Fortune's Fool: The Life of John Wilkes Booth

by Alford, Terry

  Important changes had been made in the company during his absence.2 Edwin Adams, a spirited actor who excelled in romantic drama, was the new leading man. “A handsome dashing sailor lad” in type, he did wonderfully clever parodies, including one of the elder Booth as Iago.3 For a time Booth and Adams were quite friendly. They may have visited Boston together at some point, as letters written by Booth to friends in that city often send greetings to Adams’s relatives who lived there. But the relationship cooled. The pair was too close in age, looks, and ambition. After the assassination, Adams readily offered information about Booth, then a fugitive, and told unflattering stories of “this horrid monster,” his erstwhile friend.4 Also new to the Marshall was Clementina DeBar, June’s ex-wife. Her divorce from John’s brother had been bruising, but John remained cordial to Clem and fond of her daughter, Blanche, who had lived with the family ten years earlier. Other newcomers included George, Ella, and Eliza Wren, English-born actors and singers. The delightful Ella caught Booth’s eye immediately. Finally there was the youthful Oliver Doud Byron. It amused Israel B. Phillips, the corpulent stage manager of the Marshall known as “Old Phil,” to call this youngster “Old Doud.” Since Byron was a neophyte, nothing could have been more absurd, but the handy youth “was the right hand and both feet [of Phillips,] who was not active on his pedal extremities,” recalled John Barron.5 Byron spent a great deal of time with Booth, liked him, and thought him a fine actor.6

  Booth made his home at the Powhatan Hotel, sharing his room occasionally with Byron. Not the best hotel in the city, the Powhatan was comfortable and convenient to the theater, accommodating the late hours and irregular mealtimes of the actors. Kunkel, Moxley, and Adams also lived there, as did James W. Collier, the Marshall heavy. The fraternity felt at home at the Powhatan, even putting on a special performance at the hotel during the Christmas season. Significantly, the Powhatan was a temperance house. Its prohibition of alcohol reinforced Booth’s determination to stay clear of liquor.7 In this and other ways life at the hotel brought a semblance of stability to Booth’s life. Here he was known under his own name, and here, for the first and only time in his life, he was stationary enough to be listed in a city directory.8

  the heir-at-law, a popular five-act comedy, opened the season on Saturday, September 3, 1859. An immense throng mobbed the theater to see it, so numerous that the critic for the Dispatch complained he could not get within seeing or hearing distance of the stage. “From floor to roof there was one dense mass of mankind, wedged down, packed and driven into the pit as close as matches in a matchbox, tight as nails in woodwork, [their mouths] open as so many hungry fellows around a free lunch.” Even a good place to stand was unavailable.9 This large crowd received the actors enthusiastically. Booth appeared as Henry Moreland, one of the male leads, with Adams, Chester, DeBar, “Old Doud,” and the others taking their appropriate parts. As the evening progressed, an audience member briefly stole the show. Forced to perch in a gallery window, he slipped and fell out of the building a distance said to be eighty feet to the sidewalk. Amazingly, he walked away from the accident, remarking only that the bricks on Seventh Street were rather hard.10 Back onstage, Booth’s Henry, the beloved of Ella Wren’s Caroline, embraced her, exclaiming, “Let me clasp you to my heart and shelter you there forever.” She fainted into his arms.11 The play concluded with the cast, in turn, speaking an epilogue in verse. Ella sang a ballad, and her brother George costarred in a short farce, concluding the evening’s entertainment.

  Kunkel and Moxley were shrewd to feature their stock company for the first week of each new season. During this shakedown interlude the players worked with each other before the traveling stars arrived. The Enquirer reported that the new cast was the best dramatic company with which the managers had ever opened in Richmond.12 As a bonus, it possessed enough musical talent to produce an opera, “each and every performer sustaining their role with marked ability.”13 The theater was crowded nightly, and Booth was well received. The Enquirer stated, in a characteristically brief notice of the resident actors, that he was very good, popular, and well known.14

