79 Facts About John Wilkes Booth

John Wilkes Booth was an American stage actor who assassinated United States President Abraham Lincoln at Ford's Theatre in Washington, DC, on April 14,1865.

John Wilkes Booth shot President Lincoln once in the back of the head.

John Wilkes Booth fled on horseback to Southern Maryland; twelve days later, at a farm in rural Northern Virginia, he was tracked down sheltered in a barn.

John Wilkes Booth's parents were noted British Shakespearean actor Junius Brutus John Wilkes Booth and his mistress, Mary Ann Holmes, who moved to the United States from England in June 1821.

John Wilkes Booth was named after English radical politician John Wilkes, a distant relative.

John Wilkes Booth's father built Tudor Hall on the Harford County property as the family's summer home in 1851, while maintaining a winter residence on Exeter Street in Baltimore.

The John Wilkes Booth family was listed as living in Baltimore in the 1850 census.

John Wilkes Booth's sister recalled that he wrote down the palm-reader's prediction, showed it to his family and others, and often discussed its portents in moments of melancholy.

John Wilkes Booth aspired to follow in the footsteps of his father and his actor brothers Edwin and Junius Brutus Jr.

John Wilkes Booth began practicing elocution daily in the woods around Tudor Hall and studying Shakespeare.

John Wilkes Booth made his stage debut at age 17 on August 14,1855, in the supporting role of the Earl of Richmond in Richard III at Baltimore's Charles Street Theatre.

John Wilkes Booth began acting at Baltimore's Holliday Street Theater, owned by John T Ford, where the Booths had performed frequently.

Later that year, John Wilkes Booth played the part of Mohegan Indian Chief Uncas in a play staged in Petersburg, Virginia, and then became a stock company actor at the Richmond Theatre in Virginia, where he became increasingly popular with audiences for his energetic performances.

John Wilkes Booth said that, of all Shakespearean characters, his favorite role was Brutus, the slayer of a tyrant.

John Wilkes Booth was an excellent swordsman, although a fellow actor once recalled that Booth occasionally cut himself with his own sword.

John Wilkes Booth engaged Philadelphia attorney Matthew Canning to serve as his agent.

John Wilkes Booth was billed as "The Pride of the American People, A Star of the First Magnitude," and the critics were equally enthusiastic.

The National Republican drama critic said that John Wilkes Booth "took the hearts of the audience by storm" and termed his performance "a complete triumph".

Between September and November 1863, John Wilkes Booth played a hectic schedule in the northeastern United States, appearing in Boston, Providence, Rhode Island, and Hartford, Connecticut.

At one point during the performance, John Wilkes Booth was said to have shaken his finger in Lincoln's direction as he delivered a line of dialogue.

John Wilkes Booth said that the actor thrilled him, prompting Booth to give Tad a rose.

On November 25,1864, John Wilkes Booth performed for the only time with his brothers Edwin and Junius in a single engagement production of Julius Caesar at the Winter Garden Theatre in New York.

John Wilkes Booth made the final appearance of his acting career at Ford's on March 18,1865, when he again played Duke Pescara in The Apostate.

John Wilkes Booth invested some of his growing wealth in various enterprises during the early 1860s, including land speculation in Boston's Back Bay section.

John Wilkes Booth started a business partnership with John A Ellsler, manager of the Cleveland Academy of Music, and with Thomas Mears to develop oil wells in northwestern Pennsylvania, where an oil boom had started in August 1859, following Edwin Drake's discovery of oil there, initially calling their venture Dramatic Oil but later renaming it Fuller Farm Oil.

John Wilkes Booth was already growing more obsessed with the South's worsening situation in the Civil War and angered at Lincoln's re-election.

John Wilkes Booth withdrew from the oil business on November 27,1864, with a substantial loss of his $6,000 investment.

John Wilkes Booth was strongly opposed to the abolitionists who sought to end slavery in the United States.

John Wilkes Booth attended the hanging of abolitionist leader John Brown on December 2,1859, who was executed for treason, murder, and inciting a slave insurrection, charges resulting from his raid on the Federal armory at Harpers Ferry, Virginia.

John Wilkes Booth had been rehearsing at the Richmond Theatre when he read in a newspaper about Brown's upcoming execution.

When Brown was hanged without incident, John Wilkes Booth stood near the scaffold and afterwards expressed great satisfaction with Brown's fate, although he admired the condemned man's bravery in facing death stoically.

Lincoln was elected president on November 6,1860, and the following month John Wilkes Booth drafted a long speech, apparently never delivered, that decried Northern abolitionism and made clear his strong support of the South and the institution of slavery.

John Wilkes Booth was pro-Confederate, but his family was divided, like many Marylanders.

John Wilkes Booth was outspoken in his love of the South, and equally outspoken in his hatred of Lincoln.

John Wilkes Booth is alleged to have been a member of the Knights of the Golden Circle, a secret society whose initial objective was to acquire territories as slave states.

John Wilkes Booth was unaware of Booth's deep antipathy towards Lincoln.

Once in Confederate hands, Lincoln would be exchanged for Confederate Army prisoners of war held in Northern prisons and, John Wilkes Booth reasoned, bring the war to an end by emboldening opposition to the war in the North or forcing Union recognition of the Confederate government.

John Wilkes Booth recruited his friends Samuel Arnold and Michael O'Laughlen as accomplices.

John Wilkes Booth met with several well-known Confederate sympathizers at The Parker House in Boston.

John Wilkes Booth spent ten days in the city, staying for a time at St Lawrence Hall, a rendezvous for the Confederate Secret Service, and meeting several Confederate agents there.

