Fortune's Fool: The Life of John Wilkes Booth

Terry Alford considers John Wilkes Booth as “one of the most remarkable personalities of his era” (6). Consequently, Fortune's Fool presents an always interesting but often contradictory Booth, part affable gentleman and part moody murderer.Accordingly, the book has several components. One segment describes Booth's theatrical career, another tracks his politics and path to the balcony in Ford's Theater, and the final page-turning portion recounts Booth's frantic escape into southern Maryland and death in a northern Virginia tobacco barn. To put this story together, Alford draws heavily on the memories of Booth's friends and acquaintances, sometimes recalled years after the events.To be sure, Booth could be winsome. The most frequent comment about him was his extraordinary good looks. He never lacked for female companionship. He was also genial, hard-working, down-to-earth, and a good colleague. In public he was quiet, perhaps reserved, but with a healthy sense of humor. His five-foot-eight height was average, but he exercised regularly and was very athletic. Alford says that as an actor Booth was “kissed by genius” (157).Yet Alford describes a darker side to the presidential assassin. Booth was “sinister” (6), “moody and erratic” (98), and closed-minded. Once a temperance man, by the end of the Civil War he drank heavily, though never becoming drunk. He brooded; the imprisonment of Baltimore police chief George P. Kane left him fuming for months. He was temperamental. When his brother-in-law insulted Jefferson Davis, Booth grabbed him by the throat and swung him side to side. Then, as self-control gradually returned, Booth threw his victim back into a chair and, standing over the panting man, warned him to “never, if you value your life, speak in that way” again (137).Appropriate for a conflicted personality, Booth's acting career was meteoric. He quickly became a national figure in the theater, a situation that lasted for three years and earned him a fortune. Then the phenom lost his voice, his career, and his money to chronic throat disease.No surprise that a book about a remarkable personality is filled with remarkable detail. Several examples are as follows:Although Booth's conspiracy team has often been lampooned as a team of buffoons, Alford points out that David Herold was quick-thinking, loyal, and intelligent, and that Louis Powell saw action in the war, played chess, and read medical books.Boston Corbett, the famed sergeant who shot Booth, was highly religious. After the dragnet trapped Booth in the barn, Corbett pestered his superiors for permission to enter the building and confront Booth mano et mano. Denied, Corbett then shot Booth after soldiers set the barn afire. Inspecting his handiwork—a spine-severing, mortal wound to the neck—Corbett exclaimed, “What a God we serve!” (313).Booth attended Abraham Lincoln's second inauguration. A well-known photograph places him on the Capitol portico as Lincoln pleaded for “malice toward none,” but Alford adds that Booth attempted to jump the police line inside the Rotunda and join the dignitaries as they processed to the portico and the ceremonies. Booth was just a few feet from the president, but a brief scuffle with police sent him back into the crowd. Whether Booth would have attempted assassination at this very dramatic moment is pure conjecture because he always intended to survive his crime, but he was also impulsive and the police who dealt with him were convinced that he “meant mischief” (226).Alford wisely steers clear of definitively identifying Booth's motives. To be sure, Booth was a white supremacist and a Confederate sympathizer marooned in the North, which grated on him. Moreover, a promise to his mother not to enlist weighed heavily, and as the war turned desperate for the South, Booth felt guilty for his avoidance of military service. Alford thinks that a decisive moment came as Booth stood with a large crowd outside the White House on April 11, 1865, and listened to Lincoln endorse enfranchisement for black veterans. This, Alford surmises, “snapped the last line holding Booth to the ground” (257) and from that moment the unemployed actor was determined to kill the Great Emancipator.Alford also skillfully addresses the age-old question of conspiracy. On one hand, Booth's ring clearly extended to Confederate sympathizers in southern Maryland. As he spun his plot, which originally was a kidnapping scheme, Booth visited this area, where he met numerous underground Confederates ready to assist.More debatable is Booth's contact with the Confederate government. Not a shred of evidence places Booth in contact with Confederate authorities in Richmond, but more suspect was an October 1864 trip to Montreal, where Booth consorted with the Confederate agents, sympathizers, refugees, and spies. All he said was that this jaunt was “a little business” (189), but Booth met often with Confederate agent George N. Sanders, who told an English journal that he was “plotting atrocities which would make the world shudder” (187). No record exists of Booth's conversations with Sanders. Alford does not believe that Booth spoke with the chief Confederate in Canada, Jacob Thompson, who reportedly controlled a million-dollar treasure chest to further the Southern cause. Nobody observed the two together, and six weeks after the assassination Thompson asserted that he had never met or corresponded with Booth or any of the other conspirators. (Alford might have added that at this point what else could Thompson have said?) This reviewer is deeply suspicious of Booth's visit to Canada—he was not there to polish his French—but Alford has little hard evidence to support involvement by Canadian Confederates.In sum, Fortune's Fool is a very readable, well-researched, balanced biography of a complicated person. Alford's 340 pages of text are probably too much for most undergrads, despite his readability, but his work is prime fodder for lectures and should be read by scholars of the period and those simply looking for an excellent book.

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