  It was generally believed that Southern cities like Richmond were friendlier to actors than cities in the North and were therefore better liked by them. This was the opinion of George Alfred Townsend, the Philadelphia journalist who witnessed Booth’s Arch Street efforts. “I have never wondered why many actors were strongly predisposed toward the South. There, their social status is nine times as big as with us. The hospitable, lounging, buzzing character of the southerner is entirely consonant with the cosmopolitanism of the stage and that easy ‘hang-up-your-hatativeness’ which is the rule and the demand in Thespianship,” he wrote.15 Stripped of its regional bias, Townsend’s sentiment would certainly have been endorsed by Kunkel’s employees. “Richmond and your beautiful hills,” soliloquized John Barron in 1907 at the end of his career, “for my companions still abiding with me and for those who have passed away, I salute you. We lived many happy days enjoying your delightful hospitality and with your generous applause urging us to achievements which otherwise would not have been ours. No people ever paid more devoted homage to dramatic art than the citizens of Richmond. No city in the Union was ever dearer to the heart of the young aspirant for dramatic fame.”16

  Barron’s observations explain Booth’s growing affection for Richmond, but only in part. As Booth won his way in the city, it was not solely by being an actor. Many Richmonders would receive an actor socially, but, as Barron observed, the actor had to do the rest himself. Booth made friends because he had what Ned Alfriend termed a facility for social success.17 The young actor entered easily into the world beyond the stage. “He had always been ‘one of the boys’ in Richmond, ready for a fire or ready for a fray,” recalled Mary Bella Beale. She thought Booth had three particular qualities that were claimants upon the Southern heart: “He was brave, ardent, and affectionate.”18 Barron, who occasionally bivouacked in Booth’s room at the Powhatan, was highly impressed with his quickness in action and his generosity. And, “as to determination, he was all that the term implies.” He presented himself well and impressed acquaintances as a respectable person, neat and careful in his dress, “but never at all gaudy or flashy,” stated Joseph W. Southall, a medical student who lived at Booth’s hotel.19 George Crutchfield, a bank clerk, believed Booth’s handsome face was an asset, although his close friends teased him about his slightly bowed legs. Crutchfield summed up the common feeling about Booth when he wrote years later to the sculptor Edward Valentine, “He was a man of high character and social disposition and liked by everyone with whom he associated.”20

  Many of Booth’s friends, like Crutchfield, were members of city militia companies. These companies provided civic-minded individuals an opportunity for fraternal bonding while supporting public ceremonies and performing actual military duty in times of civil disorder or invasion. Crutchfield, whose father was a city councilman, served in the Richmond Light Infantry Blues, considered by its members to be the socially elite unit in the city. O. Jennings Wise, the governor’s son, was a member of Company F, another troop with claims of social distinction. Booth was attracted to a third unit, Ned Alfriend’s Richmond Grays.21 Its members were a varied lot. Some were Christian, some Jewish, some native, some immigrant, and this at a time when such distinctions were matters of great significance. These differences meant little in the Grays, a people’s company representative of the military-minded young men of Richmond’s white middle class. Known officially as Company A, 1st Regiment of Virginia Volunteers, the Grays were commanded by Captain Wyatt M. Elliott, an attorney and editor. The company enjoyed the honor of traveling to New York City in 1858 to escort the body of President James Monroe home to Virginia for reinterment. Later the Grays spent a week in the city, where they were entertained as guests of New York’s celebrated 7th Regiment.22 Philip Whitlock, a Polish immigrant who was a private in the Grays, boasted that “our company was considered one of the best drilled
companies in the country.”

  The public musters and dress parades of the Grays were highly attractive to Booth, as were the company’s balls, suppers, and encampments. Social as well as military occasions, these events turned heads and caused hearts to flutter. The Grays looked grand parading in their gray jackets trimmed with black above gray winter trousers, each soldier wearing a black varnished knapsack and sporting a brass letter A on his cartridge box. The company’s distinction, camaraderie, and military virtues captivated Booth.

