Booth wished to form his own opinion. The day before the execution he sought out Sheriff Campbell, a person who treated Brown with such consideration that he would be remembered in the condemned man’s will. Campbell was favorably impressed with Booth, whom he described to family as “a handsome, fresh, black-eyed youth of 20 years,” and he admitted the young man to the jail.94 Booth found Brown confined in a narrow cell off a heavily guarded corridor on the left as one entered the jail. Here the actor spent a moment “visiting the old pike-man,” as Townsend whimsically expressed it.95 No details of the meeting survive. Booth’s subsequent writings only make apparent that he perceived himself in the presence of a man of heroic dimension. Years later even Governor Wise expressed pity for Brown, who had suffered such hardships in life that he seemed “as much sinned against as sinning,” and Booth felt a qualified sympathy, too. “Poor John Brown,” he wrote in 1864, “poor old Brown.” “He was a brave old man,” he told Asia.96
The morning of Friday, December 2, 1859, was cool and clear.97 Reveille sounded at daybreak. Booth had breakfast at the Carter House and joined the Grays as they assembled.98 Special orders had been issued to each company. Some were sent to the jail to form Brown’s escort, others fanned out along the roads and into the woods, alert for mischief-makers, and Sergeant Booth and the Grays marched directly to the field of execution. Although the entire town was in motion by 9:00 a.m., the mood seemed subdued. There was no military band music, drumbeat, or bugle blast, wrote one officer, “no saluting by troops as they passed one another, nor anything done for show.”99 The long-anticipated day proved to be a somber one.
Brown’s gallows, erected earlier that morning, stood on a small knoll in a large meadow. Passing a piece of artillery commanding the road, the Grays marched through a gate and onto the field. Small white flags marked their position. In front of the gallows were the cadets of the Virginia Military Institute, conspicuous in red flannel shirts crossed by white belts. They were flanked by the cadet howitzer detachment commanded by Major Thomas J. Jackson, later known as “Stonewall.” The Grays formed before the gallows obliquely on the cadets’ left. To enhance their appearance the company had been ordered by height down the ranks. Company F gathered across on the right. It was clear that the best-equipped and -trained companies had been deliberately placed near the scaffold. The two Richmond companies, their soldiers shoulder to shoulder in solid squares, looked so impressive that Major J. T. L. Preston of VMI felt that, while “inferior in appearance to the cadets, they were superior to any other company I ever saw outside the regular army.” By ten o’clock all was ready.
His arms pinioned, Brown was led out of the jail door shortly before eleven. He was dressed in the worn black suit of ordinary business clothes he had had on since the night of the raid. With his old slouch hat and stubble of beard, he looked seedy and shopworn. Brown’s face was prison-bleached, his eyes turning from side to side at the spectacle before him. A mass of soldiers—six infantry companies and a cavalry troop—awaited him in the street. Impressed, Brown remarked, “I had no idea that Governor Wise considered my execution so important.” The undertaker George Sadler was present with a furniture wagon. Brown, Avis, and Campbell climbed aboard and took seats on a pine box that contained the condemned man’s coffin. Soldiers surrounded the wagon, the team of horses was stirred, and the eight-minute procession to the gallows began.
The chill was gone with the dew, and the morning had become as balmy as a day in May. Brown talked freely on the ride. To the east and south of Charlestown were the Blue Ridge Mountains, covered with the slight haze that gave them their name. Farther south and west were farms and rolling tracts of forest. “What a beautiful country,” exclaimed Brown wistfully. “I had no idea it was so lovely.” Elijah Avey, an eyewitness, thought Brown owned the lightest heart in Charlestown that day.100 Fate was permitting him to die publicly for a cause to which he had given everything. “I cannot say what was in his heart,” Avis declared, but Brown was no coward.101 He appeared perfectly composed and determined. Major Preston thought his demeanor was intrepid. Sadler summed up their common opinion when he said, “Capt. Brown, you are a game man.”102
Booth was standing in rank next to Philip Whitlock when Brown’s wagon arrived at the scaffold. Whitlock estimated that the Grays were about thirty feet from the gallows, giving the actor an extraordinarily good vantage point from which to watch the condemned man as he approached the steep steps to the scaffold.103 “Brown mounted as calmly and quietly as if he had been going to his dinner,” recalled Parke Poindexter, a soldier in Company F. “He did not exhibit the slightest excitement or fear.”104 At the top, Brown bid farewell to Sheriff Campbell, whom he had made executor of his will. To Avis he said, “I have no words to thank you for all your kindnesses to me.”105
Now bareheaded, Brown stood alone. “A dead stillness reigned over the field,” wrote one reporter. Governor Wise feared the old man would use the moment to deliver an antislavery lecture.106 Brown said nothing, however, merely looking out, about, and beyond. Booth, despite confidence in the justice of Brown’s sentence, experienced a rush of sympathy on seeing him, feeling “a throb of anguish as he beheld the old eyes straining their anxious sight for the multitude he vainly had thought would rise to rescue him.” Among the eight-hundred-plus soldiers and officials on the field, Brown did not have a single friend. Booth thought he was searching the distant hills for them. “His heart must have been broken when he felt himself deserted,” Booth later told Asia.107
The condemned man’s feet were tied together and a white linen hood pulled over his face. His noose adjusted, Brown was brought forward onto the drop. “I am ready now,” Brown said to Campbell, his executioner. “I do not want to be kept standing here unnecessarily long.” All waited, however, as the escort party from the jail maneuvered into position. Five, perhaps ten interminable minutes of tramping about continued. Brown stood with the rope around his neck, unsure which second would be his last. His bony fingers drummed impatiently behind his back. “Be quick,” he urged Avis. Brown continued resolute through the delay. “Once I thought I saw his knees tremble,” wrote Major Preston, “but it was only the wind blowing his loose trousers.”
At 11:15 the military authorities gave their signal. Campbell immediately took a hatchet and with one swift blow cut the rope holding up the trap door. It fell away with a screech of its hinges. Brown plunged three feet, then jerked to a halt. His arms thrashed up, his knees bent, and his fists clenched violently. The body quivered and struggled. In seconds it grew still. Death came quickly for the old abolitionist. Soon the only movement of his form came from the wind blowing it to and fro.
Booth suddenly felt weak and light-headed. “He got very pale in the face and I called his attention to it,” wrote Whitlock. “He said he felt very faint.”
“I would like a good, stiff drink of whiskey,” Booth added. Booth’s reaction would be exaggerated as others retold it, until he was staggering and catching hold of a support to stand erect at the mere sight of Brown walking to the gallows.108 Whitlock’s own handwritten account of the episode, stating simply that Booth grew pale and said he “would then give anything for a good drink of whiskey,” is credible for its lack of embellishment. Whitlock added that Booth was distressed.
A deliberate death was a difficult thing to stand and watch, and Booth was not the only person struggling with his feelings. A crude comment or a chortle was heard here and there, but there was an almost oppressive silence on the field. Sheriff Campbell was so troubled he would not even look at the body, keeping his eyes deliberately turned away. His nephew William Fellows, a guard at the jail, said that after nearly four decades he had “never quite recovered from my personal sorrow at his execution, legal and necessary though it might have been.” “A very solemn scene,” thought Major Jackson, who sent up a prayer for Brown’s soul. Major Preston broke the stillness around him by declaring, “So perish all such enemies of Virginia! All such enemies of the U
nion! All such foes of the human race!” Yet he wrote to his wife, “It was a moment of deep solemnity and suggestive of thoughts that make the bosom swell. The mystery was awful—to see the human form thus treated by men—to see life suddenly stopped in its current, and to ask one’s self the question without answer —‘And what then?’ ”
Soldiers were kept on the field until Brown was pronounced dead; then they returned to quarters. Booth dined again at the Carter House and that night kept an engagement at the home of Wells J. Hawks, a local politician. Owner of a carriage-making business, Hawks had opened his house to entertain officials, and Booth was in demand. Hawks’s son Arthur, Booth’s most enthusiastic fan in the village, greeted the actor at the door. The boy had been on the gallows field but missed the fatal moment when, perched on a fence in a distant corner, he had lost his balance and toppled off. Tea was served in the Hawks family parlor as Booth performed “Shakespeare and other poems.”109 The Sadler family was present and remembered his rendition of the poem “Beautiful Snow” by John Whitaker Watson.110 Arthur was most taken with the quarrel scene from Julius Caesar. “Surely,” Arthur later reflected, “John Wilkes Booth was the greatest Brutus who ever lived.”111 In 1925, more than sixty-five years after that evening, Arthur wrote to Edward Valentine, “I am a great admirer of all the Booth family including John Wilkes Booth,” underlining his name for emphasis.112
Booth departed with the Grays for Richmond the following day (Saturday), spent that night in Washington, and arrived in Richmond on Sunday afternoon, December 4, 1859.113 He traveled well supplied with mementos of his remarkable experience. From Sadler he secured a section of the wooden box that contained Brown’s coffin—the box upon which Brown sat on the way to his hanging. “That piece of John Brown’s coffin [container] Wilkes Booth cherished religiously, distributing bits of it to his particular friends,” recalled an associate.114 He also had one of Brown’s impressive spears. Made in Connecticut, this pike had an iron blade two inches wide and about eight inches long, screwed onto a handle made of ash. Down the handle in large ink letters was written “Major Washington to J. Wilkes Booth.” The weapon had been presented to Booth by B. B. “Bird” Washington of the Continental Morgan Guard of Winchester, the great-great-nephew of George Washington. Booth delighted in showing to family members this memento linking him to the first president.115
Booth’s most lasting keepsake was not material, however. It was a set of beliefs consistent in all his future writing and conversation. These were few and simple. Booth rejected a claim circulating in the North that Brown’s trial had been hasty or irregular. The old abolitionist “was fairly tried and convicted before an impartial judge & jury,” he believed.116 For his own part, “I may say I helped to hang John Brown,” he wrote proudly in 1860, “and while I live, I shall think with joy upon the day when I saw the sun go down upon one trator [sic] less within our land.” Four years later, after Brown had been embraced by the North, Booth remained proud of his contribution to events in Charlestown. “I was helping our common country to perform an act of justice,” he said. He mentioned his role often over the years, although never in boast. Townsend, described in Charlestown as “a John-Brown admirer and negro worshipper,” was no friend of Booth or admirer of his role in the Brown affair, but the journalist was quite perceptive in realizing that “Booth never referred to John Brown’s death in bravado.”117 Although he despised Brown’s cause, he idolized heroic characters, and Brown fit the mold perfectly. “John Brown was a man inspired, the grandest character of this century!” he exclaimed to Asia. An abolitionist, yes, but no coward hiding behind a New England pulpit. Brown was a lion, and since “open force is holier than hidden craft, the Lion is more noble than the fox.” By 1869, when time had seasoned Townsend’s understanding of Booth, the journalist wondered if the actor had not learned from Brown the secret of plots and conspiracies he displayed at Ford’s Theatre. Indisputably, Booth’s service completed his identification with the Old Dominion. “Booth’s going to John Brown’s execution was the pride of his life. Booth learned in the companionship of that episode to sympathize with Virginia. From his connection with the militia on this occasion, he was wont to trace his fealty to Virginia.”118
Home in Richmond, Booth had to face a person hardly less formidable than Brown—Kunkel. Often called “Major” for his military-like command of the theater, Kunkel could be six feet of raging basso profundo when provoked.119 The Marshall was his house. It had rules, some strict, but even then the theater was “as good an organization as an actor could care to belong to,” the tragedian George C. Boniface pointed out.120 Booth had crossed the line. “’Tis a great pity he has not more sense,” wrote his future sister-in-law Mary Devlin.121 Booth had joined the Grays, forgetting that he was already enrolled in another company. “He left [that] company in the lurch in the way his father used to do before him.”122 When the runaway returned to the theater, Kunkel fired him.123
Richmond newspapers had threatened to expose any businessman so unpatriotic as to discharge an employee on duty in Charlestown.124 O. Jennings Wise of Company F, a Booth acquaintance who returned on the train with him, was an Enquirer editor, and Captain Elliott of the Grays was an editor of the Whig. In some manner, perhaps through one of them, word of Booth’s predicament spread through the city. Alfriend recalled that in response militiamen gathered, not merely from the Grays but from the entire regiment. A large contingent mustered and marched through the city streets to the theater. There this imposing troop demanded that Booth be reinstated.
Horrified, Kunkel complied.
“it was study! study! study! rehearse! rehearse! rehearse! act! act! act!” recalled John Barron of stock life at the Marshall.125 Two parts a night, then home with two more for the next evening. The pace was exhausting; Booth and the other actors were often discovered asleep behind the scenery, their manuscripts lying beside them.126 Stars like Murdoch and Clarke came through, and then came the vivacious Lucille and Helen Western. These lovely sisters “understand perfectly how to ‘fetch the boys,’ ” declared Frank Queen of the New York Clipper.127 They drew fine houses with Hot Corn Girl, Three Fast Men, and Satan in Paris. “Tell the public a play is vulgar, not fit to be seen, and it will rush to witness it,” lamented the comedian Joseph Jefferson.128 The Westerns earned a good living on that truth. Richmond thought Helen, a beautiful brunette, simply perfect, and Booth agreed. Less talented than Lucille, black-eyed Helen “likes to show much of her person, swings plenty of curls, and can do a little of everything (if only passably well).”129
The actress Mary White was another friend. When illness forced her retirement from the company, Booth indulged a fondness for poetry in the following inscription in her autograph album:
Miss White;
May all good angels guard & bless thee.
And from thy heart remove all care.
Remember you should ne’re distrest be.
Youth & hope, can crush dispare.
+
Joy can be found, by all, who seek it.
Only be, right, the path, we move upon,
Heaven has marked it; Find & keep it
Ne’re forget the wish of —John.
Richmond, Feb 18th 1860
He who will ever be your friend
J. Wilkes Booth
The first letter of each line, as an acrostic, formed a special message: MARY + JOHN.130
Booth’s most complicated relationship involved Ella Wren, one of nine brothers and sisters, all players.131 Ella had joined the company the preceding fall with her brother George and sister Eliza. She was an actress, singer, and composer. Her vocals, sung sometimes with sweetness and at other times in thundertones, later earned her the sobriquet “the Mockingbird of the Southern Theatres.” Lacking Helen Western’s beauty, Ella had other assets. She was attractive, unaffected, and vital. Booth was now twenty-one, Ella a year younger, and they grew infatuated with each other. Marriage was mentioned, no surprise to her brother Fred, who
thought Booth the handsomest man he ever saw. Brother George, with whom Booth occasionally shared his hotel room, seemed positive about the actor. “There was no one of my friends that was better liked,” George said. The Booth family also heard of the rumored engagement, and later Edwin Booth asked Fred, with whom he was performing, “many questions regarding my family, especially of my sister Ella Wren, who was at one time engaged to be married to his brother.”132
The Wrens constitute a link to an unsettling event that occurred in February 1860. Booth and Pat Redford, a handsome clerk, had a fight in the theater box office. Redford was a ticket agent at the theater, and the management had staged a benefit performance for him the preceding winter. Incredibly, Kunkel permitted Redford to take a lead role in the production.133 Rose wrote to the family that John had trouble with the man for some reason. Insults were exchanged, and fists flew.134 Redford did like the Wren sisters, and a rivalry over the young women, then being featured with Booth in a light comedy, may have been the cause. Clearly, when the dust settled at the end of the season, the romantic landscape had altered. Booth and Ella went their separate ways. Redford married Ella’s sister Eliza.135
Meanwhile, affairs at the theater took an unhappy turn with the withdrawal of John T. Ford from the partnership.136 Ford had been with Kunkel since the latter was touring the boondocks with his Nightingale Minstrels. The departure of the talented administrator and businessman was a troubling development. Ford handled bookings for all the company’s theaters. Without him the Major experienced difficulty in engaging star power. He was forced to place urgent advertisements for “first class stars” in the New York newspapers. Exasperated, the normally friendly Whig lost patience with him. “The present low condition of drama in this city,” it stated, was due largely to Kunkel’s lamentable decision to parade actresses like the Westerns and their ilk before the public. “This place of amusement has presented so little of strictly intellectual amusement for some time past that a large number of most respectable patrons have kept away from it.” To win them back the theater should present performers of artistic merit. More Hamlet and less Hot Corn Girl. The management was also challenged to close the bars in the theater and put a stop to activities in “the third tier,” theatrical shorthand for prostitution in the upper gallery. “If the theatre can’t succeed under reforms such as these, then it ought not to succeed,” opined the Whig.137
Fortune's Fool: The Life of John Wilkes Booth Page 11