![BOOTH, John Wilkes (1838-1865). Autograph manuscript, a first draft of his Secession Crisis speech on the break-up of the Union and the threat of Civil War, with deletions, additions and interlinear insertions by the author, [Philadelphia, between 22 and 27 December 1860].](https://www.christies.com/img/LotImages/2007/NYR/2007_NYR_01851_0227_000(021719).jpg?w=1)
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BOOTH, John Wilkes (1838-1865). Autograph manuscript, a first draft of his Secession Crisis speech on the break-up of the Union and the threat of Civil War, with deletions, additions and interlinear insertions by the author, [Philadelphia, between 22 and 27 December 1860].
Details
BOOTH, John Wilkes (1838-1865). Autograph manuscript, a first draft of his Secession Crisis speech on the break-up of the Union and the threat of Civil War, with deletions, additions and interlinear insertions by the author, [Philadelphia, between 22 and 27 December 1860].
21 pages, folio (12½ x 8 in.). Paginated 1-13 by Booth, with additional unnumbered pages intended for insertion. A cover sheet with autograph note of Edwin Booth (see below). The speech penned in dark ink on lined notepaper, part of the original string with which the sheets were bound still present. A small chip detached from pp.5-6 (but present), two leaves with minor fraying at extreme edges.
Cover sheet: Blank but for a poignant penciled note of Edwin Booth, the assassin's brother: "This was found long after his death, among some old playbooks, & clothes, kept by John Wilkes Booth in my house." For years after the Lincoln assassination and the death of his brother, Edwin Booth never mentioned his brother in public. Rhodehamel and Taper, editors of Booth's writings, conjecture that Edwin may have preserved this relic "for the judgment of a future that he must have realized would always be fascinated by his brother's crime" ("Right or Wrong, God Judge Me": The Writings of John Wilkes Booth, Univ. of Illinois Press, 1997, herefter Writings).
"BLOOD & JUSTICE": JOHN WILKES BOOTH'S SECESSION CRISIS SPEECH, THE LONGEST AND MOST REVEALING DOCUMENT FROM THE PEN OF THE FUTURE PRESIDENTIAL ASSASSIN, PREDICTING "FIERCE CIVIL WAR" AND VOWING THAT "THERE IS A TIME WHEN MEN SHOULD ACT FOR THEMSELVES"
John Wilkes Booth (1838-1865), scion of a distinguished thespian family, is infamous as the first assassin of an American president, a fanatical Confederate sympathizer and agent who personally murdered President Abraham Lincoln at Ford's Theatre in Washington on 14 April 1865. This extraordinary 21-page manuscript, containing more than 5,000 words, is by a considerable margin the longest known writing of the future assassin. It remained unpublished until the 1990s. The manuscript constitutes "the earliest, the most dramatic, and one of the most revealing of the handful of political testaments that John Wilkes Booth left behind" (Writings, pp.49-50). An impassioned political jeremiad, studded with violent, inflammatory rhetoric, it was--as far as we know-never delivered. But it furnished a unique insight into the 22-year-old John Wilkes Booth's deepest convictions on the momentous national issues of slavery's expansion, secession and state's rights. The election of Abraham Lincoln in November 1860 convinced many in the slave-holding states--and Booth himself--that coercive national anti-slavery legislation would inevitably follow.
Booth's address, written in a state of high emotion and full of Shakespearean dramatic flourishes, was penned at a critical juncture: on December 20, the South Carolina legislature had proclaimed its secession from the Union, revoking its ratification to the U.S. Constitution. Then, the next day, a last-ditch compromise on slavery proposed by Kentucky Senator John Crittenden was voted down in Congress. Opening the pandora's box of secession, Booth realized, would signal the dissolution of the Union. (His fears were well grounded, for by the time Lincoln was inaugurated, a total of seven states had voted to secede). If the North took the path of coercion, Booth predicted, the inevitable result would be a "fierce Civil War." Here Booth bitterly laments the break-up of the Union forged by the patriots of 1776, flares into righteous anger at the thought that the abolitionists would risk the Union to uphold a moral position, and endorses the South's right to defend its sovereignty.
