Fortune's Fool: The Life of John Wilkes Booth

by Alford, Terry

  Troublesome youngsters who might have respected Napoleon or Wellington had less fear of Father Libertus, parish priest. Three or four bolder ones killed several of his chickens, tied them to a pole, marched around the grounds, and placed the birds against the window of the school’s housekeeper for her to cook. Foolishly, Van Bokkelen punished the entire school by suspending the twice-weekly afternoon holidays. When he did, the place erupted. Students took rifles from the clapboard armory building and set up camp one mile away in a patch of woods. Although the rebels were led by older boys like Arnold, John joined in, as did most of the rest of the student body. The headmaster was exceedingly frustrated with them; as he explained, he wasn’t running a reform school on behalf of the parents of young delinquents. Nevertheless, given the number of boys involved, he was unable to end the rebellion. The standoff continued for three days until Arnold’s father, George, a prominent Baltimore baker, and several other notables were brought to campus and negotiated an end to the trouble.122

  john saw his brother Junius Jr. infrequently. June was seventeen years older and launching his own acting career when John was born. His rare visits home were delightful to John, whom he taught to use a foil and broadsword. June had neither the taint nor the talent of their father, but he was a master swordsman, and he taught John to fence equally well with both arms.123 June also taught him how to box, a skill not only street-smart but valuable in giving a performer self-confidence in the use of his hands.124 John admired him greatly, and “Junius dearly loved this one of his brothers,” wrote Asia, “admired his athletic beauty, loved him for his nature, his disposition.”125

  After a season of managing a theater in San Francisco, June came home for a break in the spring of 1852 and filled his father’s head with tales of the wealth to be earned in the West. When he departed for California after a two-month stay, Junius Sr. accompanied him, as did eighteen-year-old Edwin, who had been traveling with his father for three years.126 It was the final time the family saw the father alive. Returning home after his tour, Junius died onboard a Mississippi River steamboat just below Louisville, Kentucky, on November 30, 1852. The cause of death was apparently enterophthisis, also known as consumption of the bowels. His remains were embalmed in Cincinnati and placed in a massive airtight iron coffin. Mary Ann went alone to retrieve the body and arrived with it in Baltimore on December 9.127

  For three days the remains lay in state in the Exeter Street house as visitors called to pay their respects. Junius reposed in the parlor, where the walls were draped in white. The coffin had a closed glass plate beneath which his face could be seen, and a marble bust of Shakespeare placed above it seemed to be peering down for a look. Junius’s gray eyes were partly opened, his lips curled in a half-smile, his brown hair thickly streaked with white. He looked just as he did when he took naps, and the children became uneasy. Perhaps their father was not dead after all but only in a trance.128 John and Asia grew frantic at the thought. Bolting from the house, they ran down the street screaming that their father was still alive.129 A physician came and established the obvious, but for John it was a traumatic moment. “I cannot look upon the dead,” he later told a friend. “It is a terrible sight to me. It sends a chill through my body.”130

  On Saturday, December 11, 1852, a funeral cortege left the house with the body and wound its way on foot some two miles through the city to the Baltimore Cemetery. The day was raw and wet, with patches of snow on the ground, but a large party from all social classes showed its respect by trudging along with the family. At the cemetery a band in the distance played the death march as services were held. On the outskirts of the funeral party hovered a small woman, standing alone. She was obviously poor, as she was too thinly clad for the weather, yet she stayed and watched until the grave closed over Junius. It was Adelaide.131

  among those who called at the house to express their condolences were Elisha and Ann Browne, the elderly couple who lived next door. Pillars of the Light Street Methodist Church, the mouselike pair informed the Booths that the father’s death was a judgment on the family’s wickedness. They urged Mary Ann “to cease following after evil.” She should at least try to teach John and his siblings—“poor things”—to be good. The couple had some missionary tracts for her. Mary Ann replied coldly that the family was content with its own Episcopal faith.132

