Book Review

War to the Knife: Bleeding Kansas, 1854-1861. By Thomas Goodrich. (Mechanicsburg: Stackpole, 1998. viii, 296 pp. $29.95, isbn 0-8117-1921-9.)

These two books invite reflection on why quite different self-proclaimed patriots were driven to violence during the nation's sectional crisis.	1
A Southern partisan, John Wilkes Booth thought himself "the worst letter writer alive." No scholar, he quit school at fifteen. Although he mastered roles in a half dozen Shakespeare plays, he wrote nothing imaginative or noteworthy. After he assassinated Abraham Lincoln in 1865, horrified friends and relations distanced themselves from his deed in part by destroying his letters. What survives of his sparse writings—about seventy documents—are gathered in this slender, meticulously edited volume.	2
Much of what scholars know or surmise about Booth's personality and private life comes from the protective, sometimes misleading memoir of his doting older sister, Asia Booth Clarke. The present collection of John Wilkes's "poor scrawls" affords a rare opportunity to catch unmediated glimpses of Booth—as a free-spirited fifteen-year-old, a rising "star" and matinee idol, a passionate Southern partisan, and finally a hunted assassin.	3
Along with brief letters about such everyday matters as bookings for theatrical tours are several Booth political testaments. A five-thousand-word draft of what the editors call a "wild, often disordered" undelivered speech in defense of the South that Booth wrote during the secession crisis is published here for the first time. Two letters dated November 1864 declare his intent to "triumph or die" in the cause of the South. Also included is the supposed text of Booth's "lost letter" to the National Intelligencer justifying the assassination.	4
In a brief introduction, the editors, John Rhodehamel and Louise Taper, reaffirm the modern view that Booth killed for "clearly articulated political motives." No "monster," he was a "highly successful actor and secret Confederate agent" who expected to be seen as a "hero" in the South. Citing William Tidwell, they claim that Booth was a willing conspirator in bizarre schemes of the Confederate secret service. After failing in attempts to kidnap Lincoln, and after the fall of Richmond and Gen. Robert E. Lee's surrender at Appomattox, Booth finally determined to kill the president because Booth was "supremely unhappy with history itself." As he noted in his pocket diary, something "great & decisive" had to be done.	5
But Booth's passionate partisanship does not explain why the handsome, gifted Booth was willing to give up wealth and acclaim and risk his future in so desperate a plot. Rhodehamel and Taper offer some help. They see Booth as heir to a great libertarian tradition of rebellion against tyrants. Like Albert Furtwangler, they note that Booth often played Shakespeare's tragic heroes Hamlet and Brutus. Booth greatly admired the Roman Marcus Junius Brutus, Shakespeare's heroic tyrant killer, after whom Booth's father was named and with whom the hunted John Wilkes identified himself in his last hours. Thus Booth was betrayed by what might be called the theatrical fallacy. In the end he bemoaned the fact that the world saw him not as Brutus but as "a common cutthroat."	. . .