INTRODUCTION
1. Asia Booth Clarke, The Unlocked Book. A Memoir of John Wilkes Booth by his Sister Asia Booth Clarke (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1938), 56–57.
2. The quote about Macbeth is from G. K. Chesterton’s article, “The Murderer as Maniac,” in Dale Ahlquist (ed.), The Soul of Wit. G. K Chesterton on William Shakespeare (Mineola, NY: Dover Publications, 2012), 67.
3. Stanley Kimmel, The Mad Booths Of Maryland (Indianapolis: Bobs-Merrill Co., 1940).
4. The much quoted statement is from Tolstoy’s novel, Anna Karenina. The idea is not unique.
5. Kingsley Davis, “Illegitimacy and the social structure,” American Journal of Sociology, 45 (September 1939), 215.
6. James W. Shettel, “J. Wilkes Booth At School. Recollections of a Retired Army Officer Who Knew Him then,” The New York Dramatic Mirror, (February 26, 1916), 1, 5.
7. Terry Alford, Fortune’s Fool (New York: Oxford University Press, 2015), 11.
8. Asia Booth Clarke, Booth Memorials: Passages, Incidents, and Anecdotes in the Life of Junius Brutus Booth (New York: W. W. Carleton, 1866), viii.
9. Edwin A. Emerson, “The Night That Lincoln Was Shot,” The Theatre, 17 (1913), 179.
10. Washington Post, July 17, 1904, A8.
11. William A. Howell, “Memories of Wilkes Booth,” The Sun (Baltimore, MD), November 23, 1899, 3.
12. John Deery, “The Last of Wilkes Booth,” New York Sunday Telegram, May 23, 1909.
13. Clara Morris, Life on Stage: My Personal Experiences and Recollections (New York: McClure, Phillips & Co., 1901) 97.
14. John Mathews Testimony, War Department Records (J. A. G.), NA, copy in Barbee papers, Box 4, Folder 2.
15. David Carroll, The Matinee Idols (New York: Arbor House, 1972), 31–35.
16. Morris, Life On Stage, 97.
17. Quoted by Alford, Fortune’s Fool, 154.
18. Morris, Life On Stage, 97.
19. Ibid. Booth was paraphrasing a line from The Taming of the Shrew (Act 2, Scene 1): “everyone knows where a wasp wears its stinger. In its tail.”
20. Ibid.
21. Ibid.
22. Ibid.
1. SINS OF THE FATHER
1. Born May 1, 1796, Junius was named after Lucius Junius Brutus, the legendary founder of the Roman Republic, a historic figure who reflected his father’s anti-authoritarian politics (Stephen M. Archer, Junius Brutus Booth. Theatrical Prometheus (Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois University Press, 1992), 6.
2. Anonymous, Memoirs Of Junius Brutus Booth, From His Birth To The Present Time (London: Chapple, Miller, Rowden and E. Wilson, 1817), 11.
3. Junius’s mother, Jane Game, died in childbirth when he was four. An undocumented anecdote about the Booth family originating with Izola Forrester’s This One Mad Act: The Unknown Story of John Wilkes Booth and His Family by His Granddaughter (Boston: Hale, Cushman & Flint, 1937), 135, claims the Booths were of Spanish Jewish descent, but it has never been corroborated by any independent source.
4. Junius Brutus Booth (JBB) letter, dated May 1, 1839, reprinted in Archer, Junius Brutus Booth, 7.
5. William Oxberry (ed.), Oxberry’s Dramatic Biography and Histrionic Anecdotes (London: G. Virtue, 1826), vol. 1, 445.
6. Anonymous, Memoirs of Junius Brutus Booth, 12.
7. Archer, Junius Brutus Booth, 283.
8. Hugh Philips, Mid Georgian London: A Topographical and Social Survey of Central and Western London about 1750 (London: Chandlers, 1964), 142.
9. Kimmel, Mad Booths, 18.
10. Anonymous, Memoirs Of Junius Brutus Booth, 13.
11. Oxberry, Dramatic Biography, 448.
12. F. A. Burr, “Junius Brutus Booth’s Wife Adelaide,” New York Press, (August 9, 1891), 19.
13. JBB to father from Ostend, March 17, 1815, FSL.
14. Burr, “Adelaide,” 19.
15. On Kean, see Jeffrey Kahan, The Cult of Kean (Hampshire, UK: Ashgate, 1988), 77.
16. William Winters, Shadows of the Stage (London: McMillan & Co., 1893), vol. 2, 29; Thomas Ford, The Actor, A Peep Behind The Curtain. Being Passages In The Lives Of Booth And Some Of His Contemporaries (New York: Wm. B. Graham, 1846), 9.
17. Ford, The Actor, 10.
18. Anonymous, Memoirs of Junius Brutus Booth.
19. Archer, Junius Brutus Booth, 44.
20. Ford, The Actor, 61.
21. Kimmel, Mad Booths, 27–28; Titone, My Thoughts Be Bloody, 28. All accounts of Mary Ann’s being a “flower girl” and their meeting at Covent Garden are based on a newspaper article, “A scandalous Story About the Booth Family,” that appeared in the Cincinnati Commercial on April 18, 1865, and was widely reprinted. Deidre Barber Kincaid provides a cogent argument they probably met at Mary Ann’s father’s flower shop, which was located on Bridge Street not far from where Junius lived on Pratt Street. Deidre Barber Kincaid, “Mary Ann Doolittle? The ‘Flower Girl’ Myth Of The Booths’ Mother,” Surratt Courier, 19 (March 2004), 3–5; see also Archer, Junius Brutus Booth, 66.
22. Kimmel, Mad Booths, 27.
23. Archer, Junius Brutus Booth, 66.
24. Lisbeth Jane Roman, The Acting Style and Career Of Junius Brutus Booth (PhD Thesis, University of Illinois, 1968), 65.
25. Jane Stabler, The Palgrave Macmillan Burke to Byron, Barbauld to Baillie, 1790-1830 (Baskingstroke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2001), 26.
26. Leslie A. Marchand (ed.), Lord Byron: Selected Letters and Journals (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 1982), 329.
27. Asia Booth Clarke, Personal Recollections Of The Elder Booth (London: privately printed but not published, 1902), 37–38.
28. Ibid.
29. Asia Booth Clarke, Booth Memorials, 64; Asia Booth Clarke, The Elder and the Younger Booth (Boston: James E. Osgood & Co., 1882), 52.
30. Archer, Junius Brutus Booth, 289–290.
31. Burr, “Adelaide,” 19.
32. Archer, Junius Brutus Booth, 67.
33. James Winston, Drury Land Journal: Selections from James Winston’s Diaries (London: The Society For Theatre Research, 1974), 28.
2. I’VE BROKEN MY PROMISE
1. Clarke, Booth Memorials, 75.
2. Ibid., 77.
3. Kimmel, Mad Booths, 30–31.
4. Clarke, Booth Memorials, 79; Clarke, Elder and Younger Booth, 69.
5. A. O. Kellogg, “Junius Brutus Booth,” The Journal of Mental Science, 14 (July 1868), 281.
6. Harford Democrat, July 6, 1900, 1.
7. Eleanor Ruggles, Prince of Players. Edwin Booth (New York: W. W. Norton & Co., 1953), 16–17.
8. Junius letter to Richard, May 9, 1824, reprinted in Kimmel, Mad Booths, 339, and Archer, Junius Brutus Booth, 93.
9. Julian Mates, America’s Musical Stage: Two Hundred Years of Musical Theatre (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1985), 24; David Beasley, McKee Rankin and the Heyday of the American Theatre (Waterloo, ON: Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 2000), 25.
10. Philadelphia National Gazette, June 10, 1824, 1.
11. Kansas City Star, January 14, 1886, 3; William W. Clapp Jr., A Record of the Boston Stage (Boston and Cambridge: James Munroe and Co., 1853), 278.
12. JBB letter to Francis Wemyss, copy in Archer, Junius Brutus Booth, 126.
13. Archer, Junius Brutus Booth, 124; Ohio State Journal, May 6, 1865, 2; Ella V. Mahoney, Sketches Of Tudor Hall And The Booth Family (Baltimore: Franklin Printing Co., 1925), 24–25.
14. Kimmel, Mad Booths, 49.
15. The original report of the incident is reprinted in Archer, Junius Brutus Booth, 141.
16. James Rush, Diary, September 28, 1835, quoted by Archer, Junius Brutus Booth, 136–137.
17. Terry Alford, Fortune’s Fool (New York: Oxford University Press, 2015), 11.
18. Burr, “Adelaide,” 19.
19. Ibid.
20. Ibid., 20.
21. Ibid., 19; Macon (GA) Telegraph, August 1, 1891, 4.
22. New York Herald, July 30, 1891, 5.
23. Burr, “Adelaide,” 19.
24. Archer, Junius Brutus Booth, 318, n.9.
25. The divorce decree is reprinted in Archer, Junius Brutus Booth, 322–324; Kimmel, Mad Booths, 340–341, and Roman, Acting Style, 51.
26. Clarke, Booth Memorials, 48.
27. Archer, Junius Brutus Booth, 215.
28. Clarke, Elder Booth, 104.
29. New York Times, August 1, 1856, 2; Clarke, Booth Memorials, 153; New Orleans Times-Picayune, August 31, 1888, 2.
30. Cleveland Leader, May 6, 1884, 6.
31. The Sun (Baltimore, MD), March 11, 1858, 2.
32. Burr, “Adelaide,” 12.
3. OLD SINS CAST LONG SHADOWS
1. Solangel Maldonado, “Illegitimate Harm: Law, Stigma and Discrimination Against Nonmarital Children,” Florida Law Review, 63 (2011), 345.
2. Davis, “Illegitimacy and the social structure,” 215–233; I. Pinchbeck, “Social Attitudes to the Problem of Illegitimacy,” British Journal of Sociology, 5 (December 1954), 309–323.
3. Macon (GA) Telegraph, August 6, 1891, 4.
4. Clarke, Unlocked Book, 59.
5. For the controversy over the location of John’s initials on his hand and the speculation that John Wilkes Booth escaped and that someone other than Booth was dragged from the barn who had the initials added to deceive the authorities into believing that the man was Booth, see Constance Head, “J. W. B.: His Initials in India Ink,” The Virginia Magazine of History and Biography, 90 (July 1982), 359–366.
6. Clarke, Booth Memorials, 114.
7. Asia letter to Jean Anderson, June 1855, MdHS.
8. Saturo Saitoh, Peter Steinglass, Marc A. Schuckit, Alcoholism And the Family (New York: Brunn/Mazel, Inc., 1992), 277.
9. Evening Post (New York), April 9, 1858, 2.
10. Daily Ohio Statesman (Columbus), April 15, 1858, 3.
11. Quoted in Arthur W. Bloom, Edwin Booth: A Biography and Performance History (Jefferson, NC: McFarland & Co., 2013), 6.
12. Edwin Booth, “Some Words About My Father,” in Brander Matthews and Laurence Hutton (eds.), Actors and Actresses of Great Britain and the United States, vol. 3 (New York: Cassell & Co., 1886), 102–103.
13. Letter dated April 23, 1876, to Edwina, in Edwin Booth: Recollections by his daughter, Edwina Booth Grossmann, and Letters to Her and to His Friends (New York: Century Company, 1894).
14. Bloom, Edwin Booth, 6.
15. James Young, “Pictures Of the Booth Family,” New York Times, July 14, 1896, 12.
16. New York Daily Tribune, May 12, 1865, 4. On the Hall family, see Dinah Faber, “Joseph and Ann Hall: Behind the Scenes at Tudor Hall,” Harford Historical Bulletin, No. 104 (Fall 2006), 3–64.
17. Edwin letter to Nahum Capen, July 28, 1881, in Clarke, Unlocked Book, 203.
18. Ella Mahoney, quoted by Alford, Fortune’s Fool, 14.
19. Kimmel, Mad Booths, 66.
20. Alford, Fortunes Fool, 17.
21. Clarke, Unlocked Book, 45.
22. Kimmel, Mad Booths, 70.
23. George Stout, “Knew The Booths in Boyhood Days,” Baltimore American, July 27, 1903, 13; “Booth’s debut,” undated clipping, Black papers, Box 8, K-OAK.
24. Blanche DeBar statement in The World (New York City), January 11, 1925, 13.
25. 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), 37.
26. Ibid., 56.
27. Shettel, “J. Wilkes Booth,” 1, 5.
28. George Alfred Townsend, The Life, Crime, And Capture Of John Wilkes Booth (New York: Dick & Fitzgerald, 1865), 21.
29. New York Tribune, May 5, 1865, 5.
30. Ibid.
31. Clarke, Unlocked Book, 99–101.
32. JWB letter to T. William O’Laughlen, August 8, 1854, in Rhodehamel and Taper, Right or Wrong, 38.
33. The Sun (Baltimore, MD), February 27, 2007, 1G.
34. Rhodehamel and Taper, Right or Wrong, 64.
35. New York Daily Tribune, May 12, 1865, 4.
36. Adam Badeau, “Dramatic Reminiscences,” St. Paul and Minneapolis Pioneer Press, February 20, 1887.
37. Rhodehamel and Taper, Right or Wrong, 107.
38. Archer, Junius Brutus Booth, 224.
39. Asia letter to Jean Anderson, n.d. (estimated 1852) MdHS.
40. Clarke, Unlocked Book, 64.
41. Ibid., 92, n.1.
42. Ibid., 91.
43. Ibid., 92.
44. Ibid., 105–106.
45. Ibid., 76–77.
46. Ibid., 74.
47. Ibid., 71.
48. Ibid., 99.
49. JWB letter to O’Laughlen, June 18, 1855, Rhodehamel and Taper, Right or Wrong, 41.
50. JWB letter to O’Laughlen, November 8, 1854, Ibid., 40.
51. St. Louis Post Dispatch, May 8, 1880, 2.
52. JWB letter to O’Laughlen, April 30, 1854, Ibid., 38.
53. JWB letter to O’Laughlen, June 18, 1855, Ibid., 41.
54. Ibid.
4. THEY IDOLIZED HIM
1. Clarke, Unlocked Book, 107.
2. The Sun (Baltimore, MD), August 14, 1855, 3.
3. Clarke, Unlocked Book, 107.
4. Nora Titone, My Thoughts Be Bloody (New York: Free Press, 2010), 95–96.
5. Clarke, Unlocked Book, 107.
6. Ibid., 104.
7. Ibid.
8. Southern Aegis, July 18, 1857, 14; August 8, 1857, 39; August 22, 1857, 55.
9. Townsend, Life and Crimes, 21.
10. Gordon Samples, Lust for Fame: The Stage Career of John Wilkes Booth (Jefferson, NC: McFarland & Co., 1982), 19; David Beasley, McKee Rankin, And the Heyday Of The American Theatre (Waterloo, ON: Wilfred Laurier University Press, 2002), 49.
11. The various stock company roles are described in J. Brander Matthews, “Actors and Actress of New York,” Scribner’s Monthly, 17 (April 1879), 769–784; J. Palgrave Simpson, “The Poor (Walking) Gentleman,” The Theatre: A Monthly Review Of Drama, Music, and the Fine Arts, 1 (May 1880), 269–273; James A. Herne, “Old Stock Days in the Theatre,” The Arena, 6 (September 1892), 401–416; Samples, Lust For Fame, 52–54; and Thomas A. Bogar, Backstage At The Lincoln Assassination. The Untold Story Of The Actors and Stagehands At Ford’s Theatre (Washington, D.C.: Regnery, 2013), 24–25, 53–54, 58. The quote about “a good actor” is from Frederick Ware, Fifty Years of Make Believe (New York: International Press, 1920), 38.
12. Edwin said he and John had learned fencing from their brother June. Francis Wilson, Francis Wilson’s Life of Himself (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Co., 1924), 135.
13. Clarke, Unlocked Book, 111.
14. Emerson, Theatre Magazine, 17 (June 1910), 180.
15. Arthur F. Loux, John Wilkes Booth: Day by Day (Jefferson, NC: McFarland & Co., 2014), 18.
16. Wilkes-Barre (PA) Times, December 19, 1894, 6.
17. Townsend, Life and Crimes, 21.
18. Washington (WA) Standard, August 17, 1878, 6.
19. Townsend, Life and Crimes, 25.
20. Kimmel, Mad Booths, 150.
21. Townsend, Life and Crimes, 25.
22. Quoted by Loux, Booth: Day by Day, 30.
23. Titone, My Thoughts Be Bloody, 168.
24. A. F. Norcross, “A Child’s Memory of the Boston Theatre,” Theatre Magazine, 42 (May 1926), 72.
25. On the Richmond Theatre, see Charles F. Fuller Jr., Kunkel and Company at the Marshall Theatre, Richmond, Virginia, 1856-1861 (MA Thesis, Ohio University, 1968).
26. Deirdre Barber, “A man of Promise. John Wilkes Booth at Richmond, 1858-1860,” Journal of the South Eastern Theatre Conference, 2 (1994) 113–129, 114.
27. E. Lawrence Abel, Singing The New Nation: How Music Shaped the Confederacy, 1861-1865 (Mechanicsburg, PA: Stackpole Books, 2000), 239.
28. John Ford Sollers, The Theatrical Career of John T. Ford (PhD Thesis, Stanford University, 1962), 90.
29. Ibid., 85, n. 123.
30. Townsend, Life and Crimes, 22.
31. John M. Barron, “An Actor’s Memories Of Richmond Befo’ the War,” The Sun (Baltimore), January 20, 1907, 15.
32. Ibid.
33. Edward M. Alfriend, “Assassin Booth,” Sunday Globe (Washington, D.C.) February 9, 1902.
34. Quincy Kilby, “Some newly collected facts about John Wilkes Booth,” n.d. Original typescript in Seymour Collection, Princeton University Library, copy in JOH.
