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Categories: Pinned post

Under the Veil: Revealing the True Identity of John Wilkes Booth’s Photograph

Posted on July 8, 2026 by Dave Taylor

The Assassin’s Collection of Photographs

In the early morning hours of April 26, 1865, Sgt. Boston Corbett ended the manhunt for Abraham Lincoln’s assassin by firing the shot that fatally wounded John Wilkes Booth. After collapsing to the ground, the assassin was dragged from the tobacco barn where he had taken refuge and laid out upon the Garrett farmhouse porch near Port Royal, Virginia. For the next couple of hours, Booth lingered in and out of consciousness as he bled from the bullet wound to the back of his neck. The gathered soldiers and detectives wasted no time in identifying Booth and going through his pockets.

The most significant find was a diary in which the assassin had written down his manifesto while on the run. Pages of this previously used 1864 datebook had been ripped out by the assassin in order to provide a clean slate for his ruminations on the assassination. The diary featured a leather case, black on the outside and Moroccan red on the inside. This case contained a pocket. Inside this pocket, the authorities found some cash in greenbacks, bills of exchange on a Canadian bank, and a small collection of photographs in the form of carte de visites.

These items, along with other small objects found on Booth’s person, were tied up together in a handkerchief. Detective Everton Conger, eager to tell the War Department that his group had tracked down Lincoln’s assassin, departed the Garrett farm before Booth had died with these items in tow. When Conger arrived in Washington, D.C., he reported to Secretary of War Edwin Stanton in his office. He handed over the parcel of Booth’s items in the presence of Stanton and General Lafayette Baker. Here was the physical evidence that Lincoln’s assassin had been found.

During the trial of the Lincoln conspirators in May and June of 1865, the items removed from Booth were present on the evidence table of the courtroom. While some of the items, such as the Canadian bills of exchange, were admitted into evidence at trial, very little attention was paid to the diary. Its written contents did not provide any new information about the plot other than Booth’s reasons for striking out against Lincoln and his complaints about being called a coward in the press. The diary was obliquely referred to during some of the testimony, but it was never entered into evidence as an exhibit. The five CDV images in the pocket were never referenced and likely not even known to anyone other than Judge Advocate General Joseph Holt. After the conspiracy trial ended, the diary and its contents were returned to the War Department for storage.

In 1867, the diary became public knowledge due to its reference in a congressional investigation into President Andrew Johnson and the trial of escaped conspirator John Surratt. President Johnson asked Stanton for an accounting of the diary, and the Secretary of War stated in a letter to the President that it contained “some photographs of females,” with no more elaboration. It was during the two aforementioned proceedings that Everton Conger also testified that images had been found on Booth:

“Q. Were these photographs in the book?
A. Yes, sir.
Q. How many were there?
A. I am unable to say.
Q. Could you not remember if any were taken away?
A. I could not. I can remember that some were there.
Q. Was there anything in this memorandum book at the time you took it from Booth that is not in it now?
A. Not that I know of.”

Once again, the images did not attract much attention. They just were not considered relevant to the investigations. After being displayed during these proceedings, the photographs and the diary were returned to the Judge Advocate General’s office of the War Department. It wasn’t until 1940 that the entire collection of exhibits and objects from the Lincoln assassination trial was transferred to the Lincoln Museum, the precursor to the restored Ford’s Theatre Museum.

Identification and Misidentification

While stored out of sight for over 70 years in the JAG office, the Lincoln relics were not completely forgotten. Different clerks in the JAG often showed off their macabre collection to visitors, including newspaper reporters. It was through these little show-and-tell sessions, which also included the weapons used by Booth and his gang, that the process of trying to identify the five photographs of ladies found on Booth’s person began.

