Lust for Fame: The Stage Career of John Wilkes Booth (review)

BOOK REVIEWS Lust for Fame: The Stage Career of John Wilkes Booth. By Gordon Samples. (Jefferson, N.C.: McFarland & Company, Inc., 1982. Pp. xii, 238. $21.95.) Readers interested in John Wilkes Booth's possible motivation for Lincoln 's assassination will find very little on this subject in Gordon Samples 's book. But for those whose interest in Booth encompasses more than his "one mad act," Samples's volume provides a mine of interesting information. The book includes lengthy contemporary quotations from newspaper reviews of Booth's stage performances. These amply support Samples's thesis that despite the infamous deed that obscures all his other achievements, John Wilkes Booth was a very talented and highly acclaimed actor. Equally valuable are the excerpts from recollections of individuals who had known Booth personally during his years as a travelling star. Many of these were published originally in obscure and difficult to locate sources and the author is to be commended for bringing them to light. Several of Booth's own letters, some previously unpublished , are also includedin Samples'snarrative, shedding further lighton the more attractive aspects oftheactor'spersonality. Thebook also contains a number of photographs, a chronology, and a sampling of representative casts ofplays in which Booth acted. Footnotes andbibliogrphy further reveal the author's extensive research. Nevertheless, in spite of the volume's strong points, there are also some serious problems with the work. Factual errors, often of the most careless sort, abound. Readers with even a minimal knowledge of the period will be stunned by the misinformation that places Booth and fellow members of the Richmond Grays "preparing to board a special military train which would take them to Charleston, South Carolina, to guard the captured abolitionist, John Brown . . . "(p. 40). There is also the surprising remark describing Montgomery, Alabama, as the "last capital of the Confederacy" (p. 179). While it might be argued in the author's defense that he is a theater historian, not a Civil War specialist, when one considers that he spent many years researching Booth's life, it is nothing short of amazing that he consistently dates Booth's firing of the fatal shot at Lincoln on April 15, 1865; then, to confound his readers yet further, he also tells us that Lincoln was "killed on Good Friday" (p. 6). Nor are the factual errors, of which these examples are only a few, confined to matters peripheral to the author's interest. Unfortunately, 169 170CIVIL WAR HISTORY even in carrying out his major objective of chronicling the life of Booth before the assassination, similar mistakes abound. Booth certainly never attended St. Charles' College at Pikeville, Maryland, astheauthor states (p. 12); when his father Junius Brutus died, John Wilkes was fourteen, not thirteen as Samples avers (p. 14); and even in thechronology, which purports to give a complete list of Booth's stage appearances, certain important (and easily documented) engagements are left out entirely. The author also displays vast confusion on the date and significance of Booth's Canadian travels. He seems to think that Booth went to Canada at least twice, and in fact, narrates events properly dated to October, 1864, as if they occurred before the actor's longengagementin Boston in April and May of that same year. When it comes to the matter of the assassin 's escape, readers familiar with the last twelve days of Booth's life will wonder why Samples speaks of "the diary he kept during the six days and five nights of the escape" (p. 3). More serious, however, than any actual errors of fact is the author's uncritical acceptance of data from highly questionable sources. The GreatConspiracy (an anonymous, fictionalizednarrativebestdescribed as a "penny dreadful," publishedinPhiladelphiain 1866) is cited entirely too often as if it were a reliable fount of historic fact. In one instance (p. 166), Samples even quotes as an authentic letter of Booth to his girl friend, EUa Starr Turner, a piece obviously produced by the vivid imagination of the author of The Great Conspiracy. News stories written by the colorful but not entirely reliable "Gath" Townsend are also accorded far too much reliability. A final criticism, in yet another area, is the author...