The rise and fall of John Wilkes Booth: America’s first celebrity assassin

The applause was deafening.

Starting at the very lip of the stage, it swept backward, section by section and row by row, gaining in intensity. Men and women leapt to their feet, clapping furiously. From the loges and the mezzanine erupted a cascade of shouts and whistles and bravos, while in the cheap seats and the standing‑room‑only section at the rear of the house, playgoers stomped their feet and yelled at the top of their lungs. They had never seen or heard anything like it. For there on the stage, illuminated by the cool glow of the gaslights, wasn’t just another actor taking a bow. Here was a sensation, a revelation, a talent touched by the hand of God.

His name was John Wilkes Booth.

“He was one of the few,” recalled the English actor Charles Wyndham, who had appeared onstage with Booth in Washington during the spring of 1863, “to whom that ill‑used term of genius might be applied with perfect truth.” Newspaper drama critics agreed. “A genius,” declared the Chicago Tribune. “He was possessed of true genius” — Philadelphia Bulletin. “His brilliant genius” — Cincinnati Enquirer. “Sparking with the fire of original genius” — Baltimore Sun. “He imitates no one — not even unconsciously,” wrote the Louisville Daily Democrat. “He is guided by his genius alone — a star that is destined to light him to the very summit.” Others felt that he was already there. The Indianapolis Daily Journal wrote that “Mr. Booth is, beyond a doubt, the most promising young actor of the day.”

Audiences adored him. From New England to the Mississippi River, theatergoers snatched up tickets and filled houses to capacity whenever John Wilkes Booth came to town. “The house was filled to overflow,” reported the Chicago Evening Journal on an appearance by Booth in early 1862. “Hundreds were turned from the doors,” read one account from late 1861. “The theatre could not hold all of the people who rushed there to see and hear Mr. Booth,” came another, from late 1862. When Booth played Brooklyn for the first time, during the autumn of 1863, a local journalist wrote of “an unusual demonstration in the scramble for tickets. Such a scene of pushing, crowding and jamming mingled with expressions more vigorous than polite.”

Not surprisingly, theater owners sought to cash in on Booth’s red‑hot popularity. When the 25‑year‑old actor made his first appearance at the brand‑new Ford’s Theatre in Washington in November 1863, every seat “regular or improvised obtainable in the building was occupied,” while hundreds more stood in the rear or along the sides of the theater. In Massachusetts, one theater was so completely packed every night, reported the Boston Advertiser, that “the carpenter of the establishment has it in contemplation to put a row of hooks and pegs around the lobby and gallery, for the latecomers to hang from.” Even when Booth didn’t have a scheduled performance, so great was his reputation that people sought him out anyway. When a blizzard in January 1864 trapped Booth for a few days in St. Joseph, Missouri, the mayor and leading citizens successfully petitioned him to give a series of dramatic readings, including “The Charge of the Light Brigade” and passages from Hamlet and The Merchant of Venice.

Shakespeare was his specialty.

Though he could successfully act in both the latest plays and in light comedies — and keep the audience in stitches all the while he was onstage — it was through the great Shakespearean tragedies that the sparks of his talent arced the brightest. “We have heard of no one who makes the sense of Shakespeare so clear,” reported one Indianapolis paper, while the theater critic for the Boston Daily Evening Transcript wrote that “his reading is beautiful in the extreme, and the hidden meanings of Shakespeare’s lines are all unfolded by the power of genius and thorough study.” The New York Tribune went even further, declaring that, through Booth, “the diction of the play is almost, every line, as fresh as if written yesterday.” 

In theaters large and small, in both cities and towns, John Wilkes Booth awed audiences week after week. Especially thrilling was the physicality that Booth brought to the American stage. Actors who played opposite him often learned this the hard way. 

Theater owner and impresario John T. Ford later wrote in the Washington Evening Star of how Booth, while playing Macbeth, insisted that a twelve‑foot‑high cliff be built onstage that he could then leap off in a single bound. “He was an athlete. He put into all of his impersonations the vitality of perfect manhood,” Ford wrote. “I paid him $700 a week.” That was a substantial amount of money at the time. Nevertheless, even during rehearsals, Booth would hold nothing back. “When I came off the stage,” actor Walter Benn recalled of rehearsing a play with Booth called Damon and Pythias, “I discovered he had well clawed my neck with his fingernails, and I was bleeding profusely.”

Audiences had never seen anything like it. At one performance, the theater critic for the Daily Cleveland Herald reported, the entire house rose to its feet during his swordfight scene as Richard III, Shakespeare’s killer king. And both theatergoers and critics absolutely loved it. “The fight between Richard and Richmond in the last scene is most terrific; indeed we have never seen it equaled on stage,” wrote the St. Louis Democrat.

