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The Legend of John Wilkes Booth

Myth, Memory, and a Mummy

C. Wyatt Evans

October 2004
224 pages, 15 photographs, 6 x 9
CultureAmerica
Cloth ISBN 978-0-7006-1352-6, $24.95 (t)

WINNER OF THE AVERY O. CRAVEN AWARD, ORGANIZATION OF AMERICAN HISTORIANS

book cover imageA deformed thumb, a neck scar from a stage accident, and a broken left leg, the result of a dramatic leap. These were the telltale markings that for decades identified a sideshow attraction as the supposed body of John Wilkes Booth. They persuaded onlookers that Lincoln’s assassin was not killed in 1865 but survived the assault on Garrett’s barn to live on as a fugitive for thirty years afterwards. As Wyatt Evans shows, some popular stories, no matter how weird and improbable, simply refuse to die.

Evans recounts how a mummified corpse came to embody the romantic image of the assassin and the legend of his survival. He traces the legend’s development in the weeks following the assassination to the appearance of the “Booth Mummy,” the remains of an Oklahoma drifter embalmed in 1903 and displayed in carnival sideshows throughout the West. He assesses the political and ideological motivations in both Southern and Northern cultures that made proliferation of the legend possible as well as profitable. He concludes by examining the legend’s persistence in present-day America, the mummy’s ironic fate, and the recent efforts to exhume Booth’s real remains.

Weaving a “vernacular intellectual history,” Evans shows how the legend emerged from a tangle of cultural and historical events including white Americans’ quest for a suitable racial pre-history, collective memories of the Civil War, and even incipient suspicions of conspiracy, since belief in Booth’s escape automatically implied a government cover-up of Booth’s capture and death. More than a sop to Confederate diehards for whom Booth’s escape symbolized Southern vindication, the legend exemplified Americans’ inability and unwillingness to enact closure over the tragedy of Lincoln’s death.

The Legend of John Wilkes Booth is a compelling story of how collective memories and popular histories collide with, clash, and sometimes overcome mainstream accounts of the past. It offers an alternate venue for studying the workings of Civil War memory in American culture and demonstrates how (and why) culture produced at the grassroots level can challenge the official version of events. Through his meticulous account, Evans sheds new light on our complex attitudes toward heroes and villains, our need to mythologize tragedies, and our unwillingness to let go of myths, however absurd.

“In all the carnival of American culture, surely nothing was more bizarre than the odyssey of the supposed mummy of Lincoln’s assassin. Booth is in our memories, and Evans ably demonstrates why we refuse to put him out.”--William C. Davis, author of The Cause Lost

“In the nether world of conspiracy theories the irrational trumps the rational. This book helps us understand why.”--James M. McPherson, author of Battle Cry of Freedom

“No reader of this fascinating and fast-paced narrative will be less than mesmerized.”--Bertram Wyatt-Brown, author of The Shaping of Southern Culture

“A fresh new perspective on both Booth and American culture.”--Edward L. Ayers, author of In the Presence of Mine Enemies

C. WYATT EVANS is assistant professor of history at Drew University. He has contributed to the Journal of Southern Religion, Dictionary of American History, Encyclopedia of Modern American Conspiracies, and the volume Alcohol and Temperance in Modern History.