Killing Lincoln - Bill O'Reilly [38]
I am the man who will end Abraham Lincoln’s life. That thought motivates Booth as he walks. He returns to the idea over and over again. He is thrilled by the notion, not bothered in the least by his ability to make the mental jump from the passive violence of kidnapping to cold-blooded murder. I will kill the president of the United States.
Booth ruminates without remorse. Of course, killing a man is immoral. Even Booth knows that.
This is wartime. Killing the enemy is no more illegal than capturing him.
The actor thinks of Lincoln’s second inaugural and how he stood so close to Lincoln on that day. I could have shot him then, if I had wished.
Booth regrets the lost opportunity, then sets it aside. There will be another chance—and this time he will stand even closer, so close he can’t miss. So close he will see the life drain from Lincoln’s eyes.
It occurs to him that no American president has ever been assassinated. I will be the first man to ever kill a president. He is now even more dazzled by his own violent plan.
The United States is just three months shy of being eighty-nine years old. There are thirty-six states in the Union, thanks to Nevada’s recent admission. Lincoln is the sixteenth president. Two have passed away from illness while in office. None of them, as Booth well knows, has died by someone else’s hand. If successful in his assassination attempt, the actor will achieve the lasting recognition he has always craved.
For a nation founded by rebellion and torn open by a civil war, the citizens of the United States have been remarkably nonviolent when confronted with politicians they despise. Only one American president was the target of an assassin. And that was Andrew Jackson, the man whose politics sowed the seeds of Confederate rebellion thirty years earlier.
Jackson was leaving a funeral in the Capitol Building on January 30, 1835, when a British expatriate fired at him twice. Unfortunately for the mentally unbalanced Richard Lawrence, who believed himself to be the king of England, both his pistols misfired. The bullets never left the chamber. Congressman Davy Crockett wrestled Lawrence to the ground and disarmed him, even as Jackson beat the would-be assassin with his cane.
Jackson was also the first and only American president to suffer bodily harm at the hands of a citizen, when a sailor discharged from the navy for embezzlement punched Jackson at a public ceremony in 1833. Robert Randolph fled the scene. Jackson, ever the warrior, refused to press charges.
These are the only acts of presidential insurrection in the nation’s entire history. The American people are unique in that their considerable political passion is expressed at the ballot box, not through violence directed at their leaders, whom they can vote out of office. If judged only by this yardstick, the Democratic experiment undertaken by Americans four score and nine years ago seems to be working.
Maybe this is why Lincoln rides his horse alone through Washington or stands fearlessly on the top deck of a ship in a combat zone. The president tries to convince himself that assassination is not part of the American character, saying, “I can’t believe that anyone has shot, or will deliberately shoot at me with the purpose of killing me.”
A wider look at human history suggests otherwise. Tribal societies murdered their leaders long before the Egyptian pharaoh Tutankhamen was slain by his advisers in 1324 B.C. Stabbing and beating were the earliest methods of assassination. The Moabite king Eglon was disemboweled in his chambers, his girth so vast that the killer lost the knife in the folds of his fat. Over time, well-known historical figures such as Philip II of Macedon (the father of Alexander the Great) and perhaps even Alexander himself were assassinated. And politically motivated killing was not limited to Europe or the Middle East—records show that assassination had long been practiced in India, Africa, and China.
And then, of course, there was Julius Caesar, the victim of the most famous assassination