More than a century has passed since they clapped and shouted and cheered him. All of them, every person in every seat in every theater, now dead. One by one, they go, winking out of existence. The enslaved . . . though only ten years old I sold for . . . and the free, the civilians, the soldiers . . . wherever they fired on our boats we burnt everything that would burn . . . the spies, the thieves, the overseers, the auctioneers, the nurses . . . I have forgotten how to feel . . . the clerks and the clergy, the critics, the poets and politicians, the profiteers, the postboys, the lion tamers, the pigeon killers, the mummers, the mourners, the farmers, the famous, the failures, the fortunate, the fallen, Frederick, Mary Ann, Elizabeth, Henry, John, June, Asia, Rosalie, Edwin, Joe. One by one, they go.

—

Are there ghosts?

How could there not be?

Author’s Note

I began thinking about this book during one of our American spates of horrific mass shootings. Among other things, like other writers before me, I wondered about the families of the shooters—how would such a family deal with their own culpability, all the if-only’s? Would it be possible to rejoin the devastated community? What happens to love when the person you love is a monster? This led me to the family of John Wilkes Booth. I knew he had brothers and sisters. I didn’t know much else.

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.