Booth never crossed the lines to perform in the Confederacy, but he did perform in Union-occupied areas of the South like New Orleans, where he began a run at the St. Charles Theatre on March 14, 1864. The city’s oldest and largest theater, the St. Charles had been closed by the war. The citizens of New Orleans were in no mood to watch the imaginary woes of actors when they had trouble enough of their own. Grant’s capture of Vicksburg in July 1863 reopened the river and improved the economic life of the city, however, and DeBar decided to revive the St. Charles, with Booth to headline.156 The star played nineteen nights to mixed houses and reviews. One critic complained that his combat scene in Richard III—the physical highlight of the play—was so protracted as to be ludicrous. The remark calls to mind Ellsler’s observation that “John Wilkes as Richard never knew when he was conquered; consequently he was never ready to die. In many instances he wore poor Richmond out, and on one occasion Richmond was compelled to whisper, ‘For God’s sake, John, die! Die! If you don’t, I shall.’ ”157
Booth had caught a bad cold in Leavenworth, and by the time he played in Cincinnati en route to New Orleans, he was quite ill with bronchitis. Two physicians were called in, treating him with pills, mustard baths, and a throat cauterization. Severe hoarseness continued in New Orleans, marring his engagement. Two nights at the end of March had to be canceled. Booth just couldn’t go on. “My dear boy,” he wrote Joe Simonds, “you have no idea how sick I have been.”158
His extended time in the city gave him the opportunity to look around, and what he saw shocked him. Booth had always pointed to the forlorn appearance of Alexandria, Virginia, across the Potomac River from Washington, as an example of the cruel inflictions of the war, but New Orleans exceeded anything he could have imagined. “This great Hydra of Rebellion,” as Navy Lieutenant David D. Porter phrased it, was seized early in the war.159 A heavy hand kept the South’s largest and most prosperous city subdued. “I have never been upon a battlefield, but, O my countrymen,” Booth wrote a few months later, “could you all but see the reality or effects of this horrid war, as I have seen them, I know you would think like me. And would pray the Almighty to create in the northern mind a sense of right and justice (even should it possess no seasoning of mercy), and that he would dry up this Sea of blood between us—which is daily growing wider.”160
At the home of Thomas W. Davey, manager of the St. Charles, he ripped into the occupation, “was very vitriol in his talk as to Pres’t Lincoln, and called the Union soldiers all manner of evil names.” An old friend of Davey, First Sergeant James Peacock of the 8th Regiment, Indiana Volunteer Infantry, was present. Peacock, a Canadian native, was a recently naturalized citizen as unionist in his views as Booth was rebel, and the soldier exploded in anger at what he heard.
“Cowardly dog,” he shouted at the actor. He exclaimed that “if Booth had one spark of manhood in him, he would be in the Confederate ranks with a gun on his shoulder.” There, at least, he and his views might be worthy of notice.
Enraged, Booth reached into his hip pocket for a pistol. Peacock seized a carving knife from the dining room table and told Booth that “if he attempted to draw a pistol on me, I would eviscerate him.” Before the situation turned tragic, Davey and his wife, Lizzie Maddern, rushed into the room and calmed the men.161
This far south Booth did not care to disguise his views. Standing on the unevenly laid granite blocks that formed the pavement of St. Charles Street, Booth let out a cheer for the Confederacy. His companions dared him to follow that up by singing “Bonnie Blue Flag,” a popular rebel tune that military authorities had banned in the city. Without a moment’s hesitation he broke into song. “The rest of the party was too scared to think,” recalled Edward Curtis, who lived in Booth’s boardinghouse. “It was treason to sing that song, so they ran away.” Quickly surrounded by excited soldiers, Booth informed them that he knew nothing about the ban. He was a stranger to the city, had heard the tune, and liked it. The soldiers released him. “Booth had a way about him which could not be resisted, the way which permits a man to overstep the boundaries of the law and do things for which other people would be punished,” Curtis believed.162
