Pelham:
"The only political party that John Wilkes Booth is known to have associated with is the Know Nothing party.
And that eventually merged into the Republican Party." Nice try!
Booth was a Marylander.
In 1860, 91% of Marylanders voted for either Southern Democrat Breckenridge or Constitutional Unionist, John Bell.
The Constitutional Unionists were former Whigs and American (Know Nothings), but eventually split with as many becoming Democrats as Republicans.
Booth himself was accidently seriously wounded in October 1860, and so may have missed voting, but by early 1861 he was strongly pro-secession.
His sympathies were not with a Constitutional Union platform.
Fair to say, by early 1861 Booth was an ardent Democrat, fervent secessionist, passionate pro-Confederate who hated Republicans generally, for abolitionism, and by 1865 was enraged at Lincoln specifically for Lincoln's plans to make African-Americans equal citizens of the United States.
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“Nice try!
“Booth was a Marylander.
In 1860, 91% of Marylanders voted for either Southern Democrat Breckenridge or Constitutional Unionist, John Bell.”
Lol. Did you never take a class in logic? That “guilt by association” mess sure indicates that you didn’t.
The “nice try” is yours, which isn’t something new.
https://www.visitmaryland.org/article/who-was-john-wilkes-booth
“Sadly for the nation, Booth could not keep his stage persona separate from the rest of his life. Perhaps driven by boredom between performances, Booth joined the Know-Nothings, a staunchly anti-Catholic political party, vehemently opposed to immigration. The Know-Nothings were prone to violence, rioting, burning churches, and even tarred and feathered a Catholic priest. With the outbreak of the Civil War, Booth’s loyalties lay firmly with the South, and he is believed to have operated as an agent of the Confederate Secret Service.”
https://www.battlefields.org/learn/biographies/john-wilkes-booth
“Booth had a very active role in politics during the years before and during the Civil War. During his teen years he was active with the Know Nothings, an anti-immigrant political party. He was pro-slavery and detested abolitionists.”
https://www.factcheck.org/2022/04/posts-make-unfounded-claims-about-political-affiliation-of-john-wilkes-booth/
“John Wilkes Booth, who assassinated Republican President Abraham Lincoln in 1865, was affiliated with the anti-immigrant Know-Nothing Party and was a supporter of slavery and the Confederacy. Social media posts claim without evidence that Booth was a Democrat.”
““To my knowledge, there are no surviving statements in which John Wilkes Booth declares he is a Democrat, but merely saying so oversimplifies his politics,” Christian McWhirter, the Lincoln historian at the Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library and Museum, told us in an email.
“He certainly was not a Republican and his politics during the Civil War were almost entirely motivated by his belief in white supremacy and intense hatred of Abraham Lincoln. Booth viewed Lincoln and the Republicans as responsible for the Civil War because he considered them a ‘radical’ abolitionist party who forced the slaveholding states to secede to protect the institution of slavery,” McWhirter said.
“Booth’s political affiliations before the Civil War are a little murkier but he appears to have been a ‘Know-Nothing’ in the 1850s,” McWhirter continued. “This was a third party movement — known officially as the American Party — that for a time competed with the Republicans as the major second party replacing the collapsed Whig Party. The core of the Know-Nothing platform was opposition to immigration from various non-Anglo-Saxon groups, such as the Irish and Germans, along with Catholics.”
FactCheck plays up the Know Nothing connection, perhaps to paint Booth as an anti-immigration activist, but so far as I can see, all he did was attend a rally when he was 16. Booth was furious about Lincoln’s reelection in 1864. If he voted, most likely it would have been for McClellan.
FWIW, an ancestor of Gary Peters, the current little-known Democrat senator from Michigan, gave Booth shelter when he was on the run after the assassination. The family claimed they didn’t know what Booth had done, but most likely they did.