In her gentle autobiography and memoir about growing up with her brother John Wilkes Booth, Asia Booth treated him with kindness, respect and love. She claimed that she was not being an apologist for him in spite of his assassinating Abraham Lincoln, which she was sure would bring her whole family to eventual ruin. Instead, she stated that she simply wished that the country would be served by illuminating another side of her brother, of which they were unaware and that the our nation would find in its collective heart a way to forgive and heal from its wound. At the conclusion of my manuscript "John Wilkes Booth Before the Civil War", I quote one of her lines of tender mercy, as she recalled a happier time of their youth together. Asia descrbed her brother Wilkes as "lover of nature, tender with bugs, etc." A glimpse of John Wilkes Booth that many historians tend to ignore.