  Embarrassed by the visit, Mary Ann took an overdue step. When John and Joe (then fourteen and twelve respectively) returned to St. Timothy’s Hall, she had them baptized at the Episcopal church in Catonsville. The Reverends James Stephenson and Henry Onderdonk, two professors at the school, stood as sponsors.133 While this made John a nominal Episcopalian, Asia, who converted to Catholicism following her attendance at a school operated by the Sisters of the Carmelite Convent, insisted her brother preferred that faith.134 He was wearing a small Catholic medal, said to be an Agnus Dei medal, at the time of his death in 1865. Where the medal came from and, more importantly, what it meant to him are unknown.135 It may have been little more than a talisman since Booth went to a variety of Christian churches. As a rule he disliked preachers and their histrionics. They were “Bible thumpers,” he protested, so called for the way they slammed their fists on the Bible or slammed the Bible itself down on the pulpit to emphasize a point.136

  John’s mature beliefs resembled those of his father. On long rambles in the Pennsylvania hills with his friend Robert Brigham, Booth spoke freely about his faith. “In religion Booth was what is called a ‘free thinker,’” said Brigham. “He tied himself down to no one dogma or creed. He believed in an all-powerful head and master of all the universe, but reserved for himself the right to think out and live according to the teaching of the Bible and of nature, as he himself understood it, and to draw his own conclusions as to the meaning and intent of the Almighty.”137 As for ethics, John declared that there was no greater teacher of morality and virtue than Shakespeare.138

  with the father went his annual income of over five thousand dollars, and trouble followed immediately. James J. Gifford, the builder of Tudor Hall, had not been paid. A hard-looking man with a perpetually furrowed brow, Gifford took the roof off the house—literally tore it off—to make it plain that he wanted his money.139 Every actor’s family fears losing the roof over its head, but this was a literal case in point. The house was made livable again, but, since no one in the family was capable of earning an outside income, it was clear that big changes were at hand.

  Mary Ann decided the way forward was to rent the town house and attempt to farm the country property. The home place had eighty acres of arable land, a good garden, a small vineyard, fenced fields, and milk cows.140 With a decent manager, good hands, and economy, it might be possible to make a living there. Accordingly, just off the Bel Air highway, John built a new gate for the property. Well balanced on stout wooden posts, it swung at a touch, and the Booths moved through it and back to the farm.141

  At age fifteen John could hardly be a proper farmer, but he did what he could. Up with the sun, he could be found by the sound of his ax in the woods or his shouts in the fields. He learned about dry cows, the price of oats, the positioning of fence rails, and the driving of cattle to market. At night, when he came in, he was often too tired to wash or eat.142

  As the oldest male family member at Tudor Hall, John was protective of the physical safety and social reputations of Mary Ann, Rose, and Asia. When the white laborers came to the house for their midday meal and cider during harvest season, he did not want them associating with the women at table, and he invented excuses to explain their repeated absence. Such class snobbery, which never would have been countenanced by his father or grandfather, did not escape the workmen’s notice. “We were not a popular family with our white laborers,” Asia recalled, “because, as they said, ‘They’d heer’d we had dirty British blood, and being mixed up with Southern ideas and niggers made it dirtier.’”143

  George B. Hagan, a Virginian hired on shares in 1854 to oversee the farm,
learned the hard way about John’s sensitivity on this matter. Tension had risen at Tudor Hall over Hagan’s demanding dawn-to-dusk schedule of working the stock and hands. Mary Ann was pained to see her pet horses too tired to drag themselves to the barn at day’s end, and on July 30, 1854, a warm, cloudy summer day, she spoke to Hagan about it. “The man became very insolent and called her vile names,” said Asia. Absent from home when this unpleasantness occurred, John learned of it upon his return.

  Cutting a stout stick and carrying it like a riding whip, he and his friend Herman Stump, a law student, confronted Hagan at his lodgings. John demanded that Hagan come to the house and apologize to the ladies. The manager not only refused; he said there were no ladies at Tudor Hall to whom one might apologize.144

  John exploded in anger at his remark and clubbed Hagan on the head and shoulders. “I knocked him down, which made him bleed like a butcher,” he boasted to a friend.145 At that point Stump decided the mother was properly avenged and intervened. The next day Hagan limped to the home of James A. Fulton, Churchville’s justice of the peace, and filed a complaint against John. The result was a rather comical trial held at Tudor Hall. In attendance were Mary Ann, dressed in her widow’s weeds, a placid Rose, a belligerent Asia, an indignant John, and a half-dozen Halls of all ages who looked on helpfully. John was not arrested for assault or fined. He was simply bound over to keep the peace, the lightest punishment he could have received short of a dismissal of the charge. He and his mother signed a fifty-dollar bond, essentially a promise under penalty to behave, and the affair ended.146