35. JWB letter to Edwin, September 10, 1858, in Rhodehamel and Taper, Right or Wrong, 45.
36. Louisville (KY) Daily Courier, November 28, 1859, 1.
37. Clarke, Unlocked Book, 120.
38. JWB letter to Edwin, September 10, 1858, in Rhodehamel and Taper, Right or Wrong, 45.
39. George Crutchfield, Letter to Professor Edward V. Valentine, July 5, 1909, JOH, also in George S. Bryan, The Great American Myth (New York: Darrick & Evans, 1940), 86.
40. Ibid.
41. Charles Wallace, “Richmond in by gone days,” Richmond Dispatch, June 24, 1906, 36.
42. Edward M. Alfriend, “Recollections of John Wilkes Booth,” The Era, 8 (October 1901), 604.
43. Daily People (New York City), December 8, 1901, 3.
44. Alfriend, “Recollections,” 604.
45. Among his other honors, he was President of the American Medical Association. Charleston (SC) Courier, May 8, 1852, 2.
46. Mary Bella Beale, “Wilkes Booth’s Ring,” Atlanta Constitution, December 31, 1887, 4.
47. Dr. Beale was a third grand master of the Odd Fellows. President James Monroe had once been a guest at their house. The Times (Richmond, VA), July 2, 1890, 4.
48. Beale, “Ring,” 4.
49. Ibid.
50. J. M. Barron, “The Stage Before the War,” The Sun (Baltimore, MD), November 4, 1906, 14.
51. JWB letter to Edwin, September 10, 1858, in Rhodehamel and Taper, Right or Wrong, 45.
5. YOUNG AND PRETTY MAGGIE MITCHELL
1. Saturday Evening Gazette (Boston), July 4, 1857, 2.
2. Richmond Whig, November 3, 1857, 2; New York Clipper, March 27, 1858, 390.
3. Daily True Delta (New Orleans), January 17, 1861, 5.
4. Michael Burlingame (ed.), Lincoln’s Journalist: John Hay’s Anonymous Writings for the Press, 1860-1864 (Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois University Press, 2006), 321.
5. Daily Creole (New Orleans), December 17, 1856, 2; Daily Ohio Statesman (Columbus), June 24, 1856, 3; Ibid., June 25, 1856, 3; Towse, Sixty Years, 89.
6. John was a frequent visitor of Maggie’s dressing room. New York Clipper, December 25, 1915, 8. “From a letter in my possession written by herself I am convinced that a love affair existed between Miss Maggie Mitchell and J. Wilkes Booth and that it is probable she corresponded with him and was in his confidence. She is a rebel & Blanch Booth says Maggie can keep her secrets better than any woman she ever knew.” J. H. Baker to Dana, April 24, 1865, NARA RG 107 M473, reel 118, 114. George S. Bryan said that Blanche Chapman Ford told him of a rumored engagement. Bryan, Great American Myth, 126. According to John Ford Sollers, the rumor was in fact true. Terry Alford, personal communication.
7. Stated birth year for Maggie’s birthdate varies. The 1837 date is based on information found in census data, on www.revolvy.com, and at www.findagrave.com, “Margaret Julia ‘Maggie’ Mitchell.” All that is known of Anna’s first husband is that he was a medical doctor (Trenton Evening Times, November 20, 1883), that his surname was Lomax, and that he died shortly after he and Anna left England and came to America with their four children. Brooklyn Daily Eagle, November 8, 1885, 14. A Wikipedia article asserts Lomax was a bookbinder, but I was unable to locate the cited source.
8. Ibid.
9. Shirley Burns, “Diminutive Players,” The Green Book Magazine, 3 (March 1910), 580.
10. On Burton’s theater, see D. L. Rinear, Stage, Page, Scandals and Vandals: William E. Burton and Nineteenth-Century (Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois University Press, 2004).
11. Watertown Daily Times, December 9, 1891, 13.
12. Ibid.
13. Frederic E. McKay and Charles E. L. Windgate (eds.), Charles R. Thorne Jr., Famous American Actors of To-day (New York: Thomas Y. Crowell & Co., 1896), vol. 2, 308–313.
14. Folio, 27–28 (December 1885), 220.
15. Advertisement, “Maggie Mitchell Waltz,” “At Lucks’ Music Store,” Nashville Union and American, September 9, 1859, 1.
16. Thorne, Actors, 313. E.g., “Our Maggie,” Katy O’Sheal. The latter was her signature play for several years.
17. Wheeling Daily Intelligencer, August 30, 1859, 2.
18. Plain Dealer (Cleveland), August 5, 1855, 3. After she became famous, the New York Herald (March 7, 1889) and several other newspapers reported the brief affair and secret marriage, although some intimated the story was invented by a rejected suitor in Baltimore.
19. Saturday Evening Gazette, December 5, 1857, 6.
20. New York Clipper, March 27, 1858, 390.
21. The Sun (Baltimore, MD), April 2, 1858, 1.
22. New Orleans Times-Picayune, April 22, 1858, 1.
23. John M. Barron, “Actors of Days gone by, A Record of Impressions,” The Sun (Baltimore, MD), November 11, 1906, 15.
24. George Berrell Diary entry quoted in William G. B. Carson, “Bumping over the Road in the 70s,” Educational Theatre Journal, 10 (October 1958), 203–210, 204.
25. Barron, “Actors of Days gone by.”
26. Charlotte Observer, February 3, 1924, 16, 19. Alford, Fortune’s Fool, 57, alters the text leaving the impression that John was taken with Maggie as a performer and that there was no romantic interest at the time.
27. Richmond Daily Dispatch, October 17, 1859, 1.
6. THIS HARPERS FERRY BUSINESS
1. Clarke, Unlocked Book, 110–111.
2. New York Clipper, May 7, 1859, 23; Evening Star (Washington, D.C.), May 3, 1859.
3. Asia letter to Jean Anderson, n.d. 1860, MdHS.
4. Loux, Booth: Day By Day, 47.
5. New York Clipper, August 20, 1859, 142.
6. Asia letter to Jean Anderson, June 19, 1859, MdHS.
7. Richmond Daily Dispatch, November 21, 1859, 1.
8. Excerpts for the Charleston Mercury reprinted in The Richmond Enquirer, November 15, 1859.
9. Richmond Examiner, November 18, 1859.
10. New York Clipper, December 3, 1859, 262.
11. Richmond Daily Dispatch, February 2, 1902, 14.
12. Quoted by Deidre Lindsay Kincaid, Rough Magic: The Theatrical Life of John Wilkes Booth, (PhD Thesis, University of Hull, 2000), 77.
13. Asia letter to Jean Anderson, n.d. 1859, MdHS.
14. Richmond Daily Dispatch, November 21, 1859, 1.
15. George W. Libby, “John Brown and John Wilkes Booth,” Confederate Veteran, 38 (1930), 138.
16. Ibid., Polly Daffron, “George Libby Recalls Incidents of the War Between the States,” Richmond Times Dispatch, July 7, 1929, 9. The Richmond Grays’ Quartermaster, Major Robert Caskie, told a somewhat different version of how John joined up with his unit (“A reminiscence of John Wilkes Booth,” Texas Siftings (Austin, TX), August 4, 1883, 5.
17. Crutchfield letter to Valentine, July 5, 1909, JOH.
18. L. Terry Oggel (ed.), The Letters and Notebooks of Mary Devlin Booth (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1987) 22.
19. Richmond Daily Dispatch, November 21, 1859, 1.
20. Ibid.
21. Libby, “John Brown,” 138.
22. New York Times, October 31, 1859.
23. Henry G. Tinsley, “Last of John Brown’s Harper Ferry Guards,” San Francisco Chronicle, March 21, 1897, 16.
24. “The Life of Philip Whitlock, Written by himself,” www.jewish-history.com/cvilwar/philip_whitlock.html, accessed February 8, 2016.
25. Richmond Daily Dispatch, December 5, 1859, 1.
26. John Barron, “John Wilkes Booth, Some Recollections of Him By an Early Virginia Acquaintance,” Daily People (New York City), December 8, 1901, 3.
27. Boston Daily Globe, March 7, 1909, 43.
28. Clarke, Unlocked Book, 124.
29. “To Whom it may concern” letter, November 1864, reprinted in Rhodehamel and Taper, Right or Wrong, 125.
30. Rhodehamel and Taper, Right or Wrong, 6.
31. Richmond Whig, December 28, 1859.
32. Ella and her seven siblings and their mother had come from England in 1847. New York Times, May 14, 1898, 7.
33. During the war at least two songs, “The Young Volunteer” (Macon, Ga: John C. Schreiner and Son, 1863) and “See At Your Feet A Suppliant One” (Richmond: George Dunn and Co, 1861), carried the caption, “as sung by Miss Ella Wren.”
34. The Sun (New York City, New York), April 5, 1880, 1.
35. Fred R. Wren, “Edwin Booth,” New Orleans Times Picayune, July 14, 1907, 10.
36. Atlanta Constitution, December 4, 1881, 9.
7. THE STAR SISTERS: HELEN AND LUCILLE WESTERN
1. Overland Monthly and the Out West Magazine, 1923, 76.
2. Herbert J. Edwards, Julie A. Herne, and James A. Herne, The Rise of Realism in the American Drama (Orono, ME: University of Maine Press, 1964), 10.
3. Boston Herald, November 18, 1856, 4; December 8, 1856; Louisville Daily Courier, November 8, 1858, 4. Brown, History of the American Stage, 382.
4. Dale Cockrell, Demons of Disorder, Early Blackface Minstrels and Their World (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 69.
5. Ironically, long before the banner of “banned in Boston” became a mantra for puritanical censorship, “the pure and Puritanical city of Boston” (Detroit Free Press, May 7, 1859, quoting the New York Tribune) did not find The Three Fast Men especially objectionable, whereas theatre critics in the west railed at its sexual innuendo and exhibitionism.
6. New York Clipper, November, 14, 1863, 241.
7. Boston Herald, March 17, 1857, 2.
8. Ibid., March 11, 1857, 2.
9. Ibid., March 18, 1857, 2.
10. Helen and Lucille were the first women to be featured in a minstrel act. Frank Dumont, “The Golden Days of Minstrelsy,” New York Clipper, December 19, 1914.
11. Brown, History of the American Stage, 387; E. Lawrence Abel, Confederate Sheet Music (Jefferson, NC: McFarland & Co., 2004), 139.
12. Boston Herald, March 13, 1857, 2.
13. Ibid., March 18, 1857, 2.
14. Ibid., March 13, 1857, 2.
15. Ibid., March 24, 1857, 2.
16. Ibid., April 30, 1857, 2.
17. Louisville Daily Courier, November 10, 1858, 3.
18. Ibid.; Boston Herald, June 16, 1857, 3.
19. Boston Herald, June 34, 1857, 2.
20. Ibid., November 10, 1857, 4.
21. Ibid., November 21, 1857, 2.
22. William Dean Howells, Suburban Sketches (Boston: James R. Osgood and Co., 1872), 227–230.
23. New York Times, April 19, 1858, 4.
24. New Orleans Times-Picayune, November 7, 1858, 3; Louisville Daily Courier, November 10, 1858, 1; Pittsburgh Daily Post, March 17, 1858, 3. The “plump and pretty girls” comment is from an unidentified clipping quoted by Nan Mullenneaux, Walking Ladies: Mid-nineteenth-century American Actresses’ Work, Family and Culture (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 2008), 169–170.
25. The Spirit of the Times, 1877, 628.
26. Boston Herald, May 24, 1858, 2.
27. Pittsburgh Daily Post, October 26, 1858, 4.
28. Detroit Free Press, June 12, 1858, 3; Cincinnati Daily Enquirer, October 29, 1858, 3; Louisville Daily Courier, November 8, 1858, 1; Chicago Press and Tribune, December 10, 1858, 9; Robert L. Sherman, Chicago Stage, Its Record and Achievement (Chicago: Robert Sherman, 1947), 401.
29. Sacramento Daily Union, February 14, 1859, 5. The Bowery Theatre was notorious for its raucous, whistling, caterwauling audiences. Decorum was so rare at The Bowery Theatre that when it occurred, it was newsworthy (Cockrell, Demons, 69).
30. Detroit Free Press, May 7, 1859, 1.
31. New York Times, February 28, 1859, 1.
32. Ibid., April 12, 1859, 1.
33. New York Clipper, August 13, 1859; Sacramento Daily Union, September 16, 1859.
34. New York Clipper, October 22, 1859, 214.
35. Daily Alta California, November 1, 1859, 1.
36. Wheeling (WV) Daily Intelligencer, October 31, 1859, 3.
37. University of Louisville, “Macauley’s Theatre Collection,” http://digital.library.louisville.edu/cdm/landingpage/collection/macauley/, accessed 6/7/2015.
8. I CANNOT STOOP TO THAT WHICH I DESPISE
1. Richmond Daily Dispatch, May 12, 1860, 1.
2. For a description of these pikes see Frank Heywood Hodder, “The John Brown Pikes,” Kansas Historical Quarterly, 2 (November 1933), 386–390.
3. Clarke, Unlocked Book, 113–114.
4. Ibid., 113. Booth also exaggerated his involvement in the Baltimore riots (April 19–21, 1861), claiming he had been one of the rioters and had burned bridges (Michael W. Kauffman, American Brutus (New York: Random House, 2005), 424, n. 20) which was not possible since he was in Albany performing as Richard III on April 22 (Albany Times Union, November 3, 2014).
5. Titone, My Thoughts Be Bloody, 216–217.
6. Clarke, Elder and Younger Booth, 152.
7. Lincoln’s “taste comment” occurs in a letter he wrote to Lyman Trumbull, April 29, 1860, quoted in David Herbert Donald, Lincoln (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1995), 241; John’s “taste” in Mary Devlin to Edwin, March 1, 1860, in Oggel (ed.), Letters and Notebooks, 44.
8. Bloom, Edwin Booth, 43. Nan Mullenneaux, Walking Ladies: Mid-nineteenth-century American Actresses’ Work, Family and Culture (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 2008), 51.
9. Ibid.
10. Letter to Elizabeth Stoddard, March 12, 1863, reprinted in “Life Tragedy of Edwin Booth,” Boston Herald, November 1, 1903, 402.
11. Quoted in Bloom, Edwin Booth, 37.
12. Adam Badeau, “Edwin Booth. On And Off The Stage. Personal Recollections,” McClure’s Magazine, 1 (June–November 1893) 253–267, 26.
13. Badeau, “Edwin Booth,” 260–261.
14. Edwin letter to June, October 31, 1858, quoted in Bloom, Edwin Booth, 39.
15. Asia letter (n.d. 1859) to Jean Anderson, MdHS.
16. Johnson, “Enter the Harlot,” 66.
17. “Edward Freiberger,” undated clipping, Black papers, K-OAK.
18. Quoted in Charles F. Jr. Fuller, Kunkel and Company at the Marshall Theatre, Richmond, Virginia, 1856-1861 (MA Thesis, Ohio University, 1968), 25.
19. Bloom, Edwin Booth, 45.
20. Badeau, “Edwin Booth,” 361.
21. Asia letter August 21, 1860 to Jean Anderson, MdHS.
22. Mrs. Thomas Bailey Aldrich, Crowding Memories (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Co., 1920), 8.
9. ALMOST AN EUNUCH
1. New York Clipper, June 30, 1860, 87.
2. Ibid., July 14, 1860, 102.
3. Loux, Booth: Day by Day, 61.
4. Townsend, Life and Crimes, 22.
5. George Alfred Townsend, “How John Wilkes Booth was Started in the Theatrical Profession,” Cincinnati Enquirer, January 19, 1886, 1.
6. New York Clipper, August 6, 1859, 127.
7. National Republican (Washington, D.C.), February 16, 1874, 4.
8. Canning paid $45,000 for renovating the Montgomery Theatre in Alabama. New York Clipper, June 30, 1860, 87.
9. Mona Rebecca Brooks, The Development Of American Theatre Management Practices Between 1830 and 1896 (PhD Thesis, Texas Tech University, 1981), 45.
10. Edwin lost money starring his friends Ned Adams and Lawrence Barret as star performers. Both were good stock actors but failed as stars. Ruggles, Prince of Players, 232.
11. Cincinnati Enquirer, January 19, 1886, 1.
12. Ibid.
13. Montgomery Advertiser, September 12, 1860, quoted in Kincaid, Rough Magic, 120.
14. Abel, Singing The New Nation, 245.
15. Emma Mitchell, another of Maggie’s sisters, was a dancer in the troupe. New York Clipper, October 20, 1860, 215.
16. Daily Times (Columbus, GA), October 5, 1860.
17. Daily Sun (Columbus, GA), October 6, 1860.
18. Daily Gazette and Comet (Baton Rouge, LA), October, 24, 1860.
19. Cincinnati Enquirer, January 19, 1886, 1. Canning’s story is improbable, starting with his holding the gun while John scraped away the rust. The second improbability was that the gun was a pistol. It is more likely that it would have been a derringer. Finally, John was known to be a crack shot with a pistol and a rifle; no one was a crack shot with a derringer.
20. New York Clipper, November 4, 1860.
21. Kincaid, Rough Magic, 125.
22. Abel, Singing The New Nation, 246–247.
23. Dear Miss Letter (1860), from the John K. Lattimer Collection, reproduced in Heritage Auctions Catalog (Dallas, TX), November 20, 2008, Lot No. 61201.
24. Philadelphia Press, May 18, 1865, 2; Catherine Mary Reignold Winslow, Yesterdays With Actors (Boston: Cupples and Hurd, 1887), 141.
25. New York Dramatic Mirror, December 31, 1913, 8.
26. Philadelphia Press, May 18, 1865, 2.
27. “Dear Miss” Letter, Lattimer Collection.
10. LITTLE REHEARSALS: LOUISE WOOSTER
1. Louise Wooster, The Autobiography of a Magdalen (Birmingham, AL: Birmingham Publishing Co., 1911), 19.
2. Ibid., 7–9.
3. Ibid., 18–19, 29–30.
4. Ibid., 32–33.
5. Ibid., 46–47.
6. Ibid., 48.
7. William Warren Rogers, Confederate Home Front: Montgomery During the Civil War (Tuscaloosa, AL: University Alabama Press, 2001), 85; Louise said her name was Jennie Garborough. Thomas P. Lowry gives her name as Jenny Yarborough in his book Sexual Misbehavior in the Civil War: A Compendium (e-book, Xlibris Corp., 2006), 13.
