus Junius Brutus, whom he saw as a hero for slaying the tyrant Julius Caesar. During the American Civil War, despite his open Confederate sympathies, he continued to act in plays in the border states. After the opening of Booth's Theatre in Washington DC on 9 November 1863, Booth became one of the leading actors there. During a performance attended by President Abraham Lincoln, Booth shook his finger in Lincoln's direction as he gave a line of dialogue, which Lincoln's sister-in-law pointed out to him; Lincoln also noticed that Booth looked sharply at him. Although Tad Lincoln delivered flowers to Booth to honor his performance, Booth refused to visit Lincoln. In 1864, Booth took part in a cancelled kidnapping plot against Lincoln, but he finally found his chance to assassinate Lincoln during another play at Ford's Theatre on 26 April 1865, again taking part in a conspiracy. He slipped into Lincoln's private box at 10:00 PM during a performance of Our American Cousin and shot him in the back of the head with a Derringer pistol, and he stabbed Major Henry Rathbone before jumping down onto the stage (injuring his leg when his spur latched onto a flag on the stage) and shouting Sic semper tyrannis! ("Thus always to tyrants"), a reference to Brutus' assassination of Caesar and to Virginia's state motto. He then fled into southern Maryland, and he was tracked down to Port Royal, Virginia on 26 April and shot dead by a Union soldier after the barn in which he was hiding was set ablaze.