John Wilkes

Haven't we heard this before? An unknown gunman assassinates a beloved sitting president, then flees. A suspect is identified, but before he can be brought to trial he is himself killed under the noses of federal officials. Sometime later a high-level commission convened to investigate the matter concludes the president's murder was the work of a deranged individual acting alone.Sound familiar? We hasten to add that the above scenario is not intended as a description of the assassination of President John F. Kennedy by Lee Harvey Oswald in November 1963, but rather of President Lincoln's assassination by the actor John Wilkes Booth nearly a century earlier.

Thank you for Cassandra Fortin's story of Dec. 30, 2007, on the History Channel documentary of John Wilkes Booth and the assassination of President Lincoln. The program will do a lot to bring attention to one of Maryland's many unique historic and heritage areas. I would like to mention that the Maryland Office of Tourism Development has produced a map guide titled "John Wilkes Booth: Escape of an Assassin, War on the Chesapeake" that your readers can use to follow in his footsteps. Sites on the map guide include Ford's Theatre, Surratt House Museum and Dr. Samuel A. Mudd House Museum.

Thank you for Cassandra Fortin's story of Dec. 30, 2007, on the History Channel documentary of John Wilkes Booth and the assassination of President Lincoln. The program will do a lot to bring attention to one of Maryland's many unique historic and heritage areas. I would like to mention that the Maryland Office of Tourism Development has produced a map guide titled "John Wilkes Booth: Escape of an Assassin, War on the Chesapeake" that your readers can use to follow in his footsteps. Sites on the map guide include Ford's Theatre, Surratt House Museum and Dr. Samuel A. Mudd House Museum.

It's almost universal knowledge that John Wilkes Booth assassinated Abraham Lincoln at Ford's Theater on an April night in 1865. But after taking a guided bus tour in 1986 that detailed Booth's escape route, Tom Jennings discovered that there was a lot more to the story. "Many people don't know that Booth was on the run for 12 days ...

AMERICAN GOTHIC:THE STORY OF AMERICA'SLEGENDARY THEATRICALFAMILY -- JUNIUS, EDWIN ANDJOHN WILKES BOOTH.Gene Smith.Simon & Schuster.320 pages. $23. As the Civil War wound down, an actor boasted that he was about to astonish the world. "What are you going to do?" inquired his listener. "Kill Jeff Davis, take Richmond, or play Hamlet a hundred nights?"There was no reply. The performer would hardly want to murder his hero Davis, and taking Richmond was out of the question. After all, he was only one disgruntled Southerner, with a few like-minded colleagues.

In December 1860, more than four years before John Wilkes Booth assassinated Abraham Lincoln in Ford's Theater in Washington, the actor wrote a 21-page manuscript that showed his fanatical state of mind, his sympathies for the Southern secessionists, and his association with the historical characters he portrayed in Shakespeare's plays.In the view of Lincoln scholars, had these sentiments been known to the officials responsible for guarding the president, it is possible that Booth would not have had such easy access to the theater on April 14, 1865.

Manhunt: The 12-Day Chase for Lincoln's Killer James L. Swanson William Morrow / 448 pages / $26.95 On May 24, 1865, less than a month after the death of John Wilkes Booth, a publisher issued a book called The Assassinator. It was a fictionalized account of Booth's assassination of President Abraham Lincoln and the beginning of a historians' cottage industry that is still going strong. Nearly 141 years later, the body of literature about Lincoln's death is immense and seemingly exhaustive.

John E. Mudd, a partner in the law firm of Mudd, Harrison and Burch who specialized in medical malpractice and insurance cases, died of respiratory failure Monday at his Towson home. He was 75. In a legal career that spanned nearly 50 years, Mr. Mudd was a likable and highly respected figure. "I remember him coming to Towson and joining my father's law firm in the early 1960s. He was a young, bright and energetic lawyer who was instantly popular. And he spent the rest of his life practicing law in Towson," said Baltimore County Circuit Judge John Grason Turnbull II. "In the courtroom, he was dynamic and friendly, and always came across that way to jurors.

American Brutus: John Wilkes Booth and the Lincoln Conspiracies by Michael W. Kauffman. Random House. 509 pages. $29.95. No one, it is fair to say, has been decided upon as the most glorious person in Maryland history. But the most despised, the most loathed? That award still goes to John Wilkes Booth, of Harford County, Ford's Theater in Washington and Green Mount Cemetery. Booth, professional actor and Abraham Lincoln's assassin, is the subject of this definitive biography. Michael Kauffman, of Owings, is a historian who has devoted 30-plus years to his subject, and even leads tours of Booth's escape route.