8. L. C. W., Autobiography, 48.
9. Ibid., 48–49.
10. Lowry, Sexual Misbehavior, 13; E. Susan Barber and Charles F. Ritter, “Dangerous Liaisons: Working Women and Sexual Justice in the American Civil War,” European Journal of American Studies, 10 (2015), 2–19.
11. Lowry, Sexual Misbehavior, 56–57.
12. E. Lawrence Abel, A Finger in Lincoln’s Brain (Santa Barbara, CA: Praeger, 2015), 30.
13. Ibid.
14. Bloom, Edwin Booth, 33.
15. Abel, A Finger In Lincoln’s Brain, 34–44.
16. New York Daily Graphic, November 6, 1873, 35.
17. L. C. W., Autobiography, 49.
18. Ibid., 50.
19. Ibid.
20. Bloom, Edwin Booth, 39.
21. Montgomery Weekly Advertiser, December 5, 1860, 3.
22. A printed invitation to the St. Andrews dinner was found among John’s personal effects. Edwards and Steers, Evidence, 623.
23. Ibid.
24. Stanley Kimmel speculates John decided to go as a star under his own name after reading a Montgomery newspaper report that his brother Edwin had received $5,000 as his share of the months profits from a Boston engagement. Kimmel, Mad Booths, 157; See also Ruggles, Prince of Players, 123, Samples, Lust For Fame, 48.
25. Greencastle (IN) Banner, November 15, 1860, 2.
26. New York Times, November 9, 1860.
27. Ibid., November 20, 1860, from a speech on November 13.
28. Draft of speech, December 1860, in Rhodehamel and Taper, Right or Wrong, 58.
29. Effie Ellsler Westen (ed.), The Stage Memories of John A. Ellsler (Cleveland: Rofant Club, 1950) reprinted in Rhodehamel and Taper, Right or Wrong, 66; Wooster, Autobiography, 51–52, 56.
30. Ibid., 52–53.
11. THE SOUTHERN MARSEILLAISE
1. Alabama Secession Banner of 1861, http://www.crwflags.com/fotw/flags/us-alsec.html#disc, accessed January 16, 2015. Prior to the adoption of the “Stars and Bars” flag of the Confederacy, various Southern states created their own state secession flags like Alabama’s.
2. The “Southern Marseillaise” was adapted to the tune of the revolutionary French national anthem by Armand Blackmar in New Orleans on December 21, 1860, in celebration of South Carolina’s secession (George Henry Preble, Origin and History of the American Flag (Philadelphia: Nicholas L. Brown, 1917), vol. 2, 498) although Louisiana did not secede until January 26, 1861. It was the South’s unofficial anthem until it was replaced by two more popular unofficial anthems, “Dixie” and “The Bonnie Blue Flag.”
3. Daily Graphic (New York City), June 12, 1875, 11.
4. Montgomery Weekly Advertiser, December 19, 1860, 3. Frank P. O’Brien, “Passing of the Old Montgomery Theatre,” Montgomery Advertiser, November 24, 1907, 6.
5. Cincinnati Daily Press, December 24, 1860, 1.
6. Springfield (MA) Republican, Jan 10, 1861, 2.
7. Abel, Singing The New Nation, 237.
8. Daily Creole (New Orleans), December 17, 1856, 2.
9. Daily True Delta (New Orleans), November 18, 1860, 1.
10. On Waldauer, see William Hyde and Howard Louis Conrad (eds.), Encyclopedia of The History of St Louis: A compendium of History and Biography for Ready Reference (New York: The Southern History Company, 1899), vol. 4, 2391–2392.
11. Daily Crescent (New Orleans), January 24, 1861, 1; New York Clipper, March 9, 1861, 375.
12. Ibid., January 24, 1861, 1.
13. Brooklyn Daily Eagle, November 8, 1885, 14. An actual count of her Fanchon appearances places the number at around 1,200. Thomas Bogar, personal communication.
14. Alabama seceded on January 11, 1861. Maggie may have left just before since she opened in New Orleans on January 14.
15. Weekly Post (Montgomery, AL), February 6, 1861.
16. James P. Jones and William Warren Rogers, “Montgomery as the Confederate Capital; View of a New Nation,” Alabama Historical Quarterly, 26 (Spring 1964), 1–125; Weekly Post (Montgomery, AL), February 13, 1861, 25–26.
17. C. Vann Woodward and Elizabeth Muhlenfeld (eds.), The Private Mary Chestnut: The Unpublished Civil War Diaries (New York: Oxford University Press, 1984); Weekly Post (Montgomery, AL), February 28, 1861, 16, 18.
18. Lt. Col. John H. Napier, “Martial Montgomery,” Alabama Historical Quarterly, (Fall–Winter 1967), 107–131, 130; Jones and Rogers, “Montgomery,” 67.
12. ALL FOR LOVE AND MURDER: HENRIETTA IRVING
1. New Orleans Times-Picayune, January 22, 1865, 4.
2. Kincaid, Rough Magic, 129.
3. Rochester Union and Advertiser, January, 22, 1861, 3.
4. New York Clipper, December 15, 1860.
5. Rochester Union and Advertiser, January 26, 1861, quoted by Kincaid, Rough Magic, 129.
6. Henrietta wrote a brief autobiography, now housed in the Union Square Theatre Collection, Hampden-Booth Theatre Library (HL). My thanks to Raymond Wemmlinger for making it and other letters available to me.
7. Ibid.
8. Located at the corner of Ninth and Walnut Streets, the Walnut Street Theatre was the first theatre to install gas lighting, air conditioning, and the tradition of the curtain call. Bernard Havard and Mark D. Sylvester, Walnut Street Theatre (Charleston, SC: Arcadia Publishing, 2008).
9. Couldock was an England-born émigré, whose acting style was characterized as “old-school” with emotive sentimentalism and great sweeping gestures. New York Times, May 12, 1895, 21; John A. Garraty and Mark C. Carnes, American National Biography (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), 581–582.
10. Irving, Autobiography, H-BTL.
11. The incident with the diamond was reported in the Minnesotian on September 17, 1857, and is also mentioned in Frank M. Whiting, “Theatrical Personalities of Old St. Paul,” Minnesota History, 23 (December 1942), 313.
12. For Couldock and Henrietta in Chicago, see Sherman, Chicago Stage, 405–408.
13. Rock Island (IL) Argus, August 19, 1905, 6.
14. Chicago Press and Tribune, July 2, 1858, 1.
15. New York Clipper, January 29, 1859, 26; February 12, 1859, 342.
16. Ibid., December 3, 1859, 263.
17. Townsend, Life, Crime and Capture, 24.
18. Albany Evening Journal, February 18, 1861.
19. New York Tribune, February 13, 1861; Albany Atlas & Argus, February 18, 1861; New York Clipper, February 23, 1861; Henry Pitt Phelps, Players of a Century. A Record of the Albany Stage. Including Notices of Prominent Actors Who Have Appeared in America (Albany: Joseph McDonough, 1880) 326.
20. C. R. Rosebery, “Actor Checks Into Hotel in Albany,” Albany Times-Union, April 12, 1965, 18.
21. Ibid.
22. Phelps, Players, 324.
23. Ibid., 326.
24. Ibid.
25. Herbert Adams, “John Wilkes Booth Won Hearts in Portland,” in Donald W. Beattie, Rodney M. Cole, and Charles G. Waugh (eds.), A Distant War Comes Home (Camden, ME: Down East Books, 1991), 36.
26. Clara Morris, Life on the Stage. My Personal experiences and Recollections (New York: McClure, Phillips & Co., 1901), 126.
27. The Albany (NY) Evening Journal (April 20, 1861, 2) dubbed it “The Baltimore Massacre.” The events are described in E. Lawrence Abel, “Cloak and Dagger,” America’s Civil War, 4 (January 1992), 30–37; Daniel Stashower, “Lincoln Must Die,” Smithsonian Magazine, 43 (February 2013), 74–89.
28. Adams, “John Wilkes Booth,” 37.
29. But not in Albany, possibly to avoid the scandal tarnishing the Stanwix Hotel’s reputation.
30. Cincinnati Daily Enquirer, May 5, 1861, 3.
31. Louisville Courier-Journal, May 10, 1861.
32. Chicago Tribune, May 14, 1861, 4. The Chicago Tribune misreported John’s name as J. Edwards Booth. Four years later, the Albany Atlas & Argus had an entirely different version. “Quite a pretty sensational story,” it said of the previous accounts, “but there is no truth in it.” Booth, it went on, “roomed with an actress whose temper was quite as violent as his own.” John, it said, was the aggrieved lover: “On returning to his room one night he found his mistress sitting up, and on the table before her two glasses of punch. Thinking she had been entertaining some male friend, he grew jealous, and they quarreled, he finally slapping her face. She subsequently left, and the next night, we believe, having purchased a pistol she sat for some hours on the stairs waiting his coming, with the apparent determination of shooting him; but he didn’t come. He perhaps found more agreeable company, and there the affair ended.” Reprinted in New York Daily News, June 1, 1865.
33. Thomas P. Lowry, “John Wilkes Booth’s spurned lover slashed him with a knife and nearly changed the course of history,” America’s Civil War, 20 (November 2007), 23–24.
34. Townsend, “How John Wilkes Booth was Started in the Theatrical Profession,” 1.
35. Jim Bishop, The Day Lincoln Was Shot (New York: HarperPerennial, 2013 [originally published 1955]), 65.
36. Alford, Fortune’s Fool, 108.
37. William A. Howell, “Memories of Wilkes Booth,” 3.
38. Henrietta Irving, Autobiography, HL.
39. Pomeroy’s Democrat (Chicago, IL), April 29, 1876, 4.
13. MY GOOSE HANGS HIGH
1. It was customary at the close of each season for regular patrons to present one or more of the leading stock actors with a gold-headed cane. John received his in Montgomery. Washington Post, January 5, 1902, 30.
2. Howell, “Memories of Wilkes Booth,” 3.
3. Washington Post, January 5, 1902, 30.
4. Howell, “Memories of Wilkes Booth,” 3.
5. Ibid.
6. JWB letter to Joseph H. Simmonds, October 9, 1861, in Rhodehamel and Taper, Right or Wrong, 72.
7. Ibid.
8. Excerpts taken from Loux, Booth: Day by Day, 87–94.
9. Daily Advertiser (Newark, NJ), April 26, 1865, 2.
10. Edwin’s characterization of John’s feelings about secession (Edwin letter to Nahum Capen, July 28, 1881, in Clarke, Unlocked Book, 202).
11. Asia letter to Jean Anderson, n.d., MdHS.
12. Kansas City (MO) Star, November 8, 1897, 3.
13. Brown, History of the American Stage, 510.
14. Clarke, Unlocked Book, 115–116.
15. Edwin letter to Nahum Capen, July 28, 1881, in Clarke, Unlocked Book, 202.
16. Ibid.
17. Ann Harley Gilbert, The Stage Reminiscences of Mrs. Gilbert (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1901), 57–61.
18. Mary Ann letter to JWB, March 26, 1865, Edwards and Steers, Assassination, 166. Being a “Roman mother” meant a willingness to sacrifice her child for Rome (i.e., the current war).
19. Baltimore American, June 8, 1893, 4.
20. Daily Advertiser (Newark, NJ), April 26, 1865, 2.
21. DeBar’s sister Clementina was June’s one-time wife.
22. Edwards and Steers, Evidence, 100 (James H. Baker testimony).
23. Grant M. Herbstruth, Benedict DeBar and the Grand Opera House in St. Louis, Missouri, from 1855 to 1879 (PhD Thesis, University of Iowa, 1954), 98–99.
24. Edwards and Steers, Evidence, 852 (Provost Marshal, Col. H.R. McConnell testimony).
25. Chicago Tribune, January 21, 1862.
26. Evening Journal (Chicago, IL), February 1, 1862, quoted by Loux, Booth: Day by Day, 96.
27. The Sun (Baltimore, MD), February 17, 1862.
28. American and Commercial Advertiser, quoted by Loux, Booth: Day by Day, 98.
29. Herne, “Old Stock Days,” 407.
30. Ibid.; Julie Herne, “Biographical note,” in James A Herne (ed.), Shore Acres and Other Plays (New York: Samuel French, 1928), 11; James A. Perry, The American Ibsen (Chicago: Nelson-hall, 1978), 8–13.
31. The Sun (Baltimore, MD), February 19, 1862, 2; February 20, 1862, 2.
32. Ibid., March 10, 11, 1862.
33. J. E. Buckingham, Reminiscences and Souvenirs of the Assassination of Abraham Lincoln (Washington, D.C.: Rufus H. Darby, 1894), 49. Buckingham was the doorman at Ford’s Theatre the night of the assassination.
34. Boston Post, reprinted in Daily Missouri Democrat (St. Louis, MO), May 21, 1862, 1.
35. Ibid.
36. Winslow, Yesterdays with Actors, 142.
37. Ibid.
38. Kincaid, Rough Magic, 168.
39. Ibid.
40. Loux, Booth: Day by Day, 87.
41. JWB letter to “Dear Miss,” April 14, 1864, in Rhodehamel and Taper, Right or Wrong, 104.
42. Daily Courant (Hartford, CT), April 5, 1862, 3.
43. Edwards and Steers, Evidence, 754; Letter dated February 18, 1865.
44. Samples, Lust, 92.
45. Kincaid, Rough Magic, 172.
46. Booth letter to Edwin Keach, December 8, 1862, in Rhodehamel and Taper, Right or Wrong, 83.
14. TRUE GRIT
1. Bloom, Edwin Booth, 76.
2. Mary Devlin letter to Emma Cushman, January 22, 1863, Mary Devlin letter to Edwin, February, 12, 1863, in Oggel, Letters and Notebooks, 101, 105–106.
3. Titone, My Thoughts Be Bloody, 278.
4. Townsend, Life and Crimes, 21.
5. Asia letter to Jean Anderson, March 3, 1863, MdHS.
6. Ibid.
7. JWB letter to Joseph H. Simmons, March 1, 1863, in Rhodehamel and Taper, Right or Wrong, 85.
8. Grover’s Theatrical playbill, April 11, 1863, quoted in Rhodehamel and Tapper, Right or Wrong, 87, n.2.
9. Washington National Intelligencer, April 12, 1863.
10. Charles Wyndham, “John Wilkes Booth. An Interview with the Press with Sir Charles Wyndham,” New York Herald, June 27, 1909, Magazine Section, 2.
11. Evening Star (Washington, D.C.), May 2, 1891, 5.
12. May’s account of the operation is in John Frederick May, “Mark of the Scalpel,” Records of the Columbia Historical Society, 13 (1910), 53, and testimony in Edwards and Steers, Evidence, 849–850; Surratt, Trial of John H. Surratt, vol. 1, 270. Dr. May would later positively identify John’s body by the scar from the operation he performed on John’s neck.
13. Cincinnati Enquirer, January 18, 1886, 1.
14. JWB Letter to Joe Simmonds, April 19, 1863, in Rhodehamel and Taper, Right or Wrong, 88.
15. Edwards and Steers, Evidence, 666–667 (Herold statement).
16. May, “Mark of the Scalpel,” 53, in Edwards and Steers, Evidence, 849; Joseph K. Barnes Testimony, May 20, 1865 in Benjamin Perley Poore (ed.), The Conspiracy Trial for the Murder of the President (Boston: J. E. Tilton, 1865), vol. 2, 60; Edward Steers Jr. (ed.), The Trial. The Assassination of President Lincoln and the Trial of the Conspirators (Lexington, KY: University of Kentucky Press, 2003), 95.
15. EFFIE AND ALICE
1. Emmett C. King, “What Becomes of Old Actors,” Indiana (PA) Democrat, September 13, 1911, 1; The Labor World, April 16, 1904, 5; New York Clipper, May 20, 1865, 4.
2. Johnson Briscoe, The Actors’ Birthday Book (New York: Moffat, Yard & Co., 1907), 155.
3. Jane Germon started her career when she was eight and regularly appeared on stage for more than fifty years. Her father, who worked under the name of Greene Germon, and was the first actor to play the title role of Uncle Tom on stage. New York Times, March 7, 1914, 11. He died in 1854 at age thirty-eight when Effie was nine years old. New York Times, March 7, 1914, 11.
4. Briscoe, Actors’ Birthday Book, 155.
5. The Labor World, April 16, 1904, 5.
6. Evening Press (Providence, RI), August 18, 1859, 2.
7. Evening Star (Washington, D.C.), April 14, 1862, 3.
8. Franklin Graham, Histrionic Montreal: Annals of the Montreal Stage, with Biographical and Critical Notices of the Plays and Players of a Century (Montreal: John Lovell & Son, 1902), 126.
9. Tidwell, Hall, and Gaddy, Come Retribution.
10. Daily National Republican (Washington, D.C.), April 14, 1863, 3.
11. Daily Exchange (Baltimore, MD), December 19, 1860, 2.
12. The playbill is reproduced in Samples, Lust for Fame, 175.
13. United States Census 1850.
14. Graham, Histrionic Montreal, 123. An obituary notice mistakenly states she was born in Boston. New York Times, October 26, 1890.
15. Daily Bee (Boston, MA), January, 24, 1849.
16. Daily Bee (Boston, MA), February 25, 1853, 3; March 5, 1853, 3; Boston Herald, May 23, 1855, 3; June 14, 1855, 3; February 21, 1856, 3.
17. The ballad about unrequited love was written in 1835 by Mrs. Phillip Millard. New York Clipper, November 5, 1859, 23. Alice Gray is the hardest of any of the women Booth was involved with to track down because of the name’s popularity in mid and late nineteenth century America and because it was also spelled “Grey.” In one instance it was spelled both ways in the same newspaper paragraph, see Washington National Republican, November 28, 1874, 4. Besides being a common name among women, it was the name of a racing horse, boats, and even a cow. To complicate researching Alice even more, there was another entertainer named Alice Gray. Although the latter was born twenty years later and was mainly a minstrel player, in late nineteenth century news items it isn’t always clear which Alice Gray is meant.
