Assassination Vacation

John Wilkes Booth (1838-1865) was a famous actor from Maryland especially known for his performances in Shakespearean plays. His father Junius was also a celebrated actor as were his brothers Edwin and Junius Booth, Jr. John Wilkes Booth became a supporter of enslavement and a Confederate sympathizer, supporting the Confederate cause as a spy during the US Civil War.

As the Confederacy began to lose the war, Booth and several co-conspirators hoped to kidnap Lincoln and exchange him for several prominent Confederate prisoners-o- war. After the surrender of the Confederate general Robert E. Lee on April 9th, 1865, led to the end of the Civil War, Booth and his co-conspirators hoped killing Lincoln and other high-ranking members of Lincoln’s administration, including Secretary of State William H. Seward and Vice President Andrew Johnson, would disrupt the United States government and lead to a Confederate revival.

Booth escaped from Ford’s Theater after shooting Lincoln. He was tracked down to a barn owned by Richard J. Garrett near the town of Port Royal, Virginia. Booth died from the wounds he received when shot by federal soldiers on April 26th, 1865.

Mentioned frequently in Assassination Vacation, John Brown (1800-1859) ironically inspired John Wilkes Booth—even though Brown was avowedly anti-enslavement—as well as Charles Guideau. While Sarah Vowell does not explicitly condemn John Brown and his actions, she does blame him for sparking “a grubby little guerrilla war between abolitionist Jayhawkers and the pro-slavery border ruffians of Missouri” (64).

John Brown was born in Torrington, Connecticut to a well-off family that owned a tannery. He became an avid abolitionist, studying at a school run by the prominent abolitionist Elizur Wright and claiming to have been motivated to oppose enslavement by witnessing an enslaved child being beaten with a shovel. Brown aspired to become a preacher, but he could not pursue his studies due to an eye condition and instead pursued various unsuccessful business ventures across the United States. In Kansas, which was not yet a state, he became embroiled in the violent conflict between anti-enslavement and pro-enslavement settlers who fought violently over whether or not Kansas should allow enslavement.

Believing that he had been tasked by God to help end enslavement in the United States, Brown had a plan to begin a major revolt of enslaved persons by raiding and seizing weapons from a military arsenal at Harpers Ferry, Virginia. The raid was unsuccessful, but still fanned abolitionist enthusiasm in the North and fear and anger in the pro-enslavement states of the South. Brown was convicted of treason and executed by hanging on December 2nd, 1859.

Leon Czolgosz (1873-1901) came from a family of Polish immigrants. At an early age, Leon’s mother died, and he had to give up his education and take up menial jobs at a wire mill and a glass factory. Czolgoz had lost work because of an economic crash in 1893 and was once fired and blacklisted for participating in a workers’ strike, experiences that caused him to become attracted to socialist and then anarchist politics.

By 1898, Czolgoz experienced some kind of mental or physical collapse that caused him to give up factory work and live with his father on a farm in Ohio. Still, Czolgoz remained interested in anarchist politics, meeting with, and asking for reading recommendations from, the anarchist leader Emma Goldman. Inspired by the killing of King Umberto I of Italy by the anarchist Gaetano Bresci, Czolgoz shot McKinley during the Pan-American Exposition on September 6th, 1901. Czolgoz was executed by electrocution.

One of the three assassinated presidents discussed by Sarah Vowell, James A. Garfield (1831-1881) came from an impoverished background in Ohio. He was a talented student and became a student at modern-day Hiram College in Ohio and Williams College in Massachusetts, supporting himself by working as a teacher. After graduating from Williams College, Garfield became a teacher of Latin and Greek. At the same time, he was a college administrator and a minister and taught himself law, becoming a licensed lawyer by 1861.

Garfield had also entered politics as a Republican and an abolitionist, becoming a member of the US House of Representatives and a state senator in Ohio. During the US Civil War, he fought for the Union cause as a general. In 1880, as a result of factional infighting between the Stalwarts, who opposed civil service reform, and the Half-Breeds, who wanted to see reforms end the spoils system for civil service jobs, Garfield was chosen as the Republican candidate as a compromise.

As president, Garfield supported civil rights for African Americans, civil service reform, and greater involvement and funding by the federal government for education. However, Garfield’s presidency was cut short when he was shot by the mentally ill Charles J. Guiteau on July 2nd, 1881, who blamed Garfield for not giving him a position as ambassador to France through the spoils system. Famously, Garfield might have survived if not for his physicians, whose attempts to remove the bullet in Garfield’s body caused an infection that would kill him. As Vowell notes, although Garfield is today one of the more obscure presidents, his assassination and failed recovery gripped the national attention of the United States for months.

