Old times there are not forgotten

John Wilkes Booth, the South's romantic villain, refused to accept the triumph of Northern values. Some things never change.

By David Talbot

Nov 19, 2004 | In the bitter aftermath of the latest red vs. blue presidential election, secession is in the air again. Liberal and conservative commentators alike compare the current great divide to the War Between the States -- only this time it's the emancipation of a sexual minority instead of racial minority that is fanning the flames, among other cultural conflicts. And it's not just Southern conservatives who are openly discussing splitting the Union. It's increasingly resentful blue-state liberals, who complain they are shackled to reactionary Southern cousins who delight in reviling big government while soaking up more than their share of public largesse.

So in the midst of these cannon blasts of fiery rhetoric, it comes as something of a relief to read "American Brutus," the illuminating new history book about John Wilkes Booth and the plot to kill Abraham Lincoln. If you think our house is divided now, check out America 140 years ago.

"American Brutus" was written by political historian Michael W. Kauffman, who has studied the Lincoln assassination for more than 30 years. Kauffman is one of those ardent independent historians who seem especially drawn to sagas like the Civil War and who enliven the field with their energetic, outside-the-walls-of-academe endeavors. To research the book, Kauffman writes, "I've walked the same roads and alleys that Booth took; rowed the same waters on the Potomac, jumped to the stage of Ford's Theatre; and spent more than four hundred nights in the Booth family home. I've even burned down a tobacco barn like the one in which Booth was trapped."

"American Brutus" offers a vivid, chronological account of this epic political conspiracy -- a carefully plotted assassination that was literally staged by one of the most adored leading men of his day. (Think Johnny Depp for the title role in the movie version of the jaw-dropping Booth epic that still begs to be made.) Coming nearly a century and a half before Osama's videos, the assassination was the first act of political terror as public spectacle in American history. When Booth shot Lincoln in the balcony of Ford's Theatre, hissed "Sic semper tyrannis" and jumped to the stage, he was reenacting a scene from "Julius Caesar" that he had been playing since his boyhood as the son of the great Shakespearean actor Junius Brutus Booth, who himself was named after Caesar's slayer. His beloved sister Asia had warned John when they were young "that no actor should meddle with political affairs, the stage and politics did not go hand in hand." But Booth would make history -- his lifelong dream -- by mixing the two.

One of the main contributions of "American Brutus" is its eye-opening portrayal of a country so savagely at odds with itself that political assassination -- which late in the Civil War was still so alien a concept that Secretary of State William Seward flatly declared it was "not an American practice or habit ... and cannot be engrafted into our political system" -- suddenly became a widely discussed option. Throughout the war, as Seward pointed out, Lincoln had ridden unguarded from the White House to his country retreat, the Soldiers' Home, three miles outside Washington. Even the White House itself was barely guarded and visitors wandered unimpeded through the Lincoln family's private quarters, helping themselves to the furnishings, much to the president's annoyance.

Next Page: Even Northern Democrats began to rail against the president, warning him he could suffer the same fate as Julius Caesar

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