Terry Alford offers an extraordinarily entertaining and well-researched account of the life of Lincoln assassin John Wilkes Booth in his book "Fortune's Fool," which took a quarter-century to research and write.
The biography presents a plethora of reasons for Booth's crime:
Despite growing up in Maryland, Booth identified with the culture of the South, where actors enjoyed a much higher social status than in the North. He internalized the "death-to-tyrants" motif embodied by many of the Shakespearean martyrs he depicted onstage. He was a racist who despised abolitionists and was "particularly unsettled" by the prospect of blacks achieving citizenship. He was an alcoholic who occasionally showed signs of mental illness. And he was an attention-seeker who had an unhealthy obsession with fame.
Even taken together, these explanations don't feel quite satisfactory in explaining an act of terror that robbed our nation of its greatest leader, that ended all hopes for reconciliation between North and South, plunging our nation into a century of continued racial strife.
Despite Alford's commendable efforts, Booth remains a mystery.
The best paragraph (p. 175):
Free of the stage, he could now atone. Did he do so from a simple sense of duty? Or was it more complex - a sort of self-conscious performance with himself as star? These opposing viewpoints will be endlessly debated. One thing will not. John Wilkes Booth had reached a turning point. He would stop playing history. From now on he would make it.
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