Fortune's Fool: The Life of John Wilkes Booth
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FORTUNE’S FOOL
FORTUNE’S FOOL
....
The Life of John Wilkes Booth
TERRY ALFORD
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© Terry Alford 2015
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ISBN 978-0-19-505412-5
ebook ISBN 978-0-19-023255-9
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Printed in the United States of America
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Dedicated to James O. Hall,
Historian, Mentor, Friend
CONTENTS
....
Introduction
1. Bright Boy Absalom
2. The Muffin
3. Lions and Foxes
4. The Union as It Was
5. Shining in the Rough
6. Life’s Fitful Fever
7. Mischief, Thou Art Afoot
8. The Fiery Furnace
9. Come Weal or Woe
10. This One Mad Act
11. Exit Booth
12. The Last Ditch
Epilogue: A Green and Narrow Bed
Acknowledgments
Notes
Note on Sources
Index
FORTUNE’S FOOL
INTRODUCTION
when the african american educator John E. Washington was a boy walking home in the 1880s, he quickened his step when he passed Ford’s Theatre. In fact, he ran past the building. Eyes locked straight ahead, he refused to look in that direction. The old folks said there were ghosts there, and Washington could feel them. Restless spirits, begging for release, they flowed around the theater. After midnight one might be unlucky enough to encounter a specter face-to-face. It was well known that John Wilkes Booth, his eyes glowing like hot coals, prowled the alley behind the theater as he cursed his phantom horse.
Years later, in 1942, Washington published They Knew Lincoln, a collection of anecdotes about the great president from the previous generation of city residents—the cooks, seamstresses, draymen, street vendors, and laborers whose voices often went unrecorded. Mostly former slaves, these people revered Abraham Lincoln, and Washington himself imbibed the spirit of their freedom as fully as if he, too, had been a personal beneficiary of the Emancipation Proclamation of 1863.
“Lincoln’s life to these humble people was a miracle,” he wrote. “To the deeply emotional and religious slave, Lincoln was an earthly incarnation of the Savior of mankind. Was he not also a carpenter’s son, born in a humble log cabin? Was he not a worker in the field, unlettered and unsung? Was he not despised and rejected by men, and did he not know by experience their sorrow? Did he not yearn for the day when he might learn to read and write, and enjoy the pleasures of life for himself and his children? Upon whom could he depend in his hour of need but the Almighty God for comfort and guidance? Was he not inaugurated as President amidst the waving of flags and the sounds of trumpets, only to be martyred, as Christ was, because of his services for the lowly?”
Washington had learned Booth’s name almost as soon as he learned Lincoln’s. That was because wherever history carried the great president, his assassin was not far behind. Booth left a different legacy. He was a killer of a most special kind. He wanted more than the life of one man. He wished to murder a nation and the freedom of a people.
Not surprisingly, the assassin preyed on Washington’s childhood imagination. One night when the boy was in bed, he realized that Booth was in the room with him. Booth pulled a dagger and lunged at him, chasing him over the bed. Washington dove under it, and Booth followed. Crying in fear, Washington leapt toward the ceiling and clutched onto a spiderweb. Booth flourished his knife and came after him. “I was suddenly awakened by my Grandmother, just as the dagger was approaching my heart. She found me nearly suffocated by a large bundle of bedding with which I had covered my head and screaming at the top of my voice.” It was only a nightmare.1
No one would have been more surprised by Washington’s dream than Booth himself. During the New York City draft riots of 1863, mobs rampaged through Manhattan. African Americans, a principal target of their fury, were attacked both north and south of the Booth home on East 17th Street and from river to river. “Booth spoke with detestation of the murdering of inoffensive negroes,” wrote Adam Badeau, a federal officer living with the Booths at the time. At one point the rioters burned the Colored Orphan Asylum on Fifth Avenue. Randall, Badeau’s African American servant from Louisiana, was in the Booth house that day. When it appeared that he might be in danger, Booth vowed to hide the youngster in the cellar. If the rabble came after him there, he said, he would protect the boy with his own life. Booth vigilantly watched over Randall for a week, until the riots ended.2
“John Wilkes Booth meant well to every human being,” his contemporary Joseph Howard Jr., a top reporter for the New York Times, told his readers. “None of you who judged him knew him.”3
“the president was shot in a theater tonight and perhaps mortally wounded.”4 When Lawrence A. Gobright, agent of the Associated Press in Washington, D.C., telegraphed this brief message to his subscribers in New York only moments after the assassination, one hundred and fifty years of writing on the death of Abraham Lincoln commenced. A vast literature on the death of the president has appeared over that time. Yet, oddly enough, Fortune’s Fool is the first full-length biography of John Wilkes Booth ever written.
