Booth remained in Montgomery after his engagement ended, and on November 16, 1860, he played Romeo and Juliet for the benefit of Kate Bateman, who followed him as star. Kate was a former child actress making the transition to adult leads under the management of her father, H. L. Bateman. A shrewd fellow with stiff wiry hair, Papa Bateman believed his daughter to be the greatest actress of the century, and from a strategically placed seat in the audience his large hands resounded loudly as he led the applause for her. Parental solicitude aside, Kate was elegant and beautiful onstage.35 It was exciting to theatergoers when the bill was announced because Booth would be the first actor to whose Romeo Kate ever played Juliet. The Daily Mail declared the play, promoted “by a large number of our families and leading young men,” would be the most fashionable night of the season. Therefore the newspaper urged the audience to dress stylishly and make the occasion brilliant.36
The evening came off well, declared the Mail in its notice of the following day. Its reviews of Booth continued mixed, however, in the vein of “Mr. Wilkes showed that he can learn to play Romeo with great power, though as yet his conception is crude.” Kate was positive about her costar, saying that “he was really a beautiful creature—you couldn’t help admiring him—so amiable, so sweet, so sympathetic.” Papa Bateman grew interested in him. A man of quick insight, Bateman boasted that he only required five minutes to know the measure of a man,37 and in Booth he saw something special. Booth was “so good in the part that Mr. Bateman had serious thoughts of engaging him for the jeune premier character and bringing him to England to act with Miss Bateman.” Booth never went to England or acted again with Kate. “Some trifle interrupted this engagement,” recalled a journalist. “This purpose, if it had been carried out, would have saved a great actor to the stage and possibly changed the political destiny of a nation.”38 Booth seemed relieved to have escaped Papa’s clutches, writing a friend, “Thank God, I am not yet a Bateman, and may I never be.”39
Booth’s social life was active in Montgomery, bearing out the validity of Lewis’s observation of the Deep South that “the people in that section uniformly treated actors with a sense of both their social and professional worth.”40 The affable and romantic young actor was besieged by the attentions of the citizens.41 The odds and ends that constitute Booth’s effects, found after his death, include an invitation to attend the anniversary dinner of the St. Andrew’s Society of Montgomery on November 30, 1860.42 It is unknown if he went, but this stray piece of paper is evidence of the welcome of which Booth was deemed worthy. His problem was not a shortage of such invitations. Rather, like countless other young people with places to go and things to do, he had no money. “I am very hard up,” he complained to a friend. “Extravagant habits,” the friend thought.
Help arrived when Maggie Mitchell rotated in to star. The ever-popular Maggie volunteered her services for a “Grand Complimentary Benefit” for Booth on December 1, 1860. Booth took two roles. He played the title character in the two-act drama Rafaelle. At the close of this piece he was summoned before the curtain to acknowledge the audience’s favor. Maggie followed in the comedy Katty O’Sheal, and Booth closed with the roof-raising fifth act of Richard III.43 “Booth, Booth, Booth!!” ran the advertisements, and he performed this night for the only time on his Southern tour under his own name. Booth told friends such as George Crutchfield of Richmond that he would use his family name only when he made his reputation as an actor.44 Pilgrim believed that he finally assumed the Booth name when “he was made to understand fully his financial difficulties.” Both explanations may be true in part and are not mutually exclusive. Be that as it may, John Wilkes was retiring after three long years of apprenticeship. From this night forward, J. Wilkes Booth would star.
