If opposites attract, John Wilkes Booth and Lucy Lambert Hale were made for each other. John was an ardent racist; Lucy was an abolitionist. John was trim; Lucy was stout. John was an Adonis; Lucy was a plain Jane.
Their affair began in 1862. Two days before Valentine’s Day, John and June were both staying at their brother Edwin’s house in New York. Neither was able to sleep. John could not stop thinking about Lucy, a girl he had seen from a distance in Washington a few days earlier. June was sleepless because John kept waking him up to pester him for advice about a valentine letter to Lucy. He finished at 3:30 a.m. June went upstairs to bed. John stayed downstairs on the sofa. He wanted to be up early enough to put his love note in the morning’s mail.1
This was still an era when men did not speak to women of high social status without a formal introduction. Valentine’s Day was an opportunity for a man to write a letter to a woman to whom he had not been introduced, to make her aware of his feelings without breaching social etiquette. Despite his overwhelming self-confidence with most women, John was anxious that this girl not feel affronted by attentions from an actor.
The letter arrived in time. Lucy Hale opened it, looked at the bottom to see who it was from, and was puzzled. The letter was signed “A Stranger.” Lucy read on:
My dear Miss Hale,
Were it not for the License which a time-honored observance of this day allows, I had not written you this poor note . . . You resemble in a most remarkable degree a lady, very dear to me, now dead and your close resemblance to her surprised me the first time I saw you.
This must be my apology for any apparent rudeness . . . To see you has indeed afforded me a melancholy pleasure. If you can conceive of such, and should we never meet nor I see you again believe me, I shall always associate you in my memory, with her, who was very beautiful, and whose face, like your own I trust, was a faithful index of gentleness and amiability.
With a Thousand kind wishes for your future happiness I am, to you,
A Stranger.
St. Valentine’s Day
1862.2
Despite his womanizing, in early 1862 John was not yet the famous star he was soon to become. Most of the women—girls would be more accurate—he had an interest in were teenage actresses. John was confident among his own. Among women unconnected to the theater, especially “society” women, he was careful to observe the etiquette of the day. Lucy’s father was a United States senator from New Hampshire. A United States senator’s daughter was used to being in the company of sons of prominent political and social American dignitaries. John was an actor, a profession in very low standing among the elite.
Signing the note “A Stranger” was not as enigmatic as it might seem. At the time John was preparing for the lead in an upcoming lengthy play in Baltimore later that month. The play was called The Stranger.3
Nevertheless, it was a peculiar valentine. Someone less narcissistic might have phrased it differently. It was hardly romantic to tell a woman she reminded him of a dead girl he had once loved. But perhaps the most puzzling question is who was it Lucy reminded John of?
Most likely it was the “Miss Becket” whom John had fallen in love with during his early stock days at Richmond’s Marshall Theatre. Their affair ended tragically when she fell ill with typhoid fever. Before her death, she had had her hair shorn for John to make into a theatrical wig for him to remember her by. Like other actors, John had many wigs; hers was his favorite.4
What was it about Lucy that attracted John Wilkes Booth, the handsomest man in America?
She was certainly not a knockout. Descriptions of Lucy as pretty with clear skin and a stunning figure are fanciful.5 Characterizing her as one of Washington’s beauties is fictional romanticism on the part of authors who seem to have never looked at her photo.6 The picture of Lucy that John had in his pocket when he died is matronly, to put it kindly. The few other photos of Lucy are no more flattering.7 The only physical descriptions of Lucy by contemporaries are that she had dark hair, grey blue eyes, and was “rather stout.”8 Hardly descriptions of a girl who turned the head of someone like John.
If not her looks, what then?
Lucy possessed a charisma and a personality not unlike John’s. John Hay, Lincoln’s private secretary, was in love with her. Hay had known her from their school days and told her he didn’t know anyone “of equal charm or equal power of gaining hearts, and equal disdain of the hearts you gain.” He loved and admired her. He didn’t understand her and never hoped to, he said, because if he did, she would lose some of her “indefinable fascination.” Her “magnetic vitality fills every place [she] left with haunting fancies and dreams.”9
A “rather stout” Lucy Lambert Hale. Courtesy of James O. Hall Research Center, Surratt House Museum, Clinton, Maryland.
