John Wilkes Booth “was licentious as men, and particularly as actors go, but he was not a seducer,” said John’s earliest biographer, journalist George Townsend, hedging his bet with “as far as I can learn.” Townsend was not naïve. He was aware of John’s reputation, but he’d heard of an incident where John had tried to act honorably. It involved a young girl who had become enamored of John and kept sending him flowers, love notes, photographs of herself, “and all the accessories of intrigue.”1
John was used to that kind of attention. He usually ignored it, but the girl was persistent. He finally agreed to see her, anticipating a quick intimacy. She was “so young, so fresh, and so beautiful,” he felt remorse taking advantage of her, writes Townsend. He tried to discourage her from what she had come for. He had no affection for her, he said. “Go home, and beware of actors, they are to be seen, not to be known.”
“That only made the girl more determined,” says Townsend, “and one more soul went to the isles of Cyprus [the legendary home of prostitutes].”2
Female historians Joyce Knibb and Patricia Mehrtens smile knowingly at Townsend’s saying John hesitated at “debauching” young innocent girls who flirted with him.3 The only time he had shown “restraint” was when he was just starting out his career in Richmond and turned away an infatuated girl—and that was because she came from a prominent family. Seducing a respectable white woman in the South was a violation of the South’s code of honor and demanded vengeance, often in the form of a duel. John was not afraid of a duel, but a scandal would end his career in Richmond. He did not have the same qualms about getting involved with Northern women. He had shown no such restraint in Philadelphia with a girl boarding at his rooming house nor, for instance, about a liaison with sixteen-year-old Isabel Sumner, a girl he met in Boston when he was not out drinking tea or riding with Maggie Mitchell.
Isabella (she preferred Isabel) was born in 1847 in Boston, the oldest of a family of four girls. Their father, Charles Henry Sumner, was a prosperous Boston grocer with a home at 916 Beacon Street. Although he had the same surname as Massachusetts’s well-known Senator Charles Sumner, they weren’t related. Isabel’s mother was Sally Tileston.
Bumping into Charles Sumner sometime near the end of John’s four-week Boston tour, poet Julia Ward Howe, whose “Battle Hymn of the Republic” would become one of the best tunes of the Civil War, asked him if had yet seen John at the Boston Museum. “He’s a man of fine talents and noble hopes in his profession.”
“Why, n-no madam,” Sumner sniffed, “I long since ceased to take any interest in individuals.” Slightly annoyed at Sumner’s hubris, Mrs. Howe snapped that Sumner had made great progress. “God has not yet gone so far—at least according to the last accounts!”4
Isabel likely met John in May 1864. Possibly she was one of the many girls and women who waited at the stage door after a play to catch a glimpse of John when he left the theatre.5 Isabel was a petite brunette with lively blue eyes and a pretty oval face. Somehow she managed to get his attention. They saw one another for several days until John left Boston to spend a week in New York at Edwin’s, visiting his mother and Rosalie.
Teenage Isabel Sumner. “How shall I write you, as lover, friend or brother?” Courtesy of John Rhodehamel and Louise Taper, eds. “Right or Wrong, God Judge Me”: The Writings of John Wilkes Booth. Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 1997.
When they said their goodbyes, they promised to write to one another. John had made that promise to other women many times before. This time he kept it. Ten days later Isabel received the first of six known letters he sent her.
His first letter, dated June 7, 1864, is not at all in keeping with John’s reputation as a Casanova. Instead, it shows him vulnerable and unsure of himself.
“Dear Miss Isabel,” he headed his letter and asked, “How shall I write you; as lover, friend, or brother?”
Friend or brother implied their relationship was only platonic. Lover implied much more. Until he heard back from her, John told her, he would have to be satisfied with “Dearest Friend.” He tells her he wants to protect her from the “wiles of this bad world” and keep her “good and pure.”6 It was the same lodestone of “purity” that had drawn his brother Edwin to Mary Devlin.