It is unclear how much money the big benefit earned him. Canning’s actors customarily took in from thirty to one hundred and fifty dollars on their nights;45 Booth would have been on the high end of such sums. He did net enough money to return north. No less important to Booth’s future was a report published in the Clipper, a newspaper read by every important manager in the nation. “Mr. Booth’s engagement was very successful, and his friends predict for him a brilliant future. Nature has done much for him, and he will soon be on the uppermost round of the ladder.”46 Finally, there was the cane. It was customary for the regular patrons of the theater to present the leading actor at his final performance with the gift of a gold-headed cane. Montgomery presented a cane to Booth, and he was exceedingly proud of it. He showed it to the comedian Stuart Robson, who had been awarded a cane of his own and readily appreciated its significance. A fashionable accessory, the cane was more importantly a badge of esteem and respect to a young actor like Booth, and he would part with it only under dire circumstances. Pawn a velvet coat but never a cane, Robson advised.47
Booth had known Maggie Mitchell from his first year in Richmond. There was a steadily increasing attraction between them. Speaking of Booth with a reporter in 1882, Maggie was asked, “Was he a very handsome and agreeable man?” “Oh, very,” she replied. “Indeed.”48
For the moment a young Montgomery woman named Louise Wooster occupied Booth’s affections.49 When Louise was a child, a Gypsy read her fortune and told her, “Were your life a written book and you could look half way into its pages, you would say, ‘Let me die tomorrow.’ ” The forecast proved true. Her rare physical beauty “made men rave and in the end proved her ruin.” The orphaned girl was seduced by a family friend. Other predators followed. By the fall of 1860, when Booth visited the city, she was living a self-described “life of shame” with seven other women in a house of prostitution in Montgomery.50
Eighteen-year-old Louise, who loved poetry and amateur theatricals, was naturally drawn to Booth, whom she considered wonderfully gifted. Her profession was older than his, but he talked theater with her, sharing his dreams and encouraging hers. “Booth became infatuated with the beautiful young Southern girl, and she with him,” wrote one of her friends, and the two became lovers. “I was madly in love with J. Wilkes Booth,” she reminisced in her Autobiography of a Magdalen (1911). “He was my ideal man, handsome, generous, affectionate, and brave. He was my idol.” Booth had nothing to give her but an embroidered handkerchief, but she treasured it, as well as a forget-me-not, the floral emblem of faithfulness and friendship, which she pressed in her keepsake book. Kindness was his best gift, she felt. Employed in an occupation in which she ran a daily danger of mistreatment, Louise wrote that “he was ever kind to me, and for that kindness I will ever love and cherish his memory.”
Meanwhile the presidential election of 1860 threatened the unity of the nation. Abraham Lincoln, nominee of the Republican Party and a great favorite in the North, frightened white Southerners. Responding to a speech by Senator Toombs, the Daily Mail of Montgomery editorialized that if Lincoln was elected, he must be resisted at all cost. “If the South could be stupid enough to submit to such an administration as Lincoln’s for one moment, it ought to be plundered and mulattoized both—made no better than the North!” the newspaper declared.
Illinois senator Stephen A. Douglas, Lincoln’s leading rival, brought his presidential campaign to Montgomery on November 2, 1860, and the actor went to hear him speak. “This Union is the greatest blessing ever conferred upon a free people,” Douglas told an audience of about four thousand. Its safety was more important than any other thing, including the fate of slavery. Laying into extremists of both sections, he explained the obvious—that Alabama had more security for its institutions within the Union than without. Later that day, as he made farewell remarks at the Alabama River wharf from the deck of the steamer Virginia, the floor upon which he stood gave way, hurling Douglas and those nearby to the planks below. Douglas was not seriously injured, but some wondered if the incident was not an omen.51
Booth had formerly admired Douglas, recalled Fred Ferguson, an extra at the theater, but the Little Giant’s moderation did not suit him. “He was convinced that D
ouglas was simply a professional politician and a rank opportunist,” said Ferguson. The actor retired to Yung’s restaurant, where, in the low-ceilinged dining room just past the oyster bar, he expressed his disgust with what he had heard.
“Yung’s was John Wilkes Booth’s favorite tippling place,” recalled Lorenzo F. Woodruff, a Montgomery native. “There gathered the wealth, the brains, the culture, the beauty, and the chivalry of Alabama and the South.” When Congressman Yancey announced a speech at the statehouse to rebut Douglas, Booth, Ferguson, and Yancey’s eldest son, Ben, walked from Yung’s to the capitol to attend. “Yancey’s oratory swept the young actor off his feet,” said Ferguson, “and he left the meeting in a delirium of enthusiasm. From that time until he left Montgomery he was constantly with Ben Yancey and at every opportunity sought conversation with Ben’s father.” Stirring his hot toddy, Booth sat and gazed in adoration at the Roman features of the great Fire-Eater as he spoke. Looking at Booth’s face, Ferguson realized that it defined fanaticism.