  Although burdened with responsibilities at the farm, John was still a teenager and enjoyed a busy social life. A series of eight of his letters written in the mid-1850s to a Baltimore friend tells of picnics, fairs, hunting trips, camp meetings, strawberry pickings, and rides to the Rocks of Deer Creek. He visited the city occasionally and kept up with friends there. Of the latter he wrote light-heartedly, “Give my regards to all who ask after me, and to those that don’t, tell them to kiss my Bumbelbee.” Girls were always on his mind. “I’ve got my eye on three,” he confessed. Drinking figured in the correspondence as well. “I whent to a Champaign drinking and you had better believe that the road home seemed longer that night than it ever did before.”147 Nothing in the badly written letters was sinister or misanthropic or left reason to doubt the remark of his boyhood friend Charles Harward, Ella Mahoney’s father: “Stories about John Wilkes were jolly ones with a laugh at the end.”148

  John manifested a strong interest in nativist politics at this time. The heavy immigration of the period produced fears among many of Maryland’s native-born that foreigners were taking over the state and the nation. George Alfred Townsend described their reaction in two concise sentences: “The cold German and the mettlesome Irishman had swarmed upon the land, the power of their naturalization felt at the ballot box. It was not in the nature of American boys to submit.”149 Street violence and electoral fraud occurred in Baltimore, where immigrants formed 25 percent of the city’s population, while in Harford County, with far fewer newcomers, the nativist effort centered more peaceably on winning state and federal elections.150

  “Three Cheers for America!” John wrote to a friend, and he crossed two American flags and fixed them over the door at Tudor Hall.151 Attracted by the rituals, oaths, and secret doings of the American Party (often called the Know Nothings), he attended its conclaves held a few miles away. When the former Whig and future Republican radical Henry Winter Davis campaigned for the U.S. House of Representatives in the county in the fall of 1854, John volunteered as a rally steward and banner-bearer. Dressed in dove-colored trousers, pale buff waistcoat, dark claret-red cloth coat, and broad Guayaquil straw hat, he adorned himself in party decorations. “On this particular occasion he looked remarkably handsome,” thought Asia.152

  Later in his life John had many immigrant friends. John McCullough of Coleraine in Ireland’s County Londonderry was his best and most intimate comrade. Obviously, John managed to make a distinction between individuals like McCullough and the generality of Irish immigrants, just as he did between the Hall family and African Americans as a whole. In the 1860s he was angered to see newly arrived Irish pour into the federal army. He called them “bastard subjects of other countries, false-hearted unloyal foreigners who would glory in the downfall of the Republic.”153

  the booth land was “the worst of bad farms, in a bad piece of country,” thought one visitor, and no one had ever made it pay.154 Not surprisingly, Mary Ann couldn’t either. Inexperience, lack of capital, severe weather, poor planning, hard luck, and the difficulty of securing first-class help doomed Mary Ann’s efforts. Equally vexing were certain neighbors. The farm often played host to the turkeys and chickens of William Woolsey. The prosperous Woolsey had stealthily moved the farm’s boundary marker to take for himself a sizable piece of meadow. Now his flock fed on what grain the buzzards left in the Booths’ best field. When John shot one of his turkeys, Woolsey came to the house in a rage.155 Later John noticed a strange sow heading to the barn for lunch. Exasperated with these intrusions, he sat in a gable window of the house and shot the sow, as he did a trespassing dog belonging to Stephen Hooper, a free black who lived nearby.

