Fortune's Fool: The Life of John Wilkes Booth

by Alford, Terry

  Canning knew the story behind the story. Booth was not simply tired of Henrietta, the manager reported; he was interested in Maria. “There were two sisters in the company, and neither one was very considerate. One of them was Booth’s temporary mistress, and he got a fancy for the other one, and the first sister kept watch on him.” Canning believed Henrietta placed herself outside Maria’s door and ambushed Booth when he emerged.83 Most other accounts agree that the attack occurred in Booth’s room. The actor was lying down when he heard a knock at the door. On the other side was Irving, frenzied and armed with a knife. When Booth opened the door, she stabbed him in the face. Grappling with her, Booth forced her out of the room and wrested the knife from her hand. Irving fled to her own apartment, found another knife, and stabbed herself. “She meant business,” reported a tattletale for the New York Sunday Mercury, “but she made a botch of it.” Her injuries kept her off the stage for a time, “but she recovered, got over her infatuation for Wilkes Booth, and made a clever, popular actress of herself at last, which was a heap better than suicide.”84

  Booth nursed his wound at his mother’s residence in Philadelphia. Edwin, he learned, intended opening the fall season in London. This interesting news would leave him as the only Booth available for the big-city stages. For his twenty-first birthday on May 10, 1861, Mary Ann gave him a set of books inscribed in his stage name of “J. Wilkes Booth.”85 It was her acknowledgment of his career and promise. She also proved a tender nurse for the painful souvenir from Irving. For once Booth had been lucky. The wound on his face was on the forehead at the hairline, which could be covered with a tousle of hair and no loss of good looks.86 The injury pained Booth for weeks, and the notoriety gleefully given the incident by the Clipper and Wilkes’ Spirit of the Times added embarrassment. The former claimed that the young actor trifled with Irving’s affections, while the latter called him faithless and deceptive.87 Booth learned his lesson. His amours continued, but he would not disgrace himself or the family again by giving occasion for a similar story.

  As he recuperated, Booth was deeply disturbed by the news from Baltimore. Events of April 19 had initiated the “Three Glorious Days” in which the pro-Southern element showed its muscle. “The very air was lurid with rebellion,” wrote James Hall, a Maryland physician.88 To prevent the violence that would attend passage of additional troops through Baltimore, Mayor George Brown and Governor Thomas H. Hicks ordered the railroad bridges north of the city destroyed. Exclaimed one Marylander at work on the business, “God damn them, we’ll stop them from coming down here.”89 Tracks were pulled up, telegraph lines cut, and mails stopped. U.S. flags disappeared, even from federal buildings. John T. Ford lowered the Stars and Stripes and raised the Maryland state flag at his Holliday Street Theatre.90 Unable to enter Baltimore, soldiers from Massachusetts and New York flanked the city. Washington, D.C., was reinforced by water via Annapolis, and on May 13 large columns of federal soldiers arrived in Baltimore from the south. Occupying Federal Hill, they overlooked the city and were in a position to devastate it with artillery fire. “It’s our turn now,” U.S. Treasurer Francis Spinner jubilantly declared to Lincoln’s assistant secretary John Hay as the tide turned.91

  The most severe threat to national authority ended at this time, although that fact was not apparent to those involved, least of all to Booth when he arrived in the city. He ran into William A. Howell, an actor friend of Arch Street days. Graduate of an amateur acting club in Philadelphia, Howell was employed in the utility corps at the Holliday and boarded at a house on High Street. Booth asked if he could share Howell’s room, and the latter gladly consented. Each evening Booth attended the theater, and when the play concluded, the pair walked home together. “After getting into bed, we would talk for hours of our prospects, both present and future,” recalled Howell. “He would crayon out for me his hopes and desires in a way that was irresistibly fascinating.” Few men admired Booth as much as Howell, who found him “quick, impulsive, fiery, big-hearted, generous, captivating, and magnetic.”92

