Book Reviewed: Fortune's Fool: The Biography Of John Wilkes Booth, by Terry Alford

Book Reviewed: Fortune's Fool: The Biography Of John Wilkes Booth, by Terry Alford

The Assassin

For 12 days in April 1865, when President Lincoln was assassinated, the nation was in a state of deep mourning. Thousands of federal troops, detectives, and police scoured the country in search of the assassin who shot President Abraham Lincoln. The assassins, John Wilkes Booth and co-conspirator David Herold go on the run through the Maryland countryside, across the Potomac River, and finally into northern Virginia.

In this book, author Terry Alford analyzes the troubled life of John Wilkes Booth responsible for the assassination of President Lincoln. Several authors have looked at the life of Booth, but Terry Alford says that few people close to Booth believed that he was not capable of committing such a crime. History has shown that Booth was a strong supporter of Confederate Army, and at the closing of the war in the spring of 1865, Booth considered his last option to assassinate the President to revive the conflict, by causing a state of panic and confusion in the country. Booth and his friends originally plotted to kidnap President Lincoln, but later abandoned that plan and planned to shoot him inside the Ford Theater, Washington D.C. John Wilkes Booth was a popular actor in his days and performed at the Ford's Theatre regularly, He was well known to its owner, John T. Ford, and he had given Booth free access to all parts of the theater.

John Wilkes Booth was not only a supporter of the Confederates but also strongly opposed to the abolitionists of the day. He even joined the Richmond Grays militia who had sent 1500 men to Harpers Ferry, WV to guard against any attempt to rescue John Brown from the gallows by his fellow abolitionists. Booth was wearing his militia uniform and standing near the scaffold as a key member of the militia.

Robert Redford revisited and reevaluated the historical facts about the life of John Wilkes Booth and produced the movie "The Conspirator" in 2010, starring Toby Kebbell as Booth. Redford's version of story has some differences with the story of Terry Alford. In 2008, the History channel tells the compelling story of the hunt for John Wilkes Booth based on the book by Michael Kauffman's "American Brutus: John Wilkes Booth and the Lincoln Conspiracies."