John Wilkes Booth- April 14th- Green Mount Cemetery- Baltimore, Maryland

I'll admit that I didn't grasp the significance of my random decision last Wednesday to call up fellow Examiner- Tamar Alexia Fleishman - to see if she wanted to go with me to historical Green Mount cemetery to troll for photos and find the grave of John Wilkes Booth and two of his fellow conspirators (Michael O'Laughlin and Samuel Arnold )who were interred there. It wasn't until we had passed the better part of a crystal blue spring day discussing history- both of the Lincoln assassination and the city of Baltimore, Maryland, that I realized that it was precisely 145 years to the day that John Wilkes Booth ended the life of the President most responsible for holding this nation together.

We all know the basic story. Booth ,the actor turned assassin- shoots Abraham Lincoln point blank in the head and jumps from the Presidential box onto the stage , shatters his leg and screams "Sic Semper Tyrannis !"( as always with Tyrants) before riding off into the night. Ford's Theater has continued to operate since April 14^th,1865- but it has never topped this drama. A stunned America -weary and traumatized by 4 long years of Civil War and jubilant after the surrender of Confederate forces  by General Robert E. Lee at Appomattox on April 9^th- was delivered the horrifying news that Lincoln was murdered in the night, in public, while he sat watching a comedy. How this could happen in a city occupied by Union troops charged in protecting the President was nearly impossible to grasp. How an assassin could escape and still be at large was even harder to bear.

If you think you know this whole story it is time you revisit it here.

Prepare to be fascinated.

The Booth burial plot sits in the Dogwood section below the terraced heights and crypts of Green Mount- a Victorian cemetery crowded by statuary and  historical significance. A large obelisk sits in the center of the Booth plot that reads:   

                              To The Memory Of The Children Of

  Junius Brutus

And Mary Ann Booth

John Wilkes

Fredrick

Elizabeth

Mary Ann

Henry Byron

Joseph Adrian

Booth

There are several marked plots with names of various Booth kin- but there is no actual stone marking the location of the assassin's grave. It is understandable that the family and the cemetery would have it so. There are those who would deface it still. There are those who might count it as fair game for souvenir hunting. 145 years have done little to impress the gravity of this preconceived conspiratorial act by an otherwise talented and intelligent man. No one who knew John Wilkes Booth would have considered him anything other than a forthright and unrepentant confederate sympathizer from a family of famous actors. In Washington, D.C. there were plenty of southern sympathizers. The Federal city was rife with spies and intrigue during the war years. The conspiracy itself was almost haphazardly conducted . The original plan was to kidnap Lincoln and key members of his administration and hold them for ransom in order to force an exchange of confederate prisoners of war. It was a last minute decision by Abraham Lincoln to alter his schedule that caused Booth and his co-conspirators to make the change from kidnapping to murder. No one ever accused John-son of Junius Booth- of not being able to think on his feet and improvise when circumstance commanded. He was after all, an actor- with pedigree. No one considered John of being capable of murder. Least of all his father. To hate Lincoln was one thing- to kill him quite another.

It was his brother Edwin, a famous actor in his own right ,who later took solace in a random act that occurred on a train platform at Jersey City,New Jersey when Robert Todd Lincoln was nearly dragged underneath a train. Lincoln's only surviving son nearly fell into the space between the train and the platform and unable to escape as he was pressed by a large crowd . It was  Edwin Booth who caught him by his coat and pulled him to safety at the last moment. Booth was well known to Robert Todd Lincoln  ,as his fame as a stage celebrity was widespread-it was Edwin Booth who hadn't realized whose life he had saved until he received a note of thanks from a government official.

Tamar told me of a bid to exhume  the body John Wilkes Booth   

to somehow prove that someone else lay in the grave of Jesse James.) It is cynical in the extreme to assign yet another conspiracy to the death of the misguided for the entertainment of voyeurs. America has always had a love affair with conspiracy theories-it's in our blood. Apparently Green Mount cemetery refuses to do such a thing;especially as the Booth descendants want the cemetery pay for the exhumation. Assassin or not- here he was interred by his family and here he will stay buried.

Booth was a Baltimore boy.(By way of  Bel Air,Maryland ).His family were centered in this most southern of cities. It's here  they chose to be buried together. It is here that we count backwards by studying history as it is- not how we wish it would be.

Read the last diary entry of John Wilkes Booth.

The official sketches in the courtroom of the Lincoln conspirators by General Lew Wallace- writer of Ben Hur