* * *
—
In February of 1840, the tenth and final child arrives, a boy named Joseph Adrian, the name Adrian chosen in tribute to June’s debut in Richelieu as the handsome Adrien de Mauprat. It’s a part in which June fails to shine. “Competent” is the best his fellow players can muster. “Great in nothing.” They whisper that it was only the Booth name that landed him the role. These whispers carry all the way to his father’s ear, but too late—Joe is already named.
That autumn the family moves to Baltimore, ceding the farm entirely to the Mitchells in the winter months, returning only during the summer when cholera and typhoid sweep the city. They trade the playground of orchards, fields, and forests for streets and parks. They trade their neighbors, all of whom they know by name, for a busy, noisy city of one hundred thousand people.
The Mitchells move into the cabin. This has at least one happy outcome: Ann Hall will finally be able to re-enter the carriage house, where she’ll find her money in the wall exactly as they left it. She’ll hold it a mercy from God that James Mitchell was too lazy to ever even look about the place where he had lived for two whole years.
x
Grapes clover rye potatoes peaches parsnips the piebald pony and the white calf Father’s chair and Mother’s powders rain falling through trees leaves turning silver in the stream mushrooms like fairy houses and Joe’s hands and Ann’s skirts and the color of rocks when they’re wet and lying against the black dogs fur in our fingers and Father in wigs shouting I had a dream which was not all a dream and Mother and Mother and Mother and look! How our sister comes through the forest her arms all filled with flowers.
Lincoln and the Cave of Gloom
Yes! I’ve resolved the deed to do,
And this the place to do it:
This heart I’ll rush a dagger through
Though I in hell should rue it!
—Abraham Lincoln on suicide
That same winter, while the Booths are moving to Baltimore, Abraham Lincoln suffers his second nervous breakdown. He’s in his thirties now, a fourth-term state congressman in Illinois, and for the first time, he can’t rouse himself to make his sessions. He feels too heavy to move. His thoughts circle like vultures.
He’s called off his courtship of Mary Todd. Whether this is the result or the cause of his depression is unclear. It would kill me to marry her, he tells his friends. But he knows that people think he’s behaved dishonorably towards her and he’s not certain he hasn’t.
He may be in love with someone else—several of his friends think he’s smitten with the eighteen-year-old daughter of a state senator. She has many such admirers.
He goes to a doctor, seeking medicinal solace. He writes—“I am now the most miserable man living. If what I feel were equally distributed to the whole human family, there would not be one cheerful face on earth.” He loses weight he can ill afford. His arms and legs are sticks; his clothing flaps about them like flags on poles.
Under pressure from his friend Joshua Speed, he makes a visit to the Speed plantation in Kentucky. On the deck of his boat he encounters twelve Negro men chained together like “fish on a trot-line.” This image will haunt him. Over the years he’ll refer often to these chained men. He’ll see the straitened way they are forced to walk, hear the clank of iron. He understands that they’ve been torn from their families and everyone they love. But in this first encounter, still sunk inside the miasma of his miserable self, what he thinks is that they seem, on the surface, happier than he. He wonders how this could be so.
Joshua Speed fears he’ll take his own life, and begs Lincoln to promise otherwise. Lincoln tells Speed not to worry. He’s not yet done anything to make himself a man worth remembering and he’s determined not to die until he has.
BOOK TWO
If I chance to talk a little wild, forgive me; I had it from my father.
—W. Shakespeare, Henry VIII
Baltimore couldn’t be less like the farm. Instead of frogs, choruses of drunks sing on the street after dark. Instead of birdcalls, factory whistles. Instead of the spring and the stream, trains and The Baltimore Sun presses run through the night. By the 1840s, Baltimore is the second-largest city in the United States. Everything here is modern as can be, what with the new railroad connection, the factories, and the harbor, the air pollution, the water pollution, and the noise.
Pigs roam freely. So do packs of young white delinquents. Gangs like the Gumballs, the Neversweats, and the Cock Robins own the streets. An editorial in the Sun claims that the citizens of Baltimore are more plagued by wicked boys than the people of any other city in the nation.
For six years the Booths live in a rented row house. In 1846, Father buys the roomy brick townhouse at 62 North Exeter Street. The new home has a modest elegance. A Franklin stove. One bedroom for the boys and another for the girls. A dining room. Fleur-de-lis wallpaper flocked in yellow.
Green shutters frame the windows. Mulberry trees shade the yard. There is a gazebo in the back, a high stoop in the front, and, most conveniently, the tiny Struthoff grocery right next door.
Early in the evenings, when it’s warm and dry enough, when their mothers have had just as much noise and quarrel as anyone could possibly endure, the neighborhood children, all of them white, are sent outside to play together in the street.
It’s a short walk from the stoop to the Front Street Theatre—a palatial, Grecian-inspired venue that accommodates an audience of four thousand, the entire bottom floor reserved for horses and carriages. The Jones Falls waterway runs right past the back door.
Baltimore boasts four premiere theaters and is known nationally for its enthusiastic audiences. It also has the largest population of free blacks in the country and they attend in considerable numbers, except for those plays, like Othello, that they are forbidden to see.
* * *
—
The family has fractured.
Now there is the older set, most of whom are dead, only June and Rosalie remaining and only Rosalie remaining at home—a faction of one—the only child in the house who remembers, if barely, when their father was celebrated, wealthy, and sober. The only child in the house who remembers Frederick, Mary Ann, and Elizabeth. In truth, Rosalie, now called Rose, can no longer be counted a child. She’s twenty-two by the time they move to Exeter Street.
And then there is the younger set, the city kids, the farm a mere summertime interlude in their urban lives. They choose city names for themselves: Edwin becomes Ned （or sometimes Ted）， Asia becomes Sidney, and Johnny is known as Wilkes. These three have become the beating heart of the family. They quarrel and criticize, ridicule and betray each other. Still they are each other’s whole childhood, a tightly laced, insular group. “We only had each other,” Edwin will say in later years. “We could only be comfortable with each other,” is Asia’s version of the same.
Mother may have been forced off the farm by the Mitchells, but she’s landed somewhere she likes better. She misses Ann, but has an Irish servant now who comes to cook and clean, as well as a free black woman who helps Rosalie with the laundry.
For the younger children, Mother sees possibilities. They go to school. They take dancing and music lessons. They wear better clothes, which Mother makes herself. She aspires to the middle-class respectability she herself had as a child. She sets about finding and nurturing useful social connections that have nothing to do with the world of the theater.