Second thoughts soon set in, however. It took no great intelligence to see that the Yanceys of the world would break up the Union, and that would lead to war. That was fine with Fred and Ben, both future Confederate officers. But Booth had been bred to revere the nation’s permanence. While he appreciated Yancey’s defense of states’ rights, he recoiled from the consequences of disunion. One night at Yung’s, as a party of young hotheads pushed back their dinner plates and drained their glasses, Booth stood up at the table. He had strayed from the temperance path and was drinking now—in fact, he was “the hardest drinker of the crowd of hard drinkers,” recalled James V. Ashurst, one of those present. Steadying himself by holding the edge of the table, Booth was downcast. “This is a night for us all to remember,” he said somberly. “It is fraught with portent.” Booth threw back his black hair. It seemed to frame his pale face. Turning his eyes upward, he recited the Lord’s Prayer, which Edwin always said was the most all-embracing petition for deliverance from evil that the mind of man could conceive. “He did nothing else. He said nothing else,” recalled Ashurst. “The effect of his power and elocution was amazing. That crowd—gay, noisy and disorderly a few minutes before—was hushed into silence. Before the roll of that wonderfully modulated voice, every man about the table including myself was weeping. Booth dropped back into his seat and with his head on the table covered his face with his hands.”52
Lincoln was elected on November 6, 1860, and secession was shouted for in the streets of Montgomery and elsewhere. The legislature of South Carolina called a convention to consider withdrawal of that state from the Union. Alabama and five other states in the southernmost part of the United States authorized similar meetings.
Booth was deeply troubled by Lincoln’s victory, recalled Louise. He would later write that the event was essentially a declaration of war against the South. But his cheerfulness soon returned. “All will be over in a few weeks,” he told her. Like most other Americans he simply did not believe that the unthinkable was possible. “There will be no war,” he assured Louise. “It would be too terrible, and neither side will dare begin it.”
As the crisis deepened, however, so did Booth’s anxiety. He studied the newspapers, following political developments closely. Yancey’s statement that if Alabama left the union he would go with it drew a rebuke from Booth: “The whole union is our country and no particular state. We should love the whole union and not only the state in which we were born. We are all one people.” Booth at this time held views more common in the Upper South than in deepest Dixie. Deploring Lincoln’s election, that region sought a compromise between the sections to keep the nation together. If the people of Alabama wanted to divide the nation, Booth did not. “He loved the union, though from his mad act the world would judge that he did not. His love for the union was one of his strongest passions. I knew him and know that he did,” Louise, a secessionist in feeling, said.
In Booth’s view the abolitionists were the worst sinners, but Southern radicals were falling into their game. “He was as bitter against secession as he was against abolition,” recalled Louise. Both extremes imperiled the nation. “Men have no right to entertain opinions which endanger the safety of the country,” he wrote. “So deep is my hatred for such men that I could wish I had them in my grasp and I had the power to crush. I’d grind them into dust!” Louise saw that his feelings were as violent as his words. Once, reading a newspaper, Booth became enraged. Throwing the newspaper down, he exclaimed, “If I could I would kill every d—— Abolitionist in the North and every d—— Secessionist in the South, then there would be no war. This is too grand a country to be plunged into a civil war by such fanatics!”
It is not solely through Louise’s recollections that his Virginia-brand unionism is known. Booth began to draw unfavorable notice from others in Montgomery. “Young, impetuous, fearless, true,” as his friend John Ellsler described him, Booth spoke his mind openly and with the naïveté of one who felt his opinions were so just that, properly explained, they had to be accepted by others. Yes, the South was grievously provoked, he told one secessionist, and “he was a Southern man and liked the people of the South who had been kind to him, but he could not for all that admit they had any right or occasion to secede. That they had had it all their own way in Congress, and that if they insisted on fighting, they should take the American flag and fight under that.”53
Suddenly Yung’s was no longer congenial. Booth had spoken too boldly in a secessionist furnace like Montgomery. “Poor Wilkes had foolishly expressed himself in regard to the rebellion,” Louise declared. “I felt very uneasy about him.” Canning was concerned, too. “Booth’s sympathy for, and utterances on behalf of the Union, were so unguarded in their expression that his life was in jeopardy.”54
Tormented by the anathema of national disintegration, his views unpopular, and his person threatened, Booth underwent an emotional crisis. He became moody and erratic, alternatively haranguing Louise, then falling silent for hours. At moments his eyes swam with tears. Such behavior led one acquaintance to consider him “a trifle crazy.”55 Another contemporary employed the adjective crazy without the kindly qualifier of trifle before it.56 Louise recalled more sympathetically, “I often thought that off the stage his mind was not just right. I don’t mean that he was insane, but there was something about him.”