  While Howell did not say, the ambitions Booth imagined for himself were apparently still as personal as they were political. His money problems had grown perilous. Hard times compelled Booth to take a few secondary roles at the Holliday, where his old mentor Harry Langdon was manager.93 He was even forced to pawn his Montgomery presentation cane. Lack of cash could not, however, interfere with his preoccupation with the ladies. Enamored with one young woman, he followed her about, stared at her through shop windows, and even attended church to catch her eye. To impress another enchantress, he borrowed money from Stuart Robson to redeem his cane and so present an elegant appearance for an afternoon rendezvous in the park.94

  Ultimately war fever intruded. Howell was a Northerner and Booth a border state man who had declared himself unwilling to fight for secession. “Yet the excitement and turbulence grew so prodigious as to become contagious and infect Wilkes Booth and myself,” Howell recalled. Booth told Howell that he would go to Harford County and raise a company for the Confederate army. Howell, who expected a lieutenancy out of the arrangement, would stay in Baltimore to look after their prospects there. The spreading Yankee presence doomed the plan. Political arrests were being made, weapons seized, local government shoved aside, and open recruiting for the South no longer safe.95 “I have often tried to conjecture what the outcome might have been had Wilkes Booth and myself raised a company and donned the gray,” fancied Howell as an elderly man in 1899. “We might have won the bubble reputation at the cannon’s mouth and, in case we had come out alive, have gone to Congress and been Governors.”

  The fate of George P. Kane, Baltimore’s police marshal, demonstrated the new state of affairs. A former Whig Party leader, Kane was a militia officer, businessman, city official, theatrical investor, and Booth family friend. During the April 19th riot he placed himself fearlessly between the Massachusetts troops and the citizens in an effort to stop the bloodshed. Kane’s Southern sympathies were undisguised, however, and Unionists in Baltimore complained to Washington that he commanded the bridge burners. When soldiers from Federal Hill, acting under orders of Major General Benjamin Butler, attempted to seize city arms from a warehouse, Kane refused to hand over his key, demanding to know their authority for such an action. “By authority of my sword!” a Northern colonel responded. The weapons were seized, and shortly thereafter so was Kane. Troops arrested him without a warrant in a 3:00 a.m. raid at his home on June 27. Major General Nathaniel P. Banks explained, “The government cannot regard him as otherwise than the head of an armed force hostile to its authority and acting in concert with its avowed enemies.” The marshal was hauled away to a military prison.96

  Kane’s arrest enraged Booth, and he remained angry about it for months. In March 1862 Kane’s name came up in a discussion of public events during a rehearsal at Mary Provost’s Theatre in New York City. One cast member declared that the person who ordered Kane’s arrest should be shot. Booth, who had been silent as the company debated the war, was still so angry at the marshal’s treatment that he erupted: “Yes, sir, you are right! I know George P. Kane, he is my friend, and the man who could drag him from the bosom of his family for no crime whatever, but a mere suspicion that he may commit one some time, deserves a dog’s death!” One startled but perceptive eyewitness to Booth’s outburst recalled, “It was not the matter of what he said, it was the manner.”97 Said another: “I don’t think J. W. is all o.k. in his nut.”98

  Kane spent more than a third of the entire war in prison. When he was released in November 1862—without charge, trial, explanation, or apology—he did not blame Lincoln for his incarceration. He blamed Secretary of State William Seward. On his way south, Kane wrote of Seward in a public letter, “All that is bad in a man, unpatriotic in a citizen, and corrupt in an officer finds itself concentrated in this individual.”99 The Confederate element in Maryland loathed Seward, whom it held chiefly responsible for its miseries. Booth fully shared this opinion.r />
  Large and unfriendly crowds continued to line the streets and hurrah for Jefferson Davis as Northern troops passed through Baltimore, but the trickle of soldiers became a flood, and they passed unopposed.100 The crackdown on the Southern faction accelerated. “Violent and unwarrantable searches and seizures, illegal arrests and imprisonments of citizens in military fortresses and dungeons, the subversion of state laws, the displacement of lawful authorities, and the substitution of an illegal and unauthorized force” were the order of the day, complained the editor Samuel S. Mills shortly before his own arrest.101 Mayor Brown joined Mills in prison, while Governor Hicks threw in with the Union. Baltimore, the nation’s third-largest city, was being subdued. The reflexively anti-Lincoln New York Day-Book lamented, “If secession be ever so wrong, the means resorted to to put it down are infernal and infamous.”102

