Booth's mistress, Ella Starr, and other "unknown" Booth ladies!

[Wild Bill]

Booth was a co-operationist in 1860-61, not a secessionist. He did not become secessionist until later in the war. His cooperationists attitude is in his Philadelphia Speech in Dec 1860, his secessionist attitude is in his 1864 To Whom It May Concern letter of 1864 and his attitude as an assassin in his letter to the National Intelligencer in 1865. It is all explained in my Book Sic Semper Tyrannis or in a longer version in my Last Confederate Heroes, take your choice. The originals are in Rhodehammer and Taper's collection of Booth's papers. Another version of the same is in Rick Stelnick's Dixie Reckoning.

He was not a madman, but like a lot of Southerners, he changed his stance as the war went on. The epitome was in Kentucky that "seceded" in 1865 during Reconstruction and Missouri by 1875. See Merton Coulter, Civil War and Readjustment in Ky; and TJ Stiles, Jess James: The Last Rebel of the Civil War