Blood on the Moon

by Edward , Jr. Steers

  The South wants justice, has waited for it long. She will wait no longer.

  The South is leaving us. O would to God that Clay and Webster could hear those words. Weep fellow countrymen, for the brightest half of our stars upon the nation’s banner have grown dim. Once out my friends, all will be dark and dreary.

  ... The south has a right according to the constitution to keep and hold slaves. And we have no right under that constitution to interfere with her or her slaves.20

  Near the end of the manuscript, Booth told of the incident involving his schoolboy friend, Tommy Gorsuch. Young Tommy’s father, Edward Gorsuch, had been killed, some said murdered, while attempting to recover his runaway slaves from a Pennsylvania farmhouse. Booth ended his unfinished manuscript with the following account: “The fugitive slave law. Gentlemen, when I was a school boy, my bosom friend was a boy three years my senior named Gorruge [Thomas Gorsuch], he was as noble a youth as any living. He had two brothers grown to be men. And an old father who loved and was beloved by them. He was all that a man of honour should be. Two of his negroes committed a robbery, they were informed upon. They nearly beat the informer to death. They ran away from Maryland, came to this state [Pennsylvania]. The father, the two sons, the boy my playmate, came to this state under the protection of the fugitive slave law (not only to recover their property, but to arrest the thieves who belonged to them). ...”21

  Booth’s speech stopped short at this point without finishing the story of Tommy Gorsuch’s father. Today, we know the incident by the name given to it by the newspapers in 1851, the Christiana Riot. The incident in Christiana was a microcosm for the growing concern sweeping the nation over slavery. It was a dark harbinger of the violence that was becoming endemic in the decade leading up to the Civil War. Most important, Booth used it years later as an example of the unwarranted “constant agitation of the slavery question.”22

  Edward Gorsuch, young Tommy’s father, owned several hundred acres of rich land north of Baltimore where he farmed wheat and corn with the help of several slaves. In September of 1849 four of Gorsuch’s slaves made their escape across the border into the neighboring free state of Pennsylvania. Two years had passed with no word of the slaves. The matter had begun to fade from Gorsuch’s mind when he received a letter from a man named William Padgett. Padgett, who earned the better part of his living as an informer on fugitive slaves, wrote Gorsuch that he had information about Gorsuch’s runaways. Padgett had learned that all four lived not far away in the village of Christiana in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania. For a fee, Padgett would be happy to help Gorsuch in gaining their capture. Gorsuch accepted Padgett’s offer and set out for Pennsylvania accompanied by his son Dickinson Gorsuch, his cousin Joshua Gorsuch, his nephew Dr. Thomas Pearce, and two of his neighbors, Nathan Nelson and Nicholas Hutchings.23

  Padgett led the party to the home of a free Black named William Parker, where Gorsuch found two of his slaves. Parker was himself an escaped slave who had come to the area several years earlier. Parker had organized the local Blacks into an effective resistance group by teaching them to fight violence with violence. Shortly after arriving at Parker’s house, Gorsuch and his posse found themselves confronting a large number of free Blacks from the surrounding area.

  After several tense minutes of bantering back and forth between Parker and Gorsuch, violence erupted. Someone struck the elder Gorsuch with a club. Stunned, he fell to his knees. Seeing his father fall, Dickinson Gorsuch raised his revolver to shoot toward the attackers only to be struck across the arm with such force that the revolver was knocked to the ground. At that moment all hell broke loose. When calm eventually returned to the scene, young Dickinson Gorsuch lay wounded from a shotgun blast to the abdomen. Edward Gorsuch was found kneeling in a pool of his own blood. Protruding from his neck was the rusty blade of an old corn cutter whose handle had been worn smooth from years of use. Edward Gorsuch died within the hour. His son Dickinson would eventually recover from his wounds.

  In the days following the fight at William Parker’s house, the national press began to refer to the incident as the Christiana Riot. The Southern press made Gorsuch a cause celebre in their defense of slavery, demanding Federal action. Following the arrest of several area Blacks and three White men who had refused to aid the Federal marshal on the scene, a sensational trial soon followed. The trial was turned into a test between two cultures: Southern versus Northern, slave versus free. In the end, freedom prevailed. The twelve jurors took only fifteen minutes to return a verdict of “not guilty.”24 Southerners were outraged, while Northerners celebrated.

