John Wilkes Booth is a hard man to make sense of. To some he was kind, gentle, charming, lovable, loyal, generous, always considerate of others, and fond of children. To others he was calculating, callous, moody, depressed, cynical, erratic, manipulative, a liar, and as undisciplined on stage as off it. When he died he had photos of five women in his pocket. Only one of them was his fiancée. Edwin Booth said his brother John “was so peculiar I never seemed to know him.”1
John had an endless stream of women after him. He didn’t have a “type.” Many of the women he romanced were beautiful. Others, like Henrietta Irving, Ada Gray, and his fiancée, Lucy Hale, were not particularly good-looking. For John, it was any port in a storm. He fell in love easily—and fell out of love just as easily. His feelings for women, though often genuine, didn’t last for long. He was attentive until he seduced them, then he lost interest and went on to the next relationship. His motto, where women were concerned, was “me first.” John’s only intimacy was with himself.
Nevertheless, the ladies raved over him—especially actresses. “He was very popular with those dramatic ladies . . . to whom divorce courts are superfluous.”2 Wives and daughters from prominent families were no less immune to his charm and looks. They “flocked to his performances . . . it was no unusual sight to see numbers standing all over the house” at his matinees.3 When he left the theatre at night, his adoring fans followed him, each one hoping he would notice her in particular.4 “Married women waylaid him in every provincial town or city where he played . . . their motives were various. . .whether curiosity or worse.”5 They sought introductions. They invited him into their parlors. There wasn’t enough space to go into “the millionth catalogue of Booth’s intrigues,” said an early biographer.6 Even after he assassinated Lincoln, many women felt a kind of hysterical sympathy and pity and even love for him. It was said that at the very least, one woman would have been at his deathbed if she could get to it. Opera singer Clara Kellogg mused that, given the chance, hundreds of women would have surrounded his deathbed.7
John was his family’s “golden boy.” “I always gave you praise for being the fondest of all my boys,” his mother wrote him three weeks before he shot Lincoln.8 Favoritism in families follows familiar patterns, writes psychologist Ellen Weber Libby. “Sons growing up as the favorite child of one parent are likely to achieve great professional success.” They are also more likely, says Libby, to be manipulative and to struggle with issues of intimacy and addiction.9
John had more than one reason to have trouble with intimacy. Family life was often unpredictable and chaotic. One day his father might be caring and loving, the next he might be tyrannical. Being the golden boy did not mean he escaped such uncertainty. Growing up in a home with a father who was periodically insane and an alcoholic left deep psychological scars. Adult children of alcoholics are often insecure and take themselves seriously. They crave approval. They are addicted to excitement. They don’t feel remorse when they break rules. They are impulsive. They have an animosity toward people in authority. They often become alcoholics themselves. Importantly, they are leery of intimacy because they lack trust and therefore fear commitment.10 Promiscuity, and especially his penchant for prostitutes, was John’s way of sidestepping commitment.11
It would have been a miracle if John’s lechery didn’t result in his contracting a venereal disease. All John’s biographers agree that, like their father, Junius’s sons (with the possible exception of his youngest, Joseph Adrian, because so little is known of him) were womanizers. We don’t know if Junius Sr. or Jr. contracted venereal diseases from their sexual adventurisms, but Edwin did, by his own admission.12
Nearly all of the letters John wrote or received were destroyed, so any mention of his having venereal disease no longer exists. John McCullough, one of John’s closest friends, was the first actor whose “disease” was tabloid news.13 McCullough said that John was “a wonderful companion of disease.”14 “Disease” was typical nineteenth-century euphemism for “syphilis.”15 The word was taboo in polite society, shameful to mention because it implied sex outside of marriage. Only fornicators, whores, sodomists, and the like fell prey to it. For moralists, syphilis was their punishment.