Like a lovesick schoolboy, John asked, “Do you think the least little bit of me,” then begged Isabel to forgive him for asking. “I know the world, and had begun to hate it,” he wrote and went on to tell her what would make any teenage girl or grown woman giddy hearing from the most sought-after man in America: “[When] I saw you. Things seemed changed.”7
John ended that letter asking Isabel to keep all his letters to herself and not to show them to even her closest friends. He might write some foolish things, he said, and didn’t want anyone else to read what he had written. John had been as discreet about the letters from other women that he’d received. He expected the same from Isabel but felt he had to say so. On the off-chance that his letters might be intercepted, he sent them to general delivery at the Boston post office instead of her home address.8
One of the “foolish things,” he said, he didn’t want anyone else to read was his telling her “I love you.” He would be embarrassed, he said, if some stranger read it. Self-absorbed as always, he told her to “never trifle with anothers [sic] heart”9 with no sense of the irony of what he was saying.
John left New York for Pennsylvania on June 8 to start developing the oil fields he had invested in. He would be gone about three weeks, he told Isabel. He hoped she would write to him. When he didn’t receive a reply after two weeks, he sent a second letter. “Have you forgotten me so soon?. . .Do not forget me . . . I should hate to be forgotten so soon.”10
When John returned to New York on July 14, there were several letters from Isabel. Thinking about her kept him awake all night. At 2:30 a.m. he dashed off a quick note telling her how happy he was to get her letters. Absence, he said, had made his heart grow fonder. “I had no idea how much I care for you till the last week or so.” In his first letter he said he was reluctant to say he loved her. After anxiously waiting to hear from her, he no longer cared. He wanted to let her know “I love you.”11
When Isabel didn’t write back, John fretted she had been offended by his openness. After ten days without a return letter, he wrote asking if he had said anything that upset her. If he had, he apologized profusely. He was sorry for allowing “my fancy to play so free.” He couldn’t write anymore. His fear of losing her, he said, “seems to paralyze my hand.” If she didn’t want to hear from him again, he wrote, he wouldn’t trouble her anymore, but he would never stop thinking of her as “something pure and sacred.” Then he added he wasn’t going to wait for an answer. He was coming to Boston.12
Two days later John registered at the Parker House. Conspiracy theorists contend he was there to meet with Confederate agents.13 If so, John would have had to have planned that meeting months in advance. He had just written Isabel two days earlier he was coming to Boston after previously writing her several letters about how much he loved her. If those letters were a cover, he would have had to anticipate he was being watched and that his letters were being read, despite his telling Isabel not to show them to anyone and his addressing them to her at general delivery at the Boston post office.
Because the names of four of the guests at the hotel are untraceable, conspiracy advocates maintain they were Confederate aliases.14 John’s letter to Isabel makes it clear he was in Boston to see Isabel, not some elusive Confederate spies. If those unidentified guests were Confederate agents, their registering at the Parker House at the same time as John was a mere coincidence.15
How long John stayed in Boston, how much time he spent with Isabel (without Isabel’s parents knowing anything about it), or what they said to one another, can only be guessed. John was acting like a lovesick teenager. Before saying goodbye, he gave Isabel a pearl and diamond ring and had it inscribed “J. W .B. to I. S.”16 A gift like that would have sent any girl’s head spinning. Isabel assured him she was still his “friend.”
Promising he would soon see her again, John left Boston at the end of July 1864 for a brief visit with his mother and sister Rosalie at Edwin’s in New York, then he left by train with Edwin and his brother-in-law John Sleeper Clarke to visit with Asia in Philadelphia. The talk at the beginning of the trip was innocuous until it got around to the war. John and Clarke had once been friends, but they’d had a falling-out. John believed Clarke had married Asia for her family name. Though he never let on, John may also have harbored some resentment for Clarke’s stealing some of Asia’s affections.
