John Wilkes Booth - the evolution of a monster

Fates and Traitors

nolead begins By Jennifer Chiaverini Dutton. 400 pp. $27 nolead ends

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Reviewed by

Jim Higgins

nolead ends A man commits a horrible act of political violence. The women who knew him struggle to accept and understand his action - and examine their consciences.

The shape of John Wilkes Booth's story, unfortunately, is familiar in our time. As is the response of his mother, Mary Ann, dramatized by Jennifer Chiaverini in her new historical novel, Fates and Traitors. After learning of her son's death, she covers her face with her hands and weeps. "Was there anything she could have done to prevent this unspeakable tragedy? How had she missed the signs that her bright, beautiful boy had become a monster?"

Fates and Traitors opens with Booth's final hours in a Virginia barn, confronted by the Union soldiers tracking him. As he reluctantly accepts his death, he worries about four women in his life: his mother; his sister and childhood confidante, Asia; his sweetheart, Lucy Hale, daughter of an abolitionist senator; and Mary Surratt, the widow who ran the Washington boardinghouse where Booth met with fellow conspirators.

Chiaverini then traces how Booth grew into the man who would assassinate Lincoln, as seen by the women around him. His father, Junius, a gifted but dissolute Shakespearean actor, tried but failed to prevent his sons from following his path. Wilkes (as his beloved sister called him) and brothers Edwin and June became actors. Chiaverini telegraphs his destiny in a scene where the boyish Wilkes performs Brutus from Julius Caesar for Asia, who wonders "if he ever truly understood the play, for he delivered his lines as if Brutus were the hero of the drama." She tries to explain dramatic irony to him, but Wilkes insists Brutus "is the only character in the entire tragedy who put the good of Rome before himself." He will later see his own act in the same light.

The Booths did not support slavery. In fact, Junius bought and freed a slave, who then worked as manager of the family farm. As Chiaverini describes it, Wilkes' identification with and defense of the Confederacy grows out of his rebellious nature, bitter about his struggles to establish himself as an actor in comparison to the gifted Edwin.

Chiaverini depicts the constraints on women's autonomy in this era - and how shrewdly women worked through or around them. Booth's courtship of Lucy reminds us how many Confederate sympathizers lived in Washington during the war. Her book also shows how easy it can be for a young woman, excited by the attention of a handsome, charismatic man, to minimize harsh notes in his personality.

This review originally appeared in the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel.