Shy and nonconfrontational, Mary Ann was not curious by nature, a characteristic that pleased Junius, who believed—and proclaimed in her presence—that a woman’s job was to stay home and keep quiet.78 Mary Ann realized instantly that her own wedding had been a legal sham, her husband was an adulterer, and her children were illegitimate. Her trust had been terribly abused. Rose, the only family member home when Adelaide appeared, watched Mary Ann wither before the fiery stranger. “This was a crushing blow, an exquisite chagrin to her fine mother,” recalled Mrs. Mahoney, who learned the story from Ann Hall.
Weary and chastened, yet finally relieved of a guilt that had haunted him for twenty-five years, Junius acceded to the inevitable. On May 7, 1847, the disgraced husband gave Adelaide one thousand dollars, and she settled in for the residency period required for a divorce, at the end of which time additional rewards could be harvested.79
The matter did not end there, however. Adelaide liked the jolly god as much as Junius did, and when drunk she engaged in a distressing pattern of behavior. “It was a custom with her to haunt the Baltimore markets for a chance meeting with the woman who had usurped her place,” noted Eliza Mitchell Ward, Mary Ann’s niece. “These encounters were as much avoided by the one as sought for by the other. She assailed [Mary Ann] with violent, often coarse language and opprobrious epithets, which the other never resented but cut short by the speediest exit.” A crude revenge for Adelaide, it was painful public humiliation for Mary Ann.80
In February 1851 Adelaide filed for divorce on the grounds of desertion. “Booth came to the United States in company with a woman with whom he has been in the habit of adulterous intercourse,” she alleged to the Baltimore County Court. This woman had a large number of children, “the fruits of said adulterous intercourse.” Junius offered no defense, admitting the truth of her statements, and two months later the divorce was granted. On May 10, 1851—John’s thirteenth birthday—the father obtained a license to marry Mary Ann and appears to have done so on that day.81 “It was tardy justice to the mother of the Booth children,” wrote a New York journalist who dug up the story forty years later.82
Although John could hardly miss the strange tension in the household or the grim faces of his elders, he was too young to understand the scandal convulsing his family. Told nothing, he realized only that he and his siblings had suddenly become the objects of gossip, “objects nonetheless vulnerable for not knowing why they were attacked,” said Mrs. Mahoney.83 In time he learned scraps of the story and finally got the details from Rose when he was twenty.84 The odd reality was that he did not feel illegitimate. He did not feel extraneous or neglected. He enjoyed a childhood in which he was wanted, loved, and admired. Therefore, whatever the facts, it was understandable for him to join Edwin and insist that their father had only one wife: their mother.85 The truth, thought cousin Eliza, was locked behind “gates so securely closed and guarded by the children, in their struggle for professional rank and social position, that even a legal inquisition could hardly have forced them ajar.”86
Nevertheless, in his heart of hearts, John was angered by Junius’s misconduct toward his beloved mother, and he moved in a boyish way to distinguish himself from his father. He began putting his initials on things. He carved them on the big beech tree near the springhouse at the farm and scattered them throughout the woods on the property. He even branded himself. On his left hand he tattooed his initials, surrounded by a wreath of stars, in India ink.87 The initials affirmed his identity as a Booth, but they also asserted his individuality. He was himself and not his father. Junius was a great actor—the greatest—but John could be a better man.
