 By the age of 16 , Booth was interested in the theatre and in politics , and he became a delegate from Bel Air to a rally by the Know Nothing Party for Henry Winter Davis , the anti @-@ immigrant party 's candidate for Congress in the 1854 elections . Aspiring to follow in the footsteps of his father and his actor brothers , Edwin and Junius Brutus , Jr . , Booth began practicing elocution daily in the woods around Tudor Hall and studying Shakespeare . 
