My Thoughts Be Bloody: The Bitter Rivalry That Led to the Assassination of Abraham Lincoln

ISBN: 1416586067

Author: Titone, Nora

Condition: New

Historian Nora Titone takes a fresh look at the strange and startling history of the Booth brothers, answering the question of why one became the nineteenth-centurys brightest, most beloved star, and the other became the most notorious assassin in American history.The sceneof John Wilkes Booth shooting Abraham Lincoln in Fords Theatre is among the most vivid and indelible images in American history. The literal story of what happened on April 14, 1865, is familiar: Lincoln was killed by John Wilkes Booth, a lunatic enraged by the Union victory and the prospect of black citizenship. Yet who Booth really was-besides a killer-is less well known. The magnitude of his crime has obscured for generations a startling personal story that was integral to his motivation.My Thoughts Be Bloody, a sweeping family saga, revives an extraordinary figure whose name has been missing, until now, from the story of President Lincolns death. Edwin Booth, John Wilkess older brother by four years, was in his day the biggest star of the American stage. Without an account of Edwin Booth, author Nora Titone argues, the real story of Lincolns assassin has never been told. Using an array of private letters, diaries, and reminiscences of the Booth family, Titone has uncovered a hidden history that reveals the reasons why John Wilkes Booth became this countrys most notorious assassin.The details of the conspiracy to kill Lincoln have been well documented elsewhere. My Thoughts Be Bloody tells a new story, one that explains for the first time why Lincolns assassin decided to conspire against the president in the first place, and sets that decision in the context of a bitterly divided family-and nation. By the end of this riveting journey, readers will see Abraham Lincolns death less as the result of the war between the North and South and more as the climax of a dark struggle between two brothers who never wore the uniform of soldiers, except on stage.