some respite from scandal came when Booth was sent to Milton School for Boys, a boarding school in Sparks, Maryland. A classical academy for boys ages ten to thirteen, it was operated by John Emerson Lamb, an elder of the Society of Friends. Lamb expected students “to exhibit in their social intercourse a pleasant and obliging disposition, to avoid turbulent and quarrelsome behavior, and to adhere strictly to the truth on all occasions.”88 The school was academically demanding, but its homelike atmosphere—warm yellow pine floors, low-beam ceilings, and large fireplaces gleaming with brass cookware, all managed in a pastoral setting by a headmaster as gentle as his name—made the time pass pleasantly. John liked being there and put his initials on the stone step leading to the back porch, on the building wall, and on the large rock in front of the schoolhouse.89 “Jack, as he was called, was very popular, a good swimmer, ball-player, tree-climber, etc,” said his fellow student Clarence Cobb. “But he would not study. He was very slow at his books.” Cobb also claimed that John bullied the smaller boys cruelly until one fought back and put him in his place.90 Cobb’s statement does not square with either the ethos of the school or the fond feelings that Lamb entertained for John. Lamb’s granddaughter Esther recalled, “He held him in such esteem that he referred to him as one of his boys.”91
Mary Ann visited on the day of the annual school picnic. She wore lilacs and a dress of pale gray so as not to appear too conspicuous among the Quaker company of lisse caps, plain kerchiefs, and broad-brimmed hats. A dinner for three hundred was held on the grounds, followed by the awarding of school prizes and recitations. Alone on a platform, John did several scenes as Shylock from The Merchant of Venice and was warmly applauded. Smiling and blushing, he bowed repeatedly.92
In the woods near the school were English Gypsies. John saw them, and curiosity led him to go over and have his fortune told. He learned that he had been born under an unlucky star. “You’ve a bad hand,” an old crone told him. “It’s full enough of sorrow. Full of trouble. You’ll die young and leave plenty to mourn you. You’ll have a fast life—short, but a grand one. Young sir, I’ve never seen a worse hand. I wish I hadn’t seen it.” John copied her troubling message in pencil on a strip of paper. When he showed it to Asia, she told him to forget it. “It was only a Gipsey’s tattle for money,” she said reassuringly. He agreed, laughing dismissively at the prophecy, but the words lingered in his mind. He was superstitious by nature, and he studied the paper so often that it grew tattered through folding and unfolding. Well, he concluded, “the Gypsey said I was to have a grand life. No matter how short, then, so it be grand.”93
Gypsies aside, John felt personally unlucky. This self-perception showed early in his life. When he and some friends were setting off fireworks in Exeter Street, they annoyed an adult who sent a constable after them. Everyone escaped the dragnet but John. He was collared, hauled off to the watch-house, lectured, and fined. “That is my luck,” he told his sisters.94 No matter what game or mischief was afoot, he was the one sure to be scraped, kicked, nabbed, trounced, or trampled. His saving grace was his resilience.
On a September evening in 1850 John, along with Lamb and his son Eli, climbed the hill to Gunpowder Meetinghouse, a gray fieldstone building near the school, to attend the wedding of Abraham Scott and Ann Price, two Friends from Baltimore County.95 After the simple ceremony, a queue formed. Traditionally, Friends have no clergy, so those present signed the marriage certificate as witnesses. John came forward to write “John W. Booth,” his customary signature when young.96 The name affirmed that, as a member of a loving community, he pledged his support of the young couple in their life together. It was an eye-opening example of how marriage was meant to be—open and joyous, not tardy and furtive.
John liked Eli Lamb but grew particularly close to another fellow student, Thomas Gorsuch. Tom’s older brother was the Gorsuch who preached at Mount Zion Church near the farm. Both were sons of Edward Gorsuch, a prosperous farmer who lived near the school. A hospitable figure in the academy neighborhood, “the father was all that a man of honour should be,” wrote John. On September 11, 1851, the elder Gorsuch was killed and a third son, named Dickinson, was severely wounded at Christiana, Pennsylvania, while attempting to reclaim four runaway slaves. No one was ever punished for Edward Gorsuch’s death. The incident created a firestorm of sectional cont