  Several of the Grays were personal friends. Louis J. Bossieux was the first lieutenant of the company; his son Cyrus was a corporal and his son Louis F. a private. The Bossieux family had connections to the theater going back a generation when it owned an entertainment hall at the rear of the Marshall.23 Alfriend, an aspiring playwright, was a private in the Grays, and so was Miles T. Phillips, who worked evenings in the theater box office. The family of Quartermaster Robert A. Caskie were noted theater aficionados. Individual Grays like Whitlock attended the Marshall frequently. Fond of Shakespeare, Whitlock rarely missed a performance, and when he was a very old man he could still rattle off the prices of seats in different parts of the house.24

  Booth never enrolled in the company. The theater demanded odd hours and a transient lifestyle that made such commitments difficult. Indeed, the stage tolerated no rivals. Booth understood that. And he knew that Richmond, while delightful, was not home to him as it was to Crutchfield and Alfriend. But Booth socialized with friends in the company and often joined them at their outings. He was a regular when they mustered for fun at Schad’s Garden, a rural park in a grove of trees on West Broad Street. There was bowling and target shooting there, and a ballroom with music, dancing, and beer. On these festive occasions Booth generally wore a magnificent velvet vest with large pockets, wrote Herbert Ezekiel, a friend of Whitlock and the Beale family. In one pocket he carried a derringer. In the other, a dirk.25

  October 16, 1859, was a Sunday, and there were no performances at the theater that day. It was just as well. No show could have competed with a real-life drama being enacted elsewhere in Virginia. John Brown, an abolitionist notorious for his activities in the Kansas Territory, launched an antislavery raid into Virginia. Emerging from a staging area on a secluded Maryland farm, Brown and eighteen followers crossed the Potomac River and seized the U.S. government armory in the little town of Harpers Ferry. Hostages were taken and efforts made to liberate slaves. Shooting erupted in the streets. Outraged citizens and local militia besieged Brown and his raiders in the fire-engine house of the armory. On Tuesday morning, October 18, a force of marines under the command of Brevet Colonel Robert E. Lee stormed the building. Wounded, Brown was taken prisoner along with six of his men.

  News of the raid produced outrage and anxiety in Richmond. Doubly alarming were initial reports of the size of Brown’s force. Rumor had a biracial army of up to 750 abolitionists in the attacking party. Fearing the worst, Governor Henry A. Wise ordered out the 1st Regiment of Virginia Volunteers, the state’s first line of defense. The Grays and other units readied themselves throughout the night of October 17, and on the following morning, cheered by a large crowd standing in a heavy rain, they boarded a train and headed north. When they arrived in Washington, D.C., that afternoon, the soldiers learned that the raid had been suppressed; orders were waiting to return home. Their mission superseded by events, the Grays departed for Richmond, never having reached the site of the insurrection.26

  The entire raid lasted less than forty-eight hours, but the shock of the event was profound and long-lasting. Brown and his little army of black and white abolitionists, woefully inadequate to accomplish anything practical, had achieved one extraordinary thing. They had taken the argument over slavery from distant western prairies and brought it home to Virginia. Slavery was to be overthrown by violence, Brown declared in a speech, “and it would be war to the knife and knife to the hilt.”27 “It seemed to me,” wrote William Fellows, a student who lived near the scene of the attack, “that this shaggy bearded man Brown was about as near a human fiend as one could be.”28 In the wake of the raid Fontaine Beckham, the mayor of Harpers Ferry, and three citizens lay dead, as did of ten of Brown’s own party and one of Lee’s marines. As John H. Claiborne, a Virginia doctor, wrote, the event “opened the eyes of the Southern people to the great gulf which separated them from the North, a gulf not wide enough nor deep enough to insure them safety or to secure them from rapine and murder.”29

  Booth, performing in Lynchburg at the time, was deeply disturbed by the raid. “He was always an intense Southerner in all his feelings and thoughts, on all the questions that were dividing the North and South,” wrote Alfriend, and his reaction to the raid was predictable.30 Brown was a common cutthroat and murderer.31 Back in Richmond, Booth visited the hotel bars, loudly declaiming what manner of punishment Brown deserved.32 He told friends he desired to go to Harpers Ferry “and help shoot the d-d Abolitionists.”33 For the chance of a dustup with the radicals, “John Wilkes was in a perfect fever of delight,” recalled Edwin Hunter Brink of the Marshall. These feelings were shared by many others. Isabella Pallen, “one of Virginia’s most devoted admirers and one of the most rebellious of rebels, gave Wilkes Booth her blessing,” recalled her daughter, Mary Bella. She offered him for the purpose the use of a rusty old carbine from the War of 1812.34

