| The assassination of President Abraham Lincoln on April 14, 1865, made the name of his assailant, John Wilkes Booth, familiar to the entire nation. Unlike the names of future presidential assassins, however, his was already known to much of the American public. Junius Brutus Booth, Sr., the assassin's father, had acted throughout the country since 1821. He enjoyed a long and distinguished career. The elder Booth's older sons, Junius, Jr., and Edwin, also actors, kept the name in lights after the father's death in 1852. Then, in early 1862, John Wilkes Booth established his own reputation as a nationally ranked performer. He toured widely, acting in all the principal cities of the nation. When a play called for a mysterious stranger, a fiendish tyrant, or a passionate swashbuckler, the handsome and athletic young Booth filled the billliterally. Dramatic critics were mixed in their opinions of him. Some were lukewarm toward him while others were unstinting in their praise. The play-going public was less hesitant, embracing him without reserve. Soon Booth was earning twenty thousand dollars a year. By the time he quit his full-time stage career in May 1864, at the age of twenty-six, he had become one of the most popular and successful actors in the United States. |
| One need not search far in the historical record to find friendly recollections of John Wilkes Booth by his contemporaries. The actors and staff at Ford's Theatre thought the world of him. Gay and light-hearted, "he was nothing like his terrible deed suggests," claimed Kitty Brink, a wardrobe assistant and dresser. Actor John Matthews found Booth was "a most winning, captivating man." To W J. Ferguson of Ford's he was "a marvelously clever and amusing demigod." Even members of the Ford family remembered him fondly, despite the hardships |
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