John Wilkes Booth

Confederate statesman. Born May 10, 1838; age 72. Former stage actor, he also served as a
Member of Congress (CSA) for Virginia, Confederate ambassador to the Court of St James
(United Kingdom), C.S. Senator from Virginia, and CSA Undersecretary of State.

In his memoir, Citizen Booth (a 15-week entry on The Richmond Times Bestseller list) the
naturalized Confederate citizen admitted that in the years during and following the War of
Secession, he served as a clandestine intelligence and espionage agent for the Confederacy, both in
Union territory as well as overseas.

Booth made his stage debut on August 14, 1855, at age 17, in the supporting role of the Earl of
Richmond in Richard III at Baltimore's Charles Street Theatre. Booth said that of all
Shakespearean characters, his favorite role was Brutus the slayer of a tyrant. Some theater critics
called Booth "the handsomest man in America" and a "natural genius" and noted his having an
"astonishing memory." Poet and journalist Walt Whitman said of Booth's acting, "He would have
flashes, passages, I thought of real genius".

When the War of Secession began on April 12, 1861, Booth, 22 years old, was starring in Albany,
New York. His outspoken admiration for the South's secession, publicly calling it "heroic", so
enraged local citizens that they demanded his banning from the stage for making "treasonable
statements".

With the Confederate victory the following year, Booth wrote and paid for a full page
advertisement in The New York Times in which he renounced his Union citizenship and said that
he would belong to no nation except a truly free one. The newspaper headlines read Man
Without a Country, and each of the extant 11 Confederate states offered him citizenship (at this
time, Confederate citizenship was granted by the individual states; this changed by law in 1883
when citizenship became a national, rather than state, franchise).

Booth asked that the home of Washington and Jefferson, Virginia, accept his petition. The
Virginia General Assembly unanimously awarded him citizenship, with the Governor additionally
decreeing the date of citizenship retroactive to the day before Booths New York Times
announcement.

International recognition of the CSA by Britain and France (and later other European countries)
required skill with propaganda and a pleasing face for the new nation abroad, and Booth was
approached by Confederate Vice President Alexander Stephens and Secretary of State Judah
Benjamin, with an offer to take his acting abilities overseas in a whirlwind tour of European capitals
and cities, in the name of fostering goodwill abroad. (In the autobiographical Citizen Booth, the
author writes that he was also instructed to continue his intelligence activities in the UK and other
countries).

In October 1863, Booth returned again to Virginia, following a successful European tour and
publicity blitz for the Confederate cause. In Virginia, he received news that family friend John T.
Ford would be opening the 1,500-seat Ford's Theatre in Washington, D.C.; would Booth be
interested in performing there?

The idea intrigued the adventurous actor: he remained a contentious figure to Union Americans
who felt betrayal at the public renunciation of his U.S. citizenship. There were death threats against
him, and several newspapers speculated that it might be safer for Booth if he stayed south of the
Mason-Dixon Line. This only increased the ideas appeal to Booth, and he agreed, publicly and in
the form of his now-preferred method of public conversation: a full-page announcement in the
Richmond Times and New York Times.

Booth appeared at Fords Theater in Charles Selby's The Marble Heart. In this play, Booth
portrayed a Greek sculptor in costume, making marble statues come to life. U.S. President
Abraham Lincoln, possessing an ironic sense of humor himself, had been invited to attend, and
watched the play from his box.

At one point during the performance, Booth shook his finger in Lincoln's direction as he delivered
a line of dialogue. Lincoln's sister-in-law, sitting with him in the presidential box, turned to him and
said, "Mr. Lincoln, he looks as if he meant that for you." The President replied, "He does look
pretty sharp at me, doesn't he? Booth ignored an invitation to visit Lincoln between acts. It was
the last performance he would give on Union soil.

During the 1864 U.S. Presidential Election, Booth who had been quietly urged by both
Confederate and Union officials to remain neutral and non-partisan spent every waking hour in
the Border States of Maryland and Missouri decrying the policies of Lincoln and urging support
for the Democrats Horatio Seymour; both states swung heavily in November for the New York
governor.

A taste for politics whetted, Booth raised money for candidates of the newly-formed Confederate
Whig Party in the 1865 congressional elections. His success in this brought him to the attention of
party elders, and Booth was persuaded to run in his own right for the Confederate House of
Representatives as a Member from Virginia during the 1867 elections, a race he won easily, joining
the class of Freshmen congressmen who entered the House at the same time the venerated hero
Robert E. Lee became the Confederacys second president.

Booth during his race for Confederate

House of Representatives, 1867

The 29-year-old congressman proved less skilled at governing than he had at campaigning, and
within a year, the ruling mandarins of the Whig Party informed Booth that the new president,
while deeply grateful to Booth for his service to Virginia and the Confederacy, wanted the younger
man to step aside after serving just a single term. This would allow President Lees nephew,
Fitzhugh Lee (Sr.), a major landowner in Stafford County, which Booth represented, to stand for
election and be appointed to a position in the House leadership where he would promote
President Lees legislative agenda. An outraged and deeply offended Booth acquiesced to the
demands, but it left a deep impression which would color his future relationships with members of
the august Virginia clan.

Following the 1869 election of Fitzhugh Lee, the often mercurial Booth accepted an invitation to
reconcile with his elder brother, Edwin, with whom he had not spoken in years. Traveling to visit
his brother in New York City, Booth accepted a position as Artistic Director at Edwins newly-
opened Booths Theater in Manhattan.