  Edward Gorsuch had been determined to carry on his way of life, even if it resulted in his death. To his Southern countrymen, “He died for law.”25 To Northern abolitionists, he died in an evil cause receiving his just reward. The death of Tommy Gorsuch’s father touched the young John Wilkes Booth personally. While he would move on with his life, he would not forget what happened in Christiana.

  The young boy eventually put death behind him and turned to brighter, gayer moments in his life. As he grew older he became even more handsome and more charming. He captivated all who crossed his path. John Deery, a close friend and owner of Booth’s favorite billiard establishment in Washington, remembered Booth in later years: “John cast a spell over most men… and I believe over most women.”26 Others echoed Deery’s assessment: “He was one of the best raconteurs to whom I ever listened. As he talked he threw himself into his words, brilliant, ready, enthusiastic. He could hold a group spellbound by the hour at the force and fire and beauty of him.”27 His brother Edwin would remark wistfully, “John Wilkes had the genius of my father, and was far more gifted than I.”28

  In 1874 Asia Booth Clarke wrote a memoir of her brother and her family.29 In it she provides a sister’s insight, painting a sympathetic picture while shedding light on the darker, more complex character of her brother. She loved to write and was an accomplished correspondent. Like all the Booth children, she inherited her father’s love of classical literature and his personality quirks. Small trifles could send her off sulking. Her siblings were cautioned to leave her alone during these little fits. To one of her closest friends she wrote just before her twenty-first birthday, “Oh Jean, my Jean, all is vanity.”30 Vanity was clearly a Booth family trait.

  Asia and John made a wonderful couple. Both were bright, witty, and full of life. John loved his older sister, and she adored him. In her memoir she wrote: “As a boy he was beloved by his associates, and as a man few could withstand the fascination of his modest, gentle manners. He inherited some of the most prepossessing qualities of his father,… he had the black hair and large hazel eyes of his mother. These were fringed heavily with long up-curling lashes, a noticeable peculiarity as rare as beautiful.”31

  But Asia’s flattering description of her brother was not without its shadows. With his father dead, brothers June and Ned on tour, and young Joe away at school, it was a feminine world that surrounded young John. Its mores would bond him even closer to the Southern culture he would passionately adopt in his adult years. It had a certain political correctness that rejected democratic principles. Asia described how her younger brother bristled at the thought of the women of Tudor Hall dining at the same table as the White laborers. He would have none of it. It simply wasn’t the Southern way. Asia may well have influenced her brother in his view of social graces. She wrote about the difference between Northern women and Southern ladies: “There were no ‘Masters’ and ‘Mistresses’ in the North. Thus [Northern women] unwillingly yielded, and forced themselves to encourage undue familiarity with those, too often the refuse of other countries, who had been in more servile bondage than the American slaves. Often grating under the insolent freedom of these ignorant menials whom they dared not even to call servants, northern women vaunted their love of equality and called themselves democratic.”

  Asia described her brother’s first signs of “undemocratic feeling” when it came time to share the
ir meals with the farmhands: “It was the custom for members of the family to dine and sup with the white men who did the harvesting. Wilkes had a struggle with his pride and knew not which to abide by, his love of equality and brotherhood, or that southern reservation which jealously kept the white laborer from free association with his employer or superior.”32

  According to Asia, “Wilkes made a compromise with his pride, as he termed it, and desired us, his mother and sisters, not to be present at the meals with the men.” It was a short leap from this view of Northern crudity to the uncouth “Railsplitter” from the west. In Lincoln, John could only see an “ignorant menial” whose strange view of a republican democracy included the lowest forms of society at the dinner table. To John Wilkes Booth, Lincoln was a man who both ate his meals and blew his nose with his fingers.

