| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 110.4

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 110.4 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Canada and the United States

C. Wyatt Evans. The Legend of John Wilkes Booth: Myth, Memory, and a Mummy. (CultureAmerica.) Lawrence: University Press of Kansas. 2004. Pp. xv, 269. $24.95.
Anyone who has studied the Lincoln assassination is familiar with the legend that John Wilkes Booth escaped from Garrett's barn in April 1865. The prime promoter of the Booth escape story was Finis Bates, whose The Escape and Suicide of John Wilkes Booth (1907) told the convoluted story of Texas drifter John St. Helen who in the 1870s supposedly confessed to being Booth. When another vagabond, David George, committed suicide in Enid, Oklahoma in 1903, amid rumors that he was Booth, Bates made his way to Oklahoma and identified George's remains as his old acquaintance St. Helen. Bates eventually took charge of the body, which became part of traveling carnival exhibits. Traditional historians have dismissed the legend as part of the sensational nonsense that often surrounds American assassinations.	1
While the story is obviously sensational and untrue, C. Wyatt Evans urges that historians should not reject it so readily, since the legend reveals a great deal about the Civil War and its aftermath. There were many myths of the "Lost Cause," and this is in effect one of them. From a southern perspective, the idea that Booth escaped capture resurrected the South's vindicator, who became a symbol of vengeance against the North and perpetuated the idea that the South would not be reconstructed according to northern wishes. Booth also became a symbol of white supremacy.	. . .

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