The assassin of President James Garfield, Charles Guiteau (1841-1882) had mental illness. He attempted to become a student at the University of Michigan, but he failed the entrance exams. After that, he joined the utopian Oneida Community in upstate New York. After he left the Oneida Community, Guiteau tried and failed to become a lawyer.

Guiteau became convinced that his effort to support the Garfield campaign led to his presidential victory and believed he was entitled to the role of ambassador to France as a reward. Angrily rebuked in person by the Secretary of State James G. Blaine, Guiteau became fixated on his “betrayal” by Garfield and shot him on July 2nd, 1881, leading to Garfield’s death. After a widely publicized trial during which Guiteau’s lawyers tried to have him found not guilty by reason of insanity, Guiteau was instead found guilty. He was executed by hanging on June 30th, 1882.

Along with John Brown, Emma Goldman (1869-1940) is one of the two historical figures discussed throughout Assassination Vacation who influenced one of the three presidential assassins, Leon Czolgosz. Goldman was born to a Jewish family in Lithuania, which was then part of the Russian Empire. Goldman and her family were among the many Jewish migrants fleeing Russian persecution. Goldman arrived in New York City in 1885.

Radicalized by her experiences with poverty, poor working conditions, her abusive, authoritarian father, and an early failed marriage, Goldman fell in with a group of New York radicals. Goldman became an outspoken leftist, anarchist, and atheist, advocating for workers’ rights and birth control and against US involvement in World War I. She was also involved in a plot by her long-time lover Alexander Berkman to assassinate William Clay Frick, the manager of Carnegie Steel Company in Pittsburgh.

She became an anarchist writer and lecturer, making a living by doing public tours and working as a midwife and physician. At the same time, Goldman faced imprisonment and legal harassment over her views, culminating in her and Berkman being deported to the Soviet Union in 1919 under the Anarchist Exclusion Act, which banned anarchists from immigrating to the United States. Soon disillusioned with the oppression of free speech and workers’ rights in the Soviet Union, Goldman left there and eventually ended up living in Toronto, Canada where she died in 1940 at the age of 70. 

Vowell decries Goldman’s flirtation with political violence and highlights the fact she played a role in inspiring Czolgoz to assassinate President McKinley, but still sympathizes with her, concluding, “I find Goldman fascinating, but bothersome” (218).

Famously born in a log cabin owned by a poor family, Abraham Lincoln (1809-1865) grew up on what was then the United States’ frontier in Indiana and Illinois. He mostly educated himself, becoming a voracious reader and working as a lawyer. At an early age, he also entered politics, becoming a member of the Illinois House of Representatives and later the US House of Representatives as a candidate for the Whig Party. The Whigs would collapse and eventually disappear as a political party over the course of the 1850s. Like many other former Whigs in the northern states, Lincoln would later join the new Republican Party. Throughout his political career as a Whig and later as a Republican, Lincoln opposed enslavement (although his views on how to address enslavement changed over time) and endorsed using federal government policies to promote businesses, banks, and railroads.

Brought to national prominence by his speeches and debate performances, Lincoln became a leader of the new Republican Party and was elected president in 1860. Almost all of Lincoln’s votes came from the Northern and Western states. Believing that Lincoln would abolish enslavement, South Carolina and other Southern states seceded from the United States in response to his election, even though Lincoln was willing to support a compromise that would have prevented the federal government from outlawing enslavement in any state. The secession of the Southern states, who formed the Confederacy, led to the US Civil War.

To weaken the Confederacy, Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation on January 1st, 1863, freeing the enslaved persons in all states that were still part of the Confederacy. The Emancipation Proclamation did not end enslavement in the United States, but it was a major step toward abolition.

His popularity bolstered by a number of major military victories against the Confederacy, Lincoln was reelected in 1864. By May of 1865, the Civil War ended with the defeat of the Confederacy. While attending the play Our American Cousin with his wife Mary Todd Lincoln at Ford’s Theater in Washington, DC, the actor and Confederate sympathizer John Wilkes Booth shot Lincoln in the head, killing him, just a month after the end of the war. Some historians argue that, had Lincoln not been assassinated, his second administration may have done more to protect civil liberties for the newly freed African Americans. Vowell refers to Lincoln in religious terms, presenting him as the embodiment of American ideals.