Richmond Daily Whig, November 28, 1859, 2; Washington Evening Star, November 25, 1859, 2; Washington Evening Star, November 28, 1859, 2.
Unpublished recollections of Philip Whitlock, Mss5:1W5905:1, manuscript collections of the Virginia Historical Society, 87; Clarke, Unlocked Book, 113, 124.
The “Secret Six” who financed him were Samuel Gridley Howe, Thomas Wentworth Higginson, Franklin B. Sanborn, George Luther Stearns, Gerrit Smith, and Theodore Parker. See Edward J. Renehan, Jr., The Secret Six: How a Circle of Northern Aristocrats Helped Light the Fuse of the Civil War (New York: Crown, 1995). The notion that conspirators kept the masses ignorant of their intentions had become a staple of conspiracy literature as early as 1747, when anti-Masonic tracts began to assert that secret authorities were manipulating their subordinates and exploiting their naïveté. Fear of secret societies would bloom again during the Civil War, unhampered by the need or expectation of factual proof. See Daniel Pipes, Conspiracy: How the Paranoid Style Flourishes and Where It Comes From (New York: Free Press, 1997), 61–62.
Edward M. Alfriend, an actor and member of the Grays, recalled the theater confrontation in The (Washington) Sunday Globe, February 9, 1902. Asia Booth Clarke, undated letter [ca. December 1860] to Jean Anderson, in the Peale Museum, Baltimore. In a letter dated November 28, 1859, Mary Devlin tells Edwin, “I told you I thought he would seize the opportunity,” and predicts the hard life of a soldier would dissuade him from further service. (She apparently did not know about St. Timothy’s Hall.) New York Public Library at Lincoln Center, Theatre Collection.
Roy P. Basler, ed., The Collected Works of Abraham Lincoln (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1953), 3:541.
Chapter 7: “ The man of genius in the Booth family”
Columbus Daily Sun, October 3, 1860, 3; Morris, Life on the Stage, 99.
Columbus Daily Times, October 5, 1860, 3.
The wound was described in different sources as both serious and minor and as being “in the thigh,” in the “fleshy part of the leg,” “in the side,” and “in the rear.” The standard account comes from the Columbus Daily Sun, October 13, 1860, 2, but this comes from Canning’s interview with George Alfred Townsend, published in the Cincinnati Enquirer, January 19, 1886, 1. Though it was recorded long after the fact, it is by far the most detailed, and does not conflict with earlier versions of the story. Later, Canning’s wife said that according to her husband, the scar left by the bullet was “not to be mistaken once described.”
Montgomery Daily Mail, October 30, 1860, 3.
Montgomery Advertiser, November 7, 1860; Baltimore Daily Republican, November 8, 1860; New York Herald, November 8, 1860, 1; and New Bern (NC) Progress, as quoted in Robert S. Harper, Lincoln and the Press (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1951), 67. 6. The New York Times, December 14, 1860, 1.
Buchanan’s message was published in The Philadelphia Inquirer, December 5, 1860, 1.
Ibid.
Edwin discovered the speech years later in his own house, which is now The Players in New York. The speech is in the Hampden-Booth Theatre Library there. The full text appears in John Rhodehamel and Louise Taper, eds., “Right or Wrong, God Judge Me”: The Writings of John Wilkes Booth (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1997), 55–64.
Ibid., 55.
Albany Argus, February 18, 1861; New York Clipper, February 23, 1861; Albany Journal, February 24, 1861; Albany Express, March 5, 1861.
Norma B. Cuthbert, Lincoln and the Baltimore Plot, 1861 (San Marino, CA: Henry E. Huntington Library, 1949).
12 Stat. 1258.
The Baltimore Sun, February 27, 1861; The James Buchanan incident brought suggestions that an alternate railway should be built to avoid Baltimore. New York Tribune, March 11, 1857, 5. A congressional committee looked into the so-called Baltimore plot and various other threats against Lincoln, focusing on Cipriano Ferrandini, a barber at Barnum’s Hotel. No criminal charges were ever brought in the case. See House Report No. 79, Thirty-sixth Congress, Second Session, 2:3–19, 125, 132–38, 166–78; and Richard G. Reese, “Lincoln and the Baltimore Barber,” The Baltimore Sun, February 26, 1961.
The New York Times, December 14, 1860, 1. The circumstances surrounding Baltimore in April 1861 are covered in O.R. I:2: 580 et seq.
