The life, crime, and capture of John Wilkes Booth,: with a full sketch of the conspiracy of which he was the leader, and the pursuit, trial and execution of his accomplices./ By George Alfred Townsend.

, ~Lfe, C'nme, and Captur of' JoAn Wko.ootA.
obtain some applause. But, in general, he was stumbling and worthless
I myself remember, on three oonsecutive nights, hearing him trip up and
receive suppressed hisses. He lacked enterprise; other young actors, in.
stead of waiting to be given better parts, committed them to memory, in
the hope that their real interpreter might not come to hand. Among these
I recall John McCullough, who afterwards became qSuite a celebrated
actor. He was getting, if I correctly remember, only six dollars a week,
while Booth obtained eight. Yet Wilkes Booth seemed too slow or indifferent to get on the weather side. of'such chances. He still held the part
of third walking gentleman, and the third is always the first to be walked
off in case of strait, as was Wilkes Booth. He did not survive forty
weeks engagement, nor make above three hundred dollars in all that time.
The Kellers arrived; they cut down the company, and they dispensed with
Wilkes Booth. He is remembered in Philadelphia by his failure as in the
world by his crime.
About this time a manager named Kunkle gave Booth' a salary of twenty
dollars a week to go to the- Richmond Theater. There he played a higher
order of parts, and played them better,,winning applauses from the easy
provincial cities, and taking, as everywhere the ladies by storm. I have
never wondered why many actors were strongly predisposed toward the
South. There, their social status is. nine times as big as with us. The hos.
pitable, lounging, buzzing character of the southerner is entirely consonant
with the cosmopolitanism of the stage, and that easy" hang-up-your-hatativeness," which-is the rule and the demand in Thespianship. We place
actors outside of society, and execrate them because they are there. The
South took them into affable fellowship, and was not ruined by it, but be
loved by the fraternity. Booth played two seasons in Richmond, and left
in some esteem.
When the John Brown raid occured, Booth left the Richmond Theater
for the scene of'strife in a picked company with which he had affiliated for
some time. From his connection with. the militia on.this occasion he was
w6nt to trace his fealty to Virginia. He was a non-commissioned. officer,
and remained at Charleston till after the execution, visiting the old pike
man in jail, and his company was selected to form guard around the scaf.
fold when John Brown went, white-haired, to his account. There may be
irL this a consolation for the canonizers of the first arm-bearer between
the sections, that one whose unit swelled the host to crush out that brave
old life, took from the scene inspiration enough to slay a merciful President
in his unsuspecting leisure. Booth never referred to John Brown's death
in bravado; possibly at that gallows began some such terrible purpose as
he afterward consummated.
It was close upon the beginning of the war when Booth resolved to
transform himself from a stock actor to a "star." As many will read this
who do not understand such distinctions,-let me preface it by explaining
that a "star" is. an actor who belongs to no one theater, but travels from
each to all, playing a few weeks at a time, and sustained in his chief char
acter by the regular or stock actors. A stock actor is a good actor, and a
poor fool. A star is an advertisement in tights, who grows rich and cor
-.rupts the public taste. Booth was a star, and being so, had an agent. The
'/agent is a trumpeter' who goes on before, writing the impartial notices which
you see in. the editorial columns of country papers and counting noses at
the theater doors. Booth's agent w. one Matthew Canning, an exploded
Philadelphia lawyer, who took to managing by passing the bare and J.
Wilkes no longe', but our country's rising. tragedian. J. Wilkes Booth,
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