From this speech it is clear that both Lincoln and Booth deplored, in similar terms, the break-up of the Union forged by the patriots and founding fathers that they honored. In his first inaugural address--three months later--Lincoln lamented secession's "destruction of our national fabric" and memorably evoked "the mystic chords of memory" linking "every battlefield and patriot grave" to "every living heart." Here, Booth also speaks reverently of the noble sacrifices of the Revolutionary War patriots, and asks, rhetorically.
"Is our liberty less dear to us than it was to our fathers of '76?...Think of the peaceful dead...Think of the lives nobly lost in rearing aloft this great temple of liberty. Think of all the blood spilled to cement the work...the actions of our fathers...who even died to secure to us (their sons) this glorious heritage of freedom....Do you think my brothers that the spirit of those peaceful dead will smile upon us when this union is destroyed. No, No, this union must and shall be preserved."
As Rhodehamel and Taper observe, "In recent years...there has been increasing recognition that the shot from Booth's little pocket pistol was not a bolt out of the pathological blue, not an act of psychosis or drunken frenzy...but rather a political murder that can be understood only in the context of the most violent period in American history and of Booth's beliefs and prejudices...." Therefore, "if we allow John Wilkes Booth his words, we will discover the clear and authentic voice of a man convinced of the righteousness of his cause...." (Writings, p.2).
"A FIRE LIGHTED AND FANNED BY NORTHERN FANATICISM"
The political conflagration about to consume the nation, Booth asserts, "is a fire lighted and fanned by Northern fanaticism. A fire which naught but blood and justice can extinguish. I tell you the Abolition doctrine is the fire which if allowed to rage, will consume the house and crush us all beneath its ruins. Shall we my brothers be destroyed on account of these Abolition leaders (it is the leaders not the mass)." Born in the border state of Maryland and having lived in Richmond and drilled with the elite militia, the University Grays, Booth naturally absorbed deeply and unquestioningly the pervasive and at times vitriolic, pro-slavery, state's rights dogma. That militant ideology came to saturate the southern papers and to animate politicians, Congressmen, the clergy and the general populace. Booth's sister, Asia Booth Clarke, marveled at her brother's passionate identification with the South, and concluded on balance, years after the assassination, that her brother "was what he had been since childhood, an ardent lover of the South and her policy, an upholder of Southern principles...a man so single in his devotion, so unswerving in his principles, that he would yield everything for the cause he espoused" (Asia Booth Clarke, The Unlocked Book, p.115).
"INSANE ON...ONE POINT": SECESSION
Booth, like Americans on both sides of the sectional crisis, deeply revered the sacrifices and achievements of the American patriots of the Revolution, and regarded the severing of the bonds of union with unmitigated horror. Edwin Booth himself recalled that the volatile John Wilkes was regarded, in the family, as "a goodhearted, harmless, though wild-brained boy," and remembered that the family "used to laugh at his patriotic froth whenever secession was discussed. That he was insane on this one point, no one who knew him can well doubt..." (Edwina Booth Grossman, ed. Edwin Booth: Recollections by His Daughter, pp.227-228). In his draft, Booth expresses anguish and despair over South Carolina's recent act of secession. He warns of its ominous implications, especially if an attempt is made by the North to force her back into the Union. If that were to happen, he vows, it will be the catalyst for the formation of "one great Confederation" of Southern, slave-holding states.
"Gentlemen, I am no alarmist...Many laugh at the secession of South Carolina, thinking that she will come back or that if she stays out, we will never miss her. It is sheer folly to reason so. And then again, there are many who are for instant coercion. That is madness. The first attempt at force would be the cue for every Southern state to aid her. [I]t would speedily link together the southern states in one vast confederation."