Having had no engagements in a month, it was time—perhaps past time—for Booth to depart. He came hurriedly to Louise one evening and said, “I must go home tonight or I cannot get away at all.” Canning found it “necessary to resort to strategy and spirit Wilkes Booth out of the city to save his life,” said John Ellsler. “This I had from the lips of the manager himself.”57 To save face, Booth announced publicly that he intended to return to the South at a later date to fill engagements.58 The sectional crisis, he asserted, “cannot last longer than a few weeks or a few months at the longest. Such a glorious country as ours cannot be broken up by a few fanatics.”59
With the help of his fellow actor Sam Chester, who Booth thought saved his life on this occasion, the star left Montgomery on December 3, 1860. He took a four-hundred-mile rail trip to Savannah, Georgia, where he secured a cabin on the steamer Huntsville. He arrived in New York City on Sunday, December 9.60 Edwin was playing in the city, and John lingered long enough to be noticed by Wilkes’ Spirit of the Times, a weekly newspaper whose theater columns were eagerly read. “He was looking well,” the editor stated. “The press and public in that section of the country [the Deep South] hold him in the very highest estimation. He is several years younger than his brother Edwin Booth, and the resemblance between them in person, voice, and manner is very striking.”61 By December 16 Booth had joined his mother and Rose, who lived in a rented residence in Philadelphia near Asia and Clarke.62
John was, oddly enough, now homeless. However warm his welcome on Marshall Street, the house there scarcely deserved the title of home. After the family left Tudor Hall in 1857, Booth had, in fac
t, no such special place in his life. He lived with Edwin, with Asia, with friends, in rented rooms, or at hotels. He traveled constantly in his profession. Wardrobe items were stashed here, papers there. A deteriorating relationship with Edwin compounded his rootlessness when Mary Ann and Rose moved to New York City in 1863 to live permanently with the older brother. John came to feel unwelcome there. This lack of roots mirrored an inner disconnection in the young actor. He told one person he might move to Canada, then told another he might move to Virginia. “I am a northern man,” he wrote in 1860. Yet he contradicted Asia when she said the Booths were a Northern family. The question was well worth asking: where did John Wilkes Booth belong?
Philadelphia provided the young actor with no refuge from the escalating national collapse. The city voted for Lincoln, but the president-elect was not universally popular. Conservatives and moderates backed the call of Mayor Alexander Henry for a nonpartisan Grand Union Rally on December 13, 1860. One of the rally organizers was David Paul Brown, a Booth family attorney and author of Sertorius, a play whose title role the elder Booth had often performed.63 Booth joined the thirty to forty thousand people who crowded around historic Independence Square for the event. Magnificent banners that floated above them from the upper-story windows of the nearby Continental Hotel provided the rally theme. “Concession before Secession,” they read, and the words captured the feeling of most present. Professing loyalty to the Union, speakers offered olive branches to the South.
Despite such conciliatory gestures, South Carolina declared its independence from the United States on December 20, 1860. There could be no such thing as peaceful secession, Booth knew. Soon after, the Senate rejected the Crittenden Compromise, a measure proposing a series of constitutional amendments to protect slavery and secure its existence in a share of the western territories.64 The bill’s authors hoped to allay Southern fears, and Booth believed, along with many others in Maryland and Virginia, that this measure was the one compromise that could have saved the nation.
Fortune's Fool: The Life of John Wilkes Booth Page 13
