He was a famous actor. Not a failed one. A star. That’s the part people forget.
The Voice
John Wilkes Booth’s speaking voice was trained for the stage — a professionally cultivated instrument, rich, resonant, and designed to reach the back row of a nineteenth-century theater without amplification. He was not a failed actor who turned to politics. He was a successful one. The Booth family was the most famous theatrical dynasty in America. His brother Edwin was the greatest Shakespearean actor of the age. John Wilkes was a star in his own right — audiences, particularly women, found him magnetic.
He spoke in the cadence of Shakespeare’s tragedies, which he performed professionally for years. Declamatory. Dramatic. Building to climaxes with an actor’s instinct for timing. Every action was framed as part of a drama in which he was the hero. The assassination of Lincoln was, in his own mind, the final act of a play he was writing, directing, and starring in.
“Sic semper tyrannis!” he shouted after shooting Lincoln and leaping to the stage — the words attributed to Brutus at Caesar’s assassination, also the motto of Virginia. He’d rehearsed the line. He’d planned the exit. He broke his leg in the jump, which wasn’t in the script, and spent twelve days fleeing before being shot in a barn. The theatrical instinct never left him, even dying.
How We Know
No recordings of Booth exist. The evidence comes from contemporary accounts of his performances, reviews in newspapers, the testimony of witnesses at Ford’s Theatre, his letters and diary entries (written during his twelve-day flight), and the extensive documentation surrounding the Lincoln assassination investigation. Michael W. Kauffman’s American Brutus (2004) is the definitive biography.
The Accent
Mid-Atlantic American — the cultivated accent of a mid-nineteenth-century actor, trained to project Shakespearean verse in theaters from New York to Richmond. Underneath: a Maryland accent, the border-state English of a man raised between North and South who chose the South. The voice was polished, musical, and trained. It was also the voice of a fanatic, which is the combination that makes Booth so disturbing.
In Their Own Words
After shooting Lincoln: “Sic semper tyrannis!” (“Thus always to tyrants.”)
In his diary (while fleeing): “I struck boldly, and not as the papers say. I walked with a firm step through a thousand of his friends, was stopped, but pushed on.”
In his justifying letter: He compared himself to Brutus and the assassination to a service to the Republic.
What They Sounded Like in Context
Imagine Ford’s Theatre, April 14, 1865. Booth enters the presidential box. The play on stage is Our American Cousin. He waits for a laugh line — he knows the script, he’s an actor — because the laughter will cover the gunshot. It does. He fires. He leaps to the stage. “Sic semper tyrannis!” The actor’s voice carries perfectly. He’s performed the greatest exit in American history. He’s also just murdered the president.
Twelve days later, cornered in a Virginia barn, the voice is different. Hoarse. Desperate. The performance is over. He writes in his diary that he expected to be celebrated as a hero. He wasn’t. The actor misread his audience for the first and last time.
Sources
- Michael W. Kauffman, American Brutus: John Wilkes Booth and the Lincoln Conspiracies (Random House, 2004).
- Booth diary, National Archives.
- Ford’s Theatre witness testimony, Lincoln assassination investigation records.