“IT CANNOT BE DENIED”: LUCY HALE
Days after the assassination, sensational rumors about John’s engagement to a senator’s daughter spread like wildfire, despite Lucy Hale’s father’s and friends’ denials and efforts to keep her name out of the papers. It was simply too juicy a story for reporters to ignore.
In Cincinnati, where John’s brother June was appearing at Pike’s Opera House, reporters confronted him at the Burnet House where he was staying. June couldn’t hold out against all the badgering and admitted the rumors were true. Days before the assassination, he said, John had sent him a letter saying he was engaged to Miss Hale but there was opposition to their marriage.1
A day later, the denials came fast and furious. The Boston Daily Advertiser printed a letter from a “gentleman” from Boston “who is entirely competent to give an opinion” about Lucy’s engagement. The “gentleman” identified only as “C” vehemently denied there had been any such engagement:
In your paper of this morning, you gave a dispatch from Cincinnati, stating that ‘J. Wilkes Booth was to have been married soon to a daughter of Senator Hale.’ There is no truth in that statement, nor the slightest foundation for it; and I would request thet [sic] in justice to Senator Hale and his family, you will give this same publicity you have the statement.2
The Springfield Republican editorialized that John Wilkes Booth “wasn’t the kind of a man that any young lady of character would have noticed, much less married.”3 There was “no truth whatever in the report,” the Cincinnati Daily Enquirer asserted. The only relationship between the two was a “ball-room acquaintance.” The New York Tribune called John’s impending marriage to Lucy “the most impertinent bit of gossip that has lately crept into some of the journals.”4
Despite the denials, the rumor mill was now churning full blast. An unidentified woman was said to have been allowed to board the Montauk with other VIPs and had cut a lock of the assassin’s hair as a memento. No one doubted the mystery woman was Lucy. Years later, a variation on that rumor had Lucy grieving for John and having a premonition that someone else was lying dead on board the Montauk. Unable to go aboard herself, she purportedly prevailed upon Maggie Mitchell, the most famous woman of the day, to go to the Montauk and bring something that would prove or disprove it was in fact John. According to this new variation of the story, Maggie, who had herself been intimately associated with John, was said to have managed to clip a lock of the dead man’s hair and to have known immediately it wasn’t him.5
Later, disregarding its previous confidence that the rumors were false, the Springfield Republican admitted John and Lucy had in fact been engaged: “It cannot be denied, we are afraid, that John Wilkes Booth, the assassin, was engaged to be married to a daughter of Senator Hale. He has been very much of a beau among the ladies of the National Hotel at Washington the past winter.”6
Relying on a private source, the Dayton Daily Empire reported the rumor was true:
There is positive evidence of its truth [the engagement]; but this evidence is in private letters, which cannot be denied; [the Daily Empire’s source] adds that Booth was very intimate with the wives and daughters of prominent Republican Senators and Representatives at the National Hotel last winter. They must have known that he was not only a secessionist, but a gamester and a whoremonger. Such was his general reputation, and because he was handsome and could spout Shakespeare by the hour, these ladies permitted intimacies that have carried them with the infamous assassin into the newspapers. All I can say is—served them right—good enough for them. When our women, married and unmarried, are so coarse, so reckless and so wicked that they like to dally with temptation, that they rather enjoy intimacies with scoundrels, let them take the consequences. They are none the worse for being found out.7
The Boston Traveller editorialized that the names of the women who had had anything to do with the assassin should not be protected, condemning his engagements to “sundry daughters and sisters of prominent politicians.” It continued:
It is notorious that ladies of social distinction placed themselves freely in his way, sought introductions to him, invited him to the parlors at the National and other hotels, and considered it quite the thing to indulge in a conversation, a flirtation or a dance with the handsome rake. Not innocent girls only but married ladies also, are those whose names are now bandied about Washington in infamous connection with the name of this vile assassin. Why should it not be told of? The reputation is the legitimate penalty of the association. It is shameful that lewd fellows of every degree, bold, garrulous libertines, who can dress well and talk gossipy nonsense and quote Shakespeare as Wilkes Booth did, have a welcome entrance into the fashionable circles of this country. In Booth’s case there is no excuse of ignorance. His disloyal principles and his loose morals were alike notorious. And those who knowing this, courted his seductive society, are suffering the disgrace of it, as they ought to.8
Even those who did not personally know Lucy did what they could to keep her name from surfacing. At the conspiracy trial, Sam Chester reiterated his conversation with John in New York when John told him he was engaged to be married to a young lady from Washington, but Chester said he would not like to “compromise the lady by giving her name” since she came from “a very respectable family.”9 Chester was never pressed to disclose the mystery woman’s name.
