Two months later came the terrible event which plunged the nation, and especially the Booth family, into such awful sorrow. Edwin was playing in Boston, but at once gave up his engagement and returned to his home in New York. Numbers of the most eminent people hastened to assure him of their sympathy and their belief in his loyalty. He had indeed been stanch for the Union, and the only vote he ever cast was for Lincoln in 1864. But he was overwhelmed by this fresh misfortune, this new cloud that had settled on his house. His brother Junius and his brother-in-law were thrown into prison in Washington, and he felt himself an object of suspicion. I had returned to the field, and was in Richmond when the news reached me. I wrote to him at once, but my letter was withheld. All letters to him for awhile were kept back, and I suppose especially any from Richmond. I could not leave my post immediately, and it was a month or more before I reached New York, where I went, of course, direct to him. The first shock was over, but the old gloom was greater than ever.
He told me he had seen nothing in his brother to excite suspicion, and I have always believed that the awful act was the result of a disturbed brain. It was so theatrical in plan and performance; the conspiracy, the dagger, the selection of a theatre, the brandishing of the weapon, the cry “Sic Semper Tyrannis” to the audience—all was exactly what a madman brought up in a theatre might have been expected to conceive; a man, too, of this peculiar family, the son of Junius Brutus Booth, used all his life to acting tragedies. He had not only nursed me tenderly, a soldier wounded for the cause he should have hated, but in all the exciting period of the riot he said no word that indicated sympathy with the South. He went out daily to inquire the news, and was indignant at the outrages he reported; he even assisted to shield my negro servant who remained hidden in the cellar for nearly a week. Two months before the end of the war he wished me well when I set out to rejoin Grant.
After a few months Booth returned to the stage, and was welcomed back with an enthusiasm which showed that not only his genius but his nobility of character, his elevation of thought, his refinement of manner had all been appreciated. In 1869 he remarried—this time a Miss McVicker, an actress of Chicago, whom I never saw. She left the stage upon her marriage. In the same year he opened Booth’s Theatre. His pecuniary success had been very brilliant, and he had long been ambitious to build and control a theatre 265 where the most elevating influences of the drama should be exemplified. It was a beautiful tribute to his art. Everything was done that taste and study and care and elaborate expenditure could accomplish, to produce the greatest plays in the most admirable manner; but Booth had no business talent, and some of those with whom he was brought into contact had a large share of this talent, and used it to injure or betray his interests. He lost largely, and finally was obliged to declare himself a bankrupt. He gave up all he had in the world, his personal and private property, his theatre, his library and theatrical wardrobe, and many treasures of his profession, and became once more a travelling star. His performances, however, proved more attractive than ever; he was soon able to repay all his creditors, and afterward remained a man of fortune.
Meanwhile the vicissitudes of life had drifted us far apart. I was in Europe officially for many years, but in 1880 had a leave of absence. During the month of June a public breakfast was offered Booth at Delmonico’s by many of the most eminent men in New York, and I then met him for the first time since 1867. After the breakfast I went to his rooms, and he put his arms around me and begged that we should be to each other all we had ever been. Each promised, and each kept his word.
But he started for England a few days afterward, and it was not till the next year that I returned there. Then I saw much of him. He played this time with great success, at Irving’s theatre. The great English actor gave him every facility; relinquished his house to him for a while, and treated him with a distinguished courtesy worthy of his own position as head of the British stage. Irving had been in the stock company that supported Booth during his first English engagement, but now they were equals, and played on alternate nights, and sometimes together, in Othello and Iago. Booth’s houses were crowded with the most cultivated and important people in England; and his acting, despite a certain national jealousy, was by many pronounced superior to that of the Englishman. Invitations came to him from aristocratic quarters, in which his daughter was included; but his wife was in miserable health and unable to go at all into the world, or even to receive any one but her own family. This marred the gratification at his success, and in 1881, after lingering in great suffering, both for herself and those about her, the second wife of Edwin Booth also died. I had returned from Europe and passed the night after her funeral in his rooms at New York. His mother and sister also passed away, and his daughter married, so that he was left, in a great degree, alone.
His profession, however, remained to him. It was about this time that he began those remarkable dramatic tours with Barrett which were more successful from a pecuniary point of view than any other of his enterprises. It is even said, by those competent to pronounce, that the financial results surpassed any known in the history of the stage. Everywhere he was recognized as the head of the American theatre. His acting was ripened and chastened by study and long experience, by the development of his own powers, and the opportunities he had enjoyed of comparison with his greatest foreign rivals. He was accepted as the equal in America of what Garrick had been in his palmiest days—the peer and companion of whatever was best in American society.
It is four or five years since he conceived the idea of founding the Players’ Club, and, having become a man of more than ordinary means, he was able to gratify this ambition. He bought and rebuilt a fine house in a desirable position in New York, and filled it with choice books and pictures and relics of the stage, and then invited men of distinction and culture to meet actors of character and ability on an equal footing. The club has been eminently successful, and for several years Booth, its founder and president, made it his home. He had a suite of rooms, modestly but tastefully furnished, and among his friends and books 266 and pictures passed the last days of his life. When he wrote the extracts from the Shakespearian sonnets in the volume he gave me thirty years ago, I think he felt some consciousness of the ban that the world then put upon his profession, but he could not have retained the feeling, for there was no ban applied to him. Exclusive English aristocrats invited him and his daughter, and visited them in return; and Edwin Booth voted to admit Grover Cleveland to the Century Club, and invited General Sherman to become a member of the Players’.
I was very much struck, on my return from Europe in 1881, with the dignity and composure which years of recognition had given to his bearing. The glowing beauty of his youth, of course, was gone, his features bore traces of his own sorrows and experiences, and besides were worn and hardened by those terrible passions of the stage which were for the time so real to him. I have indeed no doubt that it was the intense strain on brain and nerve which his acting demanded, and not any private grief or anxiety, that broke him down before his time.
Years, however, had enhanced his innate nobility. He was always reverent to religion, and had warm friends among the clergy of various denominations. A Catholic priest and the Protestant Bishop of New York were among the first to call after his paralysis was known. I never heard him speak disrespectfully of sacred themes or of good women. His character in later years took on a softer phase; his irritability was rarer, indeed it almost disappeared, while the range of his friendships was wider.
When he received a foreign actor who came to call on him, as they all did, or welcomed some distinguished visitor to his club, he did it with a calm dignity and gracious courtesy that was very natural and yet imposing, while his more intimate bearing when we were alone was inexpressibly confiding and affectionate, though more subdued than in the earlier days.