John Wilkes Booth wasn’t just another actor. He was a superstar. His looks did not go unnoticed either.

“Now it is scarcely an exaggeration to say that the [fair] sex was in love with John Booth,” Clara Morris later wrote in a memoir. “At depot restaurants those fiercely unwilling maiden‑slammers of plates and shooters of coffee‑cups made to him swift and gentle offerings of hot steaks, hot biscuits, hot coffee, crowding round him like doves about a grain basket, leaving other travellers to wait upon themselves or go without refreshment. At the hotels, maids had been known to enter his room and tear asunder the already made‑up bed, that the ‘turn‑over’ might be broader by a thread or two, and both pillows slant at the perfectly correct angle.” 

A. F. Norcross, who grew up in a theatrical family in Boston, remembered the impact that Booth had with the girls in the laundry that cleaned and ironed his collars and cuffs. “They always saw to it that Mr. Booth’s package was ready when he came for it,” she recalled, “and vied with each other as to who should have the honor of delivering it.”

The attention was even more intense at the theaters themselves. “The stage door was always blocked with silly women waiting to catch a glimpse, as he passed, of his superb face and figure,” recalled Kate Reignolds. Clara Morris witnessed it as well. “At the theatre, good heaven!” she wrote, “as the sunflowers turn upon their stalks to follow the beloved sun, so old or young, our faces smiling, turned to him.” Once, after a matinee in Boston, a crowd of female theatergoers tried to force their way into his dressing room. And all across the loyal states, women sent Booth letters by the bushel basket.

Interestingly, Booth was also a hit with men.

“He joked with the cabmen at the stand corner of the Tremont House,” Norcross recalled. “He loved a jest and in his quiet, quizzical way made friends everywhere.” He was instant friends with bartenders and stagehands, and he could tell stories like few others. “He was a most charming fellow, off the stage as well as on, a man of flashing wit and magnetic character,” Wyndham remembered. “He was one of the best raconteurs to whom I have 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.”

Children adored him — and he them. “He could while away hours playing with children,” John Ellsler recalled; “he often did so with mine.” When Booth would spend the night with the Tompkins family when he visited Boston, their twelve‑year‑old son would sneak up to the actor’s room in the morning for a pillow fight. Another time, while waiting for a train outside of Cameron, Missouri, in January 1864, Booth happily joined in a snowball fight with a group of local kids. And Clara Morris remembered an incident one morning when Booth, dashing out of the theater on the way to the telegraph office, plowed directly into a small child — “a small roamer of the stony streets” — standing in the middle of the sidewalk.

“Oh, good Lord!” Booth cried out. “Baby, are you hurt?”

Booth then picked up the “dirty, tousled, small heap” and stood it on its feet.

“Don’t cry, little chap!”

Then, according to Morris, “the aforesaid little chap not only ceased to cry but gave him a damp and grimy smile, at which the actor bent towards him quickly, but paused, took out his handkerchief, and first carefully wiping the dirty little nose and mouth, stooped and kissed him heartily, put some change in each freckled paw, and continued his run to the telegraph office.” Morris added: “He knew of no witness to the act. To kiss a pretty, clean child under the approving eyes of mamma might mean nothing but politeness, but surely it required the prompting of a warm and tender heart to make a young and thoughtless man feel for and caress such a dirty, forlorn bit of babyhood as that.”

He made a big impression on another child as well.

During the spring of 1863, Booth played Washington for nearly a month. “Mr. John Wilkes Booth, First appearance in Washington, A Star of the First Magnitude,” crowed the playbill at Grover’s Theatre. Along with appearances in Romeo and Juliet, Othello, and Richard III, he also acted in The Marble Heart, a play about a sculptor who falls in love with one of his sculptures. Sitting in the audience at one such performance was ten‑year‑old Tad Lincoln and his friend Gustav Schurmann, a teenaged bugler with the 40th New York Infantry Regiment. Both were absolutely transfixed by the “dark, handsome man with brilliant black eyes” who played the leading role.

“I’d like to meet that actor,” Tad said. “He makes you thrill.” And so they did.

During the intermission after the second act, the stage manager brought Tad and the young bugler to Booth’s dressing room and introduced them. “Booth shook hands with us in the pleasantest fashion imaginable,” Schurmann recounted. “He talked to us while he made up, and when we went away he gave us each a bunch of roses.”

Only there was another side to John Wilkes Booth as well.

