Asia shrieked. Lying in bed, five months pregnant with twins, she stared dumbfounded at the Philadelphia Inquirer’s April 15 bold, front-page headline:
MURDER OF PRESIDENT LINCOLN!
His Assassination Last Night While at Ford’s Theatre, in Washington!
J. WILKES BOOTH THE SUPPOSED MURDERER
Startled by the hysterical scream coming from his bedroom, her husband John Clarke’s first thought was that Asia or one of the children was hurt. Rushing into the bedroom he was relieved to see Asia sitting up in bed holding the morning Philadelphia Inquirer. What was wrong? Clarke blurted. Asia didn’t say anything. She merely held up the paper.1
She couldn’t believe what she’d just read. How could the brother she idolized have done what he was accused of? She knew he was devoted to the South. But this? Everyone in the Booth family knew their lives would never be the same.
Edwin was in Boston in his room at the Parker House on the night of April 14, 1865, entertaining some guests. Around half past twelve he rose with a glass of champagne in his hands to give a toast. He was just about to speak when there was a knock on the door. A boy came in, asked for Mr. Booth, and handed him a telegram. Edwin excused himself for a moment while he opened the envelope and read the brief message. In an instant, his face turned white.
“My God!” he uttered. Sinking onto a nearby chair, he put his head on a table next to the chair and wept. Someone picked up the telegram and read it to the room: “John Wilkes Booth has shot Abraham Lincoln at Ford’s Theatre.”2
Later a detective searched Edwin’s trunks and correspondence for any incriminating evidence. Finding none, the Boston Evening Transcript published a letter from the detective exonerating Edwin of any “knowledge that such an act was contemplated.”3
What could anyone with “the once honored and now despised name expect?” Edwin rhetorically asked Adam Badeau. How could someone “so lovable and in whom all in the family found a source of joy in his boyish and fighting nature have done such a thing. . . .two days ago [I was] one of the happiest men alive. Now what am I? . . . I am half-crazy now. . .Poor Mother! I go to New York today—expecting to find her either dead or dying [from shock].”4
June was in Cincinnati at Pike’s Opera House the night of the assassination. “This morn news came of the death of the President & John’s deed last night in Washington,” he wrote in his diary. “The excitement was so great that I remained in the Hotel till the night of Monday the 17th.”5 Late that night he left for Asia’s, arriving the next day.
After Asia and Clarke got over their initial shock, they remembered the package John had left with them a few months earlier. Clarke dashed over to the safe where Asia had put it. Beside bonds and a deed were two letters, the one to his mother and the other his “To Whom It May Concern” manifesto, laying out his reasons at the time he wrote it for kidnapping Lincoln.6
Clarke sat on the letters for two days, wondering what to do with them. Since neither letter implicated him or Asia, he believed publicizing them would show the public they had had nothing to do with John’s heinous act. John’s “To Whom It May Concern” letter clearly stated he was acting on his own. There was no mention of anyone in the family. Clarke decided to show them to a journalist at the Philadelphia Inquirer on April 19. Together they called on United States Provost Marshal William Millward, asking permission to have them printed in the Philadelphia Inquirer. Millward read them and agreed to only allow the “To Whom It May Concern” letter to be published. The letter to John’s mother, he felt, might garner sympathy for the assassin.
John’s “To Whom It May Concern” letter was never introduced as evidence in the conspiracy trial.7 When Secretary of War Stanton read its reprinted text in the Washington Evening Star, he was livid. Stanton felt the letter would not only exonerate the Confederate government from complicity in the assassination, it also might result in some people feeling sympathy for the assassin and could diminish the animus toward the other conspirators. With that in mind, Stanton dashed off an angry note to Millward, demanding an explanation for his allowing the letter to be printed. Millward answered that rather than creating sympathy for the assassin, in his opinion, it was proof positive of a conspiracy.8
After the letter appeared in the newspapers, government agents swooped down on Asia and Clarke’s house and turned it upside down looking for incriminating evidence. Anything associated with John’s name was confiscated—photographs, letters, and anything else that belonged to him. Even a little picture of him hanging over the babies’ cribs in the nursery was confiscated. After they left, other agents, “enraged and furious,” searched and ransacked the house. All Asia’s mail was opened before being handed over to her. The servants were asked to spy on her.
