John Wilkes Booth

The farm outside Bel Air, Maryland, held 150 acres, a four-room log house and ten children, of whom he was the ninth and not one of whom was legitimate. Their father was the great and erratic Shakespearean Junius Brutus Booth, who had a wife in England and a household in Maryland, and who married the household only on May 10, 1851, which happened to be this son's 13th birthday. The boy rode well, fenced well and studied badly, and left school at 14 when his father died. He was political early: at 16 he served as a delegate to a Know Nothing rally. He made his stage debut in Baltimore at 17, and the audience jeered him for losing his lines.

He got better fast, and by the end of the 1850s he was earning 20,000 dollars a year on a face and a physique rather than the study his brother Edwin put in. He played the South and the South took to him. In 1864 he assembled men around a plan to seize Lincoln on the road to the Soldiers' Home and trade him for Confederate prisoners, and it never came off. On April 11, 1865, standing in the crowd outside the White House, he heard Lincoln say he favored the vote for some Black men, and changed the plan to murder. Three nights later he walked up to the state box at Ford's Theatre, where the staff knew him and nobody stopped him, and shot the president in the back of the head with a single-shot derringer.

He expected to be thanked. In the pine thickets of southern Maryland he read borrowed newspapers instead, and filled a datebook with justification, writing that the country owed all her troubles to Lincoln and God had made him the instrument of the punishment. The broken leg has never been resolved. Witnesses said his spur caught a flag on the box and he came down badly on the stage, while Booth told Dr. Samuel Mudd, who splinted it before dawn, that his horse had fallen on him. On April 26 soldiers cornered him in a Virginia tobacco barn and fired it, and Sergeant Boston Corbett shot him through the neck against orders. The bullet took three vertebrae and part of the cord. He asked to have his hands held where he could see them, said useless, useless, and died at dawn.

Three of those vertebrae are still in a Maryland museum, which refused the family's request to take DNA from them in 2013. The rest went into an unmarked plot at Green Mount Cemetery in Baltimore in 1869, after his brother Edwin wrote to Andrew Johnson until the body was released. Edwin had once caught a young man by the collar and pulled him back from the gap between a moving train and a Jersey City platform. The young man was Robert Todd Lincoln, who put it in writing in 1909. And one night in November 1864 the three Booth brothers acted together, once, in Julius Caesar, to raise money for a statue of Shakespeare. It stands in Central Park.

John Wilkes Booth's life against the full span of the corpus.

• Earl of Richmond in Richard III other
  His debut at 17. He dropped lines and the house jeered. 1855
• Fuller Farm Oil company
  A Pennsylvania drilling venture he quit in November 1864 at a loss of his 6,000 dollar stake 1864
• Mark Antony in Julius Caesar other
  The only night he acted with both brothers. The proceeds bought Central Park its Shakespeare. 1864
• Duke Pescara in The Apostate other
  His last performance, at Ford's Theatre on March 18, 1865 1865

• May 10, 1851 aged 13 His parents finally marry, on his 13th birthday His father's first wife had obtained a divorce on grounds of adultery.
• August 14, 1855 aged 17 Debuts on the Baltimore stage at 17
• December 2, 1859 aged 21 Watches John Brown hang, in a borrowed militia uniform He put on the coat of the Richmond Grays to get close to the scaffold, and afterward said he was satisfied.
• November 25, 1864 aged 26 Plays Mark Antony opposite Edwin's Brutus at the Winter Garden The only performance the three Booth brothers ever gave together.
• March 4, 1865 aged 26 Attends Lincoln's second inauguration as the guest of his fiancee Lucy Lambert Hale, daughter of a United States senator, knew nothing of his politics.
• April 11, 1865 aged 26 Hears Lincoln endorse the vote for some Black men, and decides on murder
• April 14, 1865 aged 26 Shoots Lincoln in the state box at Ford's Theatre A .41 caliber derringer, one shot, at about a quarter past ten.
• April 26, 1865 aged 26 Shot by Sergeant Boston Corbett in a burning tobacco barn in Virginia He was paralyzed by the wound and died about three hours later.
• 1869 aged ~31 The body is released to the family and buried unmarked in Baltimore Edwin Booth had written repeatedly to President Andrew Johnson to get it.

• Abraham Lincoln 1809–1865
  16th President who preserved the Union during the Civil War and issued the Emancipation Proclamation. assassinated
• John Brown 1800–1859
  Militant abolitionist whose raid on Harpers Ferry sharpened sectional conflict preceding the Civil War. watched him hang
• Andrew Johnson 1808–1875
  17th president whose obstruction of Reconstruction weakened protections for formerly enslaved people and led to impeachment. marked in the plot
• Ulysses S. Grant 1822–1885
  18th President and Union Army general whose leadership was decisive in winning the Civil War. declined the theater invitation that night
• Frederick Douglass 1818–1895
  Former slave who became a leading abolitionist, orator, and advocate for equal rights. argued for what Booth killed to stop