Historians have long recognized the need for such a book. It would fill an important gap in the assassination record as well as help dispel some of the absurd theories about April 14, 1865, and its aftermath. The old standby, Francis Wilson’s John Wilkes Booth: Fact and Fiction of Lincoln’s Assassination (1929), was written by an author born in 1854 and is out of date. The books that came along in subsequent decades were a mixed lot, many written by special pleaders or conspiracy junkies. Recent titles, the best of which are mentioned in “Notes on Sources,” have been much better. Still, no Booth biography appeared. That was surprising, not only because there was an amazing—if disturbing—story to be told, but it was apparent that without a thorough understanding of Booth our knowledge of the murder of Lincoln was lacking. After all, as Booth’s friend and co-conspirator Samuel Arnold explained, everything that happened was due to him. “He alone was the moving spirit,” said Arnold.5
The story of Booth
’s life is complex and the task of researching it formidable. There is no comprehensive collection of John Wilkes Booth papers with which to start, for example. Like many other highly verbal individuals, Booth was not much of a writer. His surviving letters are few and seldom revealing. Beyond a short memoir by his older sister Asia, his family members, horrified by what he did, left little about him. Government investigators compiled an invaluable mass of information in 1865 about Booth’s role as a conspirator, but the material focused on the assassination and did not give a broad picture of the man’s life. If Booth had not been an actor and public figure before the murder, it would be impossible to recover his life in any meaningful depth.
The best source for learning about Booth before the assassination—about his family, childhood, education, career as an actor, personality, and public life—turned out to be the recollections of his friends. As time passed following Lincoln’s death and they felt safe to do so, these friends spoke. It says something about Booth that although they shrank from what he did, they did not shrink from him. Much of what they remembered is surprisingly positive.
Born in 1838, Booth was the fourth son of Junius Brutus Booth and Mary Ann Holmes, an immigrant couple from London. His inheritance was complex. His father was a brilliant actor whose alcoholism, scandalous behavior, and lapses of sanity cast a disturbing shadow over the future assassin’s childhood. His mother was an indulgent parent whose unqualified love formed a wholesome counterweight to the unpredictable father. The son seemed a mix of the two. Excitable, erratic, and reckless, he was loveable, congenial, and kind-hearted as well.
Detesting the wear and tear of theatrical life, Junius wanted another vocation for John, but it is unsurprising that the youth followed his father’s footsteps. He served his apprenticeship at the Marshall Theatre in Richmond, where he learned the daily ins-and-outs of his profession. Equally significant was the welcome that Richmond society extended to him. He loved the city, and as the crisis between North and South intensified in the late 1850s, he identified fully with the people and the customs of the future Confederate capital.
This was shown when he volunteered with the Virginia militia in 1859 to ensure the peace at Charlestown and carry out the execution of John Brown, whose abolitionist raid at nearby Harpers Ferry had convulsed Virginia in fear and anger. Booth was fascinated by Brown—attracted by his indomitable spirit yet repelled by his abolitionism, a movement the young actor believed would tear the country apart. When Brown was hanged, Booth stood only feet from the gallows and told friends he considered the moment the proudest of his life.
Booth hoped to become a traveling star in the spring of 1861, but the outbreak of the Civil War brought theatrical life to a halt, and he was swept up in the conflict. Like most others in the Upper South, he had hoped this moment could be avoided through sectional compromise, but when events dictated otherwise, Booth decided to become a Confederate soldier. He and his widowed mother, fearful for his life, discussed the topic exhaustively. She reminded him tearfully of his childhood promise that, in return for the love and encouragement she had given him, he would always strive to make her happy. Devoted to the kindest of mothers, he yielded to her frantic pleas for him to live in the North and keep away from trouble. This decision, which went against both his beliefs and his instincts, was fraught with ill consequences for the future.
As the Civil War raged in the early 1860s, and hosts of young men his age wrote the history of their generation, Booth acted. He performed Shakespearean classics and melodrama. His impetuous personality had a spark of genius that shone onstage and, added to his superb good looks, wonderful voice, and exciting acting style, brought him stardom within a matter of months. Some critics complained that he was hurried, inarticulate, and crude at times. Others saw him as uniquely gifted. The public embraced him without reserve, and he played successfully throughout the North, being particularly popular in Boston and Chicago. For many he had the potential to become the greatest actor of his day, if he did not already deserve the title.
Despite professional acclaim and material success, Booth was a deeply troubled man by the summer of 1864. “For four years I have lived (I may say) a slave in the north—a favored slave it’s true, but no less hateful to me on that account,” he wrote his mother. “Not daring to express my thoughts or sentiments, 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 and helpless children, I have cursed my willful idleness and begun to deem myself a coward and to despise my own existence.”6 To rescue himself from self-reproach, he concocted a plot to abduct Lincoln and present him to the Confederacy as a bargaining chip to force the North to exchange of prisoners of war. He recruited a small cadre of former school friends, Confederate operatives, and Southern sympathizers to assist him. Twice—in January and again in March 1865—he put his scheme in motion, only to fail both times. Doubts flourished about his leadership, and some of his associates drifted away.