  Although aristocratic in character, Booth was not averse to a little sweat of his own, albeit aristocratic sweat. After his father died and the family moved into Tudor Hall, Booth tried his hand at farming. It was to no avail. While the spirit was willing, the body was not. He was not a sower but a reaper. Let others do the sowing. He had bigger plans.

  In August of 1855 the seventeen-year-old Booth began his formal acting career. It was at the same age that his father first played upon the stage in England. Young John played the part of Richmond in Richard III at the Charles Street Theatre in Baltimore.33 It was a flawed performance, perhaps premature, but the thrill had overtaken him. He played to tolerant reviews more out of respect for his father than for him. The truth was that his poor performance was due to poor preparation. Determined not to ride on his father’s or brother’s coattails, he billed himself as “J. Wilkes,” reserving his fall name until that day when he would do it credit and not embarrassment. He told Asia he would never be able to equal his father. Perhaps not, but he would come close, very close. Over the next ten years he would ascend to the heights of his father’s profession and claim his own place among America’s matinee idols.

  By 1858 Booth had accepted a position paying eleven dollars a week with the Richmond Theatre in Richmond, Virginia.34 He was still performing under the name “J. Wilkes.” Booth was in the employ of the theater’s owners during the 1858–59 season and was, therefore, well placed for one of the most dramatic events in American history, an event that was spawned from the violence of Christiana eight years before.35

  On October 16, 1859, John Brown and his “liberation army” of eighteen men seized the United States armory at Harpers Ferry, (West) Virginia. Brown had sought to foment a major slave uprising throughout Virginia and elsewhere and to begin the final purge of slavery from American soil. A colonel in the United States Army, Robert E. Lee, and his handsome, young Lieutenant, James Ewell Brown “Jeb” Stuart, were sent to Harpers Ferry where they soon quelled the uprising and took Brown and other survivors prisoner.

  Brown was placed on trial and charged with treason against the sovereign state of Virginia. The attack on a United States arsenal was treated as a state crime. After a trial of one week, Brown was found guilty and sentenced to hang on December 2, 1859. Two weeks after the trial ended, the Richmond Militia was ordered to Charlestown, (West) Virginia, the site of the hanging, to ensure order at the spectacle and to represent the capital city at the execution. Brown’s hanging would be a special state event.

  Booth was in Richmond fulfilling a theatrical contract at the time of the trial. On learning that a militia unit was about to travel to Charlestown, Booth was able to convince his military friends with his persuasive “force and fire and beauty” to allow him to join their ranks. Wearing a borrowed uniform, Booth climbed aboard the train and bundled with his new comrades as they made their way west into the Blue Ridge Mountains of Virginia.

  During the next two weeks Booth took his turn standing sentinel and serving his adopted “state’s cause.” It was a wonderful feeling, and one that carried no threat of harm. It afforded Booth all the glory and none of the danger. On the ill-fated day of Brown’s execution, Booth stood with the Richmond troops encircling the scaffold that the great abolitionist would ascend to meet his maker. Booth could not help but admire the fire and passion of the old man’s commitment to his cause even if it was an evil cause. There was an attraction to Brown’s death that fixated the twenty-one-year-old Booth. He told Asia that Brown was a man inspired, “the grandest character of this century!”36

  Brown’s hanging did not quell the unrest that ran throughout the country. It only served to incense the abolitionists and reinforced the fears of many in the South. To many in the North, Brown was a martyr; to those in the South, he was a harbinger of things to come. To Booth and his cohorts, Lincoln would soon replace John Brown as the hated symbol of abolition. In one of his fits of passion Booth told his sister, “He [Lincoln] is made the tool of the North, to crush out slavery, by robbery, rapine, slaughter and bought armies” (Booth’s emphasis).37 The comment about “bought armies” was a reference to the undesirable aliens of Europe who had made their way into the mainstream of America, in Asia’s words, “The refuse of the other countries.”

