Podcast Episode Details

A well known actor, John Wilkes Booth used his professional access to enter Ford’s theater and assassinate President Lincoln

In April of 1865, John Wilkes Booth was a very depressed 27-year old.  His career in shambles, his fortune gone and involved in a volatile and passionate romantic relationship that was tenuous at best only added to his general agonizing over Confederate collapse.  To former colleagues and associates he seemed perpetually intoxicated, unstable, and possibly mentally unhinged. 

John Wilkes Booth subsequently spent several months attempting to coordinate a feasible plan to abduct the President.  He proposed kidnapping Lincoln during the President’s frequent trips to visit wounded troops at the Soldiers Home on the outskirts of the capital, on the President’s occasional, impromptu carriage rides which transpired with little security and even at Ford’s Theater itself which Lincoln frequently attended and Booth had both unlimited access to and specific knowledge of.  But none of these proposals ever amounted to any substantive efforts, the most glaring failure the absence of Booth to do anything at all despite his and other conspirators photographically documented presence only a few feet away from President Lincoln during the inauguration on March 10, 1865.

So familiar was Booth with the theater that he crossed under the stage during the performance via a trap door and subterranean passage.  He emerged on Tenth street, at the front of the building and headed to a saloon next door.  Ca

Published on 6 years, 4 months ago