“North, East and West the papers teemed with the most preposterous adventures.” One newspaper reported, “on hearing the news [about John] Mrs. J. S. Clarke had gone mad, and was at present confined at the Asylum at West Philadelphia. . .The tongue of every man and woman was free to revile and insult us. Every man’s hand was against us; if we had friends they consoled with us in secret; none ventured near.”9
Asia’s sole visitor was a Claud Burroughs, who told her he was an actor that Edwin had sent “on a secret mission” for papers she had hidden on her person. In fact Burroughs was a detective trying to fool her into giving up whatever she might in fact have concealed when the house was searched.10
Recalling those trying days, Asia wrote, “Those who have passed through such an ordeal—if there are any such—may be quick to forgive, slow to resent; they never relearn to trust in human nature, they never resume their old place in the world and they forget only in death.”11
One of the men posted at her house, charged with following her from room to room, was gentle and polite, unlike the others. Against orders he offered to bring his wife with him to stay with Asia. Asia thanked the man for the offer but declined. Privately she said she would “rather have been watched by ten men who could keep quiet, than one chattering female.”12
Mary Ann was living at Edwin’s house in New York when she heard the news. Two weeks before the assassination, she had written John that she had “never yet doubted your love & devotion to me—in fact I always gave you praise for being the fondest of all my boys.”13
After they got over their shock at the “ghastly intelligence” in the morning paper, authors Thomas Baily Aldrich and his wife, Edwin’s neighbors, first thought was how it would affect “the poor mother who idolized her wayward and misguided boy.” After a hurried breakfast they rushed over to Edwin’s. Mary Ann and Rosalie were sitting in silence, stricken and stunned with grief.
Outside newsboys kept passing by shouting, “The President’s death, and the arrest of John Wilkes Booth.” Mary Ann moaned, “O God, if this be true, let him shoot himself, let him not live to be hung! Spare him, spare us, spare the name that dreadful disgrace!”14
Edwin had telegraphed from Boston and would soon be home. The next day the Aldriches and a small group of Edwin’s friends were at his house on Sunday when he stepped from his carriage, looking “spectral as if the grave had given up its dead.”15
The nightmare for Edwin and the rest of the family had begun. Every day letters, notes, and messages arrived at the house warning Edwin the name Booth should be exterminated and anyone bearing it should be killed. There were threats about his house being burned. The family’s only hope was that John wouldn’t live to be hung, that he would at least spare them that last disgrace.
Ten days later Clarke telegraphed Mary Ann in New York that Asia was “seriously ill.” Could Mary Ann come at once? On April 26, on the way to the ferry, Thomas Aldrich and Lout Thompson, another one of Edwin’s friends, heard a newsboy shouting, “Death of John Wilkes Booth. Capture of his companion.”
Thompson closed the windows, and he and Aldrich did their best to talk loud enough to drown out the doleful news. At the station, they told Mary Ann that John was dead and handed her a newspaper. Mary Ann read the story of John’s capture and death and his next to final words, “Tell my mother that I die for my country.”16
While Mary Ann was reading about John’s death, T. J. Hemphill, acting manager at the Walnut Street Theatre, knocked on Asia’s door at home. He needed to see her, he told the servant who answered. Pale and visibly nervous, the old man held on to the center table for balance and wouldn’t look directly at her. Asia knew.
She collapsed on the sofa, turned her face to the wall, and silently thanked God the end had come. Chocking back sobs, Hemphill turned around and left.17
Asia’s and the rest of the family’s troubles were only beginning. The entire family came under suspicion of complicity in the assassination. June and Clarke were both arrested at Clarke’s home and jailed at the Old Capitol Prison where they were held without charges for several weeks.
A letter June had written to John, advising him to get out of the oil business and not be so vocal about his politics, had put him under a cloud. The “oil business” was considered code for the plot to murder Lincoln. Clarke had made the mistake in believing John’s letters would exonerate him. Instead, John’s leaving them at the Clarke home was regarded as complicity. The letters implied June and Clarke had known what John was planning—John would never have left those letters there had they not been involved. June and Clarke were locked in bare rooms with just a bag of straw and blankets. The only “convenience” was a slop bucket and a pitcher.