18. Daily Bee (Boston, MA), November 28, 1857, 2
19. States (Washington, D.C.), September 25, 1858, 2. The Louisville Daily Courier, September 27, 1858, 1, reported that the show did go on after Alice burst into tears, “a woman’s irresistible appeal.”
20. New York Clipper, October 2, 1858, 190.
21. Ibid., October 16, 1858, 201.
22. Buffalo Daily Courier, September 21, 1858, 3.
23. Daily Union (Washington, D.C.), December 3, 1858, 3.
24. Evening Star (Washington, D.C.), December 14, 1858, 3.
25. States (Washington, D.C.), December 16, 1858, 12.
26. New York Clipper, November 5, 1859, 23.
27. Anonymous, “Report of the Committee of the City Council of Charleston,” American Journal of Medical Sciences, 38 (October 1859), 509–511.
28. Charleston Mercury, January 28, 1860.
29. Daily Exchange (Baltimore, MD), July 24, 1860, 1.
30. The Sun (Baltimore, MD), August 29, 1860, 2.
31. Baltimore Daily Exchange, October 19, 1860, 3.
32. National Intelligencer (Washington, D.C.), May 4, 1863. 37
33. Ibid.
34. Loux, Booth: Day by Day, 129.
16. IMAGINE MY HELPING THAT WOUNDED SOLDIER
1. Edwin letter to Adam Badeau, March 3, 1863, in Grossmann, Edwin Booth, 142.
2. Bloom, Edwin Booth, 65.
3. Edwin letter to Adam Badeau, June 6, 1863, in Grossmann, Edwin Booth, 149.
4. Badeau to James Harrison Wilson, September 12, 1863, in Charles H. Shattuck, The Hamlet of Edwin Booth (Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 1969), 5.
5. Adam Badeau, “Edwin Booth On and Off the Stage,” McClure’s Magazine, 1 (August 1893), 264.
6. Clarke, Unlocked Book, 84.
7. Edwards and Steers, Evidence, 767.
17. THE MOST BEAUTIFUL WOMAN ON THE AMERICAN STAGE
1. New York Clipper, September 20, 1862, 8.
2. Ibid.; Sacramento Daily Union, September 4, 1860, 1. Brown, History of the American Stage, and his multivolume A History of the New York Stage from the First Performance in 1732 to 1901 (New York: Dodd Mead, 1902) are standard sources for the plays and actors who ever appeared in New York.
3. Detroit Free Press, July 9, 1911, D8.
4. Everett B. Long, Civil War Day by Day (New York: Doubleday, 1971), 707.
5. These “card-portraits,” Oliver Wendell Holmes wrote, “as everybody knows, have become the social currency, the sentimental ‘Green-backs’ of civilization.” Oliver Wendell Holmes, Soundings from the Atlantic (Boston: Ticknor and Fields, 1864), 255.
6. New York Clipper, September 20, 1862, 8. Thomas Lowry, the authority on sex during the war, estimates that about 90 percent of all the sexually-related words and pictures in the published letters and diaries of Civil War soldiers have been deleted. Enough has survived, writes Lowry, who moiled for years through those thousands of letters and diaries, to see that those boys and men were no different from the boys and men that lived before the war or after. Thomas P. Lowry, The Story the Soldier’s Wouldn’t Tell. Sex in the Civil War (Mechanicsburg, PA: Stackpole Books, 1994), 5.
7. New York Clipper, September 10, 1864, 8.
8. Daily Bee (Boston, MA), September 22, 1853, 2.
9. Boston Herald, November 18, 1854, 2.
10. Daily Atlas (Boston, MA), March 14, 1855, 2.
11. Boston Herald, March 15, 1855, 4.
12. New York Herald, September 7, 1856, 7.
13. New York Daily Tribune, December 8, 1856, 1.
14. William L. Slout, Burn Cork and Tambourines: A Sourcebook of Negro Minstrelsy (Rockville, MD: Borgo Press, 2007), 200.
15. Jane Marlin (ed.), Reminiscences of Morris Steinert (New York: G. P. Putnam and Sons, 1900), 105.
16. Saturday Evening Gazette (Boston, MA), January 31, 1867, 8.
17. New York Tribune, February 2, 1857, 8.
18. Saturday Evening Gazette, January 31, 1867, 8.
19. New York Clipper, September 26, 1891, 9; Boston Daily Globe, August 28, 1891, 10.
20. Sacramento Daily Union, September 4, 1860, 1.
21. Daily Crescent (New Orleans, LA), January 28, 1861, 1; February 19, 1861, 1.
22. New York Daily Tribune, October 21, 1861, 7.
23. Rose Eytinge, The Memories of Rose Eytinge: Being Recollections & Observations of Men Women, and Events, during Half a Century (New York: Frederick A. Stokes, 1905), 21.
24. National Republican, November 11, 1862, 1.
25. Daily Post (Pittsburgh, PA), January 19, 1863, 3.
26. Ibid., January 21, 1863, 3.
27. New York Clipper, February 3, 1863, 339.
28. Cincinnati Enquirer, January 18, 1886, 1.
29. New York Clipper, October 17, 1863.
30. Springfield Republican, October 13, 1863, 4.
31. Providence Daily Journal, October 17, 1863.
32. Providence Daily Post, October 19, 1863.
33. Courant (Hartford, CT), October 22, 1863.
34. Loux, Booth: Day by Day, 136.
35. Daily Register (New Haven, CT), October 28, 1863, 259.
36. New York Clipper, November 28, 1863; Loux, Booth: Day by Day, 136.
37. Philadelphia Press, November 9, 1863, 8.
38. Evening Star (Washington, D.C.), November 3, 1863, 1.
18. STORMING ABOUT THE COUNTRY IS SAD WORK
1. Bloom, Edwin Booth, 15. On the rigors of the star system, see Alfred L. Bernheim, The Business Of The Theatre. An Economic History of the American Theatre, 1750-1932 (New York: Benjamin Blom, 1964), 24–30.
2. Bloom, Edwin Booth, 76.
3. New York Tribune, February 13, 1861; New York Clipper, February 23, 1861; Phelps, Players of a Century, 326.
4. Adams, “John Wilkes Booth,” 36.
5. Daily Gazette and Comet (Baton Rouge, LA), October 24, 1860; Cincinnati Enquirer, January 19, 1886, 1.
6. Morris, Life on Stage, 97–98.
7. Boston Herald, January 5, 1890.
8. Winslow, Yesterdays With Actors, 141.
9. Campbell MacCulloch, “This Man Saw Lincoln Shot,” Good Housekeeping (February 1927), 112, quoting Joseph Hazelton, a program boy at Ford’s Theatre who knew Booth.
10. Andrew Cone and Walter R. Johns, Petrolia (New York: Appleton, 1870), 10, quoted by Titone, My Thoughts Be Bloody, 307.
11. San Joaquin Valley Geology, “How the Oil Industry Saved the Whales,” http://www.sjvgeology.org/history/whales.html.
12. Alex Epstein, “Vindicating Standard Oil, 100 Years Later,” The Daily Caller, May 13, 2011, http://dailycaller.com/2011/05/13/vindicating-standard-oil-100-years-later/. Kerosene was created from petroleum in 1857.
13. Weston, Stage Memories, 122–131.
14. Edwards and Steers, Evidence, 1154–1155 (Simmonds testimony).
15. Rhodehamel and Taper, Right or Wrong, 94, n.1.
16. Loux, Booth: Day by Day, 139.
17. Booth letter to Moses Kimball, January 2, 1864, in Rhodehamel and Taper, Right or Wrong, 93.
18. Ibid.
19. Ibid.
20. Morning Herald (St. Joseph, MO), January 4, 1864, 3.
21. Ibid., January 5, 1864, 2.
22. JWB to John Ellsler, January 23, 1864, in Rhodehamel and Taper, Right or Wrong, 96.
23. Morning Herald, January 5, 1864, 3.
24. Ibid., January 6, 1864, 2. January 8, the temperature plummeted even further to twenty-nine degrees below zero in the morning. Morning Herald, January 8,1864, 3.
25. Ibid., January 8, 1864, 3.
26. Ibid.
27. Ibid., January 9, 1864, 3.
28. Charles A. Krone, “Recollections of an old Actor,” Missouri Historical Society Collections, 4 (1913), 343, quoted by Loux, Booth: Day by Day, 140.
29. JWB to John Ellsler, January 23, 1864, in Rhodehamel and Taper, Right or Wrong, 96.
30. Steers and Edwards, Evidence, 5 (Edwin Adams letter to Reakert, April 17, 1865).
31. Mrs. McKee Rankin (Kitty Blanchard), “The News Of Lincoln’s Death,” The American Magazine, 67 (January 1909), 261–263.
32. Louisville Democrat, January 24, 1864, 2.
33. Chicago Daily Tribune, June 8, 1902, 48.
34. Brooklyn Daily Eagle, July 6, 1902, 39.
35. Mark, M. Krug (ed.), Mrs. (Sarah Jane Full) Hill’s Journal—Civil War Reminiscences (Chicago: R. R. Donnelley & Sons, 1980), 225.
36. Charles E. Holding, “John Wilkes Booth Stars in Nashville,” Tennessee Historical Quarterly, 23 (1964), 73–79.
37. Krug, Mrs. Hill’s Journal, 231.
38. Angela Seratore, “The Curious Case of Nashville’s Frail Sisterhood,” Smithsonian, July 8, 2013, http://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/the-curious-case-of-nashvilles-frail-sisterhood-7766757/.
39. Hamilton Gay Howard, Civil War Echoes (Washington: Howard Publishing Co., 1907), 83.
40. Samples, Lust for Fame, 140.
41. Ibid.
42. Cincinnati Daily Commercial, February 18,1864, quoted by Loux, Booth: Day by Day, 156.
43. Ibid., February 19, 1864
44. Ibid., February 20, 1864.
45. JWB letter to Richard Montgomery Field, February 22, 1864, in Rhodehamel and Taper, Right or Wrong, 101.
46. New Orleans Times-Picayune, March 20, 1864, 3.
47. Ibid., March 22, 1864, 5.
48. Ibid., March 25, 1864, reprint in Loux, Booth: Day by Day, 159.
49. New Orleans Times-Picayune, March 26, 1864, 3.
50. JWB letter to Richard Montgomery Field, March 26, 1864, in Rhodehamel and Taper, Right or Wrong, 102.
51. Times-Democrat, March 29, 1864, 4.
52. New Orleans Times-Picayune, April 3, 1864, 3.
53. Times-Democrat, April 4, 1864, 5.
54. Kauffman, American Brutus, 126.
55. E.g., New Orleans Times-Picayune, January 18, 1859, 4.
56. New Orleans Times-Picayune, March 24, 1864.
57. Abel, Singing the New Nation, 52–57.
58. Ibid.
59. John Smith Kendall, The Golden Age of the New Orleans Theatre (Baton Rouge, LA: Louisiana State University Press, 1952), 498.
60. Loux, Booth: Day by Day, 160.
61. F. Lauriston Bullard, “Boston’s Part in Lincoln’s Death,” Boson Herald, April 11, 1915, 19.
19. NOT A SECESH
1. Milwaukee Sentinel, April 27, 1861, 1.
2. Brooklyn Daily Eagle, April 18, 1862, 1.
3. New York Times, May 16, 1886, 4; Sacramento Daily Union, December 23, 1861, 47.
4. Cincinnati Daily Enquirer, December 1, 1861, 3.
5. Ibid., May 3, 1862, 23.
6. New York Clipper, April 12, 1862, 415.
7. Brooklyn (NY) Daily Eagle, November 8, 1885, 14.
8. Ibid., April 18, 1862, 1.
9. Burlingame, Lincoln’s Journalist, 321.
10. De Bow’s Review, 2 (1862), 543–544.
11. Harry Brown and Frederick D. Williams (ed.), The Diary of James A Garfield (Lansing, MI: Michigan State University, 1967), 65, 228.
12. Evening Public Ledger (Philadelphia, PA), March 23, 1918, 11.
13. Daily Evening Transcript, May 16, 1864, 3.
14. F. Lauriston Bullard, “Boston’s Part in Lincoln’s Death,” Boson Herald, April 11, 1915, 19.
15. Daily Critic (Washington, D.C.), September 30, 1881, 1.
16. Ibid.
20. ISABEL SUMNER
1. Townsend, Life Crime and Capture, 24
2. Ibid.
3. Joyce G. Knibb and Patricia A. Mehrtens, The Elusive Booths of Burrillville. An Investigation of John Wilkes Booth’s Alleged Wife and Daughter (Bowie, MD: Heritage Books, 1991), 168.
4. Bryan, Great American Myth, 100.
5. Winslow, Yesterdays with Actors, 142.
6. JWB letter to Isabel Sumner, June 7, 1864, in Rhodehamel and Tapper, Right or Wrong, 110.
7. Ibid.
8. Ibid.
9. Ibid.
10. JWB to Isabel Sumner, June 17, 1864; ibid., 113–114.
11. JWB to Isabel Sumner, July 14, 1864; ibid., 114–115.
12. JWB to Isabel Sumner, July 24, 1864; ibid., 115–116.
13. Tidwell, Hall, and Gaddy, Come Retribution, 263.
14. Ibid.
15. Ibid.
16. A photograph of the ring can be seen at “Under His Hat,” http://www.underhishat.org/pearl_ring.html, accessed 3/30/2015.
17. Clarke later related the incident to actor Charles Wyndham, “Recollections of John Wilkes Booth,” New York Herald, June 27, 1909, Magazine Section, 2.
18. Junius Brutus Booth, Unpublished Diary, August 28, 1864, FSL.
19. Abel, A Finger in Lincoln’s Brain, 36.
20. Asia letter to Jean Anderson, August 15, 1864, MdHS.
21. JWB to Isabel Sumner, August 26, 1864, in Rhodehamel and Tapper, Right or Wrong, 116.
22. Ibid.
23. JWB to Isabel Sumner, August 27, 1864; Ibid., 117.
24. Thomas Turner, “Review,” Journal of the Abraham Lincoln Association, 20 (Summer 1999), 83. Edwin also burned letters and mementos from women that John had kept.
25. Clarke, Unlocked Book, 57.
26. Bryn C. Collins, Emotional Unavailability (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1997), 8–9, chapters 3–5.
21. A GANG OF MISFITS
1. Tidwell et al., Come Retribution, 271.
2. Kauffman, American Brutus, 128.
3. Quoted in Frank Moore (ed.), Record of the Year (New York: G. W. Carleton & Co., 1876), 48.
4. New York Tribune, July 22, 1864, 1.
5. Kauffman, American Brutus, 129. Kauffman notes that Lincoln addressed his letter “To Whom It May Concern” to avoid any recognition of the Confederacy’s existence.
6. Tidwell et al., Come Retribution, 264, 273, maintains John’s “precise information” about Lincoln’s routine is strong indication he was being fed information by the Confederate Secret Service. It’s hardly a convincing argument. Lincoln’s habits and movements were widely known. If John had relied on information from the Confederate Secret Service alone his adventurism would have landed him in prison. The information he had was that Lincoln did not have a military escort when he rode to and from his summer home outside Washington. By September, Lincoln had a formidable cavalry guard on those outings.
7. Henry T. Louthan, “A Proposed Abduction Of Lincoln,” Confederate Veteran, 11 (April 1903), 157. After Confederate defeats at Gettysburg and Vicksburg in July 1863, President Davis and his Secretary of War, James A. Seddon, began receiving offers to assassinate Lincoln. Seddon did his best to discourage all such schemes: “for disposing of those in high office in Washington. . .The Laws of war and morality, as well as Christian principles and sound policy,” he said, “forbid the use of such means of punishing even the atrocities of the enemy.” O. R. Series IV, vol. 2, 703, 730. Davis was equally unreceptive. J. B. Jones, A Rebel War Clerk’s Diary at the Confederate State Capital (Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott, 1866), vol. 2, 24.
8. For a summary of revisionist assessments of Lincoln and his policies, see William L. Richter, Sic Semper Tyrannis: Why John Wilkes Booth Shot Abraham Lincoln (Bloomington, IN: IUniverse, 2009), 6–73.
9. Thomas Nelson Conrad, A Confederate Spy: A Story of the Civil War (New York: J. S. Ogilvie Pub. Co., 1892), 70; Thomas Nelson Conrad, The Rebel Scout, A Thrilling History of Scouting Life in the Southern Army (Washington, D.C.: National Publishing Co., 1904), 119. On Conrad, see Tidwell et al., Come Retribution, 282–283.
10. “To Whom It May Concern” letter, November 1864, in Rhodehamel and Taper, Right or Wrong, 127. On John’s political ideas, see Richter, Sic Semper Tyrannis, 6–73, and “‘My Policy is to Have No Policy’: Abraham Lincoln and the Reconstruction of Our Nation,” Surratt Society Conference, March 31–April 2, 2017. John Surratt categorically said that John’s abduction plan “was concocted without the knowledge or the assistance of the Confederate government in any shape or form. . . .we never acquainted them with the plan, and they never had anything in the wide world to do with it.” In fact, he added, they thought that by carrying it out on their own with no help from the government, they would be seen as even greater heroes in the South. John H. Surratt, “The Rockville Lecture,” December 6, 1870, reprinted in Louis J. Weichmann, A True History Of The Assassination Of Abraham Lincoln And Of The Conspiracy Of 1865 (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1975), 429.
11. Tidwell et al., Come Retribution, 265.
12. John W. Headly, Confederate Operations in Canada and New York (New York: Neale Publishing Co., 1906), 175–185.
13. Edwards and Steers, Evidence, 433 (John A. Deveney testimony); Ibid., 179, n.3, 621–622.
14. Martin drowned shortly afterwards when his ship sank in the St. Lawrence with all of John’s costumes and other theatrical belongings. Among the various items recovered was a four word note, “one smack little kiss,” from a girl signed “N” with a P.S., “Mollie S. was here. Pretty [pray?] also bring with my ring. . . if you cannot come send me word.” New York Times, November 15, 1891, 8.
