The Madman and the Assassin

[RJNorton]

Richard, thank you for your post. Here's the text of the review:

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The Assassin’s Assassin

Some hailed the hat-maker turned evangelical as Lincoln’s avenger. Some condemned him as a zealot who took the law into his own hand.

Gerard Helferich

April 26, 2015 5:29 p.m. ET

Unlike novelists, who are free to invent their tales, nonfiction writers must discover theirs in the real world. And the process can be fraught, sifting through the countless stories out there and hoping to find one worth telling. Will it resonate with a wider meaning beyond its specific circumstances? This question always lurks in the gloomy recesses of a nonfiction writer’s mind. But it is nudged to the fore by Scott Martelle’s “The Madman and the Assassin,” a slim account of “the man who killed the man who killed Abraham Lincoln.

Thomas (later “Boston”) Corbett was by all descriptions an odd fellow. Born in England, he came with his family to New York in 1840 at the age of 8. As a teenager, he went to work finishing silk hats, and after he married he moved among various hat-making centers in New England and elsewhere. In 1856 his wife died, and Corbett fell to drinking. Rescued by evangelical Christians, he swore off alcohol and joined the Methodist church. He took Boston as his given name, in honor of the city of his conversion, and in imitation of Christ he grew a beard and let his hair spill to his shoulders. He proselytized on street corners, and during prayer meetings he was so vociferous in his praise that the congregation took to calling him the “Glory to God man.” At the age of 25, tormented by carnal urges, he castrated himself, a process that Mr. Martelle describes in clinical detail.

When the Civil War came, Corbett enlisted in the Union Army, where his comrades found him, as Mr. Martelle writes, “eccentric beyond tolerance.” More than once Corbett faced military discipline for disorderly conduct and abandoning his post. During several tours of duty he saw only limited action, but in June 1864 he was captured and shipped to the notorious prison camp of Andersonville in Americus, Ga. Starved and forced to live in filthy conditions, he contracted scurvy and the intestinal disorders that would trouble him for the rest of his days. Yet as he led prayer services and conducted funerals in the camp, he wasn’t overly concerned for his well-being: He was convinced that he enjoyed God’s special protection. After nearly five months he was paroled and, by January 1865, had recuperated enough to rejoin his regiment, the Sixteenth New York Cavalry.

Which was how Sgt. Corbett found himself part of the detail pursuing John Wilkes Booth through the Virginia countryside in the feverish days after Lincoln’s assassination. Having tracked Booth and a co-conspirator to a tobacco barn near Port Royal, the soldiers surrounded the building and, when Booth refused to surrender, set it ablaze. Corbett peered through a gap in the barn wall and, seeing Booth raise his rifle as if to fire, drew his pistol and took a single shot. The bullet entered the assassin’s skull at a point eerily similar to where Booth’s had penetrated Lincoln’s, with the same mortal result. Later, Corbett prayed on the matter and concluded that he had no cause for remorse, that the killing was, in his words, “an act of duty in the sight of God.”

The assassin’s assassin became a celebrity, hailed by some as “the avenger of Lincoln” and condemned by others as a zealot who had taken the law into his own hands. Collecting a share of the reward on Booth’s head as well as a meager military pension, Corbett returned to hat making, though his real passion remained evangelical work. According to a roommate during this time, he was “a nervous, excitable man . . . with a keen, but wild, look in his eyes, and an interminable restlessness of body and limb.” Ready to take offense at any perceived slight, he always kept a gun close to hand.

As the economy crumpled in the Panic of 1873, Corbett moved to Kansas and tried his hand at homesteading. But after pulling his pistol one time too many—on the sergeant-at-arms of the Kansas House of Representatives—he was committed to an asylum, seemingly for good. (There would come another twist in the curious tale of Boston Corbett, though I won’t divulge it here.)

Mr. Martelle has done an admirable job of researching Corbett’s life, combing through archives and period newspapers for every drab of information. What was it about his anti-hero that excited Mr. Martelle’s imagination? As the author explains in the book’s final pages, it wasn’t Corbett’s uniqueness but his ordinariness, the fact that he was a “run-of-the-mill American—albeit a strange one—who did his job as a hatter, and then a soldier, and in the process inextricably linked himself with an unforgettable event in American history.”

Serious students of the Civil War may be happy to learn more about the obscure oddball who killed the assassin. But that same audience may find the book’s chapters on Booth, the assassination and the manhunt rather slow going, since it has all been chronicled well and fully elsewhere. More casual readers may feel their interest flagging in the final chapters, which offer a minute account of Corbett’s later life, including his health problems and financial straits. As for the story’s wider resonance, it is hard to see Boston Corbett as more than a historical footnote. If things had gone differently on that April morning, Mr. Martelle acknowledges, his protagonist “would never have risen from the background of daily life.” But, he concludes, “such is the nature of fleeting fame, and of small lives brushing up against large moments in history.”

Mr. Helferich’s most recent book is “Theodore Roosevelt and the Assassin: Madness, Vengeance, and the Campaign of 1812.”

http://www.wsj.com/articles/book-review-...1430083783