Just turning thirteen, his sense of identity still crystallizing, John Wilkes Booth learned he was a bastard. In nineteenth-century America, bastards were non-persons with no kinship or legal right to inherit property. They were restricted from entering licensed professions, not allowed to join social clubs, and barred from participating in civic organizations.1 Though John had never had any reason to believe his parents were not legally married, he now found that in the eyes of society he was no better than a thief or beggar and his mother was a “fallen woman.”2 The taint was so great that years later, a blackmailer tried to extort money from John’s brother Edwin to keep the family shame a secret.3
At thirteen, John had to find some way of proving who he was to himself. He scoured the house for his mother’s sewing needle, found some India ink, and sat down at the family table. Slowly and painfully, he pricked one hole after another into the crook between his left hand’s thumb and forefinger. Then he dabbed the holes with black, India ink, permanently tattooing “J. W. B.” into his skin.4 Almost twenty years later, those initials confirmed that the man dragged from the burning barn at the Garrett farm on April 26, 1865, was John Wilkes Booth.5
The humiliation of being bastards affected the Booth children in different ways. June had already left home and had his own scandal to deal with. In 1851, he had abandoned his wife and run off to San Francisco with a younger actress. Rosalie (called “Rose”), John’s oldest sister, never married; she remained her mother’s constant companion and caretaker until Mary Ann died and then lived with her brother Joseph until her own death in 1889.
Despite her humiliation, Mary Ann is never known to have complained. She confronted her ordeals “with sad and reverent forbearance.”6 Asia dealt with the shame by pretending nothing was amiss at the Booth homestead. Her parents’ marriage, she told her friend Jean Anderson, was ideal. “If ever there was perfect love, it was between my father and my mother.”7 In her various paeans to her father, Asia left out his “seasons of abstractions” and never mentioned his drinking, a silence typical of the children of alcoholics.8
Edwin was choleric when he read the New York Evening Post’s 1858 obituary for Adelaide, describing her as Junius’s one-time wife.9 “Oblige me by contradicting that statement,” he wrote the newspaper. “My father was married but once, and then to my mother, who, thank God, still lives.”10 Years later Edwin wrote to his daughter Edwina: “Yr Aunt Asia’s memoir of father tells of his first foolish marriage at about 18 to an adventuress of nearly 50 [Adelaide was 24]—she saw the woman once. . . . I never did.”11 Edwin also denied his father was an alcoholic.12 Years later he told his daughter Edwina he would have preferred to stay in school rather than being his father’s keeper.13 Like his father, Edwin was also a brooding melancholic and an alcoholic.
Growing up with the shame of illegitimacy was a factor in Edwin and John’s sense of unworthiness and craving for fame. Throughout their mature lives, they both strove for respectability, courting social acceptance through their professional aspirations and personal demeanor.14
Asia Booth Clarke, John Wilkes Booth’s sister, 1884. Courtesy of Eleanor Farjeon, ed. The Unlocked Book: A Memoir of John Wilkes Booth by His Sister Asia Booth Clarke. New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1938.
From the time he was young, all the children knew John Wilkes was their mother’s favorite. He was their favorite too. The Booth’s neighbor, Mrs. Elijah Rogers, who nursed all the Booth children, “loved the boy dearly.” “I knew him from babyhood, and he was always so kind, tender-hearted and good. . . . Many times he has toddled over to our house to get a slice of bread with a thick layer of sugar.”15 Asked if she would give food or shelter to John knowing that he had shot Lincoln, Ann Hall, the black servant who had also taken care of John and the other children at the Farm, didn’t hesitate. “Give him all dat I have to eat, and ‘tect him to my last breaf.”16
John had a “gentle, loving disposition.” He was “very boyish” and “full of fun,” said Edwin. He would take sleigh rides in July and wear out the sleigh’s runners. Everyone smiled and laughed at his pranks. He “would charge through the woods on horseback, spouting heroic speeches,” waving a lance a soldier who had fought with Zachary Taylor in the Mexican War had given his father. But no matter what he did, he was “his mother’s darling.”17 John was also Rose’s “idolized favorite and pet.”18 From the moment of John’s birth, “both his parents so idolized and spoiled him that by comparison they seemed indifferent to the older children,” writes Stanley Kimmel, the Booth family historian.19
With so much love and favoritism, it is hardly surprising that in spite of the family scandal, John developed an exaggerated sense of his place in the world and an ultra-high opinion of himself.