15. Melinda Jayne Squires, The Controversial Career Of George Nicholas Sanders (MA Thesis, Western Kentucky University, Bowling Green, Kentucky, 2000), 3.
16. New York Times, May 7, 1865, 1. On Nathaniel Beverley Tucker and his duties in Canada, see Ludwell H. Johnson, “Beverley Tucker’s Canadian Mission, 1864-1866,” Journal of Southern History, 29 (February 1963), 88–99. Confederate agent Robert Edwin Coxe likewise said that not only had he never met with John Wilkes Booth in Montreal, he also never heard of him until he read about him in the papers and didn’t know anyone else who had. Edwards and Steers, Evidence, 398–399 (Coxe testimony). Although he would have undoubtedly lied had he been on trial in the United States, Beverly was in Canada and not facing deportation.
17. Junius Diary, November 28, 29, 30, 1864, FSL.
18. King Holmes, Per Anders Mardh, and P. Frederick Sparling (eds.), Sexually Transmitted Diseases (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1999), 501.
19. New York Herald, November 26, 1864.
20. Daily National Republican (Washington, D.C.), April 18, 1865, 2nd edition, 3; New Berne (NC) Times, April 28, 1865, 2.
21. Clarke, Unlocked Book, 119.
22. Ernest Miller, John Wilkes Booth Oilman (New York: Exposition, 1947), 56.
23. Clarke, Unlocked Book, 126.
24. Ibid.
25. Ibid., 126–127.
26. New York Tribune, July 22, 1861, 1.
27. “To Whom It May Concern,” in Rhodehamel and Taper, Right or Wrong, 125.
28. Ibid., 126–127. That declaration, coupled with his statement at the end of that letter that he was “a Confederate, at present doing duty upon his own responsibility,” written almost six months before the assassination is at odds with any argument that John was working on behalf of the Confederate Secret Service or that the kidnapping plan was a ruse to cover up the Confederate Secret Services’ goal of using Booth to assassinate Lincoln. Samuel Arnold was adamant that there never was any connection between John and the Confederate authorities. “I was in Booth’s confidence. . . had anything existed as such he would have made known the fact to me.” Samuel Arnold, Defense and Prison Experience of a Lincoln Conspirator (Hattiesburg, MS: The Book Farm, 1943), 129. Lewis Powell, another conspirator who would later be enlisted in the kidnapping plot, made a “death bed” confession to Reverend Abraham Gillette. Just before he was hanged, Powell told Reverend Gillette that “until morning of the fatal day (of the assassination), no crime more serious than the abduction had been contemplated.” Rev. Dr. Abraham Dunn Gillette, “The Last Days of Payne,” reprinted as Appendix H in Betty J. Ownsbey, Alias “Paine”: Lewis Thornton Powell, the Mystery Man of the Lincoln Conspiracy (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 1993) 201.
29. JWB letter to Mary Ann Holmes Booth, Rhodehamel and Taper, Right or Wrong, 130–131.
30. On Mary Surratt, see Laurie Verge, “Mary Elizabeth Surratt,” in Edward Steers Jr. (ed.), The Trial. The Assassination of Present Lincoln and the Trial of the Conspirators (Lexington, KY: University Press of Kentucky, 2003), LII–LIX.
31. Edwards and Steers, Evidence, 343 (Chester testimony). Chester was conflating events later associated with the assassination.
32. Ibid. At the trial, Chester denied that John had told him the Confederate government was involved.
33. Ibid.
34. Samuel Arnold, “Confession,” April 18, 1865, in Weichmann, A True History Of The Assassination, 381.
35. Edwards and Steers, Evidence, 458, 619, 1294–1295 (Bryan T. Early, George Grillet, and Mary Van Tyle testimonies).
36. Loux, Booth: Day by Day, 200.
37. Abel, A Finger in Lincoln’s Brain, 34–36.
38. Benn Pitman, The Assassination of President Lincoln And the Trial Of The Conspirators (New York: Moore, Wilstach & Baldwin, 1865), 97 (Samuel McKim testimony).
39. John C. Fazio, Decapitating The Union: Jefferson Davis, Judah Benjamin and the Plot to Assassinate Lincoln (Jefferson, NC: McFarland & Co., 2015), 80.
40. William E. Doster, Lincoln and Episodes of the Civil War (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1915), 265. Powell’s mind, said Doster, “seemed of the lowest order, very little above the brute, And his moral faculties were equally low.” For a different opinion, see Betty J. Ownsbey, Alias “Paine”: Lewis Thornton Powell, the Mystery Man of the Lincoln Conspiracy (Jefferson, NC: McFarland & Co., 1993).
41. Ibid., 5, 106.
42. John De Ferrari, Historic Restaurants of Washington, D.C.: Capital Eats (Charleston, SC: American Palate, 2013), 37.
43. Samuel Arnold, “Confession,” 382–383.
44. Ibid., 383.
45. Ibid.
46. Philadelphia Inquirer, March 18, 1865, 1.
47. Pitman, Assassination, 236. By implication, Richmond was not aware of John’s intention to kidnap Lincoln.
48. John Simmonds estimates John lost about $6,000 in his oil adventures. Tidwell et al., Come Retribution, 265.
49. Edwards and Steers, Evidence, 179 (Junius Brutus Booth Jr. statement).
50. John and the “lady” spent the morning walking and then had dinner in the room for the lady, “the excuse being indisposition.” Edwards and Steers, Evidence, 1163 (Detective Alfred Smith statement).
51. Edwards and Steers, Evidence, 345 (Chester testimony). Earlier that month, on February 21, John bought a “brading hair ring” from Tiffiany & Co. for $1.50 (Loux, Booth: Day By Day, 188, has the cost of he ring at $150, but the receipt clearly shows its cost at $1.50 in Barbee, Box 4, Folder 218). There’s no indication of who he bought it for. Possibly he and Lucy exchanged rings. The braided hair ring would not have been so ostentatious that it would have attracted comment when Lucy wore it.
52. Ibid.
53. Ibid.
22. LUCY LAMBERT HALE
1. Clarke, Unlocked Book, 121.
2. John Wilkes Booth letter to Lucy Hale, Valentine’s Day, John Parker Hale Papers, 1926.6, Box 4, NHHS.
3. The Sun (Baltimore, MD), February 26, 1862.
4. Weekly Constitution (Atlanta, GA), December 6, 1881, 1.
5. Richmond Morcom, “They All Loved Lucy,” American Heritage (October 1970), 12–15. Morcom purchased Lucy’s letters from Jerry Trueson and subsequently donated the letters and photos of Lucy to the New Hampshire Historical Society.
6. Morcom, “Lucy,” 12; Alford, Fortune’s Fool, 217–218. Morcom’s papers, now in the New Hampshire Historical Society, do not describe her. A picture supposedly of a young Lucy looks nothing like her.
7. Rare photos of Lucy with her dog and with her husband William Chandler in Leon Burr Richardson, William E Chandler: Republican (New York: Dodd, Mead & Co., 1940) are reproduced and posted by “Sally” in the Lincoln Discussion Symposium chat room (“New Lucy Lambert Hale pic,” July and September 2012, Posts 33 and 162, http://rogerjnorton.com/LincolnDiscussionSymposium/thread-357..html, accessed January 22, 2015) and can also be found at the James O. Hall Library, “Lucy Hale” file, JOH.
8. Ford testimony, Trial of John Surratt, 587t.
9. John Hay letter to Lucy Hale, August 9, 1869, John P. Hale Papers, 1926.6, Box 6, NHHS.
10. William Chandler letter to Lucy Hale, Cambridge, July 20, 1858, William Chandler Papers, Box 3, .006, NHHS. Four years later Chandler married Caroline Gilmore, the daughter of the governor of New Hampshire. Years after Booth’s death, Lucy married Chandler (by then a widower).
11. Holmes letter to Lucy, Cambridge, April 24, 1858, NHHS.
12. Ibid., April 30, 1858.
13. W. P. K. letter to Lucy Hale, Cambridge, December 2, 1860, J. P. Hale Papers, Box 4, 1926.6, NHHS.
14. Holmes letter to Lucy, July 29, 1858, NHHS.
15. Frederick Anderson letter to Lucy Hale, Cambridge, April 28, 1864, John P. Hale Papers, Box 4, 1926.6, NHHS.
16. Cleveland Leader, January 9, 1874, 3.
17. Ibid.
18. Congressman John Bingham told an interviewer that Lucy obtained the invitation although it was only a rumor. Olney Bluff, “The Presidential Assassins,” Chicago Daily Tribune, November 23, 1873, 9. Quite possibly the invitation came by way of John Parker Hale Wentworth, Lucy’s first cousin who was also John’s roommate at the National Hotel at the time. James O. Hall letter to “Mr. Young,” July 26, 1998, JOH. Wentworth was an Indian agent from California in Washington for unspecified political reasons. There is no mention whatsoever in the letters, diaries, or photos of Lucy’s relationship with John in the voluminous Hale files at the New Hampshire Historical Society.
19. Chicago Daily Tribune, December 27, 1874, 2.
20. Gilbert, Stage Reminiscences, 58.
21. Mary Ann Booth letter to JWB, March 12, 1865, copy in Barbee, Box 4, Folder 193.
22. For a photo of the envelope and the poems and comments see Dave Taylor, “John Wilkes Booth’s Poetic Envelope,” https://boothiebarn.com/2015/03/05/john-wilkes-booths-poetic-envelope/, accessed 10/20/2015. For the provenance of the envelop, see James O. Hall, Lucy Hale file, November 15, 1994; December 3, 1994; June 12, 1998, JOH.
23. James O. Hall letter to John Rhodehamel, December 5, 1989, Lucy Hale file, JOH.
24. Dave Taylor, “John Wilkes Booth’s Poetic Envelope,” https://boothiebarn.com/2015/03/05/john-wilkes-booths-poetic-envelope/ accessed 8/15/2015.
25. Chicago Times, April 17, 1865, 2.
26. Dayton Daily Empire, April 21, 1865, 2.
27. Asia letter to Jean Anderson, May 22, 1865, MdHS.
23. ANYTHING THAT PLEASES YOU: ELLA STARR
1. New York Sunday Telegraph, May 23, 1909.
2. Steers and Edwards, Evidence, 1044 (Phillips testimony).
3. Ibid., 1279 (Tracy statement).
4. Thomas T. Eckert, May 30, 1867, quoting Lewis Powell, U.S. Congress. House of Representatives. Judiciary Committee. Impeachment Investigation. 39th Cong., 2d sess.; 40th Cong., 1st sess., H. Rep. No. 7, (Washington, D.C. Government Printing Office, 1867), 674.
5. E. A. Emerson, “How John Wilkes Booth’s Friend Described His Crime,” Literary Digest, 8 (March 6, 1926), 58.
6. Ibid.
7. Edwards and Steers, Evidence, 687 (Hess statement). Lincoln’s son, Tad, was friends with Leonard Grover’s son, Bobby, and often watched rehearsals at the theatre; Tad sometimes appeared as an extra in plays. Roger Norton, “What If the Lincolns Had Attended The Play At Grover’s Theatre?” Surratt Courier, 36 (March 2011), 3–4.
8. Leonard Grover, “Lincoln’s Interest in the Theater,” Century Magazine, 77 (April 1909), 943–949.
9. Ibid.
10. JWB to Mary Ann Holmes Booth, April 14, 1865, in Rhodehamel and Taper, Right or Wrong, 144.
11. New York Tribune, April 17, 1865, 1; Daily National Intelligencer (Washington, D.C.), April 29, 1865.
12. Doster, Lincoln and Episodes of the War, 276.
13. Cincinnati Enquirer, July 6, 1878, 9.
14. New York Herald, April 26, 1864, 4.
15. J. D. Dickey, Empire Of Mud. The Secret History of Washington, D.C. (Guilford, CT: Lyons Press, 2014).
16. Margaret Leech, Reveille in Washington, 1860-1865 (Alexandria, VA: Time-Life Books, 1980), 323.
17. Evening Star (Washington, D.C.), April 17, 1865, 3.
18. A hand-drawn map of the area can be seen at https://thelocation.wordpress.com/2012/03/20/hookers-division/. The brothels were closed in 1914 after Congress outlawed prostitution in the District of Columbia. Donna J. Seifert, “Mrs. Starr’s Profession,” in Charles F. Orser (ed.), Images of the Recent Past: Readings in Historical Archeology (Lanham, MD: AltaMira Press, 1996), 191.
19. The Oxford English Dictionary (art. “hooker”) cites the earliest known appearance in writing in 1845.
20. Leech, Reveille in Washington, 328.
21. Thomas Lowry, Stories The Soldiers Wouldn’t Tell, 73–74.
22. New York Sunday Telegraph, May 23, 1909, quoted by Francis Wilson, John Wilkes Booth, 82.
23. New York Times, October 5, 1921, 7. When he gave that interview, Deery was destitute and living in an almshouse. In her “confession,” Ella said she had known John for three years before coming to Washington and that he had brought her from Baltimore to her mother’s bawdy house in Washington
24. Edwards and Steers, Evidence, 1192 (Ella Starr note).
25. Ibid.
26. Ibid., 471, Etta letter to J. Wilkes Booth, April 18, 1865.
27. Ibid., 769, John A. Kennedy letter to Col. John A Foster, April 21, 1865.
24. ASSASSINATION
1. Kathryn Canavan, Lincoln’s Final Hours. Conspiracy, Terror, and the Assassination of America’s Greatest President (Lexington, KY: University Press of Kentucky, 2015), 11.
2. Edwards and Steers, Evidence, 687 (Hess statement).
3. Daily National Intelligencer, April 29, 1865, 2. George Townsend, Life, Crime, and Capture, 27, said John breakfasted with “Miss Carrie Bean, the daughter of a merchant, and a very respectable young lady.”
4. Joseph Hazelton in Campbell MacCulloch, “This Man Saw Lincoln Shot,” Good Housekeeping, 84 (February 1927), 112.
5. Trial of John H Surratt, I: 495–496 (Charles Wood testimony).
6. M. Helen Palmes Moss, “Lincoln and Wilkes Booth as seen on the day of the Assassination,” Century Magazine, 77 (April 1909), 951.
7. George Wren, “A shot that wasn’t fired,” Boston Weekly Globe, April 13, 1880, 6.
8. New York Tribune, April 17, 1865, 1.
9. Boston Herald, December 5, 1881, 2.
10. Edwards and Steers, Evidence, 516–517 (Harry Ford statement).
11. Boston Herald, December 5, 1881, 2.
12. Weichmann, True History, 131.
13. Edwards and Steers, Evidence, 833 (Maddox statement). John F. Sleickman, Maddox’s assistant, testified that when he went to the saloon between four and five, John was drinking with Maddox, Ned Spangler, a man named Mouldy, and a “boy” from the theatre. Pitman, Assassination, 73. The “boy” has variously been identified as “Peanut John” or W. J. Ferguson.
14. W. J. Ferguson, I Saw Booth Shoot Lincoln (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, Co., 1930), 46. Pleurisy, a painful inflammation and swelling of the linings surrounding the lungs and chest, is another well-known symptom of syphilis. Diana Coleman, Stephen McPhee, Thomas Ross, and James Naughton, “Secondary syphilis with pulmonary involvement,” Western Journal of Medicine, 138 (1983), 875–878.
15. The Ford Theatre’s presidential box is now about twelve feet above the stage, but the original architectural plans were not available when the theatre was reconstructed. Ford actor Harry Hawk said it was nine feet. Hawk also recalled that just after the shooting, two men bent down to create a platform of their backs so that a doctor (Dr. Charles Taft) at the stage-level seats could climb into the presidential box. “The Killing of Lincoln. The Graphic Story,” undated clipping, Black file, K-OAK.
16. Pitman, Assassination, 396.
17. Loux, Booth: Day by Day, 187; John Surratt letter to Bell Seaman, February 6, 1865, quoted in La Fayette Charles Baker, The Secret Service In The Late War (Philadelphia, PA: John E. Potter and Co., 1874), 390.
18. Pitman, Assassination, 124 (Lt. John W. Dempsey testimony).
19. John Y. Simon (ed.), The Personal Memoirs of Julia Dent Grant (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1975), 155.
20. Ferguson, I Saw Booth, 54.
21. Daily National Intelligencer (Washington, D.C.), July 18, 1867, 2. The conversation occurred around 4:00 p.m. The Grants’ train left Washington at 4:30 p.m. Bryan, Great American Myth, 161.
22. Mary Lincoln letter to Francis Bicknell Carpenter, November 15, 1865, reprinted in Harold Holzer and Sara Vaughn Gabbard (eds.), 1865: American Makes War Harold and Peace in Lincoln’s Final Year (Carbondale, IL: Southern University Press, 2015), 187.
23. Quoted in Isaac N. Arnold, The Life of Abraham Lincoln (Chicago: A. C. McClurg & Co., 1909), 430.
24. Daily Milwaukee News, April 25, 1865, 2. Daily National Intelligencer, April 17, 1865, 1; Boston Evening Transcript, April 17, 1865, 4.
25. Trial of John Surratt, 1, 329 (George Bunker testimony).
26. W. Emerson Reck, A. Lincoln. His Last 24 Hours (Jefferson, NC: McFarland & Co., 1987), 79.
27. Doster, Lincoln and Episodes of the Civil War, 269, 274, 305.
28. Abel, Finger in Lincoln’s Brain, 59–61. For a different perspective, see Frederick Hatch, Protecting President Lincoln: The Security Effort, the Thwarted Plots and the Disaster At Ford’s Theatre (Jefferson, NC: McFarland & Co., 2011), 109–117.