The most promising solution, Booth avows, would have been the recently defeated proposed compromise: Senator John J. Crittenden's proposal to resolve the crisis by a Constitutional amendment. But that last-minute compromise, Booth notes with disgust, had been voted down by a committee of Congress (on 21 December 1860):
"Yet she [South Carolina] must be brought back and it must be done by compromise...Mr Crittenden's compromise that could have saved us has been laid upon the table, to be rejected by whom? Why, by Northern men. Gentlemen, I don't believe that any of us are represented truly in Washington. For if that compromise was put to the vote of the people it would be carried by an overwhelming majority. The men there [in Congress] are abolitionists and are determined to gain their end regardless of the consequences! South Carolina is not lost yet. When she is the whole South is lost with her."
Anguishing that other Southern states will inevitably follow the lead of South Carolina, he evokes the memory of the two great architects of compromise, Henry Clay and Daniel Webster: "The South is leaving us [the Union]. O, would to God that Clay & Webster could hear those words. Weep, fellow countrymen, for the brightest half of our stars upon the nation's banner have grown dim."
BOOTH'S ATTITUDES TOWARDS SLAVERY AND RACE
At the core of the political creed so boldly stated in this manuscript are Booth's attitudes towards slavery. "Booth had been born into a world in which slavery was part of the accepted order of things," note Rhodehamel and Taper. He clearly "shared the conviction that blacks were an inferior people, incapable of living in freedom alongside whites" (Writings, p.7). In one passage, for example, Booth reiterates the familiar argument that slavery as practiced in the American South is essentially a benign, even humane institution:
"...What has been the cause of all this? Why nothing but the constant agitation of the slavery question. Much, too much has been said upon that subject....First, I know that the South has a right according to the Constitution to keep and hold them [slaves]. And we have no right under that Constitution to interfere with hers.... And instead of looking upon slavery as a sin...I hold it to be a happiness for themselves [the slaves] and a social & political blessing for us....I have been through the whole South and have marked the happiness of master & man. Take every individual and you will find the happiness greater there than here...."
He labels as hypocritical the claim that human chattel slavery is a sin in the eyes of God: "A sin?" he exclaims, "You never saw it as such, until it became unprofitable. And you would even now share in that sin, if it was necessary to you and could be made to pay..." And, moreover, Booth writes, the national press, he complains, is now openly complicit with the abolition movement: "Can a paper be just that exaggerates the evils of man, and turns his good into crime? Can a paper be just which shows only one side of a question, leading its readers into darkness and despair?" In fact, Booth argues, the press "makes me hate my brothers in the north. It severs all our bonds of friendship. It induces our brothers in the North to deny our rights...!" And, he shrills, alluding particularly to the Fugitive Slave Act, "What right have you [the North] to exclude southern rights from the territory?...I have as much right to carry my slave into the territory as you have to carry your paid servant or your children." Elsewhere he asserts that "the liberty of the press can be abused," and its abuse should not be tolerated.
"I SAW JOHN BROWN HUNG"
The address contains a fascinating allusion to a pivotal incident in Booth's life. In October 1859, John Brown-- fresh from "Bloody Kansas"--with a small band of militant followers, seized the arsenal at Harper's Ferry, hoping to touch off an armed uprising of slaves. At the time, Booth had been in living in Richmond, where news of Brown's murderous intentions greatly alarmed the public. Federal troops under Robert E. Lee and J.E.B. Stuart swiftly stormed the arsenal, and captured Brown and his surviving men. He was convicted and sentenced by the Virginia courts to hang. Prompted by fears that there might be an armed attempt to rescue Brown, Virginia militia were called out. Booth managed to join the Richmond Grays, a militia unit that served as volunteer armed guards at the public hanging of Brown (2 December 1859). Here, Booth glories in his participation and the justice of Brown's execution:
"For John Brown was executed (yes, and justly) by his country's laws for attempting in another way, merely what these abolitionists are doing now. I saw John Brown hung. And I blessed the justice of my country's laws. I may say I helped hang John Brown and while I live, I shall think with joy upon the day when I saw the sun go down upon one traitor less within our land. His treason was no more than theirs [the abolitionists], for open force is holier than hidden craft. The Lion is more noble than the fox."