Detectives tried unsuccessfully to identify the “lady” that John had checked into the Aquidneck House in Newport with on April 5. No stone was left unturned—except for Lucy. Lucy was never questioned.
One reason Lucy’s name never appeared in the news coverage was a prevailing sense of propriety where women of high social standing were concerned, as is evident in Chester’s testimony.10 Benjamin Perley Poore, who transcribed the trial proceedings, later commented that the name of the “estimable young lady, whose photograph was found in his [John’s] pocket-book after his death was honorably kept a secret [during the trial].”11
Booth biographer Terry Alford conjectures Lucy was never questioned because her father met privately with Andrew Johnson after he was sworn in as the new president and convinced him that his daughter Lucy knew nothing about John’s murderous plans. It is improbable such a discussion occurred. Even less probable is that Johnson agreed. Hale and Johnson had been at loggerheads over political issues for a long time, and Hale had publicly railed against Johnson in the past.12
To put a lid on the scandal, Lucy’s father squirrelled her away as soon as his appointment as minister to Spain was approved. Several days later Edwin told Asia he received “a heart broken letter from the poor little girl to whom he [John] had promised so much happiness.”13 Asia in turn wrote to her friend Jean Anderson that John and Lucy were “devoted lovers” and were to be married when she returned from Spain, with or without her father’s approval.14 Edwin had not named the “poor little girl.” Asia just assumed it was Lucy. But Edwin would hardly have described Lucy as a “poor little girl.” More likely he meant Ella Starr, whose attempted suicide had been widely reported. Lucy never once mentioned or alluded to John in the diary she kept during her time in Europe and never mentioned him in any of her correspondence.15
When Lucy returned to the United States in 1870, five years after the assassination, her return went relatively unnoticed. She was now twenty-eight with no more ambition than to take care of her ailing father at their home in Dover. He died three years later.16 Hale’s death reawakened the scandal, and for the first time the papers reported that Lucy’s photo had been among the five photos in John’s pocket when he died.17
Mrs. Lucy Hale Chandler after giving up “the romantic ideal of her youth.” Courtesy of Anonymous. New Hampshire Women: A Collection of Portraits and Biographical Sketches of Daughters and Residents of the Granite State. Concord, NH: New Hampshire Publishing Co., 1895.
Less than a year later, Lucy married widower William Chandler—her long-time admirer and now a well-known politician and publisher—in a private ceremony at her family home in Dover. “Miss Hale, now past 30,” the Chicago Daily Tribune wrote in its Social World column, “has at last given up the romantic ideal of her youth [meaning John Wilkes Booth], to marry W. E. Chandler! ‘So runs the world.’”18
Gossip about Lucy’s affair with John should have gone dormant after she married the staid Chandler. But four years later, in June 1878, the Chicago Daily Inter-Ocean touched off a bombshell: “We publish this morning an extraordinary story connecting the names of Robert Lincoln and J. Wilkes Booth as lovers of Miss Bessie Hale, and assigning a new motive for Booth’s action in regard to President Lincoln.”
Then came a series of sensational headlines:
Booth and Bob Lincoln
Were J. Wilkes Booth and Robert Lincoln Rivals In Their Love Making
A Virginian’s Story of Booth’s Insane Jealousy of Young Lincoln
He Hated the President Because He Loved his Country, And Hated the Son Because He Loved Bessie Hale
The Night Before the Assassination—Booth’s Threats Against the Lincolns
The Revenge of a Rebel and a Jealous Lover19
The Brooklyn Daily Eagle had a shorter, equally attention-getting headline: “A new version of the crime with a Love Story Thrown in.”20
According to the Chicago Daily Inter-Ocean, investigative journalist Alexander Hunter had learned about the love triangle from a Mrs. Temple who claimed to have been one of a circle of friends of the Hales’ and John’s at the National Hotel. “Booth,” she allegedly told Hunter, had “the most jealous temperament I ever knew; he was insane, sometimes, it seemed to me, and when Bessie [she called Lucy “Bessie”] accepted any attention from any other man, Booth would act like a patient just out of Bedlam.”
Mrs. Temple asserted that John Wilkes Booth was the most ardent of Lucy’s admirers except for Robert Lincoln, who was madly in love with her. Her parents pressed her to marry Robert, and she would have given in, said Mrs. Temple, but for “Booth, who, with his charm of personal manner, and intellect, carried the day and won her heart.”