roversy, pitting the rights of slave-owners under the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850 to reclaim their human property against the “higher law” rights of runaways to seek their freedom. Connected socially with the family, thirteen-year-old John was deeply disturbed by the incident. The Christiana tragedy was the first political incident to catch his attention.97
Writing about these events nine years later, Booth expressed great sympathy for the Gorsuches, but none for the slaves. John did not hate African Americans. An insubstantial people, “Nigs” (as he called them) were lucky to live in the United States even in bondage. “Witness their elevation in happiness and enlightenment above their race elsewhere,” he wrote. Their basic problem was they did not belong here. “This country was formed for the white, not the black man. And, looking upon African slavery from the same standpoint held by those noble framers of our Constitution, I for one have ever considered it one of the greatest blessings (both for themselves and us) that God ever bestowed upon a favored nation.” As far as alleged cruelty to slaves went, he claimed to have seen worse treatment by father to son.98
John could be kind to individual African Americans like the Halls. He bought candy for the children and listened patiently to old Joe, their garrulous father. But, as Mrs. Mahoney wrote astutely, “this close association gave occasion for understanding, but also for an arrogant, contemptuous paternalism toward Negroes with all the dangers implied in such an attitude.”99
asia, in biographies of her father published in 1865 and 1882, painted a picture of happy family life. Her niece Blanche, who had no emotional investment in such tales, presented a different take on life with the Booths. Blanche was June’s daughter and nine years old in 1851 when her father brought her to live with the family after his marriage to the comedienne Clementina DeBar failed. During the two years she stayed with them, she grew to adore Mary Ann and to learn that “John had a disposition as beautiful as can be imagined.” Her grandfather Junius, with his closely cropped iron gray hair and darting hawklike eyes, frightened her. He was naturally glum, silent, and unapproachable.100 Worst of all, he was violent when opposed. On occasion he belittled Blanche. When she was unable to spell the word sugar, Junius told Mary Ann that the girl did not possess the intelligence natural to a Booth. The comment was doubly hurtful, as June had doubted aloud that Blanche was his biological child.101
John left no record of what he thought of his father as a parent. Predictably, however, two such obstinate natures clashed. Sometimes Junius, whose actor eyes could bore a hole into a child, used a cold silence as a punishment. This ominous shunning continued until the offender came to heel. On other occasions Junius employed a belt. John’s playmate Stout recalled an incident when the father discovered that someone had cut the decorations off his Shylock costume. He went immediately to John and began beating him. He wanted a confession or the name of the guilty party. Finally little brother Joe cried out that Edwin had ruined the costume, and John confirmed it. The fact that the father reached instinctively for John when something was amiss speaks for itself.102
Happily, Junius was often absent on tour. At such times the regime he forced on his largely indifferent family collapsed, and they all did as they wished. Mary Ann abandoned the kitchen, Edwin fished, Rose read, Asia sulked, and Joe moped. John practiced his marksmanship, setting bottles on a fence and learning to shoot through the mouth and knock out the bottom. He boasted that his aim was so good he never wasted a bullet. In a grievous violation of his father’s rules, he went hunting.103 Mary Ann did not try to stop him. She had enough to do and was content so long as her children were.104
Although John was a loving child to his mother, he was often headstrong and willful even with her. “Seldom contentious, he was obstinately bent, and what he willed, he did,” wrote Townsend. He skipped school, chased fire engines, wrecked sleighs by riding them in summer, and nearly drowned in a reckless escapade with friends. Once he ran away from home with Billy Andrews, one of the juvenile players, to join the oystermen on Chesapeake Bay.105 Mary Ann, who had had a vision that he would die an early and unnatural death, was frantic. Upon his return from such misadventures, he was always genuinely and profoundly remorseful for worrying her, and the indulgent mother, relieved to see him unscathed, routinely forgave him.