  Clearly, some of the neighbors showed no respect for the family—perhaps because there was no adult male on the place, perhaps because the Booths were unconventional—and when John assassinated President Lincoln ten years later, they made their feelings plain. Hooper told journalists that the Booths were shiftless people who frequently stole poultry, cattle, grain—“anything rather than do a stroke of honest work.” A German immigrant who lived nearby agreed, adding, “None of the neighbors ever liked the family. They were the devil’s own play-acting people and would do anything bad.”156

  Edwin returned home from the West in October 1856. The slender, graceful brother looked almost ethereal. He had oddly luminous eyes, an improbably oriental face, and hair so long and thick that it looked like a mane. The porters who carried his trunk into the house winked knowingly at its weight and said it was filled with gold. Unfortunately that was not true, but the twenty-two-year-old had brought back something valuable. Knocking around the California mining country, managing a theater in Honolulu, and acting in Australia, he had often been down to his last dollar. The vicissitudes had been instructive. As his friend William Winter wrote, “He had four years of the most severe training that hardship, discipline, labor, sorrow and stern reality can furnish, and when he came east again, he was on the right road and in fresh exultant vigor.”157

  When Edwin had left for California in 1852, his farewell look at John had revealed “a rattle-pated fellow, filled with Quixotic notions,” charging through the woods mounted on Cola, shouting heroic speeches, and waving an old lance—“a good-hearted, harmless, though wild-brained boy.” The lance had been replaced by a rifle, but John was still the same irresponsible creature he had always been and clearly in over his head at the farm.158

  Focused and determined, Edwin took charge. Before he picked up his father’s acting mantle, he needed to get the family on a stable financial footing. He ended Mary Ann’s effort to farm.159 The family would sell the stock, put the farm up for rent, and return to the city.160

  John agreed to the proposal. “Buried here, torturing grain out of the ground for daily bread, what chance have I?” he asked.161 The preceding year he had played one night as Richmond in Shakespeare’s Richard III in support of Asia’s beau Jack Sleeper at a Baltimore theater, and he had done well.162 Stuart Robson and Ted Hamilton, friends from the brothers’ boyhood company, were already onstage, and he was eager to follow them. Sleeper, now calling himself John Sleeper Clarke, was the lead comedian at the Arch Street Theatre in Philadelphia. Edwin arranged for John to live with Clarke and his mother, Georgiana, in Philadelphia. Clarke would try to get him a position at the theater.163

  “The seriousness of life had come,” said Asia. “The last happy days of childho
od were recollections only, and each of us children went out of the solemn old woods forever.”

  In parting with John she thought how singular he was in his combination of gay and grave qualities. Everyone knew the happy side. The somber side showed itself more privately in things like his love of sad songs. The sound of the mouth harp plucked by one of the Hall children was like the buzz of an insect to Asia, but not to John. He seemed attuned to its plaintive melody. He would listen abstractedly for a while, then pull himself away as if struggling against a dark emotion.

  “Don’t let us be sad,” he told her as he roused himself. “Life is so short, and the world is so beautiful.”164

  2

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  THE MUFFIN

  john sleeper clarke was as good as his word. When Booth arrived in Philadelphia in the summer of 1857, he found that Clarke had secured him a professional engagement—his first—as a “walking gentleman” for the Arch Street Theatre’s resident acting troupe, or stock company.1 Advertisements in the city newspapers introduced the nineteen-year-old as a veteran of the New York stage.2 Not true, but the management could hardly boast that he was direct from a cabbage patch in Maryland. Booth’s salary was eight dollars per week, average for an actor of his grade. For the sum Booth was expected “to play in any piece or part for which he might be cast and to appear every day at rehearsal.”

  It was agreed that Booth would be billed as “J. B. Wilkes.” He performed under this name in Philadelphia and Richmond for the next three years. “All knew he was ‘old Booth’s son,’ ” wrote Townsend, who first met Booth at this time, but ordinary playgoers might not.3 Booth had two reasons for this disguise. “Doubtful as to his meeting with that success which his ambition had pictured for him,” he feared disgrace.4 He confided to his friend Edwin A. Emerson that if he failed, he did not want the family name tarnished by it.5 Also, “Booth” on the marquee would invite comparisons to his father. “It is a name which awakens old memoires and revives past triumphs,” a theatrical critic asserted, and Booth wished to be judged on his own merits. As his confidence grew, he bragged to the actor James Pilgrim that he would make the name of Wilkes as famous as that of Booth.6 But he was unwilling to trade on his father’s reputation. June’s playbills proclaimed him “the Father as He Lived!” By 1862, when John returned to his hometown of Baltimore as a star, he had resumed use of his last name, but his passion for individuality was unchanged. His bills boldly declared, “I Am Myself Alone!”7