Edwin and Clarke were more than aware of John’s views about the war. They had tried to steer away from any talk about politics, but talking politics was hard to avoid with a war going on. The conversation was calm at first. Then turned angry. When Clarke mentioned some news about the South’s recent setbacks, John’s face hardened and he began drumming his fingers on the seat. Clarke didn’t read the menace in his face. He made the mistake of insulting Confederate President Jefferson Davis. John’s short-fused temper exploded. He lunged at Clarke, grabbed him by the neck, and shook him side to side, like a dog shaking a toy between his teeth. Seeing what was happening, other passengers shouted for John to stop and tried to break his hold on the hapless Clarke. After John’s rage exhausted itself, he hurled the terrified Clarke back onto his seat. Standing malignantly over him, his face visibly “twisted with rage, he snarled, ‘If you value your life, never speak in that way to me again of a man and a cause I hold sacred.’”17
After what must have been an unpleasant stay at Asia and Clarke’s home, John made up his mind he had to do something in support of the Southern war effort. In early August 8, 1864, he left Philadelphia for Barnum’s Hotel at the southwest corner of Calvert and Fayette Streets in Baltimore. The Barnum was one of the largest and swankiest hotels in America, capable of housing six hundred guests. Once settled in, John sent word to two boyhood friends, Samuel Bland Arnold and Michael O’Laughlen, to meet him there.
Samuel Arnold was thirty years old, four years older than John, five foot eight, about the same height as John, with thick dark hair, a moustache, and a slight beard. The last time he’d seen John was in 1852 when they were schoolmates at St. Timothy’s Hall.
Michael O’Laughlen was twenty-four, two years older than John. He was five foot five, had black hair and black eyes, and sported a bushy moustache and a thin goatee below his lower lip. O’Laughlen also hadn’t seen John since they were boys when he lived across from the Booth home on North Exeter Street in Baltimore.
Arnold and O’Laughlen had both served in the Confederate army and both had been discharged, Arnold for sickness, O’Laughlen for disability. Both men had taken the loyalty oath to the Union, but their loyalties were still with the South. Both were also bored with their lives. Arnold was unemployed with nothing to do except look after his mother and work as a laborer on his brother’s farm. O’Laughlen worked in the family feed business.
John greeted them as old friends, offering drinks and cigars. Neither man had any idea why John had asked them to his hotel, but they were curious and excited to be with the now-famous actor. As Arnold and O’Laughlen relaxed and grew comfortable, John brought the conversation around to the war and a plan he had recently formulated to capture Lincoln on his way to his summer residence. After taking him prisoner, he was going to bring him to Richmond where the government could barter his freedom for the release of Confederate POWs. John used the word “capture,” not “kidnap.” “Kidnapping” was tawdry. “Capture” had a military ring to it. They would be heroes, he told them. John was as persuasive as ever. Arnold and O’Laughlen agreed to help.
As the two men were leaving, John said he had to wind up his business dealings in New York and would soon get back to them. John’s “business dealings” were a secret tryst with Isabel, who was coming to New York to see him. The old proverb about plans going astray was only too true in John’s plan. Days after returning to New York, John came down with a severe infection in his right arm that landed him in bed for several weeks.18
The infection was erysipelas. Also known as “St. Anthony’s fire” (named after the healing Christian saint appealed to for a cure) and “holy fire,” erysipelas is a bright red rash symptomatic of a serious, sometimes fatal, streptococcus infection that causes high fever, chills, vomiting, headache, and lassitude. Erysipelas can occur on its own, but it is also known to be symptomatic of syphilis.19 The infection would keep him bedridden for three weeks.
John Wilkes was “quite sick,” “suffering from a diseased arm” Asia wrote a friend. “He fainted from the acute pain, and Junius carried him and laid him upon his bed.”20
While he was laid up in bed, John wrote to Isabel, who by then had come to New York hoping to see him, that he had come down with “eryeocippolis.”21 Isabel sent him flowers and a get-well letter. John sent her a return letter apologizing for “not being able to see you” because he was too sick to leave the house.22
When she received his note saying he couldn’t see her, Isabel wrote back she would come to him. John wrote back his doctor had just cut a two-inch gash in his arm to relieve his symptoms; he wouldn’t be up until the next day at the earliest.23 Isabel sensed that John did not want to see her at all. Disillusioned, Isabel returned to Boston.