John, Asia, and Edwin’s first school was a one-room schoolhouse across the entrance from the Farm. John was not very studious; classmate George Y. Maynadier recalled that John “didn’t lack the brains; he lacked the interest.”20 After the family moved to High Street in Baltimore in 1840, Mary Ann enrolled them with private tutors. John “was not quick at acquiring knowledge,” said Asia. Yet once he learned something, he never forgot it.21 After the family moved to North Exeter Street in 1845, John and Edwin enrolled at Bel Air Academy in Bel Air, Maryland. Edwin was there for only a year when his mother sent him off with Junius. John stayed at the Bel Air Academy for three years, from 1846 to 1849. The headmaster recalled he was a handsome boy “in face and figure although slightly bowlegged.”22
Even as young children, Edwin and other neighborhood boys imagined themselves as actors. Once, Edwin stole the spangles from his father’s Shylock costume to create his own costume. When Junius discovered the theft, he assumed John was the culprit and beat him until John admitted that Edwin was the guilty party.23 It was not the first time Junius beat John or Edwin. Junius was a violent man when crossed.24 John envied his father’s fame, but he never spoke with any love for the tyrant.
In 1849, eleven-year-old John enrolled at the Quaker-run Milton Boarding School in Cockeysville, Maryland, seventeen miles from Baltimore.25 It was while he was at the Milton School that the gypsy read John’s palm and predicted he would have a “fast life—short, but a grand one.”26 John was at the Milton Academy when Adelaide began her lawsuit against Junius.
Cockeysville was not far enough away to keep the gossip about the family disgrace from being heard. The public humiliation left John feeling betrayed. To cope with his shame, John became a bully. He began “to fag the smaller boys cruelly,” said a classmate.27 John also took out his frustration on animals. He tied neighborhood cats together or chased them up onto perilously steep roofs. John’s earliest biographer, George Alfred Townsend, said that in those days John was always shooting cats and killed off almost all of them in his neighborhood.28
It was not the only time John killed animals. Sitting at a window at the Farm, he shot a dog “for no earthly reason.”29 Another time, John needlessly unloaded three rounds of buckshot into a neighbor’s hog that had wandered near the Booth’s barn.30 Asia ignored John’s dark side, describing him instead as “very tender of flowers, and of insects and butterflies.”
Though generally easygoing, John had a violent streak that came out when he was angered or felt insulted. When an overseer at the Farm, George Hagan, insulted John’s mother and sisters, John tore off a tree limb and pummeled Hagan on his head and shoulders when he refused to apologize.31 “I knocked him down and made him bleed like a butcher,” John boasted.32 The next day Hagan filed a complaint against John for assault.33 John got off with a simple promise to keep the peace or forfeit a fifty-dollar bond.
In John’s third year at the Milton Academy, Edward Gorsuch, the father of one of John’s classmates, Tom Gorsuch, was killed—some newspapers said murdered—trying to retrieve runaway slaves who had fled from his farm in 1849 to Pennsylvania, a free state. His friend’s father’s killing made the incident personal for John. It was the beginning of his sense of identity as a Southerner. Nine years later he wrote that it had been well within Tom Gorsuch’s father’s rights to reclaim his slaves. “The South has a right according to the constitution to keep and hold slaves. And we have no right under that constitution to interfere with her or her slaves.”34
John did not have animus toward individual blacks. He liked the family servants, the Halls, and they liked him.35 During the New York City Draft Riot of 1863, John condemned the “murdering of inoffensive Negroes” and vowed to protect a young Negro boy with his own life if a mob came after him.36
Regardless of his noblesse oblige toward individual blacks, John Wilkes Booth was a white supremacist. “This country,” he would later say, “was formed for the white, not the black man.” “Nigs,” he said, were better off in slavery. “Instead of looking upon slavery as a sin I hold it to be a happiness for themselves and a social and political blessing for us . . . True, I have seen the black man whipped but only when he deserved much more than he received.” Speaking from personal experience, John said that, whatever cruelty they experienced, he had seen much worse meted out by father to son.37
John was fourteen when he enrolled at St. Timothy’s Hall, a military-style boarding school, in Catonsville, Maryland, about six miles from Baltimore. Most of the students and John’s closest friends at St. Timothy’s were from the South. St. Timothy’s was where John met Samuel Bland Arnold, one of the conspirators he later enlisted in his plan to abduct President Lincoln in 1865.
