Notes on Booth's Diary

[Dave Taylor]

Though you can find transcriptions of Booth's diary in many places, I decided to transcribe it myself yesterday using images of the pages. In this way I could really note some of the details of the text and the way it was written. There were a few places where the text was faded to the point of illegibility, and during those times I used the transcript of the diary from the John Surratt Trail in 1867. During this whole process, I noticed a few interesting and mysterious things:

1. Davy is an afterthought:

Though David Herold was at Booth's side while he was writing his entries in the diary, he is brought up very little in the diary. This was supposed to be Booth's manifesto and so Davy got very little attention. At one point Davy is deliberately left out. The line that states, "After being hunted like a dog through swamps, woods, and last night being chased by gun boats till I was forced to return wet cold and starving," originally said "we" instead of "I". Booth changed his mind about including Davy and wrote over the word "we" with "I":



At the end of the diary, when Davy is finally mentioned (not by name, mind you), Booth writes the following: "And for this brave boy with me who often prays (yes before and since) with a true and sincere heart was it crime in him. if so why can he pray the same" The second sentence was an afterthought and was added later. You can tell because it is written smaller and between the lines that proceed and follow it:



2. Booth liked quotes

In the image right above this, you can see Booth quoting the line, "I must fight the course". This is a quote from Macbeth, Act 5, Scene 7 in which Macbeth states:

"They have tied me to a stake. I cannot fly,
But, bearlike, I must fight the course. What’s he
That was not born of woman? Such a one
Am I to fear, or none"

This quote by Booth is very appropriate to the message he has propagated in his diary. "The world has condemned me but I will fight as I can. I fear no man, only God." Booth - a Shakespearean to the end.

However, there is also this strange line that intrigues me:



To my eyes, those definitely look like quotation marks after the word "me". Before the word "I" there are two marks that could be quotation marks, or a period and a stray mark from the previous sentence. If this is a quote then it says "I care not what becomes of me". I tried searching for this quote, but I could not find anything that definitively fits Booth's persona. But perhaps this is a dramatic line from some play known in Booth's day.

3. The Mysterious I 14
Quiz - what words are underlined on this page:


Did you answer "was" "have" and "becomes"? Many transcriptions agree with you on those, however none of those words are actually underlined. Instead they only look like their underlined due to writing underneath them:



To my eyes it looks like I 14 with something else scribbled above the I. Perhaps Booth and Davy were playing Bingo in the pines?

4. M__ C__

I made this animation for Booth's handwritten calendar:


When looking at it closer, however, I think I made a mistake right under "Sund". At first blush, I thought it said, "Ms __" but now I'm not so sure. I now see several different strokes here. The word "Sund", the date "23", the strike through "23", and then text that looks like "M __ C __"



On the 23rd, Booth and Herold were near Mrs. Quesenberry's house for a time. Could "M __ C__" stand for "Mrs. Quesenberry"? If Booth was spelling phonetically, Quesenberry could sound like "Cue-sen-berry", hence the C instead of a Q.

So, while there are no secret cyphers or codices to be found in the pages of Booth's diary, there are still some mysterious markings and passages that make it an interesting relic.