  Booth passed a large Maryland flag flying on the Harford Road as he made his way to Bel Air, his mind struggling with these events and his role in them.103 His family worried that his abhorrence of abolitionists would carry him south. Asia knew that he had always considered it his fate to be a soldier and to die for his country, and she was relieved when her brother took rooms at Bel Air’s Eagle Hotel to spend the summer studying for the fall season.104

  Asia mentioned no military ambitions on her brother’s part, but he had them. He purchased as a birthday present for himself a copy of C. M. Wilcox’s Rifles and Rifle Practice (1859), a treatise on the theory of rifle firing published by an army lieutenant who taught military tactics at West Point.105 He also renewed his perilous friendship with the Bel Air lawyer Herman Stump.

  Stump, alleged to have taken part in the April 19 riot in Baltimore, was captain of a volunteer infantry company named the Harford Rifles. This militia troop was customarily called (and may be best understood as) “the Home Guard.” Booth joined them, drilling under Stump’s command. This little-known fact was revealed by Stump one winter evening in 1886 at a meeting of the Harford Historical Society. When fellow member E. M. Allen suggested the importance of preserving a record of events that occurred in the county during the Civil War, Stump began to reminisce. This was unusual because Stump was customarily silent, even with his own family, on his relationship with Booth. That night he was expansive, however, acknowledging that he had organized a militia unit to blow up the Conowingo Bridge over the Susquehanna River leading toward Philadelphia and that Booth had been a member of his company. Feeling awkward about what he was hearing, Allen ended Stump’s reminiscence by saying that “it was not his intention to revive unpleasant recollections but no man whose opinion was worth having would think less of a man now for the part he took in the late war.”106

  The Harford Rifles had been organized in the village early in 1860. Months later, after Lincoln’s election, they were still unarmed, and Stump appealed to Governor Hicks for weapons. The governor promised to furnish arms to the company, adding playfully that he wondered if Stump’s soldiers would “be good men to send out to kill Lincoln and his men.” Stump read Hicks’s letter to the militiamen, and it elicited laughs of approval from them. Hicks seemed solidly pro-Southern at the time, declaring “Maryland was indissolubly connected with the Old Dominion, and should act when and as she acted.” But when Virginia joined the rebellion in May, the governor adhered to Washington after all. Livid, Stump accused Hicks of wanting to “disarm the citizens of the State and give the arms to Northern militia, notoriously wanting them for war upon the South or outrage on our own citizens.” Stump declared that Hicks had reversed his jest. “Lincoln and his men should be the sportsmen and men of Maryland the game.”107

  Federal authorities declared Stump “an ardent advocate of the rebel cause in Harford County, attached to a volunteer military association recruiting and getting under discipline there with a view to entering the rebel service.”108 General Banks ordered a raid to arrest him and secure militia arms. Before dawn on the morning of July 13, 1861, two to three hundred men of the 12th Pennsylvania Volunteer Infantry Regiment poured into the village. “Northern fanatics in Bel Air!” noted a local diarist. “Half-starved, ill-clad, woebegone-looking wretches.”109 The soldiers fanned out, occupying the hamlet and picketing the roads. A search for weapons commenced. The Pennsylvanians took axes and chopped down the door of the town hall, an act of frightening symbolism for the future of local government. Other soldiers searched homes and made arrests. The roads out of Bel Air were closed, and no one was permitted to leave except slaves on their way to work.110

  The military strike trapped Booth in Bel Air, but Stump was more fortunate. He had attended a ball the preceding evening and afterward had escorted a young lady home and spent the night in the country. Unaware of this, soldiers raided the Eagle, where Stump boarded, and searched for him. They found Booth, in whom they had no interest, but no Stump. The federals decided to post a reward of ten dollars for him. The laughably small amount was war on a budget.