29. Frederick W. Seward, Reminiscences of A War-Time Statesman and Diplomat, 1830-1915 (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1916), 258–260; T. S. Verdi, “The Assassination Of the Sewards,” Republic: A Monthly Magazine, Devoted to the Dissemination of Political Information, 1 (July 1873), 291.
30. George Atzerodt, “Lost Confession,” in Edward Steers Jr., The Assassination Of President Lincoln and the Trial of the Conspirators (Lexington, KY: University Press of Kentucky, 2003), cvi. Townsend, Life, Crime and Capture, 76.
31. Jerrod Madonna, A Threat to the Republic. The Secret of the Lincoln Assassination that Preserved the Union (Privately published, 2006), 235. If Johnson did in fact issue him a pass, John never used it when he made his escape, and no such pass was found on his body when he died.
32. Ibid, 239.
33. Ibid.
34. Hamilton, Civil War Echoes, 84. On duty in the corridors and anterooms of the White House, Johnson’s body guard said the goatish Johnson privately entertained many women at the White House when he became president. William H. Crook, Through Five Administrations: Reminiscences of Colonel William H. Crook (New York: Harper Bros., 1910), 92. Lincoln, on the other hand, was never suspected of any improper moments in the White House because of Mary’s watchful eye. “I never allow the President to see any woman alone,” she angrily told Grant’s military secretary, Adam Badeau. Badeau was amazed that “Mary was absolutely jealous of poor ugly Abraham Lincoln.” Badeau, Grant in Peace, 357.
35. Edwards and Steers, Evidence, 1192 (Ella Starr note).
36. Pitman, Assassination, 151–152 (Farwell testimony).
37. Buckingham, Reminiscences, 13.
38. Edwards and Steers, Evidence, 485–486 (Ferguson testimony).
39. On the different medical opinions of the bullet’s path, see Abel, Finger in Lincoln’s Brain, 92–96.
40. Edwards and Steers, Evidence, 485–486 (Ferguson testimony).
41. Henry Hawk letter to father, April 16, 1865, in Reck, Abraham Lincoln, 109.
42. Si Snider, “Eyewitness of Lincoln’s assassination Live Here,” Los Angeles Times, February 11, 1923, III: 9–10.
43. William Ferguson, “Actor Describes Slaying of Lincoln,” The Sun (Baltimore, MD), February 12, 1926, 22; “I Saw Lincoln Shot,” Saturday Evening Post, February 12, 1927, 42.
44. Richard Sloan, “John Wilkes Booth’s Other Victim,” American Heritage, 42 (February–March 1991), 114–116. For more on Withers, see Norman Gasbarro, “William Withers Jr.—Lincoln Assassination Witness,” http://civilwar.gratzpa.org/2012/05/william-withers-jr-lincoln-assassination-witness/, accessed September 20, 2015; Los Angeles Times, February 16, 1916.
45. Elizabeth C. Mooney, “There’s no escaping history on John Wilkes,” Chicago Tribune, Mary 11, 1984, K20.
46. Joan L. Chaconas, “John H. Surratt Jr.,” in Edward Steers Jr., The Trial. The Assassination of President Lincoln and the Trial of the Conspirators (Lexington, KY: University Press of Kentucky, 2003), LXI–LXII.
25. I HAVE TOO GREAT A SOUL TO DIE LIKE A CRIMINAL
1. Edwards and Steers, Evidence, 823; Surratt, Trial of John H. Surratt, vol. 2, 1236
2. Edwards and Steers, Evidence, 806–807 (Lloyd testimony). Lloyd may have perjured himself to avoid being tried as one of the conspirators. John A. Marshall, American Bastille: A History Of The Arbitrary Arrests and Imprisonment of American Citizens In the Northern And Border States, On Account Of Their Political Opinions, During the Last Civil War, Together With a Full Report Of the Illegal Trial and Execution Of Mrs. Mary E. Surratt, By a Military Commission, And A Review Of the Testimony, Showing Her Entire Innocence (Philadelphia: Thomas W. Harley & Co., 1884), 834.
3. Edwards and Steers, Evidence, 939–941 (Mudd statement).
4. Ibid., 822–823 (Lovett testimony).
5. Alford, Fortune’s Fool, 279.
6. Thomas A. Jones, John Wilkes Booth (Chicago: Laird and Lee, 1893), 70–71.
7. JWB Diary, April 13, 1865, in Rhodehamel and Taper, Right or Wrong, 154. For the influence of Shakespeare’s Brutus on Booth, see Furtwangler, Assassin on Stage, 13–30, 95–116.
8. Edwards and Steers, Evidence, 745–747 (Jett testimony).
9. Ibid.
10. The U.S. Government had offered $100,000 and three states had each offered $25,000.
11. Ruggles statement in Prentice Ingraham, “Pursuit and Death of John Wilkes Booth,” The Century, 39 (January 1890), 18–19; Turner Rose, “Rappahannock Ferry,” Washington Post, May 13, 1918, 138.
12. Jett later testified at the Conspiracy trial and was never charged as a conspirator. Many years later he became insane from untreated syphilis and died in an insane asylum in Virginia in 1884. “Booth’s Capture. The Man Who Pointed Out the Refuge of the Assassin Declared Insane,” Chicago Tribune, September 7, 1882; Eric J. Mink, “Brutus’ Judas: Willie Jett,” https://npsfrsp.wordpress.com/2011/04/25/brutus%e2%80%99-judas-willie-jett-%e2%80%93-part-3/.
13. New York Times, July 30, 1896.
14. JWB Diary, April 21, 1865, in Rhodehamel and Taper, Right or Wrong, 155. George Atzerodt, David Herold, Lewis Powell, and Mary Surratt were all hanged. Sam Arnold, Michael O’Laughlen, Dr. Mudd, and Ned Spangler were all sentenced to prison at hard labor.
15. Aldrich, Crowding Memories, 72.
16. Pitman, Assassination, 93 (Conger testimony).
17. Richter and Smith, Last Shot, 132.
18. For arguments for and against Booth shooting himself, see Richter and Smith, Last Shot, 122–133.
19. Pitman, Assassination, 94–95 (Corbett testimony). For a full length biography about Corbett, see Scott Martel, The Madman and the Assassin. The strange life of Boston Corbett, the man who killed John Wilkes Booth (Chicago: Chicago Review Press, 2015). A shorter more succinct examination is Ernest B. Furgurson’s, “The Man who shot the man who shot Lincoln,” The American Scholar, 78 (Spring 2009), 42–51.
20. See Steers, Lincoln Legends, 17–202; William Hanchett, “Booth’s Diary,” Journal of the Illinois State Historical Society, 72 (February 1979), 39–56.
21. Edwards and Steers, Evidence, 1204 (Conger statement).
22. Ibid.
26. ELLA STARR
1. Ella’s mother had left the business in charge of Eliza Thomas and retired in Baltimore. Donna J. Seifert, “Mrs. Starr’s Profession,” in Charles E. Orser (ed.), Images of the Recent Past: Readings in Historical Archaeology (Lanham, MD: AltaMira Press, 1966), 190–207. Molly apparently left for New York around the same time. Still in love with John, although he was now much less attentive than before, Ella had stayed on.
2. Evening Star (Washington, D.C.), April 15, 1865, 2.
3. Ibid.; Cincinnati Daily Enquirer, April 18, 1865, 3; New York Times, April 17, 1865.
4. Edwards and Steers, Evidence, 1194 (Nellie/Ellen Starr statement).
5. Ibid., 1192 (Ella note to JWB).
6. Boston Daily Advertiser, May 30, 1865; New York Herald, May 31, 1865.
7. Doster, Episodes of the War, 276.
8. Seifert, “Mrs. Starr’s Profession,” 207. Ella may have been duped by John, but she was a shrewd business woman. She bought a parcel of land on May 16, 1865, for $2,281 that she sold three years later for $5,000 (Starr file, JOH).
9. Washington Post, July 15, 1883, 8.
10. Inter-Ocean, July 17, 1883, 5. An entirely different description of Molly as the madam “of several fashionable houses” appeared in the Boston Daily Globe, July 15, 1883, 1. The Boston paper also mentioned Molly’s sister, “Nellie Starr. the mistress of John Wilkes Booth,” but said she was deceased.
11. Harry Hawk, “Lincoln Assassination” Illinois State Register (Springfield, IL), April 16, 1901, 3.
12. Richmond Dispatch, October 5, 1902, 16.
27. ASIA AND MARY ANN
1. Colonel Alexander K. McClure, Recollections of Half a Century (Salem, MA: Salem Press Co., 1902), 247.
2. Bloom, Edwin Booth, 81.
3. Ibid.
4. Edwin to Adam Badeau, April 16, 1865, “Edwin Booth And Lincoln,” The Century Illustrated Monthly Magazine, 77 (November 1908–April 1909), 919–920.
5. Junius Brutus Booth Jr., Diary, April 15, 1865, FSL.
6. Rhodehamel and Taper, Right or Wrong, 124–127.
7. The letter was purposely never entered into evidence in the Conspiracy trial. Secretary of War Stanton was trying to prove that John was an agent of the Confederate government and the letter would have cast doubt on his case.
8. Kauffman, American Brutus, 284–285. The original letters disappeared and were lost for 130 years until discovered at the National Archives among Attorney General James Speed’s letters. Edwards and Steers, Evidence, 356, n.2.
9. Clarke, Unlocked Book, 131.
10. Ibid., 132–133.
11. Ibid., 131.
12. Ibid., 130.
13. Edwards and Steers, Evidence, 116 (Mary Ann to John, March 28, 1865).
14. Aldrich, Memories, 72.
15. Ibid.
16. Ibid.
17. Clarke, Unlocked Book, 130.
18. Asia letter to Jean Anderson, May 22, 1865, MdHS.
19. Effie Germon letter to Mrs. Clarke, May 3, 1865, in Clarke, Unlocked Book, 132.
20. Edwin letter to Emma Cary, May 6, 1865, July 31, 1865, in Grossmann, Edwin Booth, 172–173.
21. Asia letter to Jean Anderson, January 15, 1866, MdHS.
22. Bloom, Edwin Booth, 85.
23. Ibid., 84 (Asia letter to Edwin, June 3, 1879, 2).
24. Clarke, Unlocked Book, 110–111.
25. New York Clipper, October 14, 1865, 214.
26. Andrew Davis, America’s Longest Run: A History of the Walnut Street Theatre (University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2010), 132–134.
27. Asia Letter to Jean Anderson, April 18, 1866, MdHS.
28. Ibid., n.d., 1868.
29. Ibid., March 12, 1868.
30. Edwin Booth letter to General Ulysses S. Grant, September 11, 1867, in John Y. Simon (ed.), The Papers of Ulysses S. Grant (Carbondale and Edwardsville: Southern Illinois University Press, 1991), vol. 17, 315–316.
31. New York Times, September 19, 1867, 5.
32. Brooklyn Daily Eagle, January 14, 1877, 4.
33. Ibid., March 18, 1901, 5.
34. Bloom, Edwin Booth, 87.
35. Poughkeepsie (NY) Eagle-News, February 8, 1900, 31.
36. Ibid.
37. Mrs. Elijah Rogers letter to Forwood, August 16, 1886; LOC. The letter was discovered by Stanley Kimmel in 1943, three years after his The Mad Booths of Maryland was published. The letter was reprinted in the Appendix to Kimmel’s 1969, second edition on page 396.
38. New York Times, January 7, 1903, 6. Other accounts have Ford or Joseph Booth mentioning the gold tooth. Hartford Currant, June 6, 1903, 15; Detroit Free Press, March 2, 1911, 5.
39. The Sun (Baltimore, MD), January 4, 1903, 12.
40. Ibid.
41. Cincinnati Courier Journal, July 1, 1882.
42. Mrs. Elijah Rogers letter to Forwood, August 16, 1886; LOC.
43. Public Ledger (Memphis, TN), July 12, 1869, 1.
44. Coldwater (MI) Sentinel, February 26, 1869, 2.
45. The body of eleven-year-old Henry Byron, Mary Ann’s son who’d died in 1836, was buried in England when Junius had taken the family with him during a European tour in 1836–1837. The burial of the three children on top of John’s coffin was one of the reasons Green Mount Cemetery thwarted conspiracy theorists from exhuming John’s body in the 1990s to prove it wasn’t John Wilkes Booth because doing so would disturb the remains of the three children as well. “So even though Frederick, Mary Ann and Elizabeth never knew their brother John Wilkes,” writes blogger David Taylor, “even in death they managed to protect their little brother.” https://boothiebarn.com/2014/08/01/the-booth-children-and-mary-anns-acting-career/, accessed 12/5/2014.
46. New York Times, July 14, 1896.
47. Mrs. Elijah Rogers letter to Forwood, August 16, 1886; LOC.
48. Asia letter to Jean Anderson, January 28, 1869, MdHS.
49. Ibid., December 6, 1874, MdHS.
50. Asia letter to Edwin, June 3, 1879, 3. Clarke left $20,000 in his will to a Marie Hudsperth of Kingston, England. The Sun (Baltimore, MD), November 1, 1899, 9.
51. Asia letter to Edwin, June 3, 1879, H-BTL.
52. Ibid.
53. The Era Almanack, 1883, 73.
54. Ruggles, Prince of Players, 338.
55. Asia letter to Dollie Clarke Morgan, April 28, 1888, Clarke, Unlocked Book, 204.
56. Asia hadn’t titled it. She’d only had the initials “J. W. B.” tooled in gold in Old English letters on the cover.
57. Farjeon foreword, Unlocked Book, 13.
58. New York Tribune, September 18, 1928, H12.
59. Saturday Review of Literature, October 15, 1938.
60. The Scotsman, April 4, 1938, 15.
61. Terry Alford, John Wilkes Booth: A Sister’s Memoir (Jackson, MS: University Press of Mississippi, 1996).
62. Lyde C. Sizer, “Review,” North Carolina Historical Review, 74 (July 1997), 349–350.
63. Patria Ann Owens, “Review,” Illinois Historical Journal, 90 (Winter 1997), 286.
64. New York Times, October 23, 1885, 5.
65. Bloom, Edwin Booth, 138.
66. Asia letter to Jean Anderson, n.d., 1852, MdHS.
67. Ibid., May 18, 1856.
68. Mary Ann Booth letter to Edwina, 5.
69. Edwin letter to Emma Cary, November 24, 1865, Grossmann, Edwin Booth, 74.
70. Edwin letter to Julia Ward Howe, September 24, 1865, quoted in Titone, My Thoughts Be Bloody, 93.
71. Trenton Evening Times, May 17, 1863, 2.
72. New York Times, October 23, 1885, 5.
73. Ibid., October 23, 1885, 3.
74. Edwin letter to Lawrence Barrett, Bloom, Edwin Booth, 138.
28. “IT CANNOT BE DENIED”: LUCY HALE
1. Cincinnati Daily Enquirer, April 19, 1865, 2; Dayton Daily Empire, April 21, 1865, 2.
2. Statement quoted in the Evening Argus (Rock Island, IL), April 27, 1865, 2.
3. Springfield Republican, April 21, 1865, 2.
4. Cincinnati Daily Enquirer, April 21, 1865, 3; New York Tribune, April 26, 1865, 4.
5. Statement quoted in the Evening Argus (Rock Island, IL), April 27, 1865, 2.
6. Washington Post, September 30, 1881, 3.
7. Springfield Republican, April 22, 1865, quoted by John Watson, “Who Leaked Lucy’s Name,” Lincoln Assassination Forum, January 18, 2013. http://lincoln-assassination.com/bboard/index.php?topic=2267.0;wap2.
8. Dayton (OH) Daily Empire, May 10, 1865, 2.
9. Boston Traveller, May 13, 1865, 4. Even as late as 1929, Francis Wilson in John Wilkes Booth: Fact and Fiction of Lincoln’s Assassination (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1929), 186, referred to Lucy only as “a Washington Society woman.”
10. Alford, Fortune’s Fool, 398; Edwards and Steers, Evidence, 345–346 (Samuel K. Chester statement).
11. Benjamin Perley Poore, Perley’s Reminiscences of Sixty Years In the National Metropolis (Philadelphia: Hubbard Brothers, 1886), vol. 2, 183–184.
12. Hans L. Trefousse, Andrew Johnson: A Biography (New York: W. W. Norton & Co., 1997), 37; William C. Harris, With Charity for All: Lincoln and the Restoration of the Union (Lexington, KY: University Press of Kentucky, 1999), 23.
13. Clarke, Unlocked Book, 130.
14. Asia Booth Clarke letter to Jean Anderson, May 22, 1865, MdHS.
15. I was unable to find any mention of John Wilkes Booth in the Hale family papers or the Chandler (Lucy’s husband) papers at the New Hampshire Historical Society other than a newspaper item with John’s initials, JWB, in the corner that Lucy kept. Historians have likewise not found any mention of Booth in Chandler’s papers in the Library of Congress or the Dartmouth College Library. Alford, Fortune’s Fool, 398.
16. Lucy’s biographer, Richmond Morcom, commented that Lucy had lots of admirers, “but her heart belonged to daddy.” Morcom letter to James O. Hall, Lucy Hale file, JOH.
17. Washington Evening Star, December 13, 1873, 3. A few weeks after the Washington Evening Star’s report, the item about Lucy’s photo was picked up by other newspapers. The Daily Argus (Rock Island, IL), December 30, 1873, 4, headlined its piece, “Wilkes Booth’s Love.” The actual photo was not released until 1929.
18. Chicago Daily Tribune, December 27, 1874, 5.
19. Chicago Daily Inter-Ocean, June 1878, 4–5.
20. Brooklyn Daily Eagle, June 23, 1878, 2.
21. Chicago Daily Inter-Ocean, June 1878, 4–5.
22. Rockford (IL) Daily Register, June 19, 1878, 2.
23. Chicago Daily Tribune, June 21, 1878, 4.
24. New York Herald, June 21, 1878, 8.
25. “Lincoln’s Assassination,” Philadelphia Inquirer, June 25, 1878, 1.
26. New York Tribune, June 26, 1878, 4. The little that is known about Hunter’s personal life can be found in Terry Alford, “Alexander Hunter and the Bessie Hale Story,” Alexandria History, 8 (1990), 5–15.