At the age of 26 he was one of the most popular actors of his time.Then he chose to murder a U.S. president. Bad career move.John Wilkes Booth is the focus of "To Bury Caesar," a one-man historical play scheduled for today and tomorrow in the Theatre Outback at Howard Community College.The production is part of the Columbia Festival of the Arts, which begins today and runs through June 27.Written by Columbia resident Chris. Dickerson and first performed in 1983 in Spartanburg, S.C., the play looks at Booth ** to understand how a man of his stature could be driven to commit the most celebrated killing of the Civil War.The play begins and ends in a hotel room in Washington the evening Abraham Lincoln is shot at Ford's Theater.

More than 20 years ago, Gary Sloan strolled down the long lane leading to Tudor Hall. He walked up to the porch where the owner sat in a rocking chair. "I just had to see it," Sloan said of the Bel Air residence, dubbed "Shakespeare's birthplace in America" because it was formerly home to two famous Shakespearean actors -- Junius Booth and his son Edwin -- in addition to the man who shot President Abraham Lincoln -- Edwin's brother, John Wilkes Booth. For Sloan, the visit was significant because he idolized Edwin Booth, considered one of the greatest American actors of the 19th century.

When asked to be or not to be involved in the future of Tudor Hall, Harford County answered with an $810,000 offer to buy the 19th-century home of America's first Shakespearean actors -- and the nation's first presidential assassin, John Wilkes Booth. County officials settle today on the purchase of the two-story, four-bedroom cottage that acclaimed English-born actor Junius Brutus Booth built in 1847 as a country retreat from Baltimore. After his death, his widow raised their 10 children in the home a few miles from downtown Bel Air. Several of those children had successful stage careers, including Edwin Thomas Booth, considered one of America's greatest Shakespearean actors.

Manhunt: The 12-Day Chase for Lincoln's Killer James L. Swanson William Morrow / 448 pages / $26.95 On May 24, 1865, less than a month after the death of John Wilkes Booth, a publisher issued a book called The Assassinator. It was a fictionalized account of Booth's assassination of President Abraham Lincoln and the beginning of a historians' cottage industry that is still going strong. Nearly 141 years later, the body of literature about Lincoln's death is immense and seemingly exhaustive.

When the family home of Abraham Lincoln's assassin was put up for auction in 1999, preservationists and prospective buyers found that the Gothic home had an appearance to match its ill-fated past: The porch was falling apart. The paint was peeling from the cracking walls. The property was in disarray. The fate of the home, many feared, was also in danger. Historians, actors and local officials teamed up to make a play for Tudor Hall, an 8-acre property between Bel Air and Churchville, only to be trumped by a young couple who saw it as their dream house.

Is the quaintness starting to get to you? There's something about Christmas, isn't there, that just brings to the fore a sugarcoated view of years gone by, with the present suffering by comparison. "Who but turns, when Christmas comes, to take a retrospective view of the past, and in doing so, how numerous are the happy scenes and blissful hours which rise in strength and beauty upon the scenery of the mind." The Sun said that, in its first Christmas editorial, back in 1837. Yes, even when the city and the paper were young, there was a sentimental tendency to look backward at this time of year.

As a teenager, Michael Kauffman voraciously read books about the assassination of Abraham Lincoln, becoming a budding authority on the topic at an early age. As new books came out, however, Kauffman was dismayed by the paucity of fresh information, particularly on John Wilkes Booth. A central question that became the focus of Kauffman's intense curiosity - why Booth plotted to kill Lincoln - went perpetually unanswered. Thus Kauffman embarked on an investigation that would span 30 years and require countless hours at the National Archives, interviews of relatives of the accused, weekly visits to the Booth family's Harford County home, and the retracing of Booth's steps before and after the crime.

Alice Williams sat in the Historical Society of Harford County, leafing through old court records. As she read the legal documents, she discovered an arrest warrant with John Wilkes Booth's name on it. "Is this our John Booth?" asked Williams, 85, of Havre de Grace. Dinah Faber, a Booth historian, looked at the document and then left the room. She returned with a document that chronicled the incident. "This warrant confirms the story that Booth hit a man with a stick," said Faber. "Until now, all we had was a letter written by Booth and a story in his sister's book to document the incident.

If he were alive today, John Wilkes Booth would have little trouble recognizing the farmhouse of Dr. Samuel A. Mudd, where he had come seeking help 136 years ago today. The land surrounding the Southern Maryland house looks much as it did when Booth, in pain from a broken leg, knocked on Mudd's door some six hours after the actor fatally shot Abraham Lincoln about 30 miles away at Ford's Theatre in Washington. If you want to see the Mudd house in its natural surroundings, don't wait too long.

Colonial Players' production of Assassins offers a fascinating and disquieting musical journey where the audience revisits some of the nation's darkest moments and gain insight into the nine successful or would-be assassins of U.S. presidents, starting with John Wilkes Booth and ending with John Hinckley. The 1991 musical by composer Stephen Sondheim creates a shimmering musical mosaic of spirited marches, hymns, cakewalks, sardonic anthems and a folk-rock love song to define characters spanning more than a century.