"Fierce Civil War will follow..." and "God alone can tell the rest"
In the direst terms, Booth envisions the pervasive ruin that the abolitionists will bring down upon the entire nation-- not just to the South--warning that the nation's trade will collapse, "a dearth of industry will infest the land. Famine will range round. Banks will fail. Families [will be] ruined." He warns against the North's assumption that the South could be easily coerced into compliance. He castigates Northern abolitionists for creating the crisis and makes a chilling prediction of the bloody conflict soon to erupt:
"You might have prevented this! I hope I may never live to see that day, even should it follow soon when we are no more a united nation....You would say she [the South] is weak in numbers, we [the North] are strong. We will force her to submit and once more restore the Union. The South will call in the powers of Europe. Fierce Civil War will follow. And then, what then? Why God alone can tell the rest."
"BLOOD & JUSTICE": PORTENTS OF VIOLENCE
Booth repeatedly calls for "justice" to heal the grave injustices done to the South. In Booth's lexicon, justice meant the suppression of the abolitionist movement, the strict enforcement of the Fugitive Slave law and the opening of the territories to slavery. His impassioned text is studded with inflammatory passages, hyperbolic threats and seething anger against the abolitionists, whom he likens to a serpent, and brands as traitors for causing the sundering of the union:
"Men have no right to entertain opinions which endanger the safety of the country. Such men I call traitors and treason should be stamped to death...So deep is my hatred for such men that I could wish I had them in my grasp, and I the power to crush. I'd grind them into the dust! [The South] has been wronged....She must be reconciled. How can she? Why, as I said before, with naught but justice. The Abolition party must throw away its principles. They must be hushed forever. Or else it must be done by the punishment of her aggressors. By justice that demands the blood of her aggressors. By the blood of those, who in wounding her, have slain us all, with naught save blood & justice."
In many passages, Booth strikingly links the two terms "justice" and "blood." This linkage becomes his shorthand for the blood that must be shed to right the injustices to which the South had been subjected by her enemies, the abolitionists.
"SIC SEMPER TYRANNUS!": THE FINAL ACT
Written in the incandescent heat of his anger, the Secession crisis address constitutes Booth's only overtly political writing before the fateful day-four and a half years later--of Lincoln's assassination. On the morning of the assassination, Booth addressed a self-justifying letter to the editors of The National Intelligencer (Writings, pp.147-150). Though brief, it is hauntingly similar in tone, style and even wording to his earlier Secession crisis speech, and strikingly shows that Booth's pro-southern political creed had remained unaltered in the intervening years. He clung to his conviction that there would come a moment for him to take decisive, violent action for "blood & justice." As he says in the early part of the Secession crisis address "I wish to speak, not for the sake of being looked at or talked about, but to vindicate myself in the steps I am about to take."
As Booth's editors observe, Booth shared "the conviction...that Abraham Lincoln was a malignant tyrant whose policies threatened to expunge the liberties that had long been the birthright of free, white Americans." Unquestionably, Booth believed that in carrying out the assassination of the President, he acted for the best interests of his country and his race. In fact, Booth, the "son and brother of great tragic actors, had enacted at Ford's Theatre one of the great tragedies of American history. Lincoln's murder was the final, bloody act that marked the end of the nations bloodiest war, a war that Lincoln's election as president had touched off four years before." Ironically, by that infamous act, "the unwitting assassin succeeded in projecting the tragic figure of Abraham Lincoln across the firmament of history in an apotheosis that was perfectly mythic in its grandeur and its symmetry." (Writings, p.3).
