Immediately, a conundrum. I did not want to write a book about John Wilkes. This is a man who craved attention and has gotten too much of it; I didn’t think he deserved mine. And yet there is no way around the fact that I wouldn’t be writing about his family if he weren’t who he was, if he hadn’t done what he did. The tension over this issue—how to write the book without centering John Wilkes—is something I grappled with on nearly every page.

Researching the Booths was an adventure. I discovered whole communities fascinated by this family, particularly those online at LincolnConspirators.com (formerly BoothieBarn.com) and those in the flesh who maintain the Booths’ old home, Tudor Hall. There was no shortage of material. But separating fact from fiction was often impossible. A number of stories about the Booths have been told and retold, appear in many sources, yet have doubtful provenance. One result of having a brother who ranks with history’s great villains—a lot of mythology.

Donald Trump was elected to the presidency while I was still in the early stages of research. The shock and despair of this waylaid me for more than a year. It seemed pointless to be writing about anything else and it took much longer than it should have for me to realize that I wasn’t writing about anything else. The more I read of Lincoln’s warnings concerning the tyrant and the mob, the more I immersed myself in the years that led to the Civil War, the more brightly lit the road from there to here became.

The Lost Cause may be temporarily mislaid, but it has never been lost. Whenever Black people exercise genuine political power in this country, the assassin appears, the mob rises. This is the history of America and there is no escaping it. Abraham Lincoln told us so.

I was in the midst of my final edits when, during the violent insurrection of January 6th, 2021, I saw the flag of the Confederacy carried through the halls of the Capitol for the very first time. Let it be the last.

Afterword and Acknowledgments

It is only natural, when reading a historical novel, to want to know which parts are true. But the question here is a complicated one. There is an enormous amount of material, both primary and secondary, regarding the Booth family. Some of it is confusing; some of it is contradictory; all of it is fascinating. So there are things here that I am confident are true and things that I know I made up. But there are also things I did not make up, yet am uncertain are true.

Of the characters in this book, Rosalie is the most fictional. She left only a slight mark on the world—one or two letters, and occasional references to her in the books and letters of her siblings, usually referring to her as poor Rose, the invalid sister. It was a great frustration to never be able to settle the question of what exactly her infirmity was. In the end I chose scoliosis, which is referenced in her death certificate. And because, for obvious reasons, Richard III was in my head.