Asia would also have been arrested and taken to prison had she not been pregnant. The doctor who had nursed her through her various illnesses had to send a telegram to Washington confirming her “condition.” She was allowed to stay in her home. A male detective stayed in the house to make sure she didn’t run off. (In August, Asia gave birth to twins, Lillian Theresa and Creston Joseph. Asia hadn’t known she was carrying twins. When she found she was pregnant, she’d planned to name her baby John Wilkes Booth Clarke, if a boy. That was now impossible. Lillian died a year later.)
Edwin was the only one allowed his freedom. He was then at the height of his career, a national icon, having just completed his hundredth continuous performance of Hamlet just three weeks before the assassination. As soon as Edwin could, he left for Philadelphia to be with Asia and his mother. “I can give you no idea of the desolation which has fallen upon us,” Asia wrote Jean Anderson. “The sorrow of his death is very bitter. The disgrace is far heavier.”18
The only consoling letter Asia received was from one of John’s former lovers, Effie Germon. Dated May 3, 1965, Effie wrote: “Although a perfect stranger to you, I take the liberty of offering my sympathy and aid to you in your great sorrow and sickness.” Effie lived not far from Asia’s house in Philadelphia and offered to help in any way she could. She would have offered earlier, she said, had she not been ill herself. Asia treasured that letter “as precious gold.”19
Mary Ann tried to be strong for Asia’s sake, but she was “crushed by her sorrows,” Edwin wrote his friend, Emma Cary. “She feels her woe greater than she shows.”20
Edwin had moved in with his sister and mother to help out as best he could while Clarke was languishing in jail. There was another reason to stay at Asia’s. Edwin had become engaged to Blanche Hanel, a woman from a wealthy Philadelphia family. Unsurprisingly, Asia did not like her, calling her a “fashionable flirt” and a “stickler for decorum.”21
Shortly afterward, the engagement was off. Blanche’s father objected to any connection to the Booth name.22
Clarke was released from prison on May 26; June was held until June 23. Edwin’s being treated with kid gloves grated Clarke. He was as innocent as Edwin but had been shabbily treated. A festering resentment soured him on Edwin and all the Booths, including his wife. “Look at me,” he ranted to Asia, “I was dragged to jail by the neck—literally dragged to prison—and Edwin goes scot free, gets all the fame.”23 Clarke told Asia he wanted a divorce. His life, he said, was ruined because of the Booths.
John’s warning when Asia told him she was marrying Clarke popped up inside her brain. “Bear in mind,” John had told her, “you are only a professional stepping-stone.”24 Clarke had no grounds for a divorce, and Asia refused to give him one.
Still fuming with resentment, Clarke realized there was a way to get back at Edwin—he would stage Our American Cousin at the Winter Garden, which he and Edwin jointly owned. The play was indelibly associated in the mind of Americans with John Wilkes Booth and would remind everyone Edwin was the brother of the assassin.
But the rights to perform the play anywhere were owned by Laura Keene, and Clarke did not have her permission. Clarke had even been sued by Keene seven years earlier for putting on the play at the Arch Street Theatre in Philadelphia and been ordered by the court to pay Keene a licensing fee. Clarke didn’t care. He was determined to humiliate Edwin. Clarke staged it anyway and Keene sued him again. Keene lambasted him in the newspapers for “the bad taste of seeking to deprive me of the use of this play.” Your effrontery, she wrote, was “only equaled by your ever appearing in a comedy which ought to have only a memory of shame and sorrow for you and every member of your family.”25 Ironically, Laura Keene’s lawyer was a Mr. W. D. Booth. Relations between Clarke and Edwin were quite frosty after that. Edwin severed his partnership with Clarke at the Winter Garden, although they still remained partners at the Walnut Street Theatre.26
Life for Asia was dismal. Her husband was feuding with her brother. Her mother was in deep despair, and her daughter Lillian had died almost a year to the day of the assassination. “I think I am getting like poor mother,” she wrote Jean Anderson, “hardened to sorrow.”27
A year later, Clarke left for England with their son Eddie to take an engagement as actor and manager of one of London’s theatres. Asia remained in Philadelphia waiting for him to decide if he wanted to move there permanently. In February the following year, she wrote Jean Anderson that Clarke did want to make their home in London. Dutifully, she told Jean, “I must submit.”28 In March of 1868, Asia was settled in at “My cozy English home” outside northwest London.29
Mary Ann was not so hardened to sorrow that she didn’t agonize over John’s body not receiving a proper burial. Edwin tried to obtain permission from Secretary of War Stanton to retrieve his body from Washington’s Old Arsenal Penitentiary for reburial in the family cemetery. Stanton didn’t even respond to his request.
