Book description
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.
"Titone uncovers a narrative as old as Cain and
Abel. She also casts the nineteenth century's greatest True Crime
story in a new light." --New England Quarterly Review
Nora Titone studied American History and Literature as an
undergraduate at Harvard University, and earned an M. A. in History at
the University of California, Berkeley. She has worked as a historical
researcher for a range of academics, writers and artists involved in
projects about nineteenth-century America. She lives in Chicago and
this is her first book.