John and McCullough often shared a room together. Both were incorrigible womanizers. Both came down with syphilis. Had John lived as long as McCullough (who was sixty-three when he died), he would have experienced the same misery. Despite the social reticence on this issue, John and McCullough were hardly unique in coming down with syphilis. Lincoln’s law partner, William Herndon, claimed that, years before he became president, Lincoln told him he had been infected.16 During the war, more than 73,000 men in the Union army were treated for the disease (another 109,000 were treated for gonorrhea).17
The evidence for John’s syphilis comes exclusively from the record of his ailments. Individually, they could be due to anything. Cumulatively, his ailments are convincing.
One reason it was so difficult for physicians to be certain someone had syphilis, before the advent of confirming blood tests, is that syphilis is “the Great Imitator.” “It apes every disease in any field of medicine [with a] Machiavellian facility in disguise, deceit and malevolence.”18 It has no symptom peculiar to itself. Symptoms can occur on their own or in conjunction with other diseases, and not all of its symptoms are seen in every person. Some of the more common physical ailments are hoarseness, a sudden change from relatively good health to mysterious painful ailments, any lump, erysipelas, pleurisy, insomnia, jaundice, and freckling. Mental symptoms include depression, decreased memory, irritability, emotional overreaction, impulsivity, misanthropy, and grandiosity. When more than a few of these symptoms are seen in the same person, as in John’s case, the diagnosis becomes more certain.
Untreated, syphilis usually passes through three stages. In some instances, and for unknown reasons, the infection does not progress any further than the first or second stage. The classic first stage sign is a painless sore called a chancre, typically on the genitals, which heals on its own in a few weeks. Second stage syphilis is associated with a host of physical ailments. Among them are the following: a rash on the palms of the hand and soles of the feet, the episodic bouts of hoarseness John came down with, tumors like the one Dr. Frederick May removed from John’s neck, the erysipelas that John came down with while he was staying at Edwin’s house in New York, the carbuncles he had lanced when he was staying at Asia’s house in Philadelphia, pleurisy that he complained of when William Ferguson invited him to go to Peter Taltavull’s Star Saloon for a drink just before the assassination, and the freckling and jaundice that were noticed at John’s autopsy.
Unarrested by penicillin or other effective antibiotics, the infection often progresses to the second stage and then the third stage of neurosyphilis when the infection invades the brain and causes personality breakdown and mental derangement.19
By late August 1864, just after his bout with erysipelas, people who knew John noticed a personality change typical of syphilis. The change coincided with the sudden breakup with Isabel Sumner, the girl he had seemingly been so passionately in love with.
He’d also lost all interest in money. Three years earlier, he was dickering with the manager of the Boston Museum about salary. In August 1862, he was demanding $80 a night. By September, he was up to $140 a night plus a benefit once a week. By the winter of 1864, he no longer cared about money. His friend Joe Simmonds asked him what had come over him, saying John was “so different from your usual self . . . [have] you lost all your ambition or what is the matter?”20
The matter was that John had lapsed into depression. Invited to join some friends at a saloon, John nodded. “Anything to chase away the blues.”21 He was having trouble sleeping, another common sign of depression. John McCullough, with whom John occasionally shared a room, recalled how he was startled out of his sleep one night by John’s tears dropping on his face. “My God,” John sighed, “how peacefully you were sleeping. I cannot sleep.”22 His memory had become impaired. He forgot what year it was.23 Memory loss is common in syphilis.24
He was also drinking more than usual. John had always been a steady drinker. Now he was sometimes boozing as much as a quart of brandy in less than two hours. Long-time friend John Deery, owner of a saloon above Grover’s Theatre, said that in the days before the assassination John “sometimes drank at my bar as much as a quart of brandy in the space of less than two hours. . .It was more than a spree, I could see that. . . Booth was not given to sprees. . . . He seemed to be crazed by some stress of inward feeling.”25
Friends noted he was no longer “merry and jovial.”26 Instead of the “sweetly dispositioned” actor they had known, he’d become “cold, taciturn, aloof, and at times . . . almost arrogant.”27 The year before, he had not been far from “high and mighty, like most of the stars . . . any supernumerary could go to him for advice—and was always sure to get it. Whoever went to him was received with gentle courtesy, and generally came away an ardent admirer.”28 Now he was disdainful about his fellow actors. They were just “mummers.” They knew little, thought less, and understood next to nothing.29
When a theatre prompter missed giving him his cue, John threw a block of wood at him, just missing his face. During his last appearance on stage, he refused to take a bow, although he was applauded more than anyone else in the play. Gordon Samples, who chronicled John’s theatrical career, reflected on “how unlike John Wilkes Booth this was, refusing to acknowledge the overwhelming praise of the audience!”30 He “never laughed anymore. Smiles crossed his face often, but never anything like a real laugh.”