Edwin next petitioned General Grant.
I appeal to you—on behalf of my heart-broken Mother—that she may receive the remains of her son. You can understand what a consolation it would be to an aged parent to have the privilege of visiting the grave of her child, and I feel assured that you will, even in the midst of your most pressing duties, feel a touch of sympathy for her—one of the greatest sufferers living.30
“His mother, being very aged, [Mrs. Booth] craves the dead body so as to inter it before she dies,” the New York Times reported.31 The request, it informed its readers, had been denied.
Failing to get permission from Stanton or Grant, Edwin appealed to John H. Weaver, sexton at one of Baltimore’s churches and a Baltimore undertaker, to see if he could persuade President Andrew Johnson to release John’s body. Perhaps, he thought, Johnson might listen to a clergyman.
Johnson was in his office being interviewed by the associate editor of the New York World when one of his secretaries handed him a card. Ordinarily Johnson would have ignored it but told the secretary to bring Weaver in. The “slim, solemn, mournfully quiet” undertaker, dressed every inch like someone ought to in his profession, was the soul of politeness and decorum. He explained why he had come, reiterated Edwin’s plea to rebury John’s body in Baltimore, and assured Johnson it would be removed with no fanfare. The request came at an opportune time. Johnson was about to end his presidency and by then had become embittered toward both Stanton and Grant. Three days later, Johnson released the body. Edwin entrusted the Booth’s family friend John T. Ford to make the final arrangements to ship John’s body to Baltimore after its exhumation.32
The same afternoon that Johnson released John’s body, Weaver and some others unearthed the pine casket. Once cleared of the dirt, the name “John Wilkes Booth” was visible in black, inch-long capital letters on the pine lid.
Four soldiers carried the box to a red express wagon and covered it with a blanket to hide what was underneath. Everything and everyone in place, the driver shook the reins and the little, stubby sorrel trotted off.33
At the Washington undertaker’s store at the back entrance on Baptist Alley where John had made his escape, John’s youngest brother Joseph, now a doctor, was waiting to identify the body. John’s body had been wrapped in a blanket, which was now badly decayed. After four years, John’s head had become detached from his body. Although now hardly recognizable, Joseph nodded it was John. John Ford was at the train station when Joseph arrived in Baltimore late that night, February 15, 1869, with John’s remains. Ford telegraphed Edwin in New York, “successful and in our possession here.”34
Two days later, John Ford broke off rehearsals at his Holliday Street Theatre and told everyone to take the day off. Speaking softly to Blanche Chapman, his goddaughter, he told her to get her sister Ella and come quietly with him. “Keep your eyes open and your mouths closed,” he muttered.35
Blanche and Ella followed him over to a room at the back of Weaver’s funeral parlor behind the Holliday Street Theatre where years before John had been a featured star. John’s brothers Edwin and Joseph, his sister Rosalie, June’s wife, John’s mother Mary Ann, the Booth’s now elderly neighbor Mrs. Elijah Rogers, and a few other family friends were gathered around the coffin. The sides of the coffin were decayed. Patches of clay from the Old Arsenal Penitentiary burial site still adhered to it.
Despite the secrecy about the transference of the body, rumors about its being at Weaver’s spread, and curiosity seekers began gathering outside, hoping to get a glimpse of John’s remains. William Burton, one of Ford’s stock actors, sensed it had to have been something important for Ford to cancel that day’s rehearsal. Burton buttonholed another actor, Frank Rose, and whispered to follow him. The two men hopped the fence around the undertaker’s shop and managed to slip in the back door. No one seemed to notice them.
At some unspoken signal, Edwin, John Ford, and undertaker John Weaver moved to the head of the coffin. Junius stayed at the side. Weaver and his assistant removed the screws in the lid and raised the cover. “We want to make sure that there is no mistake about this,” said Ford as he and the undertaker unwrapped the blanket around the body. Blanche almost fainted at the sight of the remains.36
The face that had once been the handsomest in America was now just a detached head with hair still clinging to it. The locks were damp and matted and had no real color. “It was not so black and shiney as it was long ago,” Mrs. Rogers thought to herself.37 Though Blanche had heard that hair grew after death, she was still surprised that the hair had grown almost to shoulder length.