Booth's Secession crisis address, fortunately preserved for posterity by his aggrieved brother, reveals that the pistol shot fired by Booth in the darkened presidential box at Ford's Theatre was the natural consequence of his passionate pro-Southern, pro-slavery ideology, a creed that came, in the course of four years bloody war, to see President Lincoln as a living symbol of the moral, political and military domination of the South. As Booth here ominously affirms: "For God be my witness I love peace...but there is a time when men should act for themselves...I tell you, sirs, that treason weighs heavy in the scale. It is a time for us throw off all gentler feelings of our natures and summon resolution, pride, justice. Ay, and revenge, to take the place of those nobler passions...."
Provenance: John Wilkes Booth - Edwin Thomas Booth - The Hampden-Booth Theatre Library.
21 pages, folio (12½ x 8 in.). Paginated 1-13 by Booth, with additional unnumbered pages intended for insertion. A cover sheet with autograph note of Edwin Booth (see below). The speech penned in dark ink on lined notepaper, part of the original string with which the sheets were bound still present. A small chip detached from pp.5-6 (but present), two leaves with minor fraying at extreme edges.
Cover sheet: Blank but for a poignant penciled note of Edwin Booth, the assassin's brother: "This was found long after his death, among some old playbooks, & clothes, kept by John Wilkes Booth in my house." For years after the Lincoln assassination and the death of his brother, Edwin Booth never mentioned his brother in public. Rhodehamel and Taper, editors of Booth's writings, conjecture that Edwin may have preserved this relic "for the judgment of a future that he must have realized would always be fascinated by his brother's crime" ("Right or Wrong, God Judge Me": The Writings of John Wilkes Booth, Univ. of Illinois Press, 1997, herefter Writings).
"BLOOD & JUSTICE": JOHN WILKES BOOTH'S SECESSION CRISIS SPEECH, THE LONGEST AND MOST REVEALING DOCUMENT FROM THE PEN OF THE FUTURE PRESIDENTIAL ASSASSIN, PREDICTING "FIERCE CIVIL WAR" AND VOWING THAT "THERE IS A TIME WHEN MEN SHOULD ACT FOR THEMSELVES"
John Wilkes Booth (1838-1865), scion of a distinguished thespian family, is infamous as the first assassin of an American president, a fanatical Confederate sympathizer and agent who personally murdered President Abraham Lincoln at Ford's Theatre in Washington on 14 April 1865. This extraordinary 21-page manuscript, containing more than 5,000 words, is by a considerable margin the longest known writing of the future assassin. It remained unpublished until the 1990s. The manuscript constitutes "the earliest, the most dramatic, and one of the most revealing of the handful of political testaments that John Wilkes Booth left behind" (Writings, pp.49-50). An impassioned political jeremiad, studded with violent, inflammatory rhetoric, it was--as far as we know-never delivered. But it furnished a unique insight into the 22-year-old John Wilkes Booth's deepest convictions on the momentous national issues of slavery's expansion, secession and state's rights. The election of Abraham Lincoln in November 1860 convinced many in the slave-holding states--and Booth himself--that coercive national anti-slavery legislation would inevitably follow.
Booth's address, written in a state of high emotion and full of Shakespearean dramatic flourishes, was penned at a critical juncture: on December 20, the South Carolina legislature had proclaimed its secession from the Union, revoking its ratification to the U.S. Constitution. Then, the next day, a last-ditch compromise on slavery proposed by Kentucky Senator John Crittenden was voted down in Congress. Opening the pandora's box of secession, Booth realized, would signal the dissolution of the Union. (His fears were well grounded, for by the time Lincoln was inaugurated, a total of seven states had voted to secede). If the North took the path of coercion, Booth predicted, the inevitable result would be a "fierce Civil War." Here Booth bitterly laments the break-up of the Union forged by the patriots of 1776, flares into righteous anger at the thought that the abolitionists would risk the Union to uphold a moral position, and endorses the South's right to defend its sovereignty.
From this speech it is clear that both Lincoln and Booth deplored, in similar terms, the break-up of the Union forged by the patriots and founding fathers that they honored. In his first inaugural address--three months later--Lincoln lamented secession's "destruction of our national fabric" and memorably evoked "the mystic chords of memory" linking "every battlefield and patriot grave" to "every living heart." Here, Booth also speaks reverently of the noble sacrifices of the Revolutionary War patriots, and asks, rhetorically.