Even as Booth and his team worked to abduct the president, there was always a possibility that, given the proper opportunity and inspiration, he might murder Lincoln on impulse. He appeared ready to do so on March 4, 1865, at Lincoln’s second inauguration. Booth had grown up in a home where the self-sacrificing heroes of antiquity were honored. Subsequently, his study of plays like Julius Caesar confirmed that Brutus and Cassius were men of high principle, not common cutthroats. These convictions, held by an individual as unsettled as Booth, spelled tragedy.
As the war came to an end in the spring of 1865, he was moody and misanthropic. He drank heavily, acted oddly, and lashed out at friends. Fixated on Lincoln, he saw the president as the cause of the nation’s woes. “Our country owed all her troubles to him,” Booth wrote.7 When the rebel army in Virginia surrendered on April 9, 1865, he was stunned. He never considered such a thing possible. Goaded by the celebrations that followed in Washington and incensed by Lincoln’s pledge of limited voting rights for African Americans, he assassinated Abraham Lincoln on the evening of April 14, 1865, at Ford’s Theatre. Escaping from the rear of the theater, he became one of only two presidential assassins who successfully fled the scene of the crime.
The twelve-day manhunt for Booth that followed mesmerized the nation. The assassin simply disappeared, and there was fear he might escape into the chaos into which the Southern states had descended. But on April 26, 1865, he was cornered in a Virginia barn and shot to death during a stand-off with federal troops. So ended, at age twenty-six, the life of one of the most remarkable personalities of his era.
Booth’s friends were nearly speechless with astonishment at this turn of events. The comedian William Warren, on a train traveling to Boston, heard that Booth had shot the president from a conductor rushing down the aisle. That’s a lie, thought Warren, and, leaping to his feet, he contradicted the man. Booth was a generous and affable person. He could not be a murderer. “Alas,” wrote the comedian in his diary, “it proved too true.”8
Perhaps Booth was a better actor than Warren realized. Although the men were close, the friend had never seen Booth’s other, more sinister side. Few had. Adam Badeau also failed to detect it. “I had seen him several times under unusual circumstances,” Badeau wrote, “and he never displayed any trait or indicated any sentiment that made it probable he would end his career with this appalling catastrophe.” Since Badeau was a Union officer, Booth would not have been open with him, but even politically congenial fellows like the actor Frank Drew were no less dumfounded. “I knew he was a Southern sympathizer, of course, but so was I. He never even hinted or gave me the slightest reason to suppose he intended to commit such an atrocious crime,” Drew recalled in 1899.9
One can say in defense of these men that Booth didn’t look dangerous or irrational. There were his heated political outbursts, of course, but, as William Ferguson of Ford’s Theatre wrote, “they were accepted without analysis as part of his high-sp
irited nature. In the excitement of Civil War times this trend of his mind passed without attracting particular attention.”10 Why should it? “Booth looked the part of neither the lunatic nor villain, but seemed to be a most likable fellow,” said the sculptor Edward Valentine.11 J. B. McCormick, whose hands were scarred by injuries inflicted by Booth in stage combat, recalled in 1901, “Before he shot Lincoln, I never heard anyone say he was crazy. Even now I don’t think he was.”12
Badeau thought such statements were absurd. It was evident that “the awful act was the result of a disturbed brain.” Consider its staging. “It was so theatrical in plan and performance—the conspiracy—the dagger— the selection of a theater—the brandishing of the weapon—the cry ‘sic semper tyrannis’ to the audience—all was exactly that a madman brought up in a theater might have been expected to conceive.” Wrong, countered Ferguson. What happened at Ford’s Theatre, where Ferguson was backstage the night of the murder and no more than a foot or two away from the murderer when he escaped, proved Booth was entirely rational. The assassin carefully arranged everything he did to make certain he could both get to the president and escape when his bloody work was done. “It was the act of a man in full possession of all his undiluted faculties, working with speed and precision according to a well-laid plan.”
The actress Anne Hartley Gilbert, a family friend, wrote, “I never felt it was madness that carried him into the plot to assassinate the President. I know how high feeling could run in those days. Whatever drew Wilkes Booth in, if the lot fell to him to do the thing, I feel sure he went through it without a backward thought. He had that kind of loyalty, that kind of courage.” While there was room for light and shade in his personal life, there was none in his politics, and he fixated on his fear that Lincoln would become a king. He reacted, continued Gilbert, “with the devotion of a high-strung nihilist” who lives—and dies—for his beliefs.13