John Wilkes Booth: A Palm Reader's Prophecy, a Snagged Spur, a Burning Barn

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John Wilkes Booth was born in 1838 in a log house in Bel Air, Maryland, the ninth of ten children of a famous British Shakespearean actor, and as a schoolboy kept a fortune teller's prediction that he would have a grand but short life and a bad end. This episode follows him from a disastrous stage debut in Baltimore at 17, through performing as J.B. Wilkes to escape comparison with his brother Edwin, to stardom built on physical, reckless stage fights. A supporter of slavery, he borrowed a militia uniform in 1859 to watch John Brown hang, and during the war carried messages and smuggled quinine south in his theatrical trunks.

In late 1864 he funded a plot to kidnap the president and trade him for Confederate prisoners, which failed when the president changed his schedule. After Lee's surrender and a speech supporting voting rights for freed people, his aim turned to murder. On April 14, 1865, at Ford's Theatre, he timed his shot to a laugh line in Our American Cousin, stabbed Major Rathbone, caught his spur on a flag and broke his leg. A 12-day flight through southern Maryland ended in a burning Virginia tobacco barn, where a sergeant's shot severed his spinal cord.

Booth's conspirators were sent the same night to kill the vice president and the secretary of state.
He shouted a Latin motto warning of death to tyrants from the stage, followed by the claim that the South was avenged.
Hiding in the Zekiah Swamp, he read newspaper coverage condemning him, including from the South.
Dying on a farmhouse porch, he asked to see his hands and spoke of futility.
An autopsy identified him by a neck scar from a stage injury and his initials tattooed on his hand.

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