27. New York Tribune, June 26, 1878, 4; Chicago Daily Inter-Ocean, June 29, 1878, 4.
28. E.g., David S. Reynolds, Walt Whitman’s America. A Cultural Biography (New York: Vintage Books, 1996), 441; Bernie (Julia Burnelle Smade) Babcock’s Booth and the Spirit of Lincoln (Philadelphia, PA: J. B. Lippincott, 1925) expanded Hunter’s article into a full length love story.
29. Boston Herald, October 16, 1915, 14.
30. Alford, Fortune’s Fool, 398.
31. Leon B. Richardson letter to Mrs. Cunningham, October 6, 1944, Barbee, Box 4.
29. EFFIE GERMON
1. Washington Evening Star, April 14, 1865, 1.
2. Chicago Tribune, April 9, 1880, 2.
3. Clarke, Unlocked Book, 132.
4. Ibid.
5. E. Mack, The Effie Germon Waltz (Philadelphia, PA: Lee & Walker, 1871); S. Hassler, Effie Germon Galap (Philadelphia, PA: Lee & Wallker, n.d.).
6. “Strange facts about the Lincoln assassination,” http://texags.com/forums/49/topics/1398801, accessed 9/18/2015.
7. Evening Telegraph (Philadelphia, PA), February 22, 1866, 3.
8. The Spirit of the Times, July 13, 1868.
9. Sacramento Daily Union, April 20, 1869, 1.
10. The Labor World, April 16, 1904, 5.
11. New York Times, September 8, 1870.
12. New Era (Valley Falls, KS), November 2, 1878, 4.
13. Sacramento Daily Record-Union, May 31, 1882, 2.
14. Washington Capital, September 23, 1877, 4.
15. The “Banting diet’s” originator was William Banting, a carpenter and undertaker to Britain’s rich and famous. Three of his most illustrious internments were King George III and IV and the Duke of Wellington. In the years between burials, he’d put on a lot of bulk and sought medical help for weight loss from Dr. William Harvey, one of England’s prominent doctors. Harvey told him to give up bread, butter, milk, beer, potatoes, and every other starchy food. After losing fifty pounds in six months, Banting wrote a book about his weight loss. His 1863 Letter on Corpulence, with recipes for weight loss, became one of the first blockbuster diet books. Barry Groves, “William Banting Father of the Low-Carbohydrate Diet,” http://www.westonaprice.org/know-yourfats/william-banting-father-of-the-low-carbohydrate-diet/, accessed April 24, 2016.
16. “Tea Table Gossip,” undated 1884 clipping, Troy (NY) Daily Times. Fanny Davenport’s fifty pound weight loss on the Banting diet almost killed her. New York World, reprinted in the Saint Paul (MN) Globe, March 27, 1884, 4.
17. The Sporting Life, May 16, 1888, 11.
18. Sacramento Daily Record-Union, May 31, 1882, 2.
19. Times (Reading, PA), October 30, 1884, 3; Franklin Graham, Histrionic Montreal, 126.
20. King, “What becomes of Old Actors,” 248.
21. Philadelphia Inquirer, March 8, 1914, 9; The Sun (Baltimore, MD), March 9, 1914, 7.
30. ALICE GRAY
1. Daily National Intelligencer (Washington, D.C.), May 3, 1864, 1.
2. Ibid., April 7, 1865, 1.
3. New York Clipper, July 22, 1865, 118.
4. Ibid., September 16, 1865, 182.
5. Ibid., April 3, 1866, 3.
6. New Orleans Daily Crescent, April 23, 1866, 5.
7. New York Clipper, July 7, 1866.
8. Ibid., July 28, 1866.
9. New York Herald, August 26, 1866, 4.
10. Ibid., September 25, 1866, 7.
11. Cincinnati Daily Gazette, April 13, 1867, 2.
12. New Orleans Times-Picayune, November 14, 1868, 4.
13. Ibid., March 26, 1870, 1; April 29, 1869, 9.
14. Register (Mobile, AL), January 5, 1870, 289.
15. Ibid., January 11, 1870, 3.
16. New Orleans Times-Picayune, February 22, 1870, 1; March 8, 1870, 1.
17. Felicia Hardison Londre, The Enchanted Years of the Stage. Kansas City at the Crossroads of American Theatre, 1870-1930 (Columbia, MI: University of Missouri Press, 2007), 40.
18. Graham, Histrionic Montreal, 123.
19. New York Times, October 26, 1890, 3.
20. Commercial Tribune (Cincinnati, OH), October 26, 1890, 2.
31. HELEN WESTERN
1. New York Clipper, August 31, 1861, 159.
2. The Baltimore Daily Exchange, August 21, 1861, 2.
3. New York Clipper, October 5, 1861; November 16, 1861, 247.
4. New York Clipper, November 30, 1861, 263; The United States Biographical Dictionary, 723.
5. Cleveland Plain Dealer, November 30, 1861, 2; Baltimore Daily Dispatch, December 9, 1861, 1.
6. New York Clipper, January 13, 1877, 334.
7. Quoted in New York Clipper, May 9, 1863, 30; July 4, 1863, 94; July 11, 1863, 102.
8. The Theatre: An Illustrated Weekly Magazine of Drama, Music, Art, 1 (1886), 321.
9. The Sun (Baltimore, MD), November 30, 1863; New York Clipper, December 12, 1863, 275; Toronto Globe, December 31, 1863, 2.
10. Brooklyn Daily Eagle, November 20, 1914, 6; Life Magazine, November 19, 1951.
11. New York Times, July 12, 1864, 4.
12. New York Evening Post, July 12, 1864, 3; July 25, 1864.
13. New York Clipper, July 30, 1864, 126.
14. New York Tribune, August 4, 1864, 3; New York Times, August 5, 1864, 1.
15. Philadelphia Inquirer, March 1, 1865, 4.
16. Edwards and Herne, Herne, 9. Julie Herne never elaborated on what she meant by “withdraw” other than saying Herne’s Catholic upbringing made him break off his relationship with Lucille. Had that been the case, Herne’s Catholic upbringing would never have let him start up with Lucille, a married woman.
17. The New York Mirror, 1879, 7.
18. Mayflower, “Letter from Boston,” Sacramento Daily Union, May 20, 1865, 1; June 2, 1865, 1.
19. Quoted in John Perry, James A. Herne: the American Ibsen (Chicago: Nelson-Hall, 1978), 15.
20. Mayflower, “Letter from Boston,” Sacramento Daily Union, October 10, 1865, 3; “Letter from Boston,” December 4, 1865, 1.
21. San Francisco Chronicle, July 7, 1866, 1, quoting the New York Sunday Mercury.
22. New York Clipper, December 1, 1866, 270.
23. Philadelphia Evening Telegraph, February 15, 1867, 8.
24. New York Clipper, March 16, 1867, 90; Memphis Public Ledger, March 21, 1867, 3.
25. Daily Alta California, April 29, 1867; New York Clipper, June 1, 1867, 62.
26. Marysville (CA) Daily Appeal, May 2, 1867.
27. Daily Alta California, April 29, 1867, 1.
28. Ibid., August 11, 1867, 1; February 15, 1885, 8.
29. Ibid.
30. New York Clipper, June 8, 1867, 70.
31. Sacramento Daily Union, June 3, 1867, 1.
32. Springfield Republican, June 8, 1867, 4.
33. San Francisco Chronicle, July 20, 1867, 1.
34. New York Clipper, October 5, 1867, 206; November 30, 1867, 271.
35. Ibid., May 16, 1868, 42.
36. Ibid., August 8, 1868, 142.
37. The Sun (New York City, NY), December 12, 1868, 1; New York Clipper, December 5, 1868, 278.
38. Chicago Tribune, December 25, 1868, 1.
39. New York Clipper, December 19, 1868, 294.
40. Ibid., December 5, 1868, 279.
41. New Orleans Times-Picayune, December 17, 1868.
42. Chicago Tribune, December 25, 1868, 1.
43. Evening Telegraph (Philadelphia, PA), December 11, 1868; Chicago Tribune, January 11, 1869, 1.
44. New York Clipper, December 19, 1868, 294.
45. Chicago Tribune, December 25, 1868, 1.
46. Ibid.
47. The Sun (New York City, NY), December 12, 1868, 1.
48. Chicago Tribune, December 25, 1868, 1.
49. The Sun (New York City, NY), December 12, 1868, 1.
50. Daily Alta California, December 30, 1868, 1.
51. Chicago Tribune, December 25, 1868, 1.
52. Detroit Free Press, December 16, 1868, 1.
53. “Lucille Western’s Dream,” undated clipping, New York Mirror, 8.
54. Sacramento Daily Union, May 5, 1869, 1; Corrine Utah Daily Reporter, April 20, 1869, 1.
55. Beasley, McKee Rankin, 74.
56. Eytinge, Memories, 307–308.
57. Chicago Daily Tribune, January 12, 1877, 5.
58. A year after Lucille died, Herne married Irish born actress Katherine Corcoran and stopped drinking, something the Detroit Free Press, November 15, 1882, 2, regarded as especially newsworthy. “James A. Hearne, the former husband of Lucille and Helen Western,” it reported with much surprise, “is making an occasional experiment by way of passing a day of sobriety, rather an infrequent thing in his career. Herne did in fact turn over the proverbial new leaf and went on to become a prominent playwright nicknamed the ‘American Ibsen’ for his realistic plots. He died in New York City, June 2, 1901.”
32. FANNY BROWN
1. Mick Sinclair, San Francisco: A Cultural and Literary History (Oxford, UK: Signal Books, 2014), 64–65.
2. National Republican (Washington, D.C.), September 1, 1864, 1.
3. Boston Post, January 9, 1865, 2.
4. New Orleans Times-Picayune, February 5, 1865, 1.
5. New York Times, December 19, 1865.
6. Ibid.
7. San Francisco Daily Chronicle, March 7, 1865, 2.
8. New York Clipper, May 6, 1866, 8.
9. New York Clipper, May 20, 1865, 46; Boston Daily Globe, August 23, 1897, 10, Carlo.
10. New York Clipper, July 1, 1865, 94.
11. Ibid., November 4, 1865, 238.
12. Argus (Melbourne, AU), June 7, 1866, 8.
13. The Press (Canterbury, NZ), March 12, 1867, 1.
14. Lois M. Foster, Annals Of The San Francisco Stage, 1850-1880 (San Francisco, CA: Federate Theatre Projects, 1926), 437.
15. New York Clipper, February 27, 1869, 374–375.
16. Ibid., October 4, 1879.
17. In 1884, the first journalist to mention the photos said he had seen five cartes de visite, “presumably actresses,” implying that at that time they had not been identified. Denver Rocky Mountain News, January 13, 1884, 2, reproducing a Cleveland journalist’s report. The next journalist’s report in the World, April 26, 1891, 30, mentioned only four photos and their incorrect identifications. The clerk was noticeably evasive about the identity of one of them. The journalist ventured it was actress Olive Logan. The clerk busied himself to avoid answering. The journalist subsequently learned that it was Lucy Hale’s photo, “a daughter of one distinguished Senator from a New England State, and the wife of another now living from the same section.” Even then, Lucy’s relationship with John was still being hushed. The story of the mistaken naming of the photos and Fanny’s eventual identity is also chronicled in BoothieBarn, “Mysterious Beauty,” https://boothiebarn.com/2016/01/11/john-wilkes-booths-mysterious-beauty/.
18. Boston Herald, October 26, 1885, 4.
19. Los Angeles Times, March 1, 1897, 6.
20. New York Clipper, September 5, 1891.
33. HENRIETTA IRVING
1. Pomeroy’s Democrat (Chicago, IL), April 29, 1876, 4.
2. New York Tribune, September 15, 1863, 7; New York Herald, September 29, 1863, 1; Brooklyn Daily Eagle, March 25, 1864, 7.
3. Boston Post, February 11, 1864, 2.
4. New York Tribune, May 26, 1864, 8.
5. “The Irving Polka,” Composed Expressly For & Inscribed To Miss Henrietta Irving By Thomas Baker, Musical Director of the Olympic Theatre (New York: Wm. A. Pond & Co., 547 Broadway, 1864).
6. New Orleans Daily True Delta, December 15, 1864, 2.
7. On Eddy, see San Francisco Bulletin, December 29, 1875, 1.
8. New York Herald, January 13, 1865, 4.
9. New Orleans Daily True Delta, January 14, 1865, 4.
10. E.g., Daily Commercial Register (Sandusky, OH), May 17, 1865, 3; Evening Press (Providence RI), May 20, 1865, 2; Daily Times (Troy, NY), May 23, 1865, 3; Milwaukee Sentinel, May 17, 1865, 2.
11. Pomeroy’s Democrat (Chicago, IL), April 27, 1876, 4.
12. New York Tribune, March 1, 1871, 4.
13. New York Herald, February 21, 1871, 7.
14. New York Clipper, December 11, 1875; Albany Daily Evening News, January 12, 1876.
15. New York Clipper, August 1872, 158.
16. New York Herald, January 17, 1876, 8; New York Tribune, January 17, 1876, 8; Albany Daily Evening News, January 12, 1876.
17. Edward Ellis, An Authentic History Of the Benevolent And Protective Order Of Elks (Chicago: Charles Ellis, 1910), 294.
18. Cincinnati Daily Enquirer, April 26, 1866, 2, reprinting the Sun (New York City, NY) article.
19. Ibid.
20. Pomeroy’s Democrat, April 27, 1876, 4.
21. Cincinnati Daily Times, November 11, 1876, 4; Evansville (IN) Commercial Press, November 23, 1876, 4. Detroit Free Press, September 12, 1877, 3.
22. Chicago Daily Tribune, January 14, 1880, 8; June 14, 1880; 8; New York Clipper, February 28, 1880, 2.
23. New York Clipper, February 28, 1880, 2; Leslie Noelle Sullivan, On the Western Stage: Theatre in Montana, 1880-1920 (MA Thesis, University of New Mexico, August 1990), 58.
24. E.g., New York Clipper, February 17, 1883, 9; Detroit Free Press, October 6, 1883, 8; Brooklyn Daily Union, May 15, 1884, 1; New York Clipper, November 8, 1890, 4; Detroit Free Press, October 13, 1891, 4.
25. Henrietta letter to A. M. Palmer, February 12, 1888, Harvard Theatre Collection, copy located in JOH library. Henrietta was not exaggerating about her chances. Henrietta was suffering from uterine fibroids. New York State Death Certificate, November 28, 1905. In the 1880s, the mortality rate for abdominal hysterectomies was seventy percent. Malcolm G. Munro, “The evolution of uterus surgery,” Clinical Obstetrics & Gynecology, 49 (2006), 713–721.
26. New York Dramatic Mirror, January 31, 1891, 6.
27. Auburn (NY) Bulletin, May 4, 1895, 2.
28. New York Clipper, February 15, 1913, 4.
34. MAGGIE MITCHELL
1. Rankin (Kitty Blanchard), “News Of Lincoln’s Death,” 262.
2. New York Tribune, Mary 12, 1865.
3. Washington Post, September 30, 1881, 3.
4. Elizabeth F. Loftus and Jacqueline E. Pickrell, “The Formation of False Memories,” Psychiatric Annals, 25 (1995), 102–113.
5. When John’s body was taken from Washington for reburial in Baltimore, Maggie asked Blanche Chapman Ford to clip a lock of his hair to send her. Washington Post, September 30, 1881, 3.
6. The trip was advertised as early as January 1867. Brooklyn Union, January 25, 1867, 4. Notices appeared in newspapers even as remotely as Pickens Court House, South Carolina. Kowee Courier, June 1, 1867, 2; Montana Post, September 7, 1867, 5.
7. Sacramento Daily Union, December 12, 1867, 4.
8. Yorkville (SC) Enquirer, June 27, 1867, 2; Daily Alta California, July 28, 1867.
9. Maggie’s change of mind set tongues gossiping. According to rumor, Maggie’s companion on the voyage (besides her mother) was to have been Robert Henry Hendershot, “the drummer boy of the Rappahannock,” who became famous after capturing a Confederate soldier during the Civil War. Alice Fahs, The Imagined Civil War: Popular Literature of the North & South, 1861–1865 (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2001), 263. Maggie was secretly engaged to Hendershot—so the rumors claimed—but he had abandoned her and eloped with a girl from Poughkeepsie. Allegedly broken-hearted and humiliated, Maggie was said to have cancelled with Duncan and taken the less publicized voyage on account of Hendershot. (Hendershot would have been no more than twenty years old at the time.)
10. Washington Post, July 15, 1883, 3; Sacramento Daily Union, March 24, 1869, 2.
11. Cleveland Plain Dealer, February 17, 1869, 2.
12. George J. Olszewski, Restoration Of Ford’s Theatre (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Department of the Interior, 1963), 19. Stock certificates were $500 each, payable “at any time within ten years from date (of purchase).
13. Daily Alta California, March 15, 1872, 3.
14. Sharon Hazard, Long Branch in the Golden Age (Charleston, SC: History Press, 2007), 90; William L. Slout, Popular Amusements in Horse and Buggy America (San Bernardino, CA: Borgo Press, 1995), 52.
15. Daily Alta California, December 22, 1878; Detroit Free Press, June 12, 1869, 3.
16. New York Times, August 25, 1888, 2; Los Angeles Herald, September 24, 1888.
17. New York Dramatic Mirror, December 1888, 4.
18. Washington Post, August 10, 1889, 1.
19. Ibid., July 15, 1883, 3.
20. Daily Alta California, April 6, 1889, 5; New York Times, March 4, 1889, 5.
21. New York Times, December 14, 1889, 2.
22. Los Angeles Herald, April 6, 1889, 5.
23. Ibid.
24. Chicago Daily Tribune, October 18, 1889, 1.
25. New York Clipper, March 27, 1918, 13; New York Times, March 23, 1918; The Sun (New York City, NY), March 23, 1918, 7. Henry Paddock died in 1896, seven years after their divorce. He remarried but nothing is known about his second wife. He was buried back in Cleveland, his hometown. Abbott remarried after Maggie’s death. He died in May 1927.