A decade ago, I wrote a post about the process of identifying all the photographs found on Booth, including some incorrect claims that arose along the way. In truth, there doesn’t seem to have been any effort to identify the women in the photographs prior to the 1880s. Over time, a general consensus was reached as to the identification of four of the five ladies. The vignetted photographs were identified as:

  • Lucy Hale, John Wilkes Booth’s secret fiancée

  • Effie Germon, a fellow actress who was the visiting star at the National Theatre. The president’s son, Tad Lincoln, was watching Germon perform in the play Aladdin when the news arrived that his father had been shot at Ford’s Theatre.

  • Alice Gray, an actress who shared the stage as Booth’s leading lady during his time as a theater manager in D.C. in 1863.

  • Helen Western, an actress Booth performed alongside early in his career.

The identity of the woman in the final and only full-body image in the group remained elusive. The clerks in the JAG office came to refer to her as the “Mysterious Beauty.” The desire to identify this last image led the clerks to duplicate her CDV and circulate copies around. This tactic proved useful as she was finally identified as Fanny Brown, another actress well-known to Booth.

Thus, we can see that there was quite a bit of trial and error in trying to determine the identities of the photographs found in Booth’s pocket. But after the correct naming of the final image as Fanny Brown, a consensus was reached. These likenesses of Lucy Hale, Effie Germon, Alice Gray, Helen Western, and Fanny Brown are on display at the Ford’s Theatre museum. They have been duplicated in many books about the assassination. Websites such as this have reproduced them digitally and written about each woman’s connection to Booth. In short, there has been no question about the identity of these ladies for well over 100 years.

But one of these identifications is wrong.

Two years ago, I was working on my historical reviews of the miniseries Manhunt (loosely based on James Swanson’s 2006 book of the same name). In the penultimate episode of the series, a reference is made by the character of John Wilkes Booth to a scrape he once got into with a woman named Henrietta, who attacked him with a knife. This was based on a real event early in Booth’s career, where he was attacked by a fellow actress named Henrietta Irving in a lover’s quarrel, which may have involved Henrietta’s sister, Marie. While recounting that incident in my review, I noted that around the same time, Booth had also worked alongside another pair of acting sisters, Lucille and Helen Western. I created this image showing both Western sisters to include in the post.

Lucille and Helen Western

It then struck me that since the fictional Booth was recounting this story while hiding in the Garrett tobacco barn, I could make the connection that Booth had a picture of Helen Western on his person when he was killed. I then pulled up the picture of Helen Western found on Booth and, for the first time, directly compared the image found on Booth with a genuine photograph of Helen Western. I was immediately struck by how dissimilar they were in some key features.

Helen Western had curly, messy-looking hair, dark eyes, and a rounded jaw. The “Helen Western” in Booth’s pocket appeared to have straight hair (though mostly hidden by a veil), light eyes that had been touched up, and a pronounced jaw. I sought out more images of Helen Western for comparison.

In the end, each photograph of Helen Western strengthened my view that Booth’s “Helen Western” had been identified incorrectly.

Since photo identifications can be a bit subjective, I reached out to a few colleagues to ask for their opinions. The four people I reached out to all responded with their agreement that this image didn’t look like Helen Western. Thomas Bogar, theater historian and author of Backstage at the Lincoln Assassination, wrote, “I looked particularly at the convergence of the nose and eyes, and of the nose and mouth, and the slant and shape and thickness of the eyebrows, not to mention the shape and nose itself. No, this is not Helen Western, and it intrigues me who it might be.”

The Search

This began a search to see if the true identity of the veiled woman could be found. Despite Dr. Bogar’s long career as a theater historian, no immediate match came to his mind. I started making lists of actresses John Wilkes Booth shared the stage with during his career, then searched for images of these women. I visited the Harry Ransom Center in Austin, Texas, multiple times to consult their large theatre collection. I pulled many photograph files of actresses from the 1860s. There were a few possibilities along the way. The veiled woman shared some similarity in appearance to actress Lotty/Lottie Hough, who had performed with Booth in New York in 1862. But the match wasn’t perfect. Avonia Jones and Jean Clara Walters shared a similar hairstyle, but their dark eyes knocked them out. My wife Jen got so used to me closely comparing faces at my computer that “looking at my ladies” became a form of verbal shorthand between us.

