10

LITTLE REHEARSALS: LOUISE WOOSTER

A day or two after coming to Montgomery, John was “Lou’s” favorite star. “I was truly happy,” said the eighteen-year-old prostitute.¹

Louise Catherine Wooster (“Lou”), was born in Tuscaloosa, Alabama, to a middle-class family of six girls. Her father was an engineer from New York; her mother was a native South Carolinian. Lou’s father died a year after the family moved to Mobile, when Lou was seven. Her mother remarried three years later, to a man who squandered whatever money she had and deserted her, leaving her and her daughters destitute. Lou’s sister, Margaret, age fourteen, left home and became a prostitute.²

Lou’s mother died when Lou was fifteen. Her two younger sisters were sent to an “orphan asylum” in Mobile. Lou went to live with a married sister in New Orleans. None too happy about supporting Lou, her husband refused to take his wife’s younger sisters in as well. Lou made her way back to Mobile. She forged her older sister’s signature on a letter stating her sisters could come and live with her, and took them out of the orphanage.³

With no money of their own, the three girls accepted an offer to live with a family friend. The friend seduced Lou and then kicked her out.⁴ When Lou became gravely ill with yellow fever, another family friend brought Lou to his home to recuperate. After she recovered, he also seduced her, then took her to a brothel to be rid of her.⁵

With no alternatives, Lou entered “the life,” but balked at living a “life of shame in Mobile,” where her family was known.”⁶ With what little belongings she had, Lou left for Montgomery to work at “Big Lize’s.” “Big Lize” was Eliza Yarbourgh, madam of Montgomery’s best known “house of ill repute.”⁷

Lou was “young and rather pretty,” had a “sweet disposition,” and got along well with the other “inmates” at “Big Lize’s.”⁸ She maintained her pride, she said, and her “good old Knickerbocker blood” made her particular about only taking on “the higher class of men that visited our home.”⁹ That was make-believe. Prostitutes at “Big Lize’s” did not have the privilege of choosing their customers. At fifteen, Lou did what she was told.

Girls at “Big Lize’s” and most other brothels had short careers. They were usually dead by the age of twenty-five from suicide, syphilis, alcoholism, or morphine overdose,¹⁰ not to mention sexual assault and murder by drunks who shot them.¹¹

Condoms were expensive and rarely used. Made from sheep intestines or rubber, they cost $3 to $6 a dozen, about $45 to $90 in today’s prices.¹² Sexually transmitted diseases were rampant. Seventy-three thousand men contracted syphilis during the Civil War. Another 109,000 came down with “clap,” the common name for gonorrhea.¹³ John’s own brother Edwin was a “clap” victim.¹⁴ John would eventually come down with syphilis.¹⁵ So did John’s good friend and fellow actor, John McCullough. A few years before he died from it, McCullough reminisced how John “was a wonderful companion of poetry, adventure, and disease.”¹⁶

Prostitution was not the sort of life girls chose willingly. “Though the brightest jewel had been plucked from my little crown,” Lou vowed to herself she would leave that “life of shame should the opportunity ever be offered.”¹⁷

Lou believed John Booth was that opportunity.

John was her “ideal man, handsome, generous, affectionate and brave.” He was her idol. “Oh! How I loved him.”¹⁸

John told her he loved her too. They would never part, he said. He promised he would get her into the theater and teach her how to be a star during their “little rehearsals.”¹⁹ John’s brother Edwin had seduced a “singing chambermaid” in California with the same line.²⁰

John was still “rehearsing” with Louise when Maggie Mitchell arrived in Montgomery on Thursday, November 29, 1860, for a two-week appearance at the Montgomery Theatre.

The next day was Montgomery’s annual St. Andrews Society’s dinner. Since Maggie’s father was born in Scotland, she was part Scottish herself and felt right at home entertaining the gathering at the Post Office Restaurant with songs interspersed between toasts to impending secession, “Robbie Burns,” and haggis.²¹ John was not Scottish, but Maggie wrangled a personal invitation for him to attend.²² The following day Maggie also arranged a “Grand Complimentary Benefit By The Citizens of Montgomery” for “Mr. J. Wilkes Booth.”²³

John had vowed he would not use his family surname until he felt he had earned that right. Stepping onto the Montgomery stage that Saturday night on December 1, he felt he had. From then on, he no longer avoided using the name “Booth.”²⁴

John probably spent Saturday night and all of Sunday with Maggie. On Monday he visited Lou for a “rehearsal.” Afterwards he told her he had to leave Montgomery the next day. If he stayed any longer, he said, he would be killed for speaking out against secession.

Montgomery was the home of William Lowndes Yancey, the “Apostle of Secession.” When Senator Stephen Douglas, the proponent of popular sovereignty—the principle that people in new territories should decide for themselves if they wanted the territory to be slave or free—stopped in Montgomery as part of his bid for the presidency in 1860, Yancey’s supporters pelted him and his wife with rotten eggs.²⁵ Yancey and the South’s “fire eaters” were adamant in their opposition to any restrictions on slavery. The only way to maintain their “property” rights in slaves, they insisted, was to secede from the Union and form their own country.

After Lincoln won the national election on November 6, 1860, secession was no longer idle talk. Robert Toombs, a “fire-eating” senator from Georgia, told a Montgomery crowd of over 2,000 at the Montgomery Theatre it was time to end the Union even if it meant civil war.²⁶

Despite losing the election, Douglas continued to speak out against the prevailing sentiment in the South for dissolving the Union. It would mean war, he warned, a war that would plunge “the happiest people, the most prosperous country, and the best Government the sun of heaven ever shed his genial rays upon . . . into the horrors of revolution, anarchy, and bankruptcy.”²⁷

Douglas’s dire warning hit home to John. Long before he became a zealous Southern patriot, he was a staunch Unionist. His father and grandfather had been dedicated to the Union. John agreed with Douglas that war would destroy the country.

Never one to keep his thoughts to himself, John made the mistake of saying them aloud in public to some Montgomery fire-eaters. Did they want to “tear down this great temple of civilization that was the Union, this Monument of our father’s greatness,” he said to men who had already decided they did. He for one would “not fight for secession or for disunion.”²⁸

Expressing those thoughts in the Deep South did not endear him to Montgomery’s firebrand secessionists. He told Lou he had to leave immediately. If he stayed he could be killed or tarred and feathered for what he had said.²⁹

Lou begged him to take her with him.

“Impossible!” John told her.

“Then I will never see you again,” Lou sobbed. “Something tells me that I will not. Something tells me that this is our final parting.”³⁰

It was. John left Montgomery for Savannah on December 3 and sailed from there to New York, arriving on December 9. Years later, Lou believed he still loved her.