Lucy Lambert Hale (Lambert was her mother’s maiden name) was the younger of the Hales’ two daughters. Their older daughter, Elizabeth, was born in 1835. Lucy was born six years later in 1841 in Dover, New Hampshire.
Lucy was a young girl of twelve at boarding school in Hanover, New Hampshire, when she began turning heads. Her first known flirtation was with William Chandler, a Concord boy, future United States senator, and secretary of the Navy. Chandler sent her adolescent love letters from Harvard University in the form of poems when he was a freshman.10
Bill Chandler was not the only one of Lucy’s admirers who would later make his mark in American history. In 1858, when she was seventeen, Lucy had a brief flirtation with eighteen-year-old Oliver Wendell Homes Jr., a future Supreme Court Justice. They met when they were both vacationing in Maine with their families. As soon as Holmes got back to Harvard, where he was a freshman, he started writing to Lucy at her boarding school in Hanover, and she wrote back.
In one of his letters, Oliver confessed he had a “slightly jealous disposition.” “Give my respect to all the young ladies at Dover and thereabouts,” he said, but “to none of the ‘male species.’” Oliver signed it “Your aff. Friend.” In a P.S., he said he appreciated her perfuming her letter and its meaning, assuring her he would take the first chance to follow its invitation.”11 The perfume was called “Kiss-Me-Quick.” Lucy pretended to be offended by Oliver’s inference.
One of her letters hinted he wasn’t the only one writing her, and in Oliver’s next letter he demanded, “How many young gentlemen do you keep going at once on an average?”12 His suspicions were right. In late 1860, a Harvard student, known only by his initials, W. P. K., was begging Lucy “in the name of one whose destiny is in your hands, do not discontinue our new born correspondence in its very commencement.”
Lucy had told W. P. K. not to write anymore because he had become too ardent and said he loved her. “In case we do not have a civil war,” he said he would be at Harvard for another term and would be more than happy to visit her in New Hampshire and pleaded for her to reconsider and write to him again.13
Lucy still kept Oliver dangling. After his father returned from a trip to Hanover, Oliver asked if he had seen Lucy. Holmes Sr. said he had and that when he’d asked her about the students at her school, she had only pointed out the men. He feared, he said, that Lucy was a flirt. Oliver already knew that. In his next letter he went back to addressing her formally as “Dear Miss Hale.”14
Shortly thereafter, Lucy persuaded her father to let her transfer to a boarding school in Boston. Her being closer to Harvard would be entertaining.
Another of the heads Lucy was turning belonged to Frederick Anderson, Robert Lincoln’s roommate at Harvard. Anderson had met Lucy sometime in March or April 1864, and she had asked him for a photo of himself. Anderson apologized for sending an older photo. Anderson then reminded her he had some of her jewelry that she had asked him to hold on to when they were at some unstated reception. At the bottom of Anderson’s letter, Robert penned a short note to Lucy inviting her to their Class day. He had no objection to her coming, he said, if she promised to be good and not allow any freshman to be presented to her.15
Lucy’s family were staunch abolitionists. John Parker Hale had served in the United States Congress from 1843 to 1845 and in the United States Senate from 1847 to 1853 and 1855 to 1865. When Hale lost his election bid for another term, he petitioned Lincoln for an appointment as United States minister to Spain.
After his valentine letter to Lucy in 1862, John forgot about her. The next time Lucy saw John was a year later when she watched him on stage in Washington and sent him a bouquet of congratulatory flowers. After that “Miss Hale was always at the play with a bouquet and smiles for him.”16
The Hale family had rooms at the National Hotel in Washington and had been living there since 1861. Since John was also staying at the National Hotel, they had ample opportunities to be together. On one particular night they were both at one of the hotel’s “hops.” “The hotel was a blaze of light,” a guest recollected. No matter where he went, every woman could not help gaping at the “tall, dark” Adonis, secretly wishing they were the girl clinging to his arm. “There were some who caviled at her choice [because John was an actor]. . . the young girl’s sweet face seemed excuse for any infatuation.”17
By March 1865 Lucy was committed to John. There was never any announcement or formal engagement. Lucy never mentioned it publicly. She didn’t tell her father. If she had, he likely would have tried to break up their relationship. When Lucy asked her father for an extra ticket for Lincoln’s second inauguration, she didn’t tell him who it was for. Senator Hale, the strong advocate for abolition, had no idea the ticket was for a defender of slavery.18
Was John in love with Lucy or just using her to get close to Lincoln? John could and did have his pick of virtually any woman. His “beauty of person and face, fascinating manners, and thrilling voice, made him a ‘darling’ among the susceptible sex.”19
What attracted John to Lucy was what John Hay saw in her—an “indefinable fascination” and a “magnetic vitality.” She had another asset in Booth’s mind that had nothing to do with looks or personality. She had respectability. Marriage to a senator’s daughter would have increased John’s own respectability and social status.