One day she sat the youngster down for a talk. She told him that to be well and favorably known was just about the best thing in life. Such an achievement started with a belief in one’s self. John had wonderful potential, she thought, but it meant little if he did not develop it. If he would—if he would make that effort—he could become an exceptional adult. Work to be who he could be and she would always be there to help him, she promised. The words of the sweet-tempered mother had a profound impact on the boy. He thanked her and made a vow of his own in return. When he grew up, he said, he would take the greatest care to see that she was happy.106
junius wanted a residence at the farm more suitable to his age, station in life, and family size, and he found a design he liked for a house in Gothic Revival style in William H. Ranlett’s The Architect (1847–49). At a spot within fifty yards of the front of the old cabin, and at the foot of locust trees that he ordered left untouched, work commenced on a cellar in October 1851. Above it rose a one-and-a-half-story redbrick villa. The building had clustered chimneys, four gables, and a roof of heavy block tin. One distinctive feature was the diamond-shaped panes of glass in the windows. Not a mansion, the building was a sort of grand cottage with small homelike rooms and simple interior finishes.107 Asia named the house Tudor Hall.108
John, together with Joe, was packed off to St. Timothy’s Hall, a boarding school in Catonsville, Maryland. Located a six-mile, one-hour horsecar ride into the countryside from Baltimore, the Hall was a military academy operated under the auspices of the Protestant Episcopal Church. Students wore gray uniforms and were organized along military lines. The Reverend Libertus Van Bokkelen, a native of New York City and a closet abolitionist, served as rector. A flute-playing Episcopal priest, he was known to his students as Mr. Pan.109 Irreverently, John, who also played the flute, called him Van.110
St. Timothy’s Hall was a middle and high school whose purpose was to prepare students for college or a business career. Discipline was strict. Van Bokkelen published ninety-nine rules that included prohibitions on drinking, smoking, playing cards, coarse language, firearms, truancy, food from home, novels, group study, absence from chapel, whispering in study hall, and singing in quarters.111 Living conditions reflected his goal of instilling toughness. The rising bell sounded at 6:30 in the morning; during the winter months, students in the three-story frame barracks woke to find their overcrowded rooms so cold the water in their pitchers had frozen. They had to crack ice to wash their faces.112
Although St. Timothy’s Hall had a strong academic program and the most professional teachers John had encountered, his classroom struggles continued. Courses were challenging, and there were times when he felt like a dullard.113 He did best in presentations and debates, particularly in recitations on tragic and classical themes. His study of history, as well as his individual temperament, gave rise to a hatred of kings, and ridding the world of tyrants was a favorite theme in his declamations.114 While John impressed no one as a scholar, his learning style showed two important adaptations. He picked up memory tricks, able to hold on to anything he fully understood, and he developed as an auditory learner. “He liked to hear persons of reading and information converse, listened earnestly, and afterwards appropriated much that fell from their lips,” said a friend.115
With 130 boys, St. Timothy’s Hall was a hive of adolescent energy, and John was initially cowed in the presence of so many older and better students. Samuel Arnold, one of the senior boys, remembered him as timid.116 Schoolmates laughed at the bowlegs he inherited from his father and teased him as their own Billy Bowlegs, the nickname of the Seminole leader Holato Mico, who was in the news at the time.117 John, however, soon made friends. Fitzhugh Lee, nephew of Ro
bert E. Lee, was one of the older students whom he knew and admired.118 The self-confident Arnold was another appealing character, as was the underclassman Prentiss Ingraham, who would gain fame as the author of hundreds of postwar dime novels as well as a historically important account of John’s death.119 These three youths were representative of the student body—Maryland sprinkled with Virginia and a touch of Deep South seasoning. There were few Northerners at the school. John heard nothing at St. Timothy’s Hall to challenge his rapidly solidifying social beliefs and racial attitudes.
Wednesday and Saturday afternoons were free time for students, and John and two friends usually headed to a nearby wood where they had built a bush house. Each boy had a Colt revolver, and they purloined a rifle from the school, so the well-armed trio hunted rabbits, stole eggs, and cooked dinner. Afterward John settled back to smoke his red-clay pipe with its yard-long stem and to speak of his aspirations for the future. “He thought only of being a man admired by all people,” wrote one of the friends. “He would do something that would hand his name down to posterity—his name, known in history, to live forever.” There was nothing dark in John, who seemed cheerful and full of life, or in his remarks. “John was kind, generous, and affectionate in his nature,” the boy continued. “He was never a vicious or bad-minded boy; on the contrary, he was noble in mind and honorable in all his actions.”120
Food was always on the minds of students at St. Timothy’s Hall, and it led to a crisis. One of Van Bokkelen’s less popular ideas was to have classes before breakfast. When students got to the dining tables, they found “foul meat, eaten with silver forks,” as John wrote home.121 Little wonder the school was named for Timothy, patron saint of individuals suffering from stomach ailments.
Fortune's Fool: The Life of John Wilkes Booth Page 4