Whenever Edwin remembers, he throws in a gesture. Don’t just mouth your lines. Do something! Mostly he forgets. June is unimpressed with his performance and won’t allow a repeat.
But a young critic, Ferdinand Cartwright Ewer, leaves the San Francisco theater in a fever of excitement and goes to his newspaper offices to write a long review. Edwin Booth, he writes, has made Hamlet “the easy, undulating, flexible thing” Shakespeare intended.
Tastes were changing. Edwin’s Hamlet, as it developed over the years, was subtle where his father had been theatrical, contained where his father had been expansive, and natural where his father had declaimed. As Edwin aged, his Hamlet would become less agonized and more stoic—the embodiment of a good man enduring. This was a Hamlet who knew how his story would end, but moved forward anyway with courage and dignity. June may not have liked it, but Ewer says, in that very first review of Edwin’s very first Hamlet, that, in concept if not in polish, Edwin has already surpassed his father.
Lincoln and Clay
Having been led to allude to domestic slavery so frequently already, I am unwilling to close without referring more particularly to Mr. Clay’s views and conduct in regard to it. He ever was on principle and in feeling, opposed to slavery. The very earliest, and one of the latest public efforts of his life, separated by a period of more than fifty years, were both made in favor of gradual emancipation of the slaves in Kentucky. He did not perceive, that on a question of human right, the negroes were to be excepted from the human race. And yet Mr. Clay was the owner of slaves. Cast into life where slavery was already widely spread and deeply seated, he did not perceive, as I think no wise man has perceived, how it could be at once eradicated, without producing a greater evil, even to the cause of human liberty itself.
—Abraham Lincoln, 1852
Junius Brutus Booth is not the only luminary to die in 1852. The Great Compromiser, Henry Clay, Speaker of the House, Secretary of State, lawyer to Aaron Burr, and fierce critic of Andrew Jackson, a man whose shadow stretched from the presidency of Thomas Jefferson to that of Millard Fillmore, also dies. Lincoln, who has been out of office now for three years, is given the honor of eulogizing him at the Illinois state capitol. Henry Clay is Lincoln’s ideal politician, a person who seeks common ground, a person who brokers peace.
To that end, Henry Clay was the architect of multiple compromises that both limited and sustained slavery, most recently the Compromise of 1850, a complicated legal elaboration triggered by California’s desire to join the Union as a free state and dealing with the territories annexed from Mexico by Polk’s war. Four years later, the Kansas-Nebraska Act, also authored by Stephen Douglas, will bring Lincoln roaring back to politics. Until then, he is riding the judicial circuit, making a name for himself as a stump speechifier, and retiring in the evenings to read his beloved Burns, his Byron, his Emerson.
Meanwhile, at home:
One morning, the neighbors are treated to the sight of Mary chasing him, half-dressed, from the house with a broom. A housemaid whispers over the back fence that Mary once hit him over the head with a wooden board as he was reading the paper, blackening an eye and swelling his nose. That she both strikes and underpays the servants so that the only ones they can keep are the ones Lincoln secretly bribes to stay. That she cries continuously.
In spite of this, he misses her when he travels. He can see how unhappy she is and that’s a condition with which he has considerable experience and endless sympathy.
BOOK THREE
For such as we are made of, such we be.
—W. Shakespeare, Twelfth Night
The Booth family is gratified by the depth and breadth of national mourning for Junius Brutus Booth. Every American paper reports Booth’s death and most include long eulogies. But one response is memorable for its brevity. Rufus Choate, a storied trial lawyer turned Whig congressman, a man famous for his soaring and sustained bouts of oratory, says simply, “There are no more actors.”
If Father’s legacy once seemed tainted by drink and madness, it no longer appears so. Death has burned everything else away and only genius remains. Wires and letters for Mother pour in from everywhere. Some come from people Mother knows, but far more from people she doesn’t, people once touched by a chance encounter or a long-ago performance. For the children, there’s a comfort in the sheer number of these letters, in seeing their father recognized as a great man. The further comfort is to see Mother recognized as his wife, themselves as his children. Father has died without leaving a will and the courts are not so settled on the matter. Richard Booth, now a married man with four children, sues on the grounds that he is Father’s sole legitimate heir. The entire estate amounts to $4,728.99.
He even claims Father’s costumes, but, since she made them all herself, the court awards these to Mother. A few years later, Mother will give them to Johnny. A few years after that, Edwin will destroy them, one by one, in the furnace beneath his theater. It will take Edwin more than three hours to burn them all.
* * *
—
Although Father earned a thousand and eighty-four dollars in his final New Orleans engagement, only five hundred of that makes it home. Father’s salary ceases, of course, and the rents on certain properties in England now go to Richard.
Mother decides that the only way forward is to let the place on North Exeter and return to the farm. This is complicated by the state of the new house there. Tudor Hall is only recently completed and the architect, James Gifford, not yet paid. Gifford removes the heavy tin roof. He lets Mother know that, until his money arrives, the unmaking of Tudor Hall will continue. Mother gives him most of what’s left in the coffers and the house is re-roofed. They must manage to support themselves now on the rent from the Baltimore house and the yield from the farm.
* * *
—
At the time of Father’s death, Asia is seventeen, Johnny fourteen, and Joe twelve. Once again, the family cracks and shifts. The gravitational center that was Father is gone, with June and Edwin flung all the way to California and Johnny and Joe to a boarding school in Catonsville, some seven miles southwest of Baltimore. St. Timothy’s Hall is the sort of school that charges top dollar for a regimen of cold, exertion, and hunger, a basic program of toughen-up. Mother selected it.
The rector, Reverend Libertus Van Bokkelen, comes from New York and is a secret abolitionist. The students are none of the above, proud Southerners one and all, many from prominent families. One of Johnny’s classmates is the nephew of Robert E. Lee. St. Timothy’s has everything Mother wants for her highest-and her lowest-spirited son—a good education, military discipline, and social connections. She doesn’t care that these connections are with slavers.
Johnny makes friends quickly. He will do so all his life. And yet, he hates the school. Something is rotten in the state of Denmark, he writes in his first letter home. The classes are too hard for him, the rules too strict, the conditions too punishing. Only socially does he excel.
Meanwhile:
Off in California, Edwin is recovering his vim and his vitality.
He’s moved in with a friend of his father’s, an actor named Dave Anderson. Anderson is an older man, but not the parental sort. He doesn’t provide the guidance or guardianship that Old Spudge did. After his grim and isolated adolescence, Edwin is finally having fun.