"Is our liberty less dear to us than it was to our fathers of '76?...Think of the peaceful dead...Think of the lives nobly lost in rearing aloft this great temple of liberty. Think of all the blood spilled to cement the work...the actions of our fathers...who even died to secure to us (their sons) this glorious heritage of freedom....Do you think my brothers that the spirit of those peaceful dead will smile upon us when this union is destroyed. No, No, this union must and shall be preserved."
As Rhodehamel and Taper observe, "In recent years...there has been increasing recognition that the shot from Booth's little pocket pistol was not a bolt out of the pathological blue, not an act of psychosis or drunken frenzy...but rather a political murder that can be understood only in the context of the most violent period in American history and of Booth's beliefs and prejudices...." Therefore, "if we allow John Wilkes Booth his words, we will discover the clear and authentic voice of a man convinced of the righteousness of his cause...." (Writings, p.2).
"A FIRE LIGHTED AND FANNED BY NORTHERN FANATICISM"
The political conflagration about to consume the nation, Booth asserts, "is a fire lighted and fanned by Northern fanaticism. A fire which naught but blood and justice can extinguish. I tell you the Abolition doctrine is the fire which if allowed to rage, will consume the house and crush us all beneath its ruins. Shall we my brothers be destroyed on account of these Abolition leaders (it is the leaders not the mass)." Born in the border state of Maryland and having lived in Richmond and drilled with the elite militia, the University Grays, Booth naturally absorbed deeply and unquestioningly the pervasive and at times vitriolic, pro-slavery, state's rights dogma. That militant ideology came to saturate the southern papers and to animate politicians, Congressmen, the clergy and the general populace. Booth's sister, Asia Booth Clarke, marveled at her brother's passionate identification with the South, and concluded on balance, years after the assassination, that her brother "was what he had been since childhood, an ardent lover of the South and her policy, an upholder of Southern principles...a man so single in his devotion, so unswerving in his principles, that he would yield everything for the cause he espoused" (Asia Booth Clarke, The Unlocked Book, p.115).
"INSANE ON...ONE POINT": SECESSION
Booth, like Americans on both sides of the sectional crisis, deeply revered the sacrifices and achievements of the American patriots of the Revolution, and regarded the severing of the bonds of union with unmitigated horror. Edwin Booth himself recalled that the volatile John Wilkes was regarded, in the family, as "a goodhearted, harmless, though wild-brained boy," and remembered that the family "used to laugh at his patriotic froth whenever secession was discussed. That he was insane on this one point, no one who knew him can well doubt..." (Edwina Booth Grossman, ed. Edwin Booth: Recollections by His Daughter, pp.227-228). In his draft, Booth expresses anguish and despair over South Carolina's recent act of secession. He warns of its ominous implications, especially if an attempt is made by the North to force her back into the Union. If that were to happen, he vows, it will be the catalyst for the formation of "one great Confederation" of Southern, slave-holding states.
"Gentlemen, I am no alarmist...Many laugh at the secession of South Carolina, thinking that she will come back or that if she stays out, we will never miss her. It is sheer folly to reason so. And then again, there are many who are for instant coercion. That is madness. The first attempt at force would be the cue for every Southern state to aid her. [I]t would speedily link together the southern states in one vast confederation."
The most promising solution, Booth avows, would have been the recently defeated proposed compromise: Senator John J. Crittenden's proposal to resolve the crisis by a Constitutional amendment. But that last-minute compromise, Booth notes with disgust, had been voted down by a committee of Congress (on 21 December 1860):
"Yet she [South Carolina] must be brought back and it must be done by compromise...Mr Crittenden's compromise that could have saved us has been laid upon the table, to be rejected by whom? Why, by Northern men. Gentlemen, I don't believe that any of us are represented truly in Washington. For if that compromise was put to the vote of the people it would be carried by an overwhelming majority. The men there [in Congress] are abolitionists and are determined to gain their end regardless of the consequences! South Carolina is not lost yet. When she is the whole South is lost with her."