John Wilkes Booth, meanwhile, devoted increased energy and money to his kidnapping plot.

John Wilkes Booth assembled a loose-knit band of Confederate sympathizers, including David Herold, George Atzerodt, Lewis Powell, and rebel agent John Surratt.

John Wilkes Booth railed against Lincoln in conversations with his sister Asia.

John Wilkes Booth is made the tool of the North, to crush out slavery.

John Wilkes Booth assembled his team on a stretch of road near the Soldier's Home in hope of kidnapping Lincoln en route to the hospital, but the President did not appear.

John Wilkes Booth told Louis J Weichmann, a friend of John Surratt and a boarder at Mary Surratt's house, that he was done with the stage and that the only play he wanted to present henceforth was Venice Preserv'd.

The previous day, John Wilkes Booth was in the crowd outside the White House when Lincoln gave an impromptu speech from his window.

John Wilkes Booth immediately set about making plans for the assassination, which included making arrangements with livery stable owner James W Pumphrey for a getaway horse and an escape route.

Later that night, at 8:45 pm, John Wilkes Booth informed Powell, Herold, and Atzerodt of his intention to kill Lincoln.

John Wilkes Booth assigned Powell to assassinate Secretary of State William H Seward and Atzerodt to do so to Vice President Andrew Johnson.

Historian Michael W Kauffman wrote that, by targeting Lincoln and his two immediate successors to the presidency, Booth seems to have intended to decapitate the Union government and throw it into a state of panic and confusion.

John Wilkes Booth had hoped that the assassinations would create sufficient chaos within the Union that the Confederate government could reorganize and continue the war if one Confederate army remained in the field or, that failing, would avenge the South's defeat.

Many believe that John Wilkes Booth had bored a spyhole into the door of the presidential box earlier that day, so that he could observe the box's occupants and verify that the President had made it to the play.

John Wilkes Booth's escape was almost thwarted by Major Henry Rathbone, who was in the presidential box with Mary Todd Lincoln.

John Wilkes Booth stabbed Rathbone when the startled officer lunged at him.

John Wilkes Booth then jumped from the President's box to the stage, where he raised his knife and shouted "Sic semper tyrannis".

Kauffman contends that John Wilkes Booth was injured later that night during his flight to escape when his horse tripped and fell on him, calling John Wilkes Booth's claim to the contrary an exaggeration to portray his own actions as heroic.

John Wilkes Booth was the only one of the assassins to succeed.

John Wilkes Booth fled Ford's Theatre by a stage door to the alley, where his getaway horse was held for him by Joseph "Peanuts" Burroughs.

John Wilkes Booth had left the horse with Edmund Spangler and Spangler arranged for Burroughs to hold it.

John Wilkes Booth rode into southern Maryland, accompanied by David Herold, having planned his escape route to take advantage of the sparsely settled area's lack of telegraphs and railroads, along with its predominantly Confederate sympathies.

John Wilkes Booth thought that the area's dense forests and the swampy terrain of Zekiah Swamp made it ideal for an escape route into rural Virginia.

Mudd later said that John Wilkes Booth told him the injury occurred when his horse fell.

Elsewhere in the South, Lincoln was hated in death as in life, and John Wilkes Booth was viewed as a hero as many rejoiced at news of his deed.

John Wilkes Booth continued hiding in the Maryland woods, waiting for an opportunity to cross the Potomac River into Virginia.

John Wilkes Booth read the accounts of national mourning reported in the newspapers brought to him by Jones each day.

John Wilkes Booth was surprised to find little public sympathy for his action, especially from those anti-Lincoln newspapers that had previously excoriated the President in life.

The Garretts were unaware of Lincoln's assassination; Booth was introduced to them as "James W Boyd", a Confederate soldier, they were told, who had been wounded in the battle of Petersburg and was returning home.

John Wilkes Booth, said Garrett, displayed no reaction other than to ask if the family would turn in the fugitive should they have the opportunity.

The next day, John Wilkes Booth told the Garretts that he intended to reach Mexico, drawing a route on a map of theirs.

Nobody knows exactly what John Wilkes Booth said to the Garretts, or they to him.

John Wilkes Booth, fatally wounded in the neck, was dragged from the barn to the porch of Garrett's farmhouse, where he died three hours later, aged 26.

John Wilkes Booth's letter was seized by Federal troops, along with other family papers at Asia's house, and published by The New York Times while the manhunt was still underway.

John Wilkes Booth's body was shrouded in a blanket and tied to the side of an old farm wagon for the trip back to Belle Plain.

In 1907, Finis L Bates wrote Escape and Suicide of John Wilkes Booth, contending that a Booth look-alike was mistakenly killed at the Garrett farm while Booth eluded his pursuers.

The Lincoln Conspiracy contended that there was a government plot to conceal John Wilkes Booth's escape, reviving interest in the story and prompting the display of St Helen's mummified body in Chicago that year.

The 1998 book The Curse of Cain: The Untold Story of John Wilkes Booth contended that Booth had escaped, sought refuge in Japan, and eventually returned to the United States.

In December 2010, descendants of Edwin Booth reported that they obtained permission to exhume the Shakespearean actor's body to obtain DNA samples to compare with a sample of his brother John's DNA to refute the rumor that John had escaped after the assassination.

Bree Harvey, a spokesman from the Mount Auburn Cemetery in Cambridge, Massachusetts, where Edwin John Wilkes Booth is buried, denied reports that the family had contacted them and requested to exhume Edwin's body.