| Kidnapp Plot | John Surratt | George Atzerodt | |
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David Herald |
Michael O'Laughlen |
Edman Spangler |
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Lewis Paine |
Sam Arnold |
Samuel Mudd |
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| John Wilkes Booth | |||
| Born: May 10, 1838 Harford County, Maryland | |||
| Died: April 26,1865 | |||
| 26 Years Of Age | |||
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The assassin of President Lincoln was born on the small farm of his parents, both British immigrants, in Harford County, Maryland, the ninth of ten children. Wilkes Booth became an highly acclaimed actor prior to his act that would change history. After being shot through the neck by Sergeant Boston Corbett, He was taken to the porch of Richard Garrett's house near Port Royal, Virginia where he died. The strange Odyssey of his body to a final disposition began after being sewn up in a horse blanket. Taken to Belle Plain, it was hoisted upon the deck of the steamer John S. Ide and transported up the Potomac to Alexandria and then transferred to the Washington Navy Yard by a tugboat and finally placed aboard the monitor Montauk which was tied up at the Yard. The body was identified by a multitude of witnesses. An autopsy was performed aboard the Montauk. Then Secretary of War Edwin Stanton ordered Booth's body to be buried in the Old Penitentiary on the Washington Arsenal grounds.
It was taken there by boat and carried to a cell in the prison. A grave was dug and the corpse was wrapped in an army blanket and lowered into the hole then covered by a stone slab. In 1867 the body was exhumed and re buried in a pine box in a locked storeroom in a warehouse at the prison. The corpse was again positively identified in 1869 when Booth's remains were exhumed. A final inquest was held at Harvey and Marr's Funeral Parlor in Washington prior to release of the remains to the Booth family. The corpse was taken to Baltimore for burial and was once again positively identified by many people including John T. Ford, Henry Clay Ford, and members of the family. The body was buried in the family plot in Green Mount Cemetery in Baltimore on Saturday, June 26, 1869. John's individual grave is unmarked at request of the Booth family. It remains that way today. My Source: Find A Grave - Bio By Paul S. John Wilkes Booth was an American stage actor who assassinated President Abraham Lincoln at Ford's Theatre, in Washington, D.C., on April 14, 1865. Booth was a member of the prominent 19th century Booth theatrical family from Maryland and, by the 1860s, was a well known actor. He was also a Confederate sympathizer vehement in his denunciation of the Lincoln Administration and outraged by the South's defeat in the American Civil War. He strongly opposed the abolition of slavery in the United States and Lincoln's proposal to extend voting rights to recently emancipated slaves. Booth and a group of co-conspirators planned to kill Lincoln, Vice President Andrew Johnson, and Secretary of State William Seward in a bid to help the Confederacy's cause. Although Robert E. Lee's Army of Northern Virginia had surrendered four days earlier, Booth believed the war was not yet over because Confederate General Joseph E. Johnston's army was still fighting the Union Army. Of the conspirators, only Booth was completely successful in carrying out his part of the plot. Seward was wounded but recovered; Lincoln died the next morning from a single gunshot wound to the back of the head – altering the course of American history in the aftermath of the Civil War. Following the shooting, Booth fled on horseback to southern Maryland. He eventually made his way to a farm in rural northern Virginia; he was tracked down and killed by Union soldiers 12 days later. Eight others were tried and convicted, and four were hanged shortly thereafter. Over the years, various authors have suggested that Booth might have escaped his pursuers and subsequently died many years later under a pseudonym. Background and Early Life Booth's parents, the noted British Shakespearean actor Junius Brutus Booth and his mistress Mary Ann Holmes, came to the United States from England in June 1821. They purchased a 150-acre farm near Bel Air in Harford County, Maryland, where John Wilkes Booth was born in a four-room log house on May 10, 1838, the ninth of ten children. He was named after the English radical politician John Wilkes, a distant relative. Junius Brutus Booth's wife, Adelaide Delannoy Booth, was granted a divorce in 1851 on grounds of adultery, and Holmes legally wed John Wilkes Booth's father on May 10, 1851, the youth's 13th birthday. Booth's father built Tudor Hall that year on the Harford County property as the family's summer home, while also maintaining a winter residence on Exeter Street in Baltimore in the 1840s–1850s. As a boy, John Wilkes Booth was athletic and popular, becoming skilled at horsemanship and fencing. A sometimes indifferent student, he attended the Bel Air Academy, where the headmaster described him as "not deficient in intelligence, but disinclined to take advantage of the educational opportunities offered him". Each day he rode back and forth from farm to school, taking more interest in what happened along the way than in reaching his classes on time". In 1850–1851, he attended