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The Life, Crime and Capture of John Wilkes Booth | George Alfred Townsend | |
Letter V: A Solution Of The Conspiracy |
Page 3 of 11 |
Here began the first resolve, which, in its mere animal estate, we may name courage. Booth found that a tragedy in real life could no more be enacted without greasy-faced and knock-kneed supernumeraries than upon the mimic stage. Your "First Citizen," who swings a stave for Marc Antony, and drinks hard porter behind the flies is very like the bravo of real life, who murders between his cocktails at the nearest bar. Wilkes Booth had passed the ordeal of a garlicky green-room, and did not shrink from the broader and ranker green-room of real life. He assembled around him, one by one, the cut-throats at whom his soul would have revolted, except that he had become, by resolve, a cut-throat in himself. About this time certain gentlemen in Canada began to be unenviably known. I abstain from giving their names, because unaware of how far they seconded this crime, if at all. But they seconded as infamous things, such as cowardly raids from neutral territory into the states, bank robbings, lake pirating, city burning, counterfeiting, railway sundering, and the importation of yellow fever into peaceful and unoffending communities. I make no charges against those whom I do not know, but simply say that the confederate agents, Jacob Tompson, Larry McDonald, Clement Clay, and some others, had already accomplished enough villainy to make Wilkes Booth, on the first of the present year, believe that he had but to seek an interview with them. |
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The Life, Crime and Capture of John Wilkes Booth George Alfred Townsend |
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