According to Mrs. Temple, John had dinner with her and the Hale family several hours before the assassination. John was his usual entertaining self, but when it was over, Temple said, he bowed to leave and abruptly came back to the table, took Lucy’s hand, “gazed with one long lingering look in her face,” and left. When Lucy heard about the assassination, Temple said, she came into her room in a “fearful state of excitement.” Temple claimed Lucy then wrote a letter to John telling him she would “marry him even at the foot of the scaffold.”
“Bessie” never recovered from the shock, said Temple. Asked what she thought Lucy’s future would be like, Mrs. Temple reflected that in her opinion it would be “‘a dead woman’s life.’”21
The Chicago Daily Inter-Ocean newspaper told readers that Mrs. Temple’s story “deals, we are assured, only with facts.” Other papers were skeptical. “This story varies from others on the same subject,” said the Rockford Daily Register, “chiefly, in being sillier and less probable.”22
Robert didn’t wait to be asked for his reaction to the story. Reading the article in the Chicago Daily Inter-Ocean, the normally placid Robert Lincoln was livid. He was a successful Chicago lawyer with many important clients and was married to Senator James Harlan’s daughter. He preferred to stay out of the public limelight. In this instance he felt he had to publicly deny there was any truth in the story and dashed off an angry note to the editor of the Chicago Daily Tribune categorically refuting the whole story.
Robert said he had never known any such person as Mrs. Temple. He also vowed he had never even seen John Wilkes Booth in his life. During the time mentioned in the story, Robert said he had been in Washington for no more than two or three days and had only returned the morning of April 14, 1865.23
The same day that Robert’s denial appeared in the Chicago Daily Tribune, the New York Herald published the Hunter article and Robert’s reply saying it proved what “a gorgeous and pyrotechnic liar” Hunter was.24 Throughout the country, other newspapers followed suit. The Philadelphia Inquirer sought out actor John Mathews, one of John’s former friends, for his comment. Mathews was adamant the story could never have happened. “Wilkes Booth was not a man to act toward a rival in any such manner,” Mathews insisted. “He wasn’t a man who would have whispered idle threats about another man. He would have clobbered Robert with everyone watching.”25
If Lucy was ever asked about the Temple article, she declined to answer. Her husband Chandler was likewise never questioned by the sensationalist media.
Several days after the story appeared, the New York Tribune tracked down Alexander Hunter in Virginia where he was a member of the state legislature.26 Confronted with the many contradictions in his story, Hunter said Mrs. Temple was a made-up name but nevertheless a real person who’d been a “trusted friend” of President Lincoln’s, “as well known in Washington as the President’s wife.” He had given her the fictional name of Mrs. Temple because identifying her would have been an “unwarranted liberty,” and he wouldn’t disclose it without her permission.27 The New York Tribune shot back that Hunter hadn’t been as concerned about taking the same “unwarranted liberty” with Lucy’s reputation.
Despite its total fantasy, the story was too juicy not to become part of the John Wilkes Booth legend. Lucy was never called Bessie. Lucy’s sister’s name was Elizabeth and was affectionately called “Lizzie.” “Bessie” is a diminutive for Elizabeth, but never Lucy. Nevertheless, some historians, professional and amateur, still refer to Lucy by that name, a legacy of the Temple article. Hunter’s anecdote about Lucy telling Mrs. Temple she would marry John even at the foot of a scaffold has also become part of the John Wilkes Booth legend.28
Lucy’s marriage to a career politician kept her busy. They had their first and only child, John Parker Hale Chandler, in 1885 when Lucy was forty-four, relatively old for a first-time mother. Most of Lucy’s married life was spent shuttling between her home in Concord, New Hampshire, and Washington, D.C., fulfilling her role as a “spirited and gracious helpmate and hostess.”29
Lucy died in 1915, at seventy-four. None of the newspapers reporting her death mentioned her relationship with John Wilkes Booth, but some friends of the family said she never got over her infatuation with the assassin.30 William Chandler died two years later in 1917. He was buried next to his first wife, Ann Caroline, who died thirty years earlier in 1871.
Chandler’s family continued to deny the rumors about Lucy’s engagement to John long after both their deaths. In 1944, Leon B. Richardson, Chandler’s biographer, said he had asked Admiral Lloyd Chandler, William Chandler’s son by his first wife, about the rumors. The admiral, Richardson stated, was intensely hostile to his stepmother and did not believe there was any truth to Lucy’s engagement to John first because Lucy was in no way romantic or likely to be moved by infatuation, and secondly because his father was too straight-laced to have married a woman with a tainted past. The rumor, he insisted, was “malignant and entirely unfounded.”
Richardson said that from all he had learned, Lucy was “a thoroughly unpleasant woman.”31