John Wilkes Booth Research Paper

John Wilkes Booth

John Wilkes Booth was born and raised on a farm near Bel-Air, Maryland.

He was born the ninth of ten children to the famous actor, Junius Booth. He came from a wealthy family of actors, so he followed in their footsteps and made his stage debut at the age of seventeen. His acting career took him all over the United States.

Booth also took part in politics. He joined the Know-Nothing’s, an anti-catholic and anti-immigrant political party. He was a die-hard confederate, and worked as a secret agent for the confederates during the Civil War.

After hearing about the John Brown, an abolitionist’s, bloody raid on harpers ferry, Booth was furious. He briefly joined the Richmond militia and witnessed Brown’s hanging, which happened in December. Later that summer, Booth was set to join a traveling theatre company, taking on the role of Hamlet. He accidently shot himself in the leg with a friend's gun, and that prevented him from joining the traveling theatre company. Abraham Lincoln was elected president one month later.

Soon after the Civil War had begun, Lincoln declared martial law in Maryland to try and keep that state from seceding. Booth was furious about the declaration of martial law, and everything that Lincoln did, but he had promised his mother that he would never join the confederate army. He continued with his acting career.

Booth lived an exciting life as an actor and a secret agent, but he wanted more. So he joined a conspiracy to kidnap the United States president, Abraham Lincoln. Lincoln was an abolitionist and supported the north, so when he was elected president, it sent the confederates into rages of anger. They did not like Lincoln.

Lincoln was rumored to be attend...

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...em, but Corbett’s superior made the account that he shot Booth without order, or excuse. Corbett ended up shooting Booth in the neck. The wound was fatal and Booth died three hours later.

John Wilkes Booth was important to this country’s history because he was the first man to assassinate a President of the United States of America. He was not the first to attempt, but he was the first man to successfully assassinate a President. The assassination had a long lasting impact on our country. Both the south and the north mourned the death of Abraham Lincoln, “incontestably the greatest man I have ever known”, said Ulysses S. Grant.

Elisabeth Blair, sister of Lincoln’s first postmaster general, said, “Those of southern born sympathies know now they have lost a friend willing and more powerful to protect and serve them, than they can ever hope to find again.”