  Brown was promptly tried and convicted of murder, treason against the Commonwealth of Virginia, and “conspiring with negroes to produce insurrection.” On November 2, 1859, he was sentenced to hang. The execution was set for December 2 at Charlestown, county town of Jefferson County.35

  In response to this extraordinary situation, Governor Wise’s office was flooded with mail from across the nation. Much of it was sympathetic to the old abolitionist. One writer, signing himself “John Brown” and dating his letter on the scheduled day of execution, told Wise that on arriving in heaven, he had been greeted by Saint Peter with the words “Welcome, John Brown, you are the first man from Virginia in 20 years.” Most letters were less good-natured. They were characterized by one Richmond journalist as “full of all manner of threats at vengeance from raving abolitionists and marauders.”36 The letters promised new raids into Virginia or vowed revenge on the commonwealth if Brown were executed. Several writers threatened Wise personally. Expressing outrage at Brown’s sentence, one writer signed his letter “Brutus,” a name whose menace could not be lost on any head of government. Meanwhile, anxiety mounted in Charlestown, where Brown was jailed. Strangers were seen in the area, prowling arsonists burned barns, and Brown received letters declaring that he would be rescued. This situation was reported to Wise along with rumors that a large force of armed men was marching on the town. Colonel J. Lucius Davis, the commander of troops in the area, telegraphed his alarm to Richmond and asked for help.37

  Surprised once by fanaticism, Governor Wise reacted decisively. “The military of this city were ordered to pack knapsacks,” wrote George W. Libby of the Grays, “and to be ready at the sounding of alarm from the bell in the Old Bell Tower” in Capitol Square near Booth’s hotel.38 A feeling of crisis spread through Richmond. Early in the evening of Saturday, November 19, 1859, the great bell, customarily reserved for fire alarms, began a distinctive toll. Six strokes followed by a pause, then six more. The noise threw the city into tumult. An excited mass of people surged onto the grounds around the governor’s mansion. Mounting the portico of the building, Mayor Joseph Mayo harangued the crowd with the latest facts and rumors from Harpers Ferry.39

  Part of the audience broke away and headed for the Broad Street depot of the Richmond, Fredericksburg, and Potomac Railroad, located directly opposite the Marshall Theatre. The 1st Regiment gathered in the street to entrain. There with the Grays were Alfriend, Whitlock, Libby, and the Bossieuxs. Perspiring profusely, Miles Phillips rushed over from the theater to join them, having bid farewell to his five young daughters. The girls clung tearfully to him as Phillips told
his boarder Charlie Brooks about a shotgun and a musket he had left behind at home in the event trouble spread to Richmond. “Load them up,” Phillips ordered. The feeling along the street was intense, wrote an acquaintance of Phillips, “for not knowing the exact nature of the summons, and supposing that actual fighting was going on at Charlestown, the parting of the volunteers from their families had all the semblance, and in fact reality, of the departure of soldiers to a bona fide, acknowledged, and declared war.”40

  Joseph Southall, the medical student living at Booth’s hotel, was heading toward the depot with a group of his friends when he noticed the young actor walking just ahead of him. Near the theater he “saw Booth, who had been walking at a brisk pace, stop suddenly as if he had forgotten something.” Just as Southall reached Booth, the actor wheeled about and hurried off. “I have ever since been convinced that when he stopped and stood for a moment in thought that he then and there decided that his duty to the State had first claim on his allegiance in an emergency like that,” Southall concluded, “and that when he turned back, he had made up his mind as to his course.”41

  Face flushed and deeply agitated, Booth burst into the theater dressing room. Collier and Edwin F. Barnes, one of the supers, looked up at him in surprise.

  “What is the matter?” exclaimed Collier.

  “I’m off to the wars!” Booth exulted. Hastily snatching his overcoat and hat, he rushed from the building.42

  He left without a word to the management, added the actor James E. Murdoch.43 Kunkel would be furious. Attendance at the Marshall had suffered considerably since Brown’s raid, while those present were distracted. There were brawls in the audience during performances and arrests of patrons “raising a rumpus.” The actors were equally preoccupied. One critic lamented that Barry Sullivan was miserably sustained by the company, with Booth named as among the few exceptions who played well. The current star, William E. Burton, was ill and had canceled his engagement. The coming week would have to be taken by the company, one of whose most popular members had just bolted madly out the door.44