In December 1860, more than four years before John Wilkes Booth assassinated Abraham Lincoln in Ford`s Theater in Washington, the actor wrote a 21-page manuscript showing his fanatical state of mind, his sympathies for the Southern secessionists and his association with the historical characters he portrayed in Shakespeare`s plays.
In the view of Lincoln scholars, had these sentiments been known to the officials responsible for guarding the president, it is possible Booth would not have had such easy access to the theater on April 14, 1865.
The manuscript, written in Philadelphia, was intended as a speech, but it was never delivered. Nor has it ever been published.
It was discovered last year in the theatrical archives of the private Players Club at 16 Gramercy Park South in Manhattan, the former home of Edwin Booth, the assassin`s older brother, who was a better-known actor at the time. An undated note appended to the manuscript, written by Edwin Booth, reads: ”This was found (long after his death) among some old play-books and clothes left by JWB in my house.”
After sorting through the contents of his brother`s trunk sometime in the 1870s, Edwin Booth burned the costumes and clothes but saved the manuscript.
The manuscript, which is now being made accessible to scholars for the first time, was found by Robert Giroux, the editor and publisher at Farrar, Straus & Giroux, while he was poring over old documents at the Players Club.
The manuscript is scrawled in heavy black ink, in rather erratic handwriting, with crossed-out words, misspellings and grammatical errors. It was written in the house of his sister, Asia Booth Clarke, in Philadelphia, where Booth and his mother were spending the Christmas holidays.
In the rambling manuscript, Booth calls himself ”a Northern man” who intends to ”fight with all my heart and soul-even if there`s not a man to back me”-for equal rights and justice for the South as well as the North.
Referring to the secession of South Carolina, he says that ”she is fighting in a just cause with God Himself upon their side.” But he adds, ”I don`t believe that any of us are represented truly in Washington” because the men there are ”Abolitionists.”
Booth blames the cause of disunion on ”nothing but the constant agitation of the slavery question.”
He claims that the South has ”a right, according to the Constitution,”
to keep and hold slaves.
Attacking the ”free press,” he writes, ”Is it not (what Shakespeare says of the drama) to hold as it were the mirror up to nature?” He accuses newspapers of telling ”a hundred lies calculated to lead mankind into folly and into vice.”
In the most personal sentence in the manuscript, Booth says, ”I saw John Brown hung and I may say that I helped to hang John Brown.”