Assault on Baltimore, O.R. I:2, 607, 608; ibid., 601–2; The Baltimore Sun, May 14, 1861, 1. Publicly, the administration denied having ordered Butler to occupy the city, but the following day, Lincoln promoted him to major general. Ex parte Merryman 17 Fed. Cas. 144, no. 9,487. Taney thought that only Congress could suspend the writ.
Incremental moves: The Baltimore Sun, April 29, 1861, 4; Basler 4:346–47. O.R. I: 2, 601–2. Subsequent proclamations extended the suspension throughout the United States. Basler, 5:436–37 and 6:451–52. Lincoln said, “In my opinion I broke no law.” Basler, 4:430; His response to the House is in Executive Document no. 16, Thirty-seventh Congress, First Session; Arrest of mayor George W. Brown, O.R. II: 1, 587 and 619–21, and of police marshal George P. Kane, The Baltimore Sun, June 28, 1861, 1, and O.R. II: 1, 620, 623, and Kane’s own report, ibid., 628–30; orders for arrests of legislators: O.R. II: 1, 589, 678. Generals Nathaniel Banks and John A. Dix complained about their orders, but complied nevertheless, ibid., 586, 589.
The order prohibiting legal counsel is in O.R. II:1, 613–14. Seward’s statement to Lord Lyons was quoted by John A. Marshall in American Bastille (Philadelphia: Thomas W. Hartley & Co., 1881), xiii, which ran an engraving of “Seward’s little bell” as its frontispiece.
Of all states, Maryland had the lowest rate of response to draft calls, providing only 46,638 of the 70,965 men requested. O.R. III:4, 72.
Actor William A. Howell claimed to have roomed with Booth on High Street in 1861, but his account is confused, and undoubtedly refers to a later period. Undated clipping from The Baltimore Sun in the Stanley Kimmel collection, University of Tampa; In Fraser’s Magazine, June 1865, 791–806, an anonymous source claimed that Booth was caught tearing up rails and was released by the president’s own order. A Boston paper quoted Baltimore attorney W. G. Snethen as saying that Booth helped burn the bridges. The Commonwealth, April 22, 1865, 2. Booth allegedly told William H. Garrett that he had been present at the Pratt Street Riot. “Wilkes Booth” in the Philadelphia Press, December 17, 1881; An unidentified clipping dated October 4, 1861, lists “John Wilkes” as one of ten men released from jail on taking an oath of allegiance, but Booth had been long gone by that time. LAS 3:123; See also Albany Argus, April 22, 1861.
“The Civil War Note-book of Washington Hands,” MS 2468, on microfilm at the Maryland Historical Society. Hands did not mention the Booths, except to say that Charles Claiborne was living in their Exeter Street house.
In a letter to Nahum Capen dated July 28, 1881, Edwin Booth said, “I asked [John Wilkes] once why he did not join the Confederate army; to which he replied, ‘I promised mother I would keep out of the quarrel, if possible, and I am sorry that I said so.’ ” Published in Clarke, Unlocked Book, 202–4. Edwin and Joseph both moved to England, and Edwin returned after a year abroad. Joseph, however, continued on to Australia, and for a while even his family was unable to locate him. With Edwin and Joe out of the country, John Wilkes was providing his mother’s principal support. His residence officially changed to New York City when Mary Ann moved there, and all subsequent legal instruments (including estate papers) were filed accordingly; Though Lincoln had been conscripting soldiers since July 1862, the draft was not actually authorized under the law until Congress passed the Enrollment Act on March 3, 1863. 12 Stat. 731. About half of all eligible Northern men avoided service, and more than 2.25 million men on enrollment lists had not yet been called by the war’s end. James W. Geary, We Need Men: The Union Draft in the Civil War (DeKalb, IL: Northern Illinois University Press, 1991), 82.
Henrietta survived, married actor Edward Eddy, and lived until November 1905.
Edwin’s comment was in an 1858 letter to his brothe
r Junius in the collection of Francis Wilson, quoted in Wilson’s book John Wilkes Booth: Fact and Fiction of Lincoln’s Assassination (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1929), 17. Buffalo Morning Express, October 31, 1861; Leavenworth, Kansas, Conservative, December 27, 1863; Washington Daily National Intelligencer, April 30, 1863; New Orleans Times, March 18, 1864.
Boston Daily Advertiser, May 19, 1862; Cincinnati Enquirer, January 19, 1886, 1; John T. Ford in The Washington Star, December 7, 1881.
