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The Bitter Rivalry That Led to the Assassination of Abraham Lincoln
Simon & Schuster
June 2011
On Sale: May 31, 2011
496 pages
ISBN: 1416586067
EAN: 9781416586067
Paperback
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Non-Fiction
The scene of John Wilkes Booth shooting Abraham Lincoln in
Ford’s Theatre is among the most vivid and indelible images
in American history. The literal story of what happened on
April 14, 1865, is familiar: Lincoln was killed by John
Wilkes Booth, a lunatic enraged by the Union victory and the
prospect of black citizenship. Yet who Booth really
was—besides a killer—is less well known. The magnitude of
his crime has obscured for generations a startling personal
story that was integral to his motivation. My Thoughts Be
Bloody, a sweeping family saga, revives an extraordinary
figure whose name has been missing, until now, from the
story of President Lincoln’s death. Edwin Booth, John
Wilkes’s older brother by four years, was in his day the
biggest star of the American stage. He won his celebrity at
the precocious age of nineteen, before the Civil War began,
when John Wilkes was a schoolboy. Without an account of
Edwin Booth, author Nora Titone argues, the real story of
Lincoln’s assassin has never been told. Using an array of
private letters, diaries, and reminiscences of the Booth
family, Titone has uncovered a hidden history that reveals
the reasons why John Wilkes Booth became this country’s most
notorious assassin. These ambitious brothers, born to
theatrical parents, enacted a tale of mutual jealousy and
resentment worthy of a Shakespearean tragedy. From
childhood, the stage-struck brothers were rivals for the
approval of their father, legendary British actor Junius
Brutus Booth. After his death, Edwin and John Wilkes were
locked in a fierce contest to claim his legacy of fame. This
strange family history and powerful sibling rivalry were the
crucibles of John Wilkes’s character, exacerbating his
political passions and driving him into a life of
conspiracy. To re-create the lost world of Edwin and John
Wilkes Booth, this book takes readers on a panoramic tour of
nineteenth-century America, from the streets of 1840s
Baltimore to the gold fields of California, from the jungles
of the Isthmus of Panama to the glittering mansions of
Gilded Age New York. Edwin, ruthlessly competitive and
gifted, did everything he could to lock his younger brother
out of the theatrical game. As he came of age, John Wilkes
found his plans for stardom thwarted by his older sibling’s
meteoric rise. Their divergent paths—Edwin’s an upward race
to riches and social prominence, and John’s a downward
spiral into failure and obscurity—kept pace with the
hardening of their opposite political views and their mutual
dislike. The details of the conspiracy to kill Lincoln have
been well documented elsewhere. My Thoughts Be Bloody tells
a new story, one that explains for the first time why
Lincoln’s assassin decided to conspire against the president
in the first place, and sets that decision in the context of
a bitterly divided family—and nation. By the end of this
riveting journey, readers will see Abraham Lincoln’s death
less as the result of the war between the North and South
and more as the climax of a dark struggle between two
brothers who never wore the uniform of soldiers, except on
stage.
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