Philadelphia, 1864

Sitting alone in a hotel room, his passions stirred and his thoughts racing, John Wilkes Booth picks up a pen and some sheets of paper and starts to write. “Dear Sir,” he begins, then “To whom it may concern.” But he is writing to himself as much as to anyone else. And as his pen flies across the foolscap, out come the words that he cannot say in public. Here, in the birthplace of the nation, with the carriage traffic rumbling by on the streets below, Booth’s own beliefs come spilling out in a river of ink. He crosses out words when necessary, underlining others.

“This country was formed for the white not for the black man. And looking upon African slavery from the same stand‑point, 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.” There is more. Much more.

Booth signs the letter, “A Confederate.”

To the public, there was little to suggest that John Wilkes Booth was anything other than a loyal citizen of the United States. Though he had been born and raised in Maryland, a slave state, his own family had never owned slaves, while his brother, Edwin, was an outspoken “Union man.” And Booth himself was especially beloved by Union soldiers. Some sought to have daguerreotypes taken with him, while a group of Union officers in Nashville presented him with a sword. During a visit to New York City in the summer of 1863, Booth took extra pains to care for a Union officer named Adam Badeau, who had been shot in the left foot during the siege of Port Hudson. 

A few others, however, caught glimpses of his true sympathies.

Boston, 1864

Boston had always been good to John Wilkes Booth. There was probably no city in the United States that loved him like the great Massachusetts capital. On both bitter winter nights and blustery spring evenings, theatergoers flocked to Booth’s performances, especially at the venerable Boston Museum. 

Booth played Boston four times between May 1862 and May 1864, and each visit was nothing short of a triumph. The critic for the Evening Transcript proclaimed him to be “perhaps the most promising actor on the American stage,” while a playbill at the Boston Museum declared

that “This Young Artist’s histrionic efforts [have] never been equaled by any star at the Museum.”

Booth also made one other visit to Boston. Given his extensive travels, it wasn’t unduly strange, perhaps, that John Wilkes Booth decided to make a quick trip to the city in late July 1864. What was strange was that he gave no performances while he was in town. Nor, to our knowledge, did he attend any. So what was he doing there?

Ten months later, a man by the name of Cordial Crane stumbled upon a possible explanation. An inspector with the U.S. Customs House in Boston, he had become interested in Confederate plots against the city. Acting on a hunch, he examined the register of the Parker House in Boston, and discovered that on July 26, 1864, the hotel’s guests included:

• Charles R. Hunter, Toronto, Canada West
• J. Wilkes Booth
• A. J. Bursted, Baltimore
• H. V. Clinton, Canada West
• R. A. Leech, Montreal

Crane forwarded this information to Secretary of War Edwin Stanton, but apparently no official follow‑up took place.

Latter‑day investigators, however, have seen something else. All of the names, save for Booth’s, appear to be aliases. The man who used the name “H. V. Clinton” had also used that same name — this time claiming to be from St. Louis — one month later when he registered at St. Lawrence Hall, the hotel that served as the unofficial headquarters for Confederate Secret Service operations in Montreal. 

“Now, more than a century later, the gathering at the Parker House can be construed differently,” wrote career intelligence officers William A. Tidwell and David Winfred Gaddy and historian James O. Hall in their little‑known but deeply researched and revelatory 1988 book, Come Retribution. “It had all the earmarks of a conference with an agenda. The inference is that agents of the Confederate apparatus in Canada had a need to discuss something with Booth.”

One hundred and fifty years later, it isn’t too difficult to figure out what that was.

A fortnight after the meeting in Boston, Booth contacted two old friends in Baltimore. Over wine in Booth’s room, the three men openly discussed the war and the precarious condition of the Confederacy. Booth then steered the discussion to President Lincoln. “He said the President frequently went to the Soldiers Home, alone and unguarded, that he could easily be captured on one of those visits, and carried to the Potomac, boated across the river and conveyed to Richmond,” Sam Arnold, a fellow conspirator, later wrote. There was one other detail: “Booth said that he would furnish all the necessary materials to carry out the project.”

Two weeks after the mysterious visit to the Parker House, John Wilkes Booth had suddenly become a would-be kidnapper. He was also now an expert on Lincoln’s movements, on crossing the Potomac by boat, and, he claimed, he now had access to everything needed to abduct the president of the United States — things he may well have learned in Boston. 

“Undoubtedly he conspired to kidnap the President — that would appeal to him,” actress Clara Morris remembered. 

In April 1865, after the surrender of Robert E. Lee at the Appomattox Court House, Booth’s plans would change from kidnapping to assassination.