Anguishing that other Southern states will inevitably follow the lead of South Carolina, he evokes the memory of the two great architects of compromise, Henry Clay and Daniel Webster: "The South is leaving us [the Union]. O, would to God that Clay & Webster could hear those words. Weep, fellow countrymen, for the brightest half of our stars upon the nation's banner have grown dim."
BOOTH'S ATTITUDES TOWARDS SLAVERY AND RACE
At the core of the political creed so boldly stated in this manuscript are Booth's attitudes towards slavery. "Booth had been born into a world in which slavery was part of the accepted order of things," note Rhodehamel and Taper. He clearly "shared the conviction that blacks were an inferior people, incapable of living in freedom alongside whites" (Writings, p.7). In one passage, for example, Booth reiterates the familiar argument that slavery as practiced in the American South is essentially a benign, even humane institution:
"...What has been the cause of all this? Why nothing but the constant agitation of the slavery question. Much, too much has been said upon that subject....First, I know that the South has a right according to the Constitution to keep and hold them [slaves]. And we have no right under that Constitution to interfere with hers.... And instead of looking upon slavery as a sin...I hold it to be a happiness for themselves [the slaves] and a social & political blessing for us....I have been through the whole South and have marked the happiness of master & man. Take every individual and you will find the happiness greater there than here...."
He labels as hypocritical the claim that human chattel slavery is a sin in the eyes of God: "A sin?" he exclaims, "You never saw it as such, until it became unprofitable. And you would even now share in that sin, if it was necessary to you and could be made to pay..." And, moreover, Booth writes, the national press, he complains, is now openly complicit with the abolition movement: "Can a paper be just that exaggerates the evils of man, and turns his good into crime? Can a paper be just which shows only one side of a question, leading its readers into darkness and despair?" In fact, Booth argues, the press "makes me hate my brothers in the north. It severs all our bonds of friendship. It induces our brothers in the North to deny our rights...!" And, he shrills, alluding particularly to the Fugitive Slave Act, "What right have you [the North] to exclude southern rights from the territory?...I have as much right to carry my slave into the territory as you have to carry your paid servant or your children." Elsewhere he asserts that "the liberty of the press can be abused," and its abuse should not be tolerated.
"I SAW JOHN BROWN HUNG"
The address contains a fascinating allusion to a pivotal incident in Booth's life. In October 1859, John Brown-- fresh from "Bloody Kansas"--with a small band of militant followers, seized the arsenal at Harper's Ferry, hoping to touch off an armed uprising of slaves. At the time, Booth had been in living in Richmond, where news of Brown's murderous intentions greatly alarmed the public. Federal troops under Robert E. Lee and J.E.B. Stuart swiftly stormed the arsenal, and captured Brown and his surviving men. He was convicted and sentenced by the Virginia courts to hang. Prompted by fears that there might be an armed attempt to rescue Brown, Virginia militia were called out. Booth managed to join the Richmond Grays, a militia unit that served as volunteer armed guards at the public hanging of Brown (2 December 1859). Here, Booth glories in his participation and the justice of Brown's execution:
"For John Brown was executed (yes, and justly) by his country's laws for attempting in another way, merely what these abolitionists are doing now. I saw John Brown hung. And I blessed the justice of my country's laws. I may say I helped hang John Brown and while I live, I shall think with joy upon the day when I saw the sun go down upon one traitor less within our land. His treason was no more than theirs [the abolitionists], for open force is holier than hidden craft. The Lion is more noble than the fox."