Chicago Times, June 3, 1863; Mary Devlin Booth to Edwin Booth, February 12, 1863, in the New York Public Library, Theatre Collection; Spirit of the Times, April 5, 1862; Chicago Times, December 3, 1862; Philadelphia Press, March 9, 1863; Daily National Intelligencer, May 2, 1863. My own unpublished survey of more than eight hundred reviews shows that all but a handful were positive.
New York Tribune, March 25, 1862; Cleveland Plain Dealer, November 30, 1863; When Booth fell on the stage at the Holliday Street Theatre, notices in the Spirit of the Times (March 8, 1862, 13) said he had broken his nose. Though he finished the play with blood “streaming from his nose,” he was right back on the stage the following night, and nothing further was said about it. The New York Clipper called it a sword fight incident. Edwin had been injured several times on stage; see, for example, Asia Booth Clarke letter to Jean Anderson dated March 3, 1861, Peale Museum.
Brooklyn, New York, Standard, October 31, 1863, as quoted in Loux, 359; Louisville Journal, January 20, 1864; New York Clipper, January 25, 1862. The supposed best sword fight involved Booth and Thomas L. Conner.
Sollers, 113–14; original playbill in the John T. Ford collection, Manuscripts Division, Library of Congress. The entire passage, from act I, scene 1 of the Cibber version, was:
Booth’s innovations are marked in one of his own prompt books for Richard III, now in the Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, University of Texas at Austin. An unidentified clipping in the Harvard Theatre Collection gives H. A. Weaver’s detailed description of the sword fight. Examples of the critical praise: St. Louis Democrat, December 23, 1862; Spirit of the Times, March 22, 1862; Louisville Journal, June 30, 1862.
I have no brother, I am like no brother
And this word Love, which gray beards call divine,
Be resident in men like one another
And not in me—I am,—myself, alone
No accurate accounting of Booth’s travels is possible, but mileages noted here are based on modern roads, and calculated with the help of MapQuest.com. Booth traveled on railroads and steamboats much of the time, which adds to the total given. Brooklyn Academy of Music: Brooklyn, New York, Standard, October 31, 1863.
Canning in The Cincinnati Enquirer, January 19, 1886, 1; Adam Badeau, The Vagabond (New York: Rudd & Carleton, 1859), 329. “Furore” playbill for May 19, 1862, in the Princeton University Library Theatre Collection; The Boston Advertiser, February 1, 1863, quoting the New York Programme. Boston was the home of choice for most of the Booths. Edwin and Mary lived in Dorchester, and Mary died there in 1863. Junius settled just north of the city, and ultimately died in Manchester. Richard and Kellie Gutman, “Boston: A Home for John Wilkes Booth?” Surratt Society News 10, no. 9 (September 1985): 1, 6–8. The lot purchase was completed in October 1864, and the title was put in Mary Ann’s name. The lot remained undeveloped for as long as the Booths owned it.
The reasoning behind the Supreme Court law was to allow for one new justice to cover the geographically remote western states (California and Oregon) in their circuit riding capacities. Stephen J. Field was appointed to fill that opening. 12 Stat. 794. Before this, Attorney General Edward Bates advised the secretary of war to keep the habeas corpus issue away from the Supreme Court, as the administration would probably be defeated. Letter to Stanton, dated January 31, 1863, in Stanton Papers, document 52223. Lincoln escaped revocation of his other war powers by a single vote, when the “Prize Cases” gave him a 5–4 victory in 1862. 67 U.S. 635. When the unpopular Andrew Johnson became president, Congress let the number of justices drop to seven.
For a fuller discussion of the war’s effect on state governments, see David E. Long, The Jewel of Liberty (Harrisburg, PA: Stackpole Books, 1994).
Saulsbury in Congressional Globe, Thirty-seventh Congress, Third Session, 230.
Louisville Journal, June 20, 1862, 2. The Richmond editorial was actually directed at John C. Frémont, for his actions in Missouri.
Indianapolis Daily Sentinel, November 29, 1862, 2.
The state of morals in the District of Columbia was covered in Lafayette C. Baker, The Secret Service in the Late War (Philadelphia: John E. Potter, 1874), 217, 222; Matthew Canning quoted by George Alfred Townsend, the Cincinnati Enquirer, January 19, 1886, 1. May gave his own accounts of this in several places. Here, I’ve used his testimony from Surratt Trial, 270. May could have been known to Booth previously, as his brother Henry was a former member of Congress from Baltimore and was among those arrested with state legislators in 1861.
