Sic Semper Tyrannis

On December 20, 1860, with the secession of South Carolina from the Union, the Unites States died. At least, the American Republic, represented by the Founding Fathers, the Declaration of Independence of 1776, the Articles of Confederation of 1781, and the Constitution of 1787, perished. But that is not the story modern Americans know. Instead, we are taught that the fraud of secession and the sham of the Confederacy were defeated by the noble President Abraham Lincoln, and the Union was saved through a New Birth of Freedom. Then, at the hour of his triumph, Lincoln’s personal victory was spoiled by a mentally unbalanced actor and Southern sympathizer, John Wilkes Booth. But what if the “accepted” story is wrong? What if President Lincoln’s modern reputation is a Yankee fabrication to justify an unjust war? What if John Wilkes Booth were not merely a misguided racist? What if he were not the craziest of what historian and family biographer Stanley Kimmel once called the Mad Booths of Maryland. What if John Wilkes Booth were a rational man? The three essays that embraced within this book invite you, the reader, to suspend your belief, if only for a few moments, in the “traditional view” of American history and to look at Abraham Lincoln and John Wilkes Booth from a new and different perspective. The first essay presents a President Lincoln that was familiar to Americans before Republican propaganda made him into a demigod. The second shows John Wilkes Booth as an ordinary Southerner, very much a man of his time, holding to a cooperationist political philosophy, which was very common in the South before the Civil War. The final essay presents Booth’s transformation into a secessionist and then a tyrannicide.