The flesh on the rest of the body had disintegrated, leaving blackened bones inside a rotted, rough, brown coat, black pants, and vest. A riding boot, split open at the top, was still on the left foot that John had broken when he jumped onto the stage at Ford’s Theatre.
If it’s John’s body, there will be a gold-plugged tooth on the right side of his jaw, next to the eyetooth, Edwin murmured. Weaver lifted the head from the box and passed it to the family dentist. The gold-plugged tooth was where Edwin said it would be.38 The dentist then handed the head to anyone else who wanted to see the tooth.39 No one spoke as the skull was passed around.
William Burton broke the silence. “That boot looks like a pair John used to wear when we went skating,” he said to no one in particular. “If it is there will be a hole in the heel made by the screw of the skate,” meaning a hole in the boot where the skating blade was attached. Weaver removed the boot and examined it. Inside the heel was a hole, just as Burton said there would be.40
Before the lid was replaced, Annie Ford clipped a lock of John’s hair then handed the scissors to Blanche Chapman. Blanche looked at Mary Ann, asking if she could cut some too. Mary Ann nodded. Blanche bent over, gathered one of “those glorious ringlets” in her hand, and cut it off. She saved some of the locks for herself and sent a few strands to Maggie Mitchell, who everyone in the theatre knew had been John’s one-time lover and rumored one-time fiancée.41
The following day, February 18, 1869, John’s body was taken to Green Mount Cemetery outside Baltimore and placed in a receiving vault until the ground was soft enough for a grave to be dug. Days before the interment, on June 26, Mary Ann had asked her former Bel Air neighbor, Mrs. Elijah Rogers, to “get the children” out of the ground at the old farm and bring the remains to the cemetery so that they could be interred with John.
The pall-bearers, all of them men from the theatre who had known John, carried his coffin from the vault to its gravesite. His family, “Aunty Rogers,” and about fifty others stood in silence as John’s body was interred in the Booth family plot. “I loved the boy dearly,” Rogers tearfully recalled. “I knew him from babyhood, and he was always so kind, tender-hearted, and good.”42 Dressed in deep mourning dress, Mary Ann was visibly overcome,43 but at least “the bereaved mother has the melancholy satisfaction of placing her leaf of evergreen on the sod above the grave of her wayward son.”44
After John’s body was lowered into the grave, the remains of Mary Ann’s other deceased children, in one box together, were laid on top of John’s coffin, and the grave was filled.45 The family, “much stricken with the sorrow of the occasion, had the deep and heartfelt sympathies of all present.”46
“Oh Poor John,” a tearful Aunty Rogers later recalled, “Sorryful for such A hansom boy he was to let the enemy of souls Cheat him out of so much pleasure, as he could have done so much good in this world for he was A gentleman. Dear boy, good boy. . .poor fellow. I hope the lord had mercy on his soul.”47
There were no demonstrations at the funeral. Everything was quiet and dignified. Several of the women put flowers on the grave. Edwin arranged for his father’s remains and monument to be moved from Baltimore Cemetery to Green Mount Cemetery. On one of the sides of the monument a new inscription was added: “To the memory of the children of Junius Brutus and Mary Ann Booth. John Wilkes, Frederick, Elizabeth, Mary Ann, Henry Byron.”
Asia was happy during her first years in England.48 However, by 1870 her marriage was falling apart, she was lonely, and she hated living in England.49 To pass the time she began writing a memoir of her brother John, which she hid from Clarke—who meanwhile was seldom home and kept a mistress.50 “It is marvelous how he hates me—the mother of nine babies,” Asia wrote, “but I am a Booth—that is sufficient.”51
One day her ten-year-old son, Creston, came home crying. Some American boys had asked him whether he was related to the Booth who had murdered President Lincoln. Creston had no idea what they were talking about. Asia couldn’t bring herself to explain, but Clarke had no hesitation in telling his son about the hated family, and “for the first time [the boy] learned the story that had brought consuming and ineffaceable sorrow to his parents.”52
Another major tragedy came in 1881 when Asia’s oldest son, Edwin (“Eddie”) Booth Clarke, drowned at sea.53 Eddie had been Asia and Clarke’s favorite.54
In 1888, in an attempt to find relief from her rheumatism, Asia was vacationing in Bournemouth, a seaside resort on the south coast of England, when she took ill. A cable urged Clarke and their son Creston, who were in the United States, to hurry back to England. They arrived a few days before she died on May 6. She was fifty-two. Per her request, Asia was buried in the family lot at Green Mount Cemetery.