  Booth left the hotel and hurried up the street. Seeing the roads blockaded, he entered a shop and said to the owner, “I want you to let me go out through your back door.” Booth crept out and crawled on his hands and knees through a garden. Once clear, he went to a friend’s house near Bel Air Academy, borrowed a horse, and galloped to Thomas Run, where he found Stump and warned him of his danger.111 Stump fled to the Big Woods, a tract of heavy forest where the militia was gathering. Booth went to Tudor Hall. During all the derring-do, he had been shot at. Catherine Quinn, who was visiting at the house with her family, saw Booth rush in exclaiming that “he had been fired on by the soldiers and meant to defend himself.” Booth went to the old log house, got his rifle, and headed to the Big Woods.112

  For the young Marylanders who assembled in the dense forest, the gloom of the setting was apt. They had lost more than the day; they had lost the moment, the state, and now even their own community. They were indeed the desperate people their former friend Hicks claimed they were, and the time for life-transforming choices was at hand. Go south and throw in with the Confederacy or submit to the new regime? It would be an intensely individual decision because Marylanders would not be carried forward in a body by action of their state government as soldiers to the north and south were.

  Every man in the Big Woods agreed on two things. All opposed coercion of the seceding states, and all objected to the presence of Northern troops in their own. Beyond that, opinions varied. Some were solidly Southern. Stump’s first cousins James and Robert Archer entered the Confederate army, the former becoming a brigadier general. Others joined them, taking militia arms to Virginia. Stump opted for Canada. Some chose to stay home in Harford County and mind their own business. They became malingerers in Lincoln’s reunion crusade. Still others may have joined or been drafted into federal service. More than one thousand men from the county would ultimately wear the blue. Like Maryland itself, Harford County was divided.

  Booth’s feelings were unmistakable. “He was,” wrote Asia, “what he had been since childhood, an ardent lover of the South and her policy, an upholder of Southern principles.”113 On the slavery issue he was entirely Southern in feeling.114 Knowing that, friends urged him to join them in a company that ultimately became part of the Confederacy’s famous Stonewall Brigade. To their surprise he refused. When they renewed their appeal, he rebuffed them again. In Richmond he would be denounced “as a ‘turncoat’ from the Southern cause.” Could one love Virginia and not share her peril? One theatrical acquaintance in the future Confederate capital “never lost an opportunity of excoriating this actor for his apostasy against the South.”115

  The New York Herald reported in 1865 that “many of his friends have wondered why he did not join the rebel army, in which his sympathies were already enlisted.”116 In the early months of the war, before the brutal nature of the conflict became apparent, a multitude of romantic spirits enlisted in both armies. As a child Booth dreamed of military glory, and the conflict offered the chance to earn it. How could a healthy young man
desirous of distinction and passionate of view not be swept away by the urge to volunteer? Even Asia wondered about it. Provoked by one of John’s outbursts in favor of the South as he loitered around her home in Philadelphia, she lost patience and snapped, “Why not go fight for her then? Every Marylander worthy the name is fighting her battles.” Asia saw that her remark stung and she regretted it, but the question was a fair one.

  Family tradition, a powerful influence carrying young men into the army in 1861, had no force in the Booth family. The Booths had no military legacy.117 The father deserted a British ship during the War of 1812. “He was never a friend to gunpowder,” it was explained.118 Junius believed that actors should stay clear of politics, and Asia often reminded John of their father’s opinion. “No actor should meddle with political affairs,” she said. “The stage and politics did not go hand in hand.” June, Edwin, and Joseph felt the same. The brothers had neither military aptitude nor interest.

  Some writers later wondered if cowardice was a motive for Booth’s nonenlistment. B. F. Morris, compiler of tributes to President Lincoln, wrote that Booth was an individual “whose chivalry could induce him to murder but could never summon courage to fight in the ranks of his brother rebels.”119 The problem with this interpretation was that Booth had raw fortitude in abundance. His instinct in times of danger was to charge it head-on. Proud of his well-conditioned body, Booth had the self-confidence of an athlete. Added to that he was “a dead shot, a fine fencer, a thorough horseman, and a master of the dagger or bowie knife,” claimed New York’s Play Bill, a stage paper, in 1865. “Ninety-five men out of a hundred would be no match for him at fighting.” He was bold, even reckless with his person. Whatever his faults, he was no coward. When the Play Bill reported after the assassination that “his personal bravery has been unquestioned,” it expressed the opinion of all those who knew him well.120