Forgotten figure in the Civil War
The man who killed Lincoln’s assassin is the focus of Scott Martelle’s latest book.
Even schoolchildren know that John Wilkes Booth assassinated President Abraham Lincoln. But history has more or less forgotten Boston Corbett, the Union soldier who helped hunt Booth down and fired the shot that killed him.
As Scott Martelle discovered in researching his new book, “The Madman and the Assassin: The Strange Life of Boston Corbett, the Man Who Killed John Wilkes Booth,” Corbett was the 1860s version of a viral celebrity, adored and loathed in equal measure by a divided nation.
Not only do Corbett’s religious passions, preserved in archives all over the country, make him a fascinating figure, but he is
also a kind of Civil War-era Forrest Gump, popping up in the Andersonville prison in Georgia, the Philadelphia Centennial Exhibition, a Kansas homestead. His story sheds light on some of the dimmer corners of history.
Martelle, a lifelong journalist who serves on the L.A. Times editorial board, has published four books of nonfiction. He will be appearing at The Times’ Festival of Books on the panel “History: American Milestones” at 2 p.m. Sunday. What first got you interested in Boston Corbett?
When my last book was finished, I was looking around for another subject. My editor at Chicago Review Press asked, “Have you ever heard of this guy named Boston Corbett? He’s the guy who killed John Wilkes Booth, and he had castrated himself in 1858.” As a journalist, I thought, “OK! Yeah. I might be able to find something interesting in that.”
In his time, Corbett was dismissed by most people as a religious kook. The more I got into the papers, I realized he was actually a very complex, interesting character, and I built up a pretty healthy sympathy for him. I’m not a religious person myself, but I was taken with his concept that he wanted to live life every moment the way he thought Jesus would. You have to admire that kind of adherence to a principle, whatever the principle is. What did you want to accomplish in this book?
There are very few unturned stones about the Civil War, and what I like about this book is that it’s, as far as I can tell, the first broadly published, in-depth look at Boston Corbett’s life. He’s one of the few characters still standing out there to be explored. What do you think accounts for our fascination with the Civil War?
The sheer scope of it and how it still resonates. Our racial divide is built upon slavery, and the violent end to slavery. We’re still battling states’ rights issues. In a lot of ways, the Civil War was the violent confrontation of the ongoing discussion of what we should be as a nation. It was much more of a revolutionary war than the American Revolution, which essentially cast off the British colonial overseers but kept the same political social system; all it really changed was who was in charge.
The Civil War was about whether we were going to be a slave-based economic system, and what has superiority, the federal or the state governments. It’s an evergreen topic of interest. It’s far enough back in history that you can think about it objectively. And so many people have personal histories that trail through the Civil War: “My greatgreat grandfather was at Shiloh.”
What’s more rewarding for you, researching or writing?
I kind of like them equally. The research is just a lot of fun. Getting into archives, touching history, holding letters that someone like Boston Corbett wrote. Always talk to the archivists. They know stuff that you don’t think about. Then, when you’re writing, you’re getting inside the head of people, building up a narrative. I’ve been writing as long as I can remember. I got my first newspaper job at the age of 16, and I just keep scratching that itch. Which of your books did you enjoy writing the most?
Probably my first one, “Blood Passion: The Ludlow Massacre and Class War in the American West.”
I’d never written a book before. You get the contract, it’s for 100,000 words, and you’re all excited, and you sit down and say, “100,000 words? How am I going to do 100,000 words?” And so it was the process of learning about myself as a writer of nonfiction, starting out thinking, “Can I do this?” And at the same time, it was a fascinating story. And then, in the end, the book was well received and got some great reviews. So it’s like, “Not only can I do it, I can do it in a way that people like.”
But I’ve been really engaged with all of these books. You have to be: If you’re not obsessed with the topic, you’re not going to finish the book. I think that’s why the books are about such radically different topics. I find the story and think, “Let me see where that goes, and whether I can build a meaningful narrative arc around those events.” I’ve found characters who have survived some very interesting times. What do you think Corbett would think of America today?
He’d definitely be part of the Christian activist crowd. A lot of the religious issues we’re dealing with today weren’t really part of the national discussion back then, like abortion, capital punishment, that sort of thing. I’m not sure what he’d make of it, but I’m sure he’d be very loud about whatever he thought about it.
He’s a kind of an oddball but otherwise ordinary figure, who just because of where he was that morning, found himself — 100 years before Warhol’s 15-minutes-of-fame thing — famous for a single act. Some things don’t change. Do you think of yourself as a journalist who writes books in his spare time or as a historian with a day job in journalism?
A journalist, in both my day and night jobs. I don’t write history books; I write books about history: historical events and how people’s lives intersected with those events. In the case of Corbett, events well beyond his control.