Unbeknownst to Clarke, before her death Asia had entrusted her memoir about John to her daughter, Dolly, telling her to take it to Mr. Farjeon, one of Asia’s few family friends, and to ask him “to publish it sometime if he sees fit.”55 When the Farjeons read Asia’s memoir, they agreed its immediate publication was not possible. Apart from the fact that the assassination was still a vivid memory in many people’s minds, some of the people Asia wrote about, including Edwin, were still alive. Although Edwin had outlived the shame of his brother’s assassination, he would not want those memories stirred up again. So they laid Asia’s 132-page memoir aside until everyone mentioned in it was no longer living.
Almost sixty years later, Eleanor Farjeon, the Farjeons’ daughter, approached G. P. Putnam’s Sons with the manuscript; Putnam’s immediately recognized the memoir’s uniqueness and published it in 1938. Farjeon decided to title it The Unlocked Book: A Memoir of John Wilkes Booth by His Sister Asia Booth Clarke56 and added her own foreword. The memoir, Farjeon wrote, “shows him [John] as a person.” It was Asia’s hope, she said, that her memoir would make the name of John Wilkes Booth less hated.57
For historian Henry Steel Commager, it didn’t. Commager rejected Asia’s fawning paean to the brother she loved. “John Wilkes Booth, like other criminals, has had a great deal more attention than he merits and the attention has often been sentimental and romantic.”58 Historian Allan Nevins called the memoir a “curious, pathetic, bitter little memoir . . . written with a tortured pen.”59
In England, an ocean away from the still-smoldering animosity toward John, the Scotsman magazine was more congenial, although it also considered it “pathetic.” “To his sister Asia, John Wilkes was during his lifetime a hero; after his death a martyr. . .It is easy to see why the attention of the writer was concentrated on the period when her brother was happiest and most lovable.”60
In 1996 Asia’s memoir was republished as John Wilkes Booth: A Sister’s Memoir with an introduction and scholarly background by Professor Terry Alford.61 Reviews of the 1996 edition had an entirely different tone. The memoir is “a very valuable portrait of the Civil War and Reconstruction period,” wrote one reviewer. “As a teaching tool it will recall not only the historical moment of Lincoln’s death but also much of the context in which it happened.”62 “John Wilkes Booth, the assassin, emerges as a man—a more total likeness than we have known before,” wrote another reviewer.63
In late January 1884, Mary Ann fell and fractured her hip.64 Six months later Edwin wrote “poor mother” wasn’t getting any better. “I fear her fate is fixed—never to walk again, & poor Rose! How patient & long-suffering her life has been. Their case is pitiable & I wish I could relieve it.”65
Mary Ann Holmes Booth, John Wilkes Booth’s mother, in her old age. Courtesy of Folger Shakespeare Library.
Mary Ann had not had a happy life. Her love for her husband Junius had been a “rock to break her heart upon.”66 The “failure” of her “brighter dreams and hopes” had embittered her heart and divested her life of all romance and sentiment.67 “I am not a great advocate for marriages,” she told her granddaughter Edwina.68
After Asia and her other children left home, Mary Ann lived much of her life in hotel rooms and apartments with her daughter Rosalie. She often felt alone. John’s death crippled her spirit. “Mother is very much broken, I think,” Edwin wrote six months after the assassination. “Poor soul! She seems to have still a lingering hope in her heart that all this will prove to be a dream.”69 Her thoughts tormented her. “She bears up bravely and conceals the pain she feels,” said Edwin.70
In later life, Mary Ann was consumed by worrying about Edwin and her surviving children. Her face was kind, wrote a journalist for the Trenton Evening Times who watched her from his building, but “sometimes full of sadness, as if her soul had had bitter days to bear.” Only “when she talks to her birds” did a “sweet smile light up that face.”71
Mary Ann Holmes Booth died in New York at Joseph’s home on October 22, 1885, from pneumonia and heart failure after catching a cold. She was eighty-three.72 Edwin had his mother embalmed and interred in the family grave in Green Mount Cemetery.73 “She looked about forty and very beautiful,” he told Lawrence Barrett, “as I remember her in my boyhood.”74