For an unmarried sixteen-year-old to have traveled on her own, likely lying to her parents about where she was going, who she was seeing, and who she was staying with, was scandalous for those times. For Isabel to come to New York, John would have had to have booked a room for her at a hotel ahead of time. Their relationship had passed being platonic.
Despite what must have been heartbreaking unrequited love, Isabel remained faithful to John in one way: after John assassinated Lincoln, other women who had a romantic relationship with him, as well as mere acquaintances, burned his letters or got rid of any gifts he gave them,24 but Isabel kept John’s letters and the pearl ring he gave her with its inscribed “J. W. B. to I. S.”
Isabel was undoubtedly in love with John. Was he ever in love with Isabel? His obsession with her was out of character with the John Wilkes Booth womanizer of history. What did this matinee idol, fawned over by women drooling with lust, see in a chaste sixteen-year-old school girl?
One answer is that Isabel was not like the other women he knew. John was close to his sister Asia. Her good opinion meant a lot to him. They were more than just brother and sister. Only two years apart, they were the best of friends. They had weathered their father’s odd, often frightening delusions. They had been humiliated and called bastards and been shunned by former friends when neighbors learned their parents were not legally married. They had confided their innermost thoughts to one another. When a gypsy told John he would be famous and die an early death, the only one he told was Asia.25
John knew how Asia felt about Edwin’s late wife Mary Devlin. Mary had been an actress and was Irish. To Asia, that meant she wasn’t respectable. Like John, Asia never got over her humiliation of being illegitimate. Having an actress like Mary in the family, a woman with no respectability in middle-class society, was almost as humiliating. John intuited that Asia would have approved of Isabel. Isabel was “pure.” She also wasn’t Irish. That meant John could court her with no second thoughts that Asia would turn on her like she had turned on Mary Devlin.
The greater mystery is why John stopped seeing or writing to Isabel. His erysipelas infection eventually healed. He could have pursued Isabel again. John was impulsive, passionate, charming, like the Romeo he impersonated onstage—but he was also unable to commit to any lasting relationship.
John’s affair with Isabel fits right into psychologist Bryn C. Collins’s casebook description of the Romeos she has treated.26
Week one: Romeo (John) meets someone (Isabel) and finds himself swept off his feet (June 7, 1864: “How, shall I write you; as lover, friend, or brother. I think so much of you . . .”).
Week two: He soon begins to feel he does not know how he could have survived without her (June 17, 1864: “I should hate to be forgotten so soon.”).
Week Three: He can’t stop thinking of her. He can’t work because he can’t concentrate. He just wants to spend time with her (July 24, 1864: “it’s impossible for me to rivet my mind to a single line of study, or in fact, to anything else.”).
Week Four: Sorry, I can’t see you (August 26, 1864: “You cannot imagine how sorry I was in not being able to see you.”).
Then, “suddenly it’s gone. Everything stops. There’s no fight. There’s no discussion . . . Romeo simply disappears.” John never sees Isabel again. He does not write to her and does not even think about her anymore.
Collins did not have John Wilkes Booth’s infatuation with Isabel in mind when she narrated that typical scenario, but the parallels are uncanny. Romeos are the way they are, writes Collins, because they cannot feel subtle emotions. They see everything on a grand scale. They expect everyone to feel the same. Romeos are unable to limit themselves to one affair, says Collins, no matter what they promise. Once they lose the excitement of the romance, the affair is over and they move on to the next one.
All that was certainly true of John Booth. But something else, involving a grandiose belief he could change the course of the war, had changed his feelings about Isabel around that time.