  From 1861 through 1864 Booth continued to ply his trade of acting and emerged as a genuine star of the American stage. Under the “star” system, the finest actors and actresses toured the country performing at all the great theaters as headliners supported by local players who formed the theater’s “stock” company. As a “star,” Booth earned from hundreds to thousands of dollars a week including a percentage of the box office.38 At the height of his career he earned $20,000 in one year, an amount equal to a quarter of a million today.39 Booth’s star tours took him around the country, from Boston to New Orleans, and as far west as Leavenworth, Kansas. Wherever he traveled and performed he was hailed as a good fellow and a great actor. By 1864 Booth had achieved all he could hope for in the field of acting. Freed of his father’s shadow, his star now formed its own constellation.

  The year 1864 saw changes in Booth, both in his professional and personal behavior. He began to experience difficulty with hoarseness. His throat problems have been attributed to a variety of causes ranging from improper care of his voice to bronchitis to syphilis, and are thought by some writers to be the reason Booth left his acting career.40 His bouts of hoarseness were not persistent, however. His difficulty with his voice was episodic throughout 1864, and Booth appeared in several performances where several laudatory reviews made no reference to any difficulty with his voice or ability to project.

  Speculation claimed that Booth developed a severe cold that eventually turned into bronchitis as a result of becoming snowbound in St. Joseph, Missouri, in January of 1864. Scheduled to perform at Ben DeBar’s theater in St. Louis, Missouri, the following week, Booth was unable to travel by train because of the heavy snows.41 He was able to hire a four-horse sleigh and travel sixty miles overland to St. Louis under extremely severe conditions.42

  Although Booth does not write in his letters of contracting a cold or bronchitis, some writers have speculated that his prolonged exposure to the subzero weather during the trip to Breckinridge may have been the cause of his impaired speaking ability.43 While this may be true, it did not force Booth from the stage. Booth performed as late as March 18, 1865, in the very theater where he would murder Lincoln, and where he received his usual laudatory reviews for his performance.

  It was not bronchitis that saw John Wilkes Booth turn away from the stage in late 1864; it was his hatred for Abraham Lincoln and concern for his beloved South. Booth no longer had time for the stage. He was becoming consumed with only one passion, Abraham Lincoln. In 1860 he wrote: “Now that we have found the serpent that madens [sic] us, we should crush it in its birth.”44 The serpent was abolition. Four years later he was even more convinced that something great must be done if his beloved South was to survive. He became convinced that he was the one to crush the serpent’s chief apostle, King Abraham Africanus.

  Events were moving Booth and the Confederacy’s leaders closer and closer to
gether. The issuance of the Emancipation Proclamation “had raised to a new level of intensity the greatest fear of most southerners … a bloody slave uprising.”45 The proclamation’s authorization to enlist Blacks into the Union army was viewed as “tantamount to granting them a license to murder, rape, and pillage their former owners.”46 Lincoln’s call for emancipation was immoral—an act that threatened the life of every woman and child throughout the South.

  Stephen Fowler Hale, secession commissioner from Alabama, proclaimed that abolition policies such as Lincoln’s must lead to “amalgamation [of the races] or the extinction of the one or the other. Could Southern men submit to such degradation and ruin?”47 William C. Harris, commissioner from Mississippi, answered for his state: “She had rather see the last of her race, men, women and children, immolated in one common funeral pile, than see them subjected to the degradation of civil, political and social equality with the negro race.”48

  Lincoln’s heinous act calling for emancipation was the first step in stripping away the unwritten rule of “civilized warfare” that held political leaders immune from becoming military targets. As despicable as Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation was to the leaders of the South, it would be followed by an even more heinous event that would place Lincoln in the center of the bull’s-eye. A black flag was about to be raised.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  The Black Flag Is Raised

  The purest treasure mortal times afford

  Is spotless reputation.

  Richard the Second, 1.1

  One of Abraham Lincoln’s great hopes for resolving the slavery crisis lay in his plan of compensated emancipation. Realizing that ending slavery by military force could come about only with great loss of life and national treasure, Lincoln wanted to shorten the war and accomplish emancipation by having the Federal government compensate slave owners by purchasing their “property.” In his message to Congress on March 6, 1862, Lincoln pointed out that “any member of Congress, with the census-tables and Treasury reports before him, can readily see for himself how very soon the current expenditures of this war would purchase, at fair valuation, all the slaves in any named State.”1