A face appears, hovering more than fifteen feet above the stage: the handsome, regular features of the twenty-six-year-old John Wilkes Booth. It’s 4th March 1865.
Booth
‘… Between the acting of a dreadful thing
And the first motion, all the interim is
Like a phantasma or a hideous dream.’
As I stood above him, so close behind his head, on the day of his second inauguration, musing on Brutus, it dawned on me how childishly simple it would be to kill the son of a bitch.
As he speaks, it’s as if the sun comes out and lights the cadaverous face of Abraham Lincoln, fifty-six, ten feet directly beneath him, as can clearly be seen in the sole remaining photograph of the event. Lincoln stands at a podium, reading from a single sheet of paper.
Lincoln … On the occasion corresponding to this four years ago, all thoughts were anxiously directed to an impending civil war. All dreaded it – all sought to avert it. Both parties deprecated war; but one of them would make war rather than let the nation survive; and the other would accept war rather than let it perish. And the war came.
Neither party expected for the war the magnitude or the duration which it has already attained. Each looked for an easier triumph, and a result less fundamental and astounding. Both read the same Bible, and pray to the same God; and each invokes His aid against the other. It may seem strange that any man should dare to ask a just God’s assistance in wringing their bread from the sweat of other men’s faces; but let us judge not, that we be not judged. The prayers of both could not be answered – that of neither has been answered fully.
The Almighty has His own purposes. ‘Woe unto the world because of offences! For it must needs be that offences come; but woe to that man by whom the offence cometh.’ If we shall suppose that American slavery is one of those offences which, in the providence of God, must needs come, but which, having continued through His appointed time, He now wills to remove, and that He gives to both North and South this terrible war, as the woe due to those by whom the offence came, shall we discern therein any departure from those divine attributes which the believers in a living God always ascribe to Him? Fondly do we hope – fervently do we pray – that this mighty scourge of war may speedily pass away. Yet, if God wills that it continue until all the wealth piled by the bondsman’s two hundred and fifty years of unrequited toil shall be sunk, and until every drop of blood drawn with the lash shall be paid by another drawn with the sword, as was said three thousand years ago, so still it must be said, ‘The judgements of the Lord are true and righteous altogether.’
With malice toward none; with charity for all; with firmness in the right, as God gives us to see the right, let us strive on to finish the work we are in; to bind up the nation’s wounds; to care for him who shall have borne the battle, and for his widow, and his orphan – to do all which may achieve and cherish a just and lasting peace among ourselves, and with all nations.
As he turns away, raising his right hand preparatory to taking the oath of office, his image fades, leaving only the face of Booth, who, having listened to the speech with a sardonic curl of the lip, now turns slightly to face forward.
Booth However much he tried to pretty it up with all those fine phrases from the good book, I could tell what it was stood behind his words: it was citizenship for niggers. I was there, let me tell you, I was one of the Honour Guard, when our own General Bobby Lee strung up crazy old John Brown in Charlestown. So you could say I was in at the beginning. Now, by God, I am determined to be in at the end. I am resolved this is the last speech he will ever make.
He smiles wolfishly.
‘I do love thee so
That I will shortly send thy soul to heaven.’
I’ll put him through.