HE KILLED LINCOLN !

Greymouth Evening Star, 19 May 1938, Page 13

HE KILLED LINCOLN !

MEMOIR OF JOHN WILKES BOOTH Ten years after John Wilkes Booth, actor and Southern patriot, shot President Lincoln in a box at Ford’s Theatre, Washington, on April 14. 1865. his sister, Mrs Asia Booth Clarke, secretly completed a memoir of him. It is now published. ‘The Unlocked Book,’ with a foreword by Miss Eleanor Farejeon, who explains how it became her father’s trust to publish some time “if he sees lit” (states ‘John o London’s Weekly’). The Booths, she says, “had an inherited strain of darkness in them, which foreshadowed tragedy ” And it is significant, perhaps, that a gipsy should have told Wilkes in his youth: — “Ah, you’ve a bad hand; the lines all cris-cras. It’s full enough of sorrow—full of trouble—trouble in plenty, everywhere I look. . . You’ll die young, and leave many to mourn you, many to love you, too. You’re born under an unlucky Apart from that, there is no “darkness” in Asia’s almost idyllic chronicle of their life on a Maryland farm: young Wilkes’S passion for dressing up before the darkie servants to try himself out as au actor; his tenderness with animals: bis refusal even to punish a negro when he fired at them during a Hallowe’en rag. He was sensitive certainly; afflicted with doubts and self-questionings natural to sensitive youth: — “How shall I ever have a chance on the stage? Buried here, torturing the grain out of the ground for daily bread, what chance have I of ever studying elocution or declamation! But the “darkness” begins to loom when North comes at death-grips with South, and Wilkes, now an established actor, burns with Southern fervour and helps to run necessities through the blockade for his compatriots: — ‘lf the North conquer us it will be by numbers only, not by native grit, not pluck, and not by devotion. . . . ■So help me Holy God! My soul, my life, and possessions are for the South.” His hatred of Lincoln was fanatical. “This man’s appearance,” he exclaims to Asia, “his pedigree, his coarse, low jokes and anecdotes, his vulgar similes, and his frivolity, are a disgrace to the seat he holds. Other brains rule the country. He is made the tool of the North, to crush out, or try to crush out slavery, by robbery, rapine, slaughter, and bought armies.”

HIS FLIGHT AND DEATH. From that to the shot in the theatre bo.x was but a short, fatalistic step. Asia writes of this crisis, Wilkes s flight and death in Virginia, and the subsequent vilification and torment of the family with a fervour matching his. His cry as he escaped through the wings of the stage was: “Sic Semper tyrannis!” His last words, when lie fell to Sergeant Corbett’s shot, were: “Tell my mother —I died for my country!” In extenuation, Asia says of Lincoln: — Conquerors cannot be too caretui ol themselves, as history has ever proved. That fatal visit to the theatre had no pity in it: It was jubilation over fields of unburied dead, over miles of desolated homes. If Wilkes was mad, she concludes, his mind lost its balance between the tragic fall of Richmond and the “terrific end.” Supplemented by family letters, contemporary documents, and scarce photographs, her ‘Memoir’ reveals intimately the man whose one headlong act projected him into American history.