Whatever else was going through his mind, John began thinking about marriage. A few days after the inauguration, he wrote to his mother confiding his feelings for Lucy and that he was going to ask her to marry him.
John’s mother already knew about his feelings for Lucy. She had always had a sixth sense about her favorite son.20 Besides, Mary Ann wrote back, his secret was no secret at all. His brother Edwin already knew all about it. A friend of Edwin’s had told him John was “paying great attention to a fine young lady in Washington.” “You have so often been dead in love,” his mother wrote, “and this may prove like the others.” Knowing him better than anyone else, she urged him not to be “like a child with a new toy, [who] only craves the possession of it.”
Then came the big question: “Would her father give his consent?” Mary Ann Booth, married to an actor, mother of three actors, was well aware of the low opinion most people had about the acting profession. “You know in my partial eyes you are a fit match for any woman, no matter who she may be—but some fathers have higher notions.”21
A few days after receiving his mother’s letter, John asked Lucy to marry him. She said she would. They agreed to keep their engagement secret and exchanged rings. A week before the assassination, dining with Samuel Chester in New York, John told him that the ring on his finger was from a woman to whom he had just become engaged.
Lucy’s cousin, John Parker Hale Wentworth, was also in on the secret. The day after the inauguration, Wentworth and Lucy were in John’s room at the National Hotel. No one knows what they spoke of, but John and Lucy each wrote some verses on the back of an unused envelope. John’s poem read:
Now, in this hour, that we part,
I will ask to be forgotten never.
But in thy pure and guiltless heart
Consider me thy friend dear Ever
J. Wilkes Booth
The verses on the other side read:
“For of all sad words from
Tongue or pen.
The saddest are these—
It might have been.”
March 5th 1865
In John’s room.22
The verse in quotes is from “Maud Muller,” a poem written in 1856 by John Greenleaf Whitter. Unlike the other, it wasn’t signed. Handwriting analysis later proved it was written by Lucy.23 Women of Lucy’s social standing weren’t supposed to visit gentlemen in their room. Lucy was not conventional. And she was in love.
Some historians speculate the two lovers wrote those poems about parting because they were broken-hearted over Lucy’s leaving for Spain with her father, the United States’ newly appointed minister to that country. Since Hale didn’t receive approval until just before the assassination, that speculation of romantic tearful goodbyes is anachronistic. The poems were not to one another. They were to Lucy’s cousin and John’s roommate at the hotel, John Wentworth. Wentworth had come to Washington for the inauguration. Now that it was over, he was leaving for southern California as an Indian Affairs Agent. The poems were a goodbye to Wentworth.24
John had also confided to his brother June he was “in love with a lady in Washington”25 and was going to marry her.26 He also told Asia. A few weeks after John’s death, Asia wrote Jean Anderson that “their marriage (John’s and Lucy’s) was to have been in a year, when she promised to return from Spain for him, either with her father or without him.”27
The one thing that could always be counted on with John when it came to women was that he couldn’t be counted on at all. All the while John was courting Lucy, he was plotting to kidnap Lincoln and take him to Richmond. Success would have barred his return to Washington and marriage to Lucy. It is unlikely Lucy would have left her family and gone to live with John in the South. Skeptics have good reason to doubt how genuine John’s feelings for Lucy were. A skeptic might also point out that besides Lucy’s photo, John had photos of four other women in his pocket when he died. Would a man in love and engaged to be married carry pictures of other women alongside his fiancée’s photo?
Moreover, the night before he made the fateful decision to murder Abraham Lincoln, John probably spent the night with prostitute Ella Starr.
Whatever feelings, genuine or otherwise, he had for Lucy and all the other women in his life, John’s first love was always John. Everyone else and everything else came second.