John Wilkes Booth

American Brutus

It is a tale as familiar as our history primers: A deranged actor, John Wilkes Booth, killed Abraham Lincoln in Ford's Theatre, escaped on foot, and eluded capture for twelve days until he met his fiery end in a Virginia tobacco barn. In the national hysteria that followed, eight others were arrested and tried; four of those were executed, four imprisoned. Therein lie all the classic elements of a great thriller. But the untold tale is even more fascinating.

John Wilkes Booth

Booth was born in 1838, on a farm near Bel Air, Harford County, Maryland. In 1859, Booth happened to be preparing for a theatrical engagement in Richmond, Virginia, a few weeks before the scheduled execution of the famous abolitionist John Brown. Upon hearing of the verdict, John Wilkes Booth headed to Charles Town, bought a Richmond Gray militia uniform from state officers, and stood guard along the gallows as John Brown was hanged.
By 1864, the tide of the war had shifted in the North's favor. John Wilkes Booth began devising a plan to kidnap Abraham Lincoln from his summer residence at The Soldiers' Home outside of Washington. Booth began to devote more and more of his energies and finance to his plot to kidnap Lincoln after his reelection in early November, 1864.
On the morning of Good Friday, April 14, 1865, John Wilkes Booth heard that the President and Mrs. Lincoln, along with General Ulysses S. Grant and his wife, would be attending the play Our American Cousin at Ford's Theater. As a famous and popular actor, Booth was a friend of the owner of the Theater, and thus had free access to all parts of the Ford's theater. John Wilkes Booth stole into Abraham Lincoln's box and shot him in the back of the head with a .44 caliber Deringer.

Abraham Lincoln murder conspiracy

Now, in American Brutus, Michael W. Kauffman, one of the foremost Abraham Lincoln assassination authorities, takes familiar history to a deeper level, offering an unprecedented, authoritative account of the Abraham Lincoln murder conspiracy. Working from a staggering array of archival sources and new research, Michael W. Kauffman sheds new light on the background and motives of John Wilkes Booth, the mechanics of his plot to topple the Union government, and the trials and fates of the conspirators. Piece by piece, Michael W. Kauffman explains and corrects common misperceptions and analyzes the political motivation behind John Wilkes Booth's plan to unseat Abraham Lincoln, in whom the assassin saw a treacherous autocrat, "an American Caesar." In preparing his study, Michael W. Kauffman spared no effort getting at the truth: He even lived in Booth's house, and re-created key parts of Booth's escape.

Kauffman's discoveries

Thanks to Michael W. Kauffman's discoveries, readers will have a new understanding of this defining event in our nation's history, and they will come to see how public sentiment about John Wilkes Booth at the time of the assassination and ever since has made an accurate account of his actions and motives next to impossible-until now.
In nearly 140 years there has been an overwhelming body of literature on the Abraham Lincoln assassination, much of it incomplete and oftentimes contradictory. In American Brutus, Michael Kauffman finally makes sense of an incident whose causes and effects reverberate to this day. Provocative, absorbing, utterly cogent, at times controversial, this will become the definitive text on a watershed event in American history.
American Brutus: John Wilkes Booth and the Lincoln Conspiracies by Michael W. Kauffman

More information

Assassination of Abraham Lincoln