Between April 25 and May 27, 1864, Booth made his fourth and final appearance in Boston. At the start of this five-week marathon he had a lingering cold, but he was able to complete his engagement without losing any nights. The press declared his vocal problems temporary and his engagement highly successful.163 And yet, less than a year later, Richard Frothingham Jr. of the Boston Post, which had celebrated his performances, stated that Booth was washed up. He was suffering from an incurable bronchial affliction. “The papers and critics have apologized for his hoarseness,” wrote Frothingham, “but it has long been known by his friends that he would be compelled to abandon the stage because of this throat disease.”164
This is a serious allegation, and Frothingham was not the only one to state it. An unidentified actor friend of Booth’s informed Harry Hill, who operated a legendary Houston Street bar for sporting clientele in Manhattan, that the worst was indeed at hand. The star had consulted an elocutionist and a physician about his condition, this friend said, only to be informed that “his voice was permanently gone, for stage purposes at least.” Stunned at the news, Booth hinted darkly that there were other ways a man might win fame. “It is one of the strange ideas that are suggested by the possibilities of real life that had Wilkes Booth not lost his voice, Abraham Lincoln might not have lost his life,” Hill reflected in his 1884 series “Thirty Years in Gotham.”165
This claim must be taken with skepticism, as it provides an overly simple explanation of the assassination. Every traveling actor suffered from colds, sore throats, and bouts of bronchitis. Booth compounded his problems by smoking and drinking. But the assertion that he was finished would have astonished his family. Asia believed her brother had a wonderful future before him, and Edwin wrote that if John had not gone mad and shot the president, “he would have made a brilliant mark in the theatrical world.”166
At the same time, an unspecified throat problem did spoil June’s career, and one sees signs that John, too, was concerned about his voice.167 He put aside the pungent Louisiana perique and loaded his meerschaum pipe with kinnikinnick, a mixture of dried sumac leaves and the inner bark of dogwood or willow smoked for centuries by Native Americans. The ingredients of these leaves had astringent and antiseptic properties and were used for treating fevers. Booth found the aromatic blend soothing on his throat.168
Brown, of the Clipper, who knew more about the public and private lives of Civil War actors than any other person, believed that chronic bronchitis did drive Booth off the stage. He could do the occasional benefit, of course, and he could manage, but he could not act as before. He was being forced to the wings.169 Booth acknowledged a problem in a seldom-noticed remark to the playwright Augustus Cazauran. When Cazauran asked him to look at a new play, Booth replied, “I have left the stage. My voice goes back on me.” Surely not, Cazauran responded. “I cannot act,” Booth said bluntly. “I have quit the stage and am out of the business.”170 While the severity of his trouble remains undetermined, his remarks conceded that a cloud had appeared on the horizon.
Was it related—or only coincidental—that at about this time Booth made an effort to earn money outside of the profession? He formed the Dramatic Oil Company with Ellsler and a second Clevelander named Thomas Y. Mears. Their goal was to make a fortune in the oil country of western Pennsylvania. The men purchased drilling rights on a three-and-a-half-acre farm lot near Franklin. Mears, an inventor, prizefighter, fireman, salesman, gambler, and knockabout, would boss the job site, with Simonds coming on from Boston to manage the office. Mears hired Henry Sires, a local driller, to work the property. When Mears introduced Sires to Booth, the driller apologized for the oil-covered hand he extended in greeting. “Never mind,” laughed Booth. “That’s what we are after.”171
Franklin was a boomtown. Its streets bustled with ent
repreneurs, dreamers, and hustlers infected with oil-fever, and Booth, as intoxicated as all the rest, spent a happy, expectant season here. As Sires worked the rig, he scouted the district for new properties. When the weather was poor, he loafed at his hotel, read, or joined an impromptu club of literary spirits who gathered to drink and talk. On the weekend he attended Bible classes with Simonds at the local Methodist church. He was quiet on these occasions but quite lively at dances and at taverns, where his spirits were truly engaged. One night, watching a ruckus on the street outside a bar, Booth suddenly threw out his chest, drew back his shoulders, and cried out, “My God, I would like to be in a fight!”