John was at St. Timothy’s when Junius died. His father had been the family’s sole means of support. With him gone, Mary Ann had no income. Besieged with creditors demanding money Junius owed them,38 she moved back to Tudor Hall—a house he had built near the Farm—with Rosalie and Asia, and she rented the North Exeter Street home in Baltimore for thirty-five dollars a month, much of it going to taxes and mortgage payments.
Their once “bright happy home,” said Asia, was now “broken up forever.”39 John and Joseph stayed at St. Timothy’s until the term ended in July and then left for Tudor Hall. John’s one year at St. Timothy’s ended his formal education.
As the oldest male at Tudor Hall, fifteen-year-old John was the man of the house. By then he had become imbued with the South’s sense of social status. That meant that family members did not sit at the table with the hired help. John struggled with his sense of equality and “that southern reservation which jealously kept the white laborer from free association with his employer or superior,” said Asia, and decided on a compromise. He would eat with them at the same table while his mother and sisters ate their meals elsewhere. Southern ladies, Asia sniffed, did not force themselves to be unduly familiar with “ignorant menials whom they dared not even to call servants.”40
What John and Asia meant by “ignorant menials” were the Catholic immigrants, mostly Irish and German laborers, who were coming to the United States by the thousands and, in the course of becoming naturalized, were influencing elections. Even though John’s own parents were immigrants, neither of them had become naturalized citizens, and they had remained aloof from politics. Actors should not meddle in politics, Junius told his children.41
John was a nativist. Only native-born Americans should be allowed to run for political office, he said. That way “great privileges” would not fall into foreign hands.42 Asia teased him—would he vote for his father if he had become naturalized and run for office? John did not share Asia’s feelings for their father. “I’d have cast my vote against him if I’d been of age,” he shot back.43
Like many native-born (Protestant) Marylanders, John fell in with the new, semi-secret, anti-Catholic American Party, popularly called the Know-Nothing Party. When asked about their activities, members were told to say, “I know nothing.”
Know-Nothings believed immigrants were taking over the country and had to be stopped. In 1854, John volunteered to be a steward at a nearby rally for Henry Winter Davis, the Know-Nothing candidate for Congress. On that particular day, John donned a dark, cloth coat with velvet lapels, a pale, buff waistcoat, dove-colored trousers, and a broad, straw hat. Even at sixteen, he was conscious of his appearance. He was “always well dressed,” said Asia. He looked “remarkably handsome.”44
Asia rarely mentioned the family’s hard life at Tudor Hall. Looking back on those years, she remembered them as an idyllic time in her life. She and John took early morning rides before sunup “when the dew lay like rain on the grass.”45 They would read aloud to one another. They sang together. John recited Byron’s poems and parts of Julius Caesar and other tragedies while Asia held the book, correcting him when he missed a line.46
To hear Asia tell it, John loved farming and joyfully rose with the sun in his east-facing bedroom, ready to go to work.47 The truth is John hated farming. He called it “trying to starve respectably by torturing the barren earth.”48 He stayed in bed as long as he could. “I’ve become a very late riser,” he told his friend Bill O’Laughlen.49 “I have had so much work all day and am so tired,” he could hardly find time to write.50 Visiting Tudor Hall many years later, John’s early biographer, George Townsend, said it was the “worst of bad farms, in a bad piece of country.”51
John was never too tired, however, for girls. Just shy of sixteen, John told Bill O’Laughlen he had his “eye on three girls out here . . . I hope I’ll get enough.”52 He was also aware of his own allure. “You must not think I was blowing when I say I cut quite a dash. I saw pretty girls home from the Fair at ten o’clock at night, some at a distance of four or five miles.”53 A few days later he wrote O’Laughlen he was among thirty-seven couples invited to a “Pick nick,” but he didn’t mention who he was going with. “Ladies,” he said, “have the means of revenge.”54