John Rhodehamel - Americas Original Sin

AMERICAS ORIGINAL SIN

White Supremacy, John Wilkes Booth, and the Lincoln Assassination

JOHN RHODEHAMEL

Johns Hopkins University Press
BALTIMORE

2021 John Rhodehamel

All rights reserved. Published 2021

Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper

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Johns Hopkins University Press

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Baltimore, Maryland 21218-4363

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Rhodehamel, John H., author.

Title: Americas original sin : white supremacy, John Wilkes Booth, and the Lincoln assassination / John Rhodehamel.

Description: Baltimore : Johns Hopkins University Press, 2021. | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2020045988 | ISBN 9781421441610 (hardcover) | ISBN 9781421441627 (ebook)

Subjects: LCSH : Lincoln, Abraham, 18091865Assassination. | Booth, John Wilkes, 18381865. | White supremacy movementsUnited States. | United StatesRace relationsHistory. | United StatesHistory18491877.

Classification: LCC E 457.5 . R 525 2021 | DDC 973.7092dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020045988

A catalog record for this book is available from the British Library.

Frontispiece: Abraham Lincoln, February 5, 1865. Alexander Gardner.

Huntington Library, photOV10681.

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Johns Hopkins University Press uses environmentally friendly book materials, including recycled text paper that is composed of at least 30 percent post-consumer waste, whenever possible.

Typeset in Dante by Amy Ruth Buchanan/3rd sister design.

For my triplets

JACK SAM and CATHERINE

and my singular ANNA

And in memory of a pair of brothers and their uncle:

PRIVATE JOHN RHODEHAMEL ,

Fifty-Seventh Ohio Volunteer Infantry, died July 4, 1862,

US military hospital, Moscow, Tennessee

SERGEANT JACOB RHODEHAMEL ,

Seventy-Fifth Illinois Volunteer Infantry, killed by

shell fragment, Resaca, Georgia, May 14, 1864

CORPORAL SIMON PETER RHODEHAMEL ,

Eighth Ohio Volunteer Cavalry, died July 1 of wounds

sustained in action near Liberty, Virginia,

on June 19, 1864

ALSO BY JOHN RHODEHAMEL

George Washington: The Wonder of the Age

The American Revolution: Writings from the War of Independence, editor

The Great Experiment: George Washington and the American Republic

George Washington: Writings, editor

Right or Wrong, God Judge Me: The Writings of John Wilkes Booth, coeditor

The Last, Best Hope of Earth: Abraham Lincoln and the Promise of America, exhibition catalogue, cocurator

Foundations of Freedom

Washington, Jefferson, and Lincoln: The Shaping of the American Presidency, exhibition catalogue

Letters of Liberty

The Blessings of Liberty: The U.S. Constitution, 17871987, exhibition catalogue

AMERICAS ORIGINAL SIN

Theres a story of what never happened thats been told thousands of times, a story of political murder and revenge, sorrow and crippling doubt. A family of famous American actors named Booth all knew this story by heart. Father and sons, theyd played it many times. This story is William Shakespeares tragical history of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark. The father of the acting family, the mad tragedian Junius Brutus Booth, had moved two generations of theatergoers on two continents with his portrayal of the melancholy prince. The older son, Edwin Booth, won enduring fame as the finest Hamlet of them allbecoming the standard to which all actors aspired and none reachedwith his hundred-night run in the title role in New York City during the last winter of the Civil War. The younger son, John Wilkes Booth, had played Hamlet, too. But he won far more fame for his spectacular, violent portrayal of the murderous tyrant Richard III in another of Shakespeares tragedies.

Prince Hamlet has sworn to avenge the murder of his father, King Hamlet. The killer is none other than the dead kings brother, Claudius, Hamlets uncle, who has elevated himself to the Danish throne by his crime and in the bargain has incestuously taken his brothers widow, Gertrude, the princes mother, as his wife. But doubt drains away Hamlets native resolution. He cannot bring himself to kill. Then in the third act the hesitant avenger comes upon his guilty uncle alone and vulnerable. On his knees, his back turned and his eyes closed, Claudius will be easy to dispatch. Hamlet bares his sword.

But then the prince, who has thought long and hard about the geographies of the undiscovered country of the dead, is stricken again by doubt. He decides that this is not the time to strike. For Claudius is on his knees in prayer, and to kill him thus clean-souled will be to send him straight to heaven, hardly a fitting punishment for his cold-blooded murder of his own brother, all the more so when Hamlet reflects that his fathers own unshriven ghost is consigned to a purgatory of fearful punishment. Hamlet sheathes his sword. Two more acts remain before the stage is strewn with corpses and the prince perceives that the rest is silence.

The irony is that the usurper had been unable to shed his guilt. Claudius remained unforgiven, with no hope of salvation. He couldnt pray; he couldnt repent his crime so long as he continued to enjoy the fruits of that crimeMy crown, mine own ambition and my queen (act 3, scene 3). Had Hamlet run Claudius through on the spot, his uncles soul would have been hell-bound after all, and Hamlet would have freed himself from the treble-sworn promise of vengeance he had made to his fathers perturbed spirit.

Another character well acquainted with sorrow and sometimes troubled by doubt, one Abraham Lincoln of Kentucky, Indiana, and Illinois, was among William Shakespeares most devoted American admirers. Like the Booths, Lincoln knew Shakespeare by heart. He judged Macbeth Shakespeares greatest play. But he thought the despairing Claudiuss speech here in act 3 of Hamlet the finest passage in all the tragedies. Lincoln said that Claudiuss soliloquy always struck me as one of the finest touches of nature in the world.

Hamlet had let his doubts cancel his resolution when striking out boldly would have given him his revenge. Like the fictional Hamlet, the actual Abraham Lincoln had known heartache and had often been mired in doubt, particularly in his youth and particularly in matters of faith.

Unlike the fictional Hamlet, the actual John Wilkes Booth knew no doubt. Booth was a true believer in a time when millions of American men were proving themselves willing to kill and to die for what they believed. For when his own chance for vengeance came, at the performance of a very different kind of play, Booth never doubted. He knew he was killing for his country and for the white race, and he killed with the expectation that the killing would make him a hero, in the North as well as the South.