Booth John Wilkes John Wilkes Booth 1838 1865 was a noted Shakespearean actor He is mainly remembered as the man who assassinated President Abraham Lincoln to avenge the South less than a week after the Civil War ended John Wilkes Booth was born into a leading theatrical family on May 10 1838 near Bel Air in the slave state of Maryland The Booth home was 25 miles 40 km south of the border with the free North Booth was proslavery from an early age and thus became fervently anti-Lincoln After some early failures J Wilkes Booth as he was known on stage made his name with the Richmond Theatre Company in Virginia in 1859 While in Virginia he became even more attached to the Southern way of life and joined the Richmond militia for a short time As a militia officer he stood guard at the gallows during the hanging of the antislavery figure John Brown Curriculum Context Many curricula expect students to explain how the election of Lincoln alienated supporters of slavery Although fiercely anti-Lincoln John Wilkes Booth was a popular figure in Northern high society during the war His good looks and acting talent gained him many admirers 10 People
Booth was in great demand as an actor in Washington D C during the war years On November 9 1863 President Lincoln saw Booth star in The Marble Heart by Charles Selby at Ford’s Theatre As the war went on Booth became increasingly upset by Confederate defeats and began to gain a reputation for bouts of wild behavior In May 1864 Booth gave up acting He dabbled in the oil business and may have become a Southern spy smuggling quinine and other medicines to the Confederate army In November Booth moved to Washington where he and others devised various plots to kidnap the president They intended to ransom Lincoln for the return of Confederate prisoners of war However their attempts all failed On April 9 1865 Robert E Lee surrendered to the Union In a desperate last-ditch show of support for the Confederacy Booth decided to kill Lincoln The assassination On the night of Good Friday April 14 1865 Lincoln attended a performance of Our American Cousin at Ford’s Theatre During the third act of Tom Taylor’s play Booth entered the unguarded presidential box and shot Lincoln through the back of the head with a pistol He leaped down onto the stage shouting Sic semper tyrannis meaning So it always is with tyrants The South is avenged Despite having broken his left leg as he landed on the stage Booth escaped on horseback Twelve days later Union troops caught up with him on the farm of Richard Garrett near Bowling Green Virginia The soldiers set fire to the tobacco barn in which the assassin was hiding Booth died in the ensuing gun battle shot through the neck by Sergeant Boston Corbett Quinine An anti-malaria medicine made from the bark of a South American tree Curriculum Context Students might be asked to judge Lincoln’s attitudes toward civil liberties and presidential power during the war Is there any evidence that he was a tyrant Booth John Wilkes 11
Boyd Belle Belle Boyd 1844 1900 was one of the most famous Confederate spies of the Civil War She was dubbed La Belle Rebelle the beautiful rebel by a French journalist after her exploits gained her worldwide celebrity Belle Boyd was born Maria Isabela Boyd in Martinsburg Virginia now West Virginia in 1844 When Union forces occupied the town in 1861 17-year-old Belle befriended officers carefully noting comments about their plans which were passed to Confederates in the field She shot dead a drunken Union soldier in her family home but was tried and acquitted In May 1862 when she was staying at her father’s hotel at Front Royal in Warren County she discovered that a knothole in her bedroom floor allowed her to listen to Union officers in the parlor below One night she overheard them discussing a plan to blow up key bridges around Front Royal to thwart an attack by Confederates led by General Thomas Stonewall Jackson Belle jumped on a horse and rode 15 miles 25 km through Union positions to tell Jackson who responded by beginning his attack early To thank her Jackson made her an honorary member of his staff with the rank of captain Captured by the Union In 1862 Belle was arrested by the Union but released a month later In 1863 she was imprisoned again and released suffering from typhoid In 1864 she sailed for England When the Union captured her ship Belle charmed a Union officer Sam Hardinge into helping her He was court-martialed and discharged and the two later married in England In 1865 she published her memoirs Belle Boyd in Camp and Prison In England she became an actress and then made her American stage debut in 1868 She continued her life on stage as a lecturer entertaining audiences with her experiences Curriculum Context You might be asked to describe the importance of espionage during the war Stonewall Jackson Read about Jackson on pages 60 62 12 People
Brady Mathew Mathew Brady 1823 1896 was the most famous photographer of the Civil War His determination to use the new medium of photography to make a complete record of the conflict left thousands of memorable images Mathew Brady was born near Saratoga Springs New York Aged 16 he left home and moved to the town of Saratoga where he enrolled as an art student under the portrait painter William Page At the end of 1839 teacher and pupil traveled to New York City where Page introduced Brady to the celebrated Samuel Morse Morse had invented the telegraph which would later make him world famous but at this time he was better known as a painter and a professor of painting and design at New York University New technology Morse had just returned from Paris where he had been introduced to a pioneering photographic process the daguerreotype by its French inventor Louis Daguerre Convinced that photography would become a sensation of the age Morse set up a studio in New York and began giving classes in the daguerreotype Curriculum Context Photography is a good example of how technological innovation was changing life in the mid 19th century The Wet-Plate Process A great technical advance in photography in the 1850s meant that Brady’s photographic studios were able to turn out thousands of portraits a year The early daguerreotype was a unique image created on a chemically treated copper or silver sheet that was then covered with protective glass At the beginning of the 1850s however the wet plate process was invented in Britain In this method a light-sensitive liquid was used to fix a negative image to a glass plate From this plate the photographer could make an unlimited number of positive prints and even enlargements Alexander Gardner a Scottish photographer and chemist was a pioneer of the new process When he became Brady’s partner in 1856 the new process quickly supplanted the daguerreotype Brady Mathew 13