His mother and some of his dearest friends felt he was no longer the same person they had known. “He had changed, and ominous fears in regard to him and his future filled their minds.”31 John’s niece, Blanche DeBar, said he had become “morbid.”32 “The first twenty-five years of his life were, or seemed to be, a light-hearted epic which had no connection with the events which brought about his crime and death . . . It seemed as if there were two distinct John Wilkes Booths,” writes historian Kathryn Canavan.33
Jim Ferguson, in whose restaurant John and his friends would spend hours drinking and playing cards, couldn’t believe what was being said about John. “All the stories about his boasting of his amours,” he insisted couldn’t be true.34 He had never heard John brag about the women he seduced. The year before John had torn the signatures from the love letters he received. Even with such anonymity, John wouldn’t let anyone read them. After August 1864, he began bragging about his “love ditties” and “hair-breath” scrapes in dark passages with “the most beautiful creatures in the world.”35
He had also become spiteful. When his friend Samuel Chester wouldn’t go along with kidnapping Lincoln, John threatened to implicate him anyways.36 Although he later apologized, he was clearly not the same man. John told Chester that actor John Mathews, who had also refused to become involved, was a coward “and not fit to live.”37 John and Mathews had been friends since boyhood. John had loafed in Mathews’s bedroom at the Petersen Boarding House weeks before. It was the same house and the same room that Lincoln was taken to after John shot him. Even more ironically, John had been lying in the same bed that Lincoln was lain on and died on. John had been incensed that his good friend had turned him down. Mathews had no inkling of John’s feeling about him the day of the assassination when he agreed to take a letter that could implicate him in the assassination to the editor of the Washington National Intelligencer. When he left, he squeezed Mathews’s hand so tightly his nails left marks in Mathews’s skin.38 The kind Jekyll had turned into the malevolent Hyde. He had become an “ego-centered ass.”39 He didn’t give a second thought about the fate of the conspirators whom he convinced to be a part of his plot. They were merely tools in his self-indulgent, delusional idea of himself as the South’s savior.
The biggest puzzle about John Wilkes Booth is why did he assassinate Lincoln? Depending on who one listens to or reads, he was a typical white Southerner whose political thought predisposed him to killing the Yankee president, a puppet of a broad conspiracy, a lunatic acting on his own, or an ego-centric schemer with an inflated image of his own importance.
The political context is clear. From almost the beginning of the war, John had never tried to hide his sympathies for the South. As the war raged on, he developed a personal hatred for Lincoln, blaming him for instigating the war and overseeing the destruction of the South. What is still debated is whether a high-placed cabal exploited his hatred or whether he acted on his own.
The often-mentioned cabalists include Secretary of War Edwin Stanton, Vice President Andrew Johnson, the Confederate administration, Northern Radical Republicans, the clandestine Knights of the Golden Circle, and International Bankers. An ex-priest claimed the pope was involved, a theory that gained support from John Surratt’s brief service in the Vatican guard after the assassination.40
There is no hard evidence for any of those conspiracy theories. No one has as yet taken up Booth biographer Michael Kauffman’s challenge for anyone who “has ever come across any instance in which Booth’s name, his kidnap attempt, his stage appearances in the South, or his murderous deed was ever put to paper by any Confederate of stature” or “any mention by a bigwig Confederate of the names of the alleged conspirators” to send him that information.41 The same challenge applies to the other conspiracy theorists. Some people simply find it much more psychologically comforting to believe that a president “was the victim of a cause [rather than] a deranged gunman.”42
Since there is no evidence except innuendo that John was a dupe of some conspiracy, a reasonable alternative is that he was acting on his own.