"Fierce Civil War will follow..." and "God alone can tell the rest"
In the direst terms, Booth envisions the pervasive ruin that the abolitionists will bring down upon the entire nation-- not just to the South--warning that the nation's trade will collapse, "a dearth of industry will infest the land. Famine will range round. Banks will fail. Families [will be] ruined." He warns against the North's assumption that the South could be easily coerced into compliance. He castigates Northern abolitionists for creating the crisis and makes a chilling prediction of the bloody conflict soon to erupt:
"You might have prevented this! I hope I may never live to see that day, even should it follow soon when we are no more a united nation....You would say she [the South] is weak in numbers, we [the North] are strong. We will force her to submit and once more restore the Union. The South will call in the powers of Europe. Fierce Civil War will follow. And then, what then? Why God alone can tell the rest."
"BLOOD & JUSTICE": PORTENTS OF VIOLENCE
Booth repeatedly calls for "justice" to heal the grave injustices done to the South. In Booth's lexicon, justice meant the suppression of the abolitionist movement, the strict enforcement of the Fugitive Slave law and the opening of the territories to slavery. His impassioned text is studded with inflammatory passages, hyperbolic threats and seething anger against the abolitionists, whom he likens to a serpent, and brands as traitors for causing the sundering of the union:
"Men have no right to entertain opinions which endanger the safety of the country. Such men I call traitors and treason should be stamped to death...So deep is my hatred for such men that I could wish I had them in my grasp, and I the power to crush. I'd grind them into the dust! [The South] has been wronged....She must be reconciled. How can she? Why, as I said before, with naught but justice. The Abolition party must throw away its principles. They must be hushed forever. Or else it must be done by the punishment of her aggressors. By justice that demands the blood of her aggressors. By the blood of those, who in wounding her, have slain us all, with naught save blood & justice."
In many passages, Booth strikingly links the two terms "justice" and "blood." This linkage becomes his shorthand for the blood that must be shed to right the injustices to which the South had been subjected by her enemies, the abolitionists.
"SIC SEMPER TYRANNUS!": THE FINAL ACT
Written in the incandescent heat of his anger, the Secession crisis address constitutes Booth's only overtly political writing before the fateful day-four and a half years later--of Lincoln's assassination. On the morning of the assassination, Booth addressed a self-justifying letter to the editors of The National Intelligencer (Writings, pp.147-150). Though brief, it is hauntingly similar in tone, style and even wording to his earlier Secession crisis speech, and strikingly shows that Booth's pro-southern political creed had remained unaltered in the intervening years. He clung to his conviction that there would come a moment for him to take decisive, violent action for "blood & justice." As he says in the early part of the Secession crisis address "I wish to speak, not for the sake of being looked at or talked about, but to vindicate myself in the steps I am about to take."
As Booth's editors observe, Booth shared "the conviction...that Abraham Lincoln was a malignant tyrant whose policies threatened to expunge the liberties that had long been the birthright of free, white Americans." Unquestionably, Booth believed that in carrying out the assassination of the President, he acted for the best interests of his country and his race. In fact, Booth, the "son and brother of great tragic actors, had enacted at Ford's Theatre one of the great tragedies of American history. Lincoln's murder was the final, bloody act that marked the end of the nations bloodiest war, a war that Lincoln's election as president had touched off four years before." Ironically, by that infamous act, "the unwitting assassin succeeded in projecting the tragic figure of Abraham Lincoln across the firmament of history in an apotheosis that was perfectly mythic in its grandeur and its symmetry." (Writings, p.3).
Booth's Secession crisis address, fortunately preserved for posterity by his aggrieved brother, reveals that the pistol shot fired by Booth in the darkened presidential box at Ford's Theatre was the natural consequence of his passionate pro-Southern, pro-slavery ideology, a creed that came, in the course of four years bloody war, to see President Lincoln as a living symbol of the moral, political and military domination of the South. As Booth here ominously affirms: "For God be my witness I love peace...but there is a time when men should act for themselves...I tell you, sirs, that treason weighs heavy in the scale. It is a time for us throw off all gentler feelings of our natures and summon resolution, pride, justice. Ay, and revenge, to take the place of those nobler passions...."
Provenance: John Wilkes Booth - Edwin Thomas Booth - The Hampden-Booth Theatre Library.