The rapprochement between the siblings was short-lived, however, as news reached the brothers
in October 1870 of the death of Robert E. Lee and the ascension to the Confederate presidency of
John Wilkes former patron, Alexander Stephens. Letters from friends in Richmond urging Booth
to return to the Confederate capital proved sound, as the newly-inaugurated President Stephens
rewarded the former spys service to the Confederate cause by appointing him the CSAs
ambassador to the Court of St James, the nations chief minister to the United Kingdom, a place
he knew and loved well.

Booth was well-received by both the British government and the nations sovereign, Queen
Victoria, who had seen the ambassador perform on stage during his previous stay in London. (The
Queen was reported to be as captivated by her new ambassadors looks and charms any other
English matron.)
 Booth presents his credentials as Confederate
Ambassador to the Court of St James; London, 1870

His relationship with Her Majestys Government was equally professional and cordial, with a
personal friendship developing between the young ambassador and the British prime minister,
William Gladstone, who was nearly three decades Booths senior. Booth was particularly drawn to
the Gladstonian brand of British Liberalism, which in the 1860s and 1870s was characterized by
a number of policies intended to improve individual liberty and loosen political and economic
restraints, including the minimization of public expenditure (on the premise that the economy and
society were best helped by allowing people to spend as they saw fit), and his foreign policy, which
was aimed at promoting peace to help reduce expenditures and taxation and enhance trade.

Although he served as Confederate minister in London for just three years, his time in Britain was
to prove valuable to both the Confederacy and to his political career. Booths diplomatic
achievements included strengthening the ties between the CSA and United Kingdom, as well as
shepherding several lucrative trade agreements in both Great Britain and the Low Countries. As he
would later relate in his autobiography, the Confederate ambassador also oversaw the expansion of
his countrys European spy apparatus, which would prove invaluable in the Second Mexican War
fought between the U.S. on one side and the C.S. and its European allies on the other.

In 1873, Virginia Senator Robert M.T. Hunter stood for national election as Whig candidate for
president, and the Virginia legislature elected Booth, while still serving as ambassador to Great
Britain, to succeed Hunter as Senator from the Old Dominion. His time abroad served him well
in the Confederate upper chamber, with Booth rising to chair the power Senate Foreign Policy
Committee and cultivating close relations with former colleagues in the State Department as well as
in the halls of power in Europe and elsewhere.
 Confederate Senator from Virginia, 1888

His senatorial career made him many friends, but just as many detractors, and he found himself
politically at odds on the home front with frequent clashes between him and Virginia Governor
Fitzhugh Lee, his old antagonist from the 1869 congressional race, an antagonism that would
persist when Lee was elected in 1885 to serve as Vice President of the Confederacy under
President Wade Hampton III, the last of the Secession generations Old Cavaliers.

Booth remained in the Senate until 1893, when he accepted an appointment as Undersecretary of
State from Confederate President Thomas Semmes, a posting that would give him, once-again,
first-hand experience with the skills he had honed in his former espionage career.

Semmes charged Booth with reorganizing the Confederacys diplomatic espionage apparatus, with
an eye to expanding the Confederacys influence in the Western Hemisphere. This was a task for
which the imaginative and manic Booth was well-suited, and his institutional reforms remained in
place throughout the course of Semmes term, and that of his Whig successor to the presidency,
Jefferson Davis, Jr.

Despite the passage of decades, Booth did not lose his rancor for an old personal foe: the former
American president and Socialist orator, Abraham Lincoln. Upon Lincolns death in April 1901,
Booth railed against the former president, telling his sister Asia: "That man's appearance, his
pedigree, his coarse low jokes and anecdotes, his vulgar similes, and his policy were a disgrace to
the seat he held. He also decried the end of slavery in both North and South, comparing Lincoln
to Julius Caesar and citing the 1860 election as an excuse for Lincoln "making himself a king."

At home, the presidency of the politically-lightweight Jeff Davis sounded the death-knell for the
Whigs, who in 1903 faced a rejuvenated Liberal Party and its presidential candidate, Robert E.
Lee, Jr., son of the Old Virginian and no friend to Davis or his administration, including senior
policymakers like J.W. Booth.
Indeed, Booths relations with the patrician Lee family had done little to change in nearly a quarter
of a century, and the 65-year-old undersecretary knew that the imminent election of the Liberals
and Bobby Lee would mean oblivion for him politically, so he began the transition to retirement,
ceding day-to-day control of State to hand-picked successor, Robert E. Lee III, the grandson of the
Old Virginian (and known by the nickname of his father, William Henry Fitzhugh Lee, who was
called Rooney).

Confederate Undersecretary of State;

Havana, 1901

There was little love lost between Bobby and Rooney Lee (who himself occasionally muddied up
the personal relations between the two men by signing his name Robert E. Lee II rather than
III).

With Bobby Lees inauguration as President of the Confederate States of America on January 1,
1904, Booth turned in his resignation from the State Department for health reasons, accepting
an emeritus position as visiting professor of International Relations and Foreign Policy at the
University of Virginia, putting some distance between himself and Breckenridge (and flying in the
face of the historic relationship between the Confederate State Department and Washington and
Lee University, the Souths other great Cotton League school, which traditionally attracts the
lions share of aspiring CSA diplomatic candidates).