Confederate "Heritage" Month 2010, April 20: John Wilkes Booth's racism

John Wilkes Booth (1838-1865), actor, assassin and white supremacist

David Talbot reviewed the biography of Abraham Lincoln's assassin, the actor John Wilkes Booth, American Brutus: John Wilkes Booth and the Lincoln Conspiracies (2004) by Michael Kauffman, in Old times there are not forgotten Salon 11/19/2004. Wilkes was a passionate Confederate sympathizer who infamously shot President Lincoln in the head in Ford's Theater on April 11, 1865. As Talbot characterizes it, Lincoln's assassination "was the first act of political terror as public spectacle in American history."

Talbot's review draws some forced and not very perceptive comparisons to the sectionalism of the Civil War and that of American politics in 2004. But he also gives this description of Booth's outlook that shows what a prominent role white racism played in his decision to kill Lincoln:

According to Kauffman, Booth found the resolve he needed to carry out his monumental deed on the evening of April 11, as a crowd gathered underneath a window in the north portico of the White House to hear President Lincoln speak on the recent surrender of Gen. Robert E. Lee to Gen. Ulysses S. Grant. Among those at the front of the crowd were Booth and his co-conspirator Dave Herold. When Lincoln told the crowd that he favored giving voting rights to those "colored" men who were "very intelligent" and who had served in the Union Army, that was all Booth needed to hear. "That means nigger citizenship. Now, by God, I'll put him through," spat Booth, as he spun on his heels and pushed his way out of the throng.

Much of Booth's anti-Lincoln zeal derived from his code of Southern white supremacy. He believed that slavery was not a sin, but a boon for black Americans, who were much better off living on a Southern plantation than in Africa. "I have been through the whole South," he declared, "and have marked the happiness of master and of man." According his sister Asia's memoir, young Booth liked to spread happiness on his family farm in Maryland by throwing candies from his saddlebag onto the ground and watching "the Nigs" scramble to pick them up. "After it Nigs! Don't let the dogs get it!" Booth would yell to the family servants. "The never-forgotten bag of candies was longingly looked for by the blacks, young and old, whenever 'Mars Johnnie' came from town or village," Asia lovingly recalled. Booth's idyllic society -- where whites and blacks, the well-bred and the common, all knew their place -- was threatened by Lincoln, a man Booth, steeped in Southern chivalry, reviled as a coarse demagogue. A reporter once told Booth that the president, who was an avid theatergoer, had "rapturously" applauded one of his performances; he'd rather have the applause of a black, snapped the actor. [my emphasis]

Tags: confederate heritage month 2010, slavery, us south