“Opening the door, he stepped inside, took out his deringer, cocked it, and shot the President. The time was 10:15.”
End of Chapter Five.
After the quick buildup to the murder, Stacton immediately slows the pace. He details the shock of the audience and the cast of “Our American Cousin”; zeroes in on the doctors and hangers-on around the dying Lincoln; and finally reveals the impact of the assassination on the world. Newspapers typically given to denouncing the president tear up their pages to run “laudations and long descriptions of the nation’s grief.”
At this point we meet the true villain of the novel, not the self-deluding popinjay Booth, but the cruel and power-hungry secretary of war, Edwin M. Stanton. While Lincoln is pronounced “the last of the old men,” Stanton is distinctly “one of the new men,” who “want nothing for themselves but the prerogatives of their office.” The secretary of war is, in fact, that familiar 20th- century type, a proto-Stalin:
“He proposed to arrest everyone in sight. It was his usual method, for he had come to believe that all the world was guilty of something. It was merely necessary to discover of what, and that could be proven better in the Old Capitol Prison than in court.”
In the last quarter of the novel, Stacton reveals Stanton’s self-aggrandizing policy in action as the supposed conspirators face a farcical monkey trial. None of the Washington insiders, including Vice President Andrew Johnson, comes across as much more than a venal opportunist or half-drunk poltroon.
At one point a Miss Holloway tells Booth, “Patriotism isn’t the same as loyalty.” Throughout “The Judges of the Secret Court,” people are faced with difficult, often conflicting loyalties — to family, to friends, to the lost cause of the South, to various ideals, noble and ignoble. Wilkes’s admirably responsible older brother Edwin nearly breaks down from his sense of oppressive family responsibility and guilt. In the end, though, Edwin turns his pain inward to create in his signature role a suffering Hamlet constantly tormented by the unexpected murder of a noble king. Edwin Booth became 19th-century America’s greatest actor.
“The Judges of the Secret Court” isn’t just a novel about John Wilkes Booth; it is a vision of what life and the world do to us. No one, writes Stacton, ever sees the invisible, draconian judges of his title. “But they are there: the whole world is a courtroom, every life is a trial,” and, though we plead, plead, plead, in the end we are all found guilty — if only of being ourselves.
Dirda reviews books for The Post every Thursday. Visit his book discussion at washingtonpost.com/readingroom.
Loading...
Comments