One explanation for his plot has invoked a variation of the biblical Cain and Abel theme: jealousy of his brother Edwin’s greater fame was behind John’s killing the president. It was a way to outshine him, a way of putting himself in the limelight.43
Whatever rivalry John and Edwin had between them was political, not professional.44 When someone told John he was a better Hamlet than Edwin, John replied he was wrong. “There’s but one Hamlet to my mind,” he said, “[and] that’s my brother Edwin.”45 Edwin in turn said John had “the genius of my father, and was far more gifted than I.”46 John’s photograph was prominently displayed on the wall of Edwin’s bedroom.
Other explanations that he was committed to the South because his stage appearances were well received there, or that he killed Lincoln for the fame he believed he would receive, are equally implausible.
John Wilkes Booth was vain and fame had definitely been his ambition. But he already had it; he was not a failed actor. He enjoyed the applause he received when he toured the South, but the applause was just as loud in the North. Although some critics panned his appearances, he was enthusiastically reviewed by many others throughout the country. He consistently drew large audiences and was “widely cheered.” John Ellsler, director of the Academy of Music in Cleveland and one-time partner in John’s oil field ventures, knew all the theatrical Booths. In his opinion John had “more of the old man’s [his father’s] power in one performance than [his brother] Edwin can show in a year.”47
Many of John’s contemporaries attributed John’s actions to his having inherited, as actress Ann Hartley Gilbert kindly put it, “the family failings.”48 John’s brother June mused that “a crack” ran through the male portion of their family.49 Actor Edwin Forrest was more blunt. In his opinion, “All those Booths are crazy.”50
But before John murdered Lincoln, none of those who knew him or had any conversations with him thought he was insane. It was only after John killed Lincoln that his sanity was questioned.51
Many people took the heredity explanation for granted.52 Stanley Kimmel, the Booth family biographer, famously titled his book The Mad Booths of Maryland. Neither Edwin nor June ever killed anyone. Did the “crack” that ran through the family go deeper in John’s brain than in theirs?
Some armchair psychologists contend it was not heredity; it was poor parenting that ultimately put the gun in John’s hand. Despite Asia’s idealistic portrayal of Junius, at home he was anything but a model father. He was an alcoholic, periodically unbalanced, quick-tempered, and authoritarian. Worst of all, he had caused John and all his siblings to be bastards. In the bad parent explanation, John’s hatred for Lincoln was displaced hatred for his own father.53
John’s animus toward Lincoln had been festering for years. He was politically and racially motivated to kill Lincoln. But so were thousands if not hundreds of thousands of Southerners. Samuel Arnold, Michael O’Laughlen, and John Surratt were willing to kidnap Lincoln but drew the line at killing. John dispatched George Atzerodt to kill Vice President Johnson, but Atzerodt couldn’t go through with it. The only one of Booth’s gang capable of murder was Lewis Powell.
Did John’s syphilis turn him into an assassin? Politics and prejudice can account for John’s decision to murder Lincoln but not for his profound personality changes. Before syphilis had begun to affect his behavior, John had toyed with the idea of killing Lincoln, but it was only a passing thought. By April 14, 1865, that idea had become fixated in his mind. He believed his killing Lincoln was God’s will, that God had entrusted him as “the instrument of his [Lincoln’s] punishment.”54 That kind of grandiose delusion is a hallmark of neurosyphilis.55
The fondest of all his mother’s children had become “sad, mad, bad, John Wilkes.”56