John F. May manuscript, “The Mark of the Scalpel,” in the Manuscripts Division, Library of Congress, 4. An edited version was published in Records of the Columbia Historical Society 13 (1910): 53–87. Booth letter to Simonds, April 19, 1863, in the André de Coppet Collection, Princeton University Library; Canning to Townsend in the Cincinnati Enquirer, January 19, 1886.
Herold’s own statement mentioned the bullet operation, and dates this initial meeting on the night that Booth played in The Marble Heart, which would be April 13, 1863. LAS 4:442. He did not say how he got backstage, but he traveled with friends in the Marine Band, who would have been able to give him such access. Musicians moonlighted because their salaries, which were set at only $22 per month, forced them to seek additional income. 13 Stat. 144. Nearly every member of the Ford’s Theatre orchestra was also a member of the Marine Band, and I assume this was true of other playhouses in Washington; When Adam George Herold died in October 1864, he left a will that specified “under no circumstances should the duty of settling my estate devolve upon my son, David.” For more on Herold see Michael W. Kauffman, “David Edgar Herold, the Forgotten Conspirator,” Surratt Society News 6 (November 1981): 4–5.
Historians have speculated that Booth’s “failure” as a manager was due to Union reverses in the war, and this, they said, was a factor in his growing despondency. But before he began the Washington venture, Booth wrote to Joe Simonds, “I am idle this week but stay here in hopes to open the other theater next Monday for a week or two before going to Chicago.” Booth letter to Joseph Simonds, April 19, 1863. André de Coppet Collection, Princeton University Library.
Maj. Henry L. McConnell claimed that he had arrested Booth in St. Louis but released him on his taking the oath. McConnell’s account is not very specific, but it must have happened between December 22, 1862, and January 3, 1863, when both were in St. Louis. LAS 4:75. Ed Curtis, who was present at the New Orleans incident, published an account in an unnamed newspaper. It was subsequently quoted by John S. Kendall in The Golden Age of the New Orleans Theater (New York: Greenwood Press, 1968), 498; The New York incident is recounted in Jennings, Theatrical and Circus Life, 489–90. For details of Kane’s arrest, see The Baltimore Sun, June 28, 1861, and O. R. II:1, 620–30. This is another example of Booth’s tendency to exaggerate. He did not really know Kane, though the marshal’s joint ownership of the Howard Athenaeum, in which the elder Booth had played, probably brought him in contact with Booth’s father. Adam Badeau, “Dramatic Reminiscences,” St. Paul and Minneapolis Pioneer Press, February 20, 1887; Clarke, Unlocked Book, 118.
Tyler Dennett, ed., Lincoln and the Civil War in the Diaries and Letters of John Hay (New York: Dodd, Mead & Co., 1939). Fanciful accounts were written long after the assassination, but without benefit of contemporary evidence. See, for example, Stanley Kimmel, “Lincoln Had Deep Appreciation of Acting of John Wilkes Booth,” Washington Sunday Star, April 15, 1941.
True Delta, March 19, 1864, 1; “Booth’s Appearance in Wash
ington, November 1863,”
ncoln Lore 1301 (March 15, 1954).
“John Wilkes Booth,” Boston Advertiser, May 19, 1862, clipping in the Harvard Theatre Collection.
Boston Courier, May 13, 1862; The 1864 New Orleans engagement was tainted with hoarseness, but as one paper said, the weather had been severe the whole time Booth was in town. New Orleans Times Picayune, March 24, 1864. He had traveled almost nine hundred miles to get there from his previous engagement in Cincinnati; what followed was another long run in Boston, more than fifteen hundred miles away, and that was also plagued by violent rainstorms and cool weather. Historians have never considered these factors in assessing Booth’s health, but the Boston Transcript did. On May 16, the paper’s critic said that Booth was “over-taxing his physical power” by pushing himself too hard. In The Albion, March 22, 1862, 139, “Mercutio” (William Winter) characterized Booth’s voice as a “severe case of larynx,” implying it was a deliberate effect. The Boston-to-Chicago trip was mentioned in a June 10, 1862, letter from Mary Ann Booth, at The Players. June’s vocal lapse was recorded in his own diary for 1864. This remarkable document, discovered by the author, was tipped into an 1864 Frank Leslie’s Lady’s Almanac, and gives a wealth of detail about the Booth family. It is in the Folger Shakespeare Library, Washington.
Morris, Life on the Stage, 103.
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