the Quaker-run Milton Boarding School for Boys located in Sparks, Maryland, and later St. Timothy's Hall, an Episcopal military academy in Catonsville, Maryland, beginning when he was 13 years old. At the Milton school, students recited such classical works as those by Herodotus, Cicero, and Tacitus. Students at St. Timothy's wore military uniforms and were subject to a regimen of daily formation drills and strict discipline. Booth left school at 14, after his father's death. While attending the Milton Boarding School, Booth met a Gypsy fortune-teller who read his palm and pronounced a grim destiny, telling Booth that he would have a grand but short life, doomed to die young and "meeting a bad end". His sister recalled that Booth wrote down the palm-reader's prediction and showed it to his family and others, often discussing its portents in moments of melancholy in later years. As recounted by Booth's sister, Asia Booth Clarke, in her memoirs written in 1874, no one church was preeminent in the Booth household. Booth's mother was Episcopalian and his father was described as a free spirit, preferring a Sunday walk along the Baltimore waterfront with his children to attending church. On January 23, 1853, the 14-year-old Booth was finally baptized at St. Timothy's Protestant Episcopal Church. By the age of 16, Booth was interested in the theatre and in politics, becoming a delegate from Bel Air to a rally by the Know Nothing Party for Henry Winter Davis, the anti-immigrant party's candidate for Congress in the 1854 elections. Aspiring to follow in the footsteps of his father and his actor brothers, Edwin and Junius Brutus, Jr., Booth began practicing elocution daily in the woods around Tudor Hall and studying Shakespeare. 1860's When the Civil War began on April 12, 1861, Booth was starring in Albany, New York. His outspoken admiration for the South's secession, publicly calling it "heroic", so enraged local citizens that they demanded his banning from the stage for making "treasonable statements". When family friend John T. Ford opened 1,500-seat Ford's Theatre on November 9 in Washington, D.C., Booth was one of the first leading men to appear there, playing in Charles Selby's The Marble Heart. In this play, Booth portrayed a Greek sculptor in costume, making marble statues come to life.[50] Lincoln watched the play from his box. At one point during the performance, Booth was said to have shaken his finger in Lincoln's direction as he delivered a line of dialogue. Lincoln's sister-in-law, sitting with him in the same presidential box where he would later be slain, turned to him and said, "Mr. Lincoln, he looks as if he meant that for you." The President replied, "He does look pretty sharp at me, doesn't he?"[51] On another occasion when Lincoln's son Tad saw Booth perform, he said the actor thrilled him, prompting Booth to give the President's youngest son a rose. Booth ignored an invitation to visit Lincoln between acts, however. Civil War years Lincoln was elected president on November 6, 1860, and the following month Booth drafted a long speech, apparently undelivered, that decried Northern abolitionism and made clear his strong support of the South and the institution of slavery. On April 12, 1861, the Civil War began, and eventually 11 Southern states seceded from the Union. In Booth's native Maryland, the slaveholding portion of the population favored joining the Confederate States of America. Because the threatened secession of Maryland would leave the Federal capital of Washington, D.C., an indefensible enclave within the Confederacy, Lincoln suspended the writ of habeas corpus and imposed martial law in Baltimore and portions of the state, ordering the imprisonment of pro-secession Maryland political leaders at Ft. McHenry and the stationing of Federal troops in Baltimore. Although Maryland remained in the Union, newspaper editorials and many Marylanders, including Booth, agreed with Supreme Court Chief Justice Roger B. Taney's decision in Ex parte Merryman that Lincoln's actions were unconstitutional. Although Booth was pro-Confederate, his family, like many Marylanders, was divided. He was outspoken in his love of the South, and equally outspoken in his hatred of Lincoln. As the Civil War went on, Booth increasingly quarreled with his brother Edwin, who declined to make stage appearances in the South and refused to listen to John Wilkes' fiercely partisan denunciations of the North and Lincoln. In early 1863, Booth was arrested in St. Louis while on a theatre tour, when he was heard saying he "wished the President and the whole damned government would go to hell". Charged with making "treasonous" remarks against the government, he was released when he took an oath of allegiance to the Union and paid a substantial fine. In February 1865, Booth became infatuated with Lucy Hale, the daughter of U.S. Senator John P. Hale of New Hampshire, and they became secretly engaged when Booth received his mother's blessing for their marriage plans. "You have so often been dead in love," his mother counseled Booth in a letter, "be well assured she is really and truly devoted to you." Booth composed a handwritten Valentine card for his fiancée on February 13, expressing his "adoration". She was unaware of Booth's deep antipathy towards President Lincoln. 
Lucy Hale, Booth's fiancée in 1865 My Source: Wikipedia | |||