The Assassination of Lincoln

For my podcast reporting of this week I decided to follow a podcast from the Organization of American Historian's (oah.org) "Talking History" series. I chose "American Brutus" by Michael Kauffman, which is about John Wilkes Booth and the Assassination of Abraham Lincoln. Kauffman had previously written a book titled "American Brutus: John Wilkes Booth and the Lincoln Conspiracy" in 2004.

Kauffman argues that the assassination had not been very well investigated previously. Kauffman paints Booth as a complicated individual, who was handsome, well known as an actor, a skilled manipulator ("an actor til the end", that he was motivated by failure to assist the Confederacy and a waning self-worth that was dependent on this assassination plot. Kauffman claims that Lincoln wasn't as universally beloved as we see him as, and that Booth was surprised when he wasn't declared a hero. However, Kauffman, also says that no publication at the time called Booth a fanatic, or a radical or anything along such lines and several had drawn a comparison between Lincoln and Caesar and called for a Brutus. He spends a lot of time discussing Booth's co-conspirators, who were led to believe they were simply kidnapping Lincoln to take to the South for a trade of war prisoners, even though all evidence pointed to the contrary.

I enjoyed this podcast. For some reason, I didn't really know a lot of information about Booth prior to listening to it. I was even slightly surprised to learn very basic facts about Booth, like that he was born in Maryland, rather than the South. Unfortunately, I felt that it was both a little short and that it was mostly to plug Kauffman's book, even though it had been around for a couple of years before the podcast was recorded. However, it was about the 5th podcast I had started (got partially through several others, but stopped due to being overly opinionated, unqualified or simply of low quality).

If anyone is interested in the podcast, the instructions to subscribe to their feed are here.