Killing Lincoln/Killing Kennedy by Bill O’Reilly, Martin Dugard Page B

a pistol range. The smell of gunpowder mixes with the fragrant pomade of his mustache. His feet are set slightly wider than shoulder width, his lean athletic torso is turned at a right angle to the bull’s-eye, and his right arm is extended in a line perfectly parallel with the floor. In his fist he cradles the sort of pint-sized pistol favored by ladies and cardsharps.
    He fires.
    Booth scrutinizes the target. Satisfied, he reloads his single-shot .44-caliber Deringer. His mood is a mixture of rage and despondence. Things have gone to hell since Lee surrendered. Richmond is gone, and with it the Confederate leadership. The “secesh” community—those southern secessionist sympathizers living a secret life in the nation’s capital—is in disarray. There’s no one to offer guidance to Booth and the other secret agents of the Confederacy.
    At this point, there are at least four Confederate groups conspiring
to harm the president. Two are plotting a kidnapping, one is planning to smuggle dress shirts infected with yellow fever into his dresser drawers, and another intends to blow up the White House.
    Booth is part of a kidnapping conspiracy. He prefers the term “capture.” Kidnapping is a crime, but capturing an enemy during a time of war is morally correct. The Confederate government has strict rules governing its agents’ behavior. If Booth does indeed get the chance, he is allowed to capture the president, truss him like a pig, subject him to a torrent of verbal and mental harassment, and even punch him in the mouth, should the opportunity present itself. The one thing he is not allowed to do is engage in “black flag warfare.”
    Or in a word: murder.
     
     
    Booth wonders if the restriction against black flag warfare still applies. And, if not, what he should do about it. That’s why he’s at the range. He has a major decision to make. Shooting helps him think.
    Booth fires again. The split-second bang fills him with power, drowning out the celebrations and focusing his mind. Again, he tamps in a ball and a percussion cap.
    There is a darkness to Booth’s personality, born of the entitlement that comes with celebrity. He is a boaster and a liar, fond of embellishing stories to make himself sound daring and adventurous. He is cruel and mercurial. He is a bully, eager to punish those who don’t agree with his points of view. Outside of his love for his mother, Booth is capable of doing anything to satisfy his own urges.
    Booth is also a white supremacist. His most closely guarded secret is that he has temporarily given up the profession of acting to fight for the pro-slavery movement. The abolition movement, in Booth’s mind, is the real cause of the Civil War, a serpent that must be crushed. Enslavement of blacks is part of the natural order, Booth believes, and central to the South’s economy. Blacks, he maintains, are third-class citizens who should spend their lives working for the white man. Not only does this life fulfill them, but they are begging for correction when they step out of line. “I have been through the whole south and
have marked the happiness of master and man,” Booth writes. “I have seen the black man whipped. But only when he deserved much more than he received.”
    As a teenager, Booth was traumatized when runaway slaves killed a schoolmate’s father. He is willing to swear an oath that this sort of violence will happen on a much larger scale if the South loses the war. Newly freed slaves will slaughter southern white men, rape their women and daughters, and instigate a bloodbath unlike any other in recorded history.
    The only way to prevent that is to reinstate slavery by winning the Civil War.
     
     
    It crushes Booth to think that the South has lost. He shuts the idea out of his mind. Lee’s surrender, Booth believes, was a gross error in judgment. Even the great Marse Robert is allowed an occasional lapse.
    Booth takes solace in the 146,000 Confederate troops spread out