Booth nearly got his wish on the Allegheny River ferry. His fellow passenger Titus Ridgway, a sawmill owner, made a derogatory comment about Southerners.172 “Booth was a man who would not willingly offend or injure a living soul,” recalled the ferry operator, whose name was McAninch, but he was also quick-tempered, and he retorted in kind. Ridgway replied that Booth’s remarks were lies. “I will never allow a man to call me a liar,” shouted Booth. Ridgway grabbed a hand spike, and Booth reached for his pistol. McAninch jumped between them, seized Ridgway, forced the spike out of his hand, and turned him aside. Ridgway was an ignorant loudmouth, McAninch later explained, while “Booth was a thorough gentleman [who] always treated the ferryman with great kindness and the greatest respect.”
Meanwhile troubles abounded at the well. The irrepressible Mears found his position one sweet deal, and “Mears took good care of Mears,” as Sires saw it. The partner spent company money as if it were his own, purchasing a watch, presents, and other personal items. When Simonds finally caught up with him, Mears cursed the accountant into the ground.173 Booth took over, confronted the brawny scoundrel, and got cut with a knife for his effort. At the rig things were equally vexatious. “They always had a great deal of trouble from one cause or another,” recalled J. H. Lee, an oilman. Casing had to be pulled and replaced repeatedly, and an explosive charge intended to remove an obstruction down the bore hole actually decreased production. What should have gushed merely trickled. “Not enough to grease the working barrel,” said Sires.174 Expenses soared, and Booth, far from making a fortune, was losing one.
Heading back to his lodgings after one discouraging day, Booth noticed a litter of stray kittens. He bought some milk and took the cats home to Sarah Webber, his landlady. Would she care for the little creatures, he asked, until a good home could be found for them?175
john wilkes booth had great respect for his vocation, recalled Louise Wooster.176 “Why cannot the world understand the true nature and dignity of our noble profession?” he asked. “The world will think better of the actor some day and treat him more liberally.”177 Booth felt that Lincoln’s frequent attendance at the theater indicated that the president appreciated the stage and earned three kind words—“God bless him”—from his assassin.178 A humble and anonymous tramp understood as well. One winter day the man knocked on John Mathews’s door in Washington. The shabbily dressed vagabond, who had been over at Ford’s looking for actors, said, “I have nothing to eat or drink, no place to sleep, and hardly shoes that will stay on my feet. I thought if I could see some of the actors they would set me up a little.”
Mathews fetched a basin of water in which the man bathed his feet. “As he was washing, I looked in the glass opposite me and saw John Booth looking down at the man with an expression of interest and pity.” Mathews outfitted the tramp with shoes, socks, and an old suit and sent him on his way.
“What a compliment that was to actors, Johnny,” Booth said to Mathews. “Did you mark that, my boy? He didn’t go to one of those Bible-thumpers, did he? He went to the theater. He asked for the actors.”179
Booth was proud of his trade. It gave him fame, wealth, and a sense of self-esteem. But he walked away from it. After his final Boston appearance ended in May 1864, he refused all future engagements. It was a pivotal decision and therefore worth a hard look, but, as in many transforming moments, his motives were complex, even setting aside the significance of a throat problem whose severity is indeterminable.
First of all, Booth found performing around the country hard and lonely work. He had never liked touring.180 A star was a nomad with a nomad’s wandering and rootless life. The money was great, it was true, but the dollars were earned “by a life of toil and travel, sleepless nights, tedious journeys, and weary work.”181 It was a routine of cold and drafty theaters, indifferent hotels, and indigestible meals. These were kitted together with constant travel, often at night, on jolting, swaying trains and the attendant ordeal of banging doors, loud voices, importuning nutsellers, milling passersby, and cramped seats. One particularly irksome trip from Boston to Chicago took Booth fifty-one hours to complete.182 And, when he arrived, he was expected to be fresh and engaging, of course, and ready to tear his heart out and hand it to an audience of strangers.
Success came, but at a high cost to the mind and body that produced it. Booth suffered a terrible strain in acting colossal characters. After playing Lear, for example, he would remain Lear half the night and wake next morning weary, nervous, and unrefreshed.183 Added to that was the weekly accumulation of sprains, cuts, and bruises. While Booth impersonated supermen, he wasn’t one himself, and he often felt bludgeoned. Given his playing style, no actor in America put more blood, sweat, and tears into his work than he did. The routine was punishing.