26. Duluth (MN) News-Tribune, October 8, 1907, 5.
27. Boston Herald, October 4, 1907, 8.
35. ADA GRAY
1. Henry P. Phelps, Players of a Century: 346–347.
2. Brooklyn Daily Eagle, May 4, 1874, 1.
3. Ibid., July 6, 1902, 39.
4. Ibid., March 4, 1901, 29. The basic plot of East Lynne had Lucille’s character, Lady Isabel, who is married to Archibald Carlyle, seduced by Sir Francis Levison with whom she runs away, leaving her three children behind. Carlyle divorces Isabel, but Levison doesn’t tell her so that she won’t pressure him to marry her. Levison also becomes abusive, and she eventually runs away. After a railway accident that disfigures her face, Isabel applies for a job at Carlyle’s home as a governess. Carlyle doesn’t recognize her and hires her. Just as she is about to die, Carlyle realizes that the governess is Isabel. Before she dies, Isabel begs Carlyle to forgive her. “My sin was great,” she gasps, “but, oh, my punishment has been greater.” “Oh, dear! Oh, dear!” reflected actress Clara Morris, who knew something about maudlin plays, “the tears that were shed over that dreadful play, and how many I contributed myself!” Morris, Life on the Stage, 127.
5. Washington Post, September 14, 1883, 2.
6. Ibid., July 10, 1902, 4.
7. Brooklyn Daily Eagle, July 6, 1902, 39.
8. Russell Merritt, “Rescued from a Perilous Nest: D. W. Griffith’s Escape from Theatre into Film,” Cinema Journal, 21 (1981), 20.
9. Brooklyn Daily Eagle, July 6, 1902, 39; Chicago Tribune, June 8, 1902, 48.
10. Washington Post, July 10, 1902, 4.
11. Ibid.
12. Brooklyn Daily Eagle, August 29, 1902, 5.
13. Washington Post, July 10, 1902, 4.
14. Ibid., August 29, 1902, 9.
36. ISABEL SUMNER
1. Leah L. Nichols-Wellington, History of the Bowdoin School (Manchester, NH: Rumely Press, 1912), 177.
2. Rhodehamel and Taper, Right or Wrong, 108.
3. Boston Herald, October 14, 1900, 47.
4. Ibid., May 23, 1908, 5.
5. Rhodehamel and Taper, Right or Wrong, 108–109.
6. The title is taken from the phrase in John’s diary justifying his killing Lincoln. Were it not for those letters, John’s affair with Isabel would never have come to light.
7. Rhodehamel is curator of historical manuscripts at the Huntington Library in San Marino, California.
8. Rhodehamel and Taper in Right or Wrong, 109, mention one more recollection about Isabel. In her last years she developed an interest in the occult and had two astrological charts created for her and was especially impressed by two passages from them. Rhodehamel and Taper quote the first prognostication about how “the stars revealed that friendships before and after marriage are prone to die in a curious or unexpected manner . . . and ending the career of some person connected with [Isabel Sumner] in discredit and at a sacrifice of character.” The second prognostication was that Isabel’s “position of Venus does not argue well for domestic and love relations during the earlier part of life. The native born under such relations usually meets with disappointments—separation or some unhappy results.”
37. LOUISE WOOSTER
1. Terri L. Hicks, Oak Hill Cemetery: A Reflection of Early Birmingham 1871-1913 (MA Thesis, University of Alabama, Birmingham, Alabama 2013), 14.
2. James L. Baggett (ed.), A Woman Of the Town (Birmingham, AL: Birmingham Public Library Press, 2005), 14.
3. Ibid., 16.
4. E.g., Chicago Times, April 21, 1890, 2.
5. Ibid.
6. L. C. W. The Autobiography of a Magdalen (Birmingham, AL: Birmingham Publishing Co., 1911).
7. “Tourists Dig Birmingham Cemeteries,” http://birminghamal.org/2015/10/tourists-dig-birmingham-cemeteries/, accessed December 12, 2015.
8. Portland (OR) Oregonian, June 16, 1913, 1.
9. Washington Herald, June 16, 1913, 5.
10. Denver Post, June 16, 1913, 2.
11. Joseph D. Bryant, “Early Birmingham madam who saved sick will have scrapbook in history center,” http://blog.al.com/spotnews/2012/08/early_birmingham_madam_who_sav.html, accessed, 12/13/2015.
12. Ellin Sterne Jimmerson, “Louise Wooster,” Encyclopedia of Alabama, http://www.encyclopediaofalabama.org/article/h-1862, accessed December 13, 2015.
13. Ibid.
14. “Louise Wooster,” www.soph.uab.edu/nphw/WoosterAward, accessed December 13, 2015.
38. CLARA MORRIS
1. Morris, Life on Stage, 104–105.
2. Ibid., 20.
3. Morris, Life on Stage, 97–99.
4. Frederic E. McKay and Charles E. L. Wingate, Famous America Actors of Today (New York: Thomas Crowell, 1896), vol. 1, 90.
5. New York Times, November 19, 1924, 19.
6. Towse, Sixty Years of the Theatre, 149–150.
7. Ibid., 228.
8. The Century, 39 (January 1890), 433.
9. Boston Herald, January 10, 1890, 1.
10. Quoted in Wilson, John Wilkes Booth, 234.
11. See this book’s preface for these anecdotes.
12. New York Times, January 29, 1910, 2.
13. Ibid., September 13, 1910, 9.
14. Ibid., November 21, 1925, 1.
39. MARTHA MILLS
1. The article Edwin referred to in the Chicago Tribune, December 5, 1885, stated that “it is not generally known that Booth at the time of his death left a widow and two children,” and quoted John’s alleged widow saying she was among those who saw John’s remains before he was finally buried. Edwin’s letter to Laurence Hutton is reprinted in Bryan, Great American Myth, 363.
2. Junius Brutus Booth to Edwin Booth, April 24, 1865, reprinted in Alford, Sister’s Memoir, 118.
3. Stamford Historical Society letter, April 16, 1996, FFP.
4. Wood’s Baltimore City Directory (Baltimore: John Woods, 1870), 70.
5. Mahoney, Sketches of Tudor Hall, 45.
6. Rogers letter to Dr. William Stump Forwood, 1886, LOC, manuscripts division. Forwood was working on a biography of John’s father and had written to Mrs. Rogers for background information on the family. Either Mrs. Rogers’s memory had failed her, or Martha misled her, or she imagined Charles Alonzo, born in 1861, looked like John’s grandfather, which was possible but did not mean there was an actual family tie.
7. Gail Merrifield undated letter to Stanley Kimmel, Kimmel Collection, Kelce Library, Tampa, Florida.
8. Harvard University Library, Izola Forrester Family Papers (FFP), Box 12, marriage records.
9. Izola Forrester, This One Mad Act: The Unknown Story of John Wilkes Booth and His Family by His Granddaughter (Boston: Hale, Cushman & Flint, 1937).
10. E.g., Bryan, Great American Myth.
11. John O. Hall Letter, June 15, 1996, FFP.
12. Knibb and Mehrtens, Elusive Booths of Burrillville.
13. Ogarita letter to Harry Stevenson dated July 6, 1888, Box 34, FFP.
14. Rogers letter to Dr. William Stump Forwood, 1886, LOC.
15. Box 34, File 1/1, Donata book inscription, FFP.
16. Ibid. Adding to the skepticism, however, is a handwritten note signed by a Reverend Peleg, stating, “This is to certify on January 9, 1859 I performed a ceremony joining in Holy Matrimony, John Byron Wilkes Booth and Martha Mills D’Arcy at my home in Dingletown Connecticut according to the ordinances of God and the teaching of the Methodist Church.” The note was an obvious forgery, more than obvious from the names. John’s middle name was not Byron and Martha was never married to D’Arcy. Letter postmarked October 1898 from Brookville, Pennsylvania, allegedly found in a family Bible, FFP.
17. Knibb and Mehrtens, Elusive Booths of Burrillville, 162–163, 235.
18. Ibid., Letter to “Dear Gaily, May 16, 1967.
19. Ibid., Letter to “Dear Gaily,” November 11, 1867.
20. Dave Taylor, “The Forgotten Daughter—Rosalie Ann Booth,” BoothieBarn, https://boothiebarn.com/2013/11/25/the-forgotten-daughter-rosalie-ann-booth/, accessed April 15, 2015.
21. Trenton Evening Times, November 15, 1883, 1.
22. The Brooklyn Magazine, 2 (April 1885), 39–40.
23. C. Wyatt Evans, The Legend Of John Wilkes Booth. Myth, Memory, & a Mummy (Lawrence, KS: University Press of Kansas, 2004).
EPILOGUE
1. New York Daily Tribune, June 7, 1903, 6; Vaughan Shelton, Mask For Treason. The Lincoln Murder Trial (Harrisburg, PA: Stackpole Books, 1965), 242.
2. Townsend, Life, Crime and Capture, 25.
3. Henry A. Weaver, “NO. 2 Bullfinch Place,” Daily Inter-Ocean (Chicago, IL), August 27, 1893, 22.
4. Clara Louise Kellogg, Memoirs of an American Prima Donna (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1913), 111.
5. Townsend, Life Crime and Capture, 24.
6. Ibid.
7. Kellogg, Memoirs of an American Prima Donna, 111.
8. Letter in Shepherd, “They tried to stop Booth,” n.p.
9. Libby, “Favorite Child,” 19.
10. Kenneth J. Sher, “Psychological Characteristics of Children of Alcoholics,” Alcohol Health & Research World, 21 (1997), 247–254.
11. Curt R. Bartol and Ann M. Bartol, Criminal Behavior. A Psychosocial Approach (New York: Prentice Hall, 1986), 243; Lucy Freeman and Martin Theodores, The Why Report: A Book of Interviews With Psychiatrists, Psychoanalysts, and Psychologists (New York: Pocket Books, 1965), 198; Barbara Lerner, “The Killer Narcissists,” National Review, May 19, 1999, 34–35.
12. Bloom, Edwin Booth, 39.
13. Lueger, “Episode of syphilis-shaming,” www.slate.com/blogs/thevault/2016/01/08/.
14. New York Graphic, November 6, 1873.
15. Deborah Hayden, Pox: Genius, Madness, And The Mysteries of Syphilis (New York: Basic Books, 2003), xv; Thomas P. Lowry, Venereal Disease and the Lewis and Clark Expedition (Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 2004), 16–17.
16. Emanuel Hertz (ed.), The Hidden Lincoln, From The Letters and Papers of William H. Herndon (New York: Viking Press, 1938), 259. During his younger days, Lincoln’s neighbors in New Salem and Springfield, Illinois, knew him as a man with “terribly strong passions for women.” “He could scarcely keep his hands off them.” Judge David Davis, quoted in Douglas L. Wilson and Rodney O. Davis, Herndon’s Informants (Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 1997), 350. When he was able to afford it, Lincoln regularly paid for sex with prostitutes. A few weeks after one such incident in Beardstown, Lincoln told his new law partner, Billy Herndon, the girl had given him syphilis. Lincoln wrote to a Dr. Drake, Dean of Medicine at the College of Cincinnati, describing his symptoms and asked him to prescribe medicine to treat it. Cincinnati was a long way from Springfield. There were doctors a lot closer, but Lincoln didn’t want his “dark secret” to get out in his community. Dr. Drake wrote back to Lincoln saying that he “would not undertake to prescribe for him without a personal interview.” William H. Herndon, Herndon’s Life of Lincoln (New York: World Publishing Company, 1949), 173, n.10. By then the acute phase of the disease had passed, and Lincoln didn’t feel the urgency to make the long trip. Lincoln was one of the lucky ones whose syphilis did not progress past the first stage.
17. Lowry, Story Soldiers Wouldn’t Tell, 104. There were so many cases in Union-occupied Nashville, that the Union authorities established two venereal disease hospitals and mandated that every prostitute in the city had to be licensed, inspected, and treated (if infected). Thomas P. Lowry, Confederate Heroines (Baton Rouge, LA: Louisiana State University Press, 2006), 90.
18. Lowry, Venereal Disease, 7.
19. Judith O’Donnell and Christopher Emery, “Neurosyphilis,” Current Infectious Disease Reports, 7 (2005), 277–294; Cheryl Jay, “Treatment of Neurosyphilis,” Current Treatment Options in Neurology, 8 (2006), 185–192. A previous explanation (Ralph Brooks, “Insane or Ill,” Surratt Courier, 22 (August 1997), 9) that John’s dramatic personality change was due to syphilis met with understandable skepticism since it was predicated on hoarseness, only one of John’s symptoms and one not exclusive to syphilis. Skeptics also maintained that it could not be related to syphilis because, according to the earlier theory, hoarseness was symptomatic of the third stage of syphilis where symptoms are persistent, not episodic. Edward Steers Jr., “Historical Malpractice,” Surratt Courier, 22 (October 1997), 7. However, hoarseness is symptomatic of a common episodic symptom of second stage syphilis.
20. Quoted in Miller, Oilman, 56.
21. Edwards and Steers, Evidence, 1279.
22. William Alger, Life of Edwin Forrest, the American Tragedian (Philadelphia: Lippincott, 1877), vol. 2, 546.
23. New York Tribune, April 17, 1865.
24. Angus Morrison, “Analysis of One Hundred Cases of Neurosyphilis,” American Journal of Syphilis, 4 (July 1920), 552–559, 556; Lloyd Thompson, Syphilis (Philadelphia: Lea & Febiger, 1920), 338.
25. New York Sunday Telegraph, May 23, 1909.
26. E. A. Emerson, “How Wilkes’ Booth’s Friend Described His Crime,” Literary Digest (March 6, 1926), 58–59, 58.
27. Los Angeles Times, February 11, 1928, III, 10, quoting actress Helen Truman.
28. Washington Post, July 17, 1904, A8.
29. MacCulloch, “Saw Lincoln Shot,” 112, quoting Joseph Hazelton, program boy at Ford’s Theatre.
30. Samples, Lust for Fame, 176.
31. Collier’s, The National Weekly, 74 (1924), 12.
32. Edwards and Steers, Evidence, 426 (Blanche DeBar testimony).
33. Canavan, Lincoln’s Final Hours, 30.
34. Cincinnati Enquirer, July 6, 1878, 9.
35. Morris, Life on Stage, 100; Bloom, Edwin Booth, 79.
36. Edwards and Steers, Assassination, 340 (Chester testimony).
37. Ibid.
38. Mathews testimony, Surratt, Trial of John H. Surratt, vol. 2, 821–822.
39. Chaconas, personal communication, 2017.
40. Hanchett, Lincoln Murder Conspiracies; Charles Chiniquy, Fifty Years in the Church of Rome (New York: Fleming H. Revell, 1886); Richter, Sic Semper Tyrannis, 86–88.
41. Michael Kauffman, “The Confederate Plan to Abduct President Lincoln,” Surratt Courier (March 1981), 4.
42. Thomas Reed Turner. Beware the People Weeping. Public Opinion and the Assassination of Abraham Lincoln (Baton Rouge, LA: Louisiana State University Press, 1991), 252.
43. Titone, My Thoughts Be Bloody.
44. Kauffman, American Brutus, 127.
45. Morris, Life On The Stage, 104.
46. Alfriend, “Recollections of John Wilkes Booth,” 604.
47. Quoted in Morris, Life on Stage, 103.
48. Gilbert, Stage Reminiscences, 57.
49. June letter to Edwin, October 20, 1862, in John C. Brennan, “John Wilkes Booth’s Enigmatic Brother Joseph,” Maryland Historical Magazine, 7 (Spring 1983), 25. Edwin described John as “wild-brained.” He was only “insane,” Edwin said, on the issue of secession. Edwin Booth, “The Real Edwin Booth,” Literary Digest, 9 (October 1894), 12.
50. Winter, Vagrant Memories, 158.
51. Writers who have weighed in on John’s state of mind include James W. Clarke, American Assassins: the darker side of politics (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1982), 82; R. J. Donovan, The Assassins (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1952); D. W. Hastings, “The Psychiatry of Presidential Assassination, Part I: Jackson and Lincoln,” Lancet, 85 (March 1965), 95–100, “The Psychiatry of Presidential Assassination, Part II: Garfield and Roosevelts,” Lancet, 85 (April 1965), 157–162; L. Z. Freedman, “Assassination: Psychopathology and Social Pathology,” Postgraduate Medicine, 37 (June 1965), 650–658; A. E. Weisz and R. L. Taylor, “American Presidential Assassinations,” Diseases of the Nervous System, 30 (October 1969), 658–659. Dr. Alexander Hamilton said he saw John on stage and devoted several pages of his Recollections Of An Alienist to him. John, he said, was “clearly of unsound mind” from his earliest days. “As a boy Wilkes Booth showed many evidence of instability, and was ever subject to moods and fits of melancholy, as well as morbid suspicions and moroseness. . . . at one time he ran away from home and joined the pirate oystermen in the Chesapeake Bay.” The often-repeated anecdote of John’s forgetting his lines about his character Petruchio Pandolfo was due to “an advance form of brain weakness which in an advanced degree suggests aphasia.” Hamilton concluded that John should not be held fully responsible for his crime due to his “constitutional inferiority.” Alexander McLane Hamilton, Recollections Of An Alienist (New York: George H. Doran Company, 1916), 347–349.
52. Louisville (KY) Courier-Journal, December 23, 1902, 4.
53. G. W. Wilson, “John Wilkes Booth: Father Murderer,” The American IMAGO, 1 (June 1940), 49–60; P. Weissman, “Why Booth Shot Lincoln,” Psychoanalysis and the Social Sciences, 5 (1958), 99–115.
54. JWB Diary, Rhodehamel and Taper, Right or Wrong, 124.
55. Thompson, Syphilis, 388.
56. Charles Wyndham, “Recollections of John Wilkes Booth,” New York Herald, June 27, 1909, magazine section, 2.