Every star tired of this grind from time to time. Edwin believed that he was little more than a trained monkey. “I wish to God I was not an actor,” he wrote a friend in 1863. “I despise and dread the damned business.”184 Equally exasperated on occasion, John left no remark so impassioned, but he did tell Weston Bassett shortly before he quit acting, “To be candid with you, the profession is a very uninteresting theme with me. I like its great climaxes the same as I do the great upheavals in nature or the meteoric flashes in human life, but the almost endless details, the commonplaces, weary me.”185 The grind was like a leaden weight on someone so naturally restless. Edwin felt he had to endure such things. John embraced no such destiny. “Fate takes hold of some men, but with me I do not wait for Fate,” John told Frank Jerome, a scenic painter at the theater in Leavenworth. “I make my own fate, and have to thank no man for it.”186
The actor Harry Weaver felt that when Booth first entered his vocation “he had made up his mind to devote all his energies to the task, was most thoroughly in earnest, most sincerely devoted to his profession.”187 The effort was now spent, and his longtime friend Harry Langdon felt Booth abandoned his good acting habits toward the end. Even John Mathews, in his childlike apologies for Booth, had to admit that “he would not get down to study and bring himself into shape.”188 He had reached the limits of his willingness to slave for his art. Simply put, he did not live to act. Accordingly he never made that final and supreme effort to do what may have been within his grasp—establish himself as the very best.189
“Have you lost all your ambition, or what is the matter?” Simonds asked him not long after the actor left Franklin. “I hardly know what to make of you.”190 The withdrawal from his former world and friends confused and concerned Simonds. The business manager foresaw that retirement, with nothing else to do, would lead to trouble. Booth would grow depressed and would have too much time on his hands in which to think, or more accurately to stew.191 A helmless ship, he would be less able to curb the drinking. “None knew better than Booth himself,” thought a Chicago friend, that alcohol was trouble. The star always believed that if he could only find the right woman she could help him banish the temptation. “With him it was an often expressed hope that should he ever marry, he might obtain for a wife someone possessing sufficient influence over him to restrain him from this accursed excitement.”192
Above all, and at every occasion, hovered the war. Wherever he went, it intruded. One afternoon in Cleveland, not long before his trip to New Orleans, Booth was in rehearsal when a noise on Bank Street drew th
e company to the windows. The 29th Ohio Volunteer Militia, having just received its colors, was marching past to the cheers of the city. “I was the first to return to the stage,” recalled Martin Wright. “There was Booth striding back and forth like a caged lion. His face was white and convulsed with rage. He was swearing horribly. This was the only time I ever heard an oath pass his lips.”193
Toward the end of his life Booth wrote to his mother, “For four years I have lived (I may say) A slave in the north (A favored slave its true, but no less hateful to me on that account.) Not daring to express my thoughts, even in my own home. Constantly hearing every principle dear to my heart denounced as treasonable. And knowing the vile and savage acts committed on my countrymen their wives & helpless children, I have cursed my willful idleness. And begun to deem myself a coward and to despise my own existence. For four years I have borne it mostly for your dear sake. And for you alone have I also struggled to fight off this desire to be gone.”194
Mary Ann did not read this letter until it was too late. She found it a few days after the assassination. Clarke took it away from her and gave it to federal authorities, and they suppressed it. The letter was rediscovered at the National Archives in 1977. Those who knew Booth well, like John T. Ford, did not need to read it, however. They knew the story it told. As long as the South was winning, or at least not losing, he could live with his promise to his mother to stay out of the war. But as things grew critical for the Confederacy in 1864, Ford believed, “he brooded over it and fretted at the thought that, after all his warlike talk, he was acting a coward in the eyes of the world in keeping back from deeds. His promise preyed upon his mind.”195
On occasion he was called out and embarrassed for his inaction. Langdon found him wrapped in a large white coat and reveling with Sam Chester at the House of Lords in New York. He was drinking heavily. When the talk turned to politics, as it did increasingly, Langdon lost patience. “John, you ought to be ashamed of yourself. To stay on our side and help the other.”196 The remark hit Booth like a well-directed punch. Little could have been more hurtful.
Fortune's Fool: The Life of John Wilkes Booth Page 23