A 1860s collage CDV featuring the images of 100 actresses

However, despite some intense search periods, I never came up with a close enough match to really convince me I had found the right person. There was no guarantee that this veiled woman was even an actress. For all I knew, it was an image of a random person Booth knew and, if so, it was unlikely I would ever figure out who she was. Though I would continue to investigate the occasional actress I stumbled across in references to Booth’s acting, my “ladies project” largely went on the back burner as I explored other research avenues.

In March of 2025, I stumbled onto an intriguing lead when one of my Google alerts for John Wilkes Booth came back with an article entitled “Deaf woman fought for the right to vote.” The article highlighted different proponents of female suffrage who were deaf. Included in this list was a journalist, poet, and author named Laura Redden. The article stated that she had once been acquainted with John Wilkes Booth and even taught the future assassin a basic form of sign language. The article also included an image of Redden taken in the 1880s.

This profile image didn’t immediately set off any bells in my mind, but I was intrigued to learn more about this deaf poet, her story, and her connection to John Wilkes Booth.

The Deaf Woman Heard Around the Nation

Laura Catherine Redden was born on February 9, 1839 or 1840 (contradictory sources exist) in Somerset County on the eastern shore of Maryland. Following her father’s murder and her mother’s remarriage, Redden’s family moved from Maryland to Missouri, settling in St. Louis. In 1851, when Redden was about 11 years old, she became ill, likely with spinal meningitis. She recovered from her illness but was left completely deaf. The illness also affected her voice in such a manner that she gradually chose not to speak. This rendered her both deaf and mute. While initially hesitant to enroll at a school for the deaf, she eventually agreed to attend the Institute for the Deaf and Dumb in Fulton, Missouri. There she learned sign language, the American Manual Alphabet, and she attempted to learn lip reading, but she was never able to master the latter skill. For communication with those who did not know sign language, Redden resorted to writing. Initially, this consisted of her school slate and pencils, but in time, she carried a pad of paper with her everywhere she went.

As the written word largely became her only means of communication with the outside world, Redden began exploring it in all forms. She quickly became known for her works of prose and poetry, submitting many poems to periodicals like Harper’s Magazine. Redden was considered a star student, and upon her graduation in 1858, she was even offered a teaching position at the school, but she declined. She moved back in with her family in St. Louis and soon accepted a position as the literary editor for a weekly Presbyterian newspaper.

The tenor of the times in the late 1850s into the early 1860s was that of the growing conflict between the slave power in the South and Northern abolitionism. Redden compsoed poems about events of the day while also writing political editorials and submitting them to the St. Louis Republican newspaper. To gain purchase in the political sphere dominated by men, the 20-year-old Redden wrote under the pen name Howard Glyndon.

Redden had grown up in the slave states of Maryland and Missouri and was initially against the cause of abolition. In the lead-up to the election of 1860, Redden supported the candidacy of Stephen Douglas, feeling that the election of either Abraham Lincoln or John C. Breckinridge would throw the country into disunion and war. When Douglas lost to Lincoln, and several southern states seceded from the Union prior to his inauguration, Redden (as Glyndon) appealed for calmer heads to prevail. In an editorial called “Stand Together,” Redden called for patriots in the North and South to counter the movements of the extremists on both sides and join together under the banner “Union for the Union!” When the Civil War began with the firing on Fort Sumter by Confederate forces in South Carolina, Redden argued against her state of Missouri joining the Confederacy, despite her strong disagreements with the federal government.

Prior to the hostilities, a Missouri convention had voted almost unanimously against secession. In June of 1861, the Missouri governor, Claiborne Jackson, was in secret communication with Confederate President Jefferson Davis regarding a plan to force Missouri to secede by way of a military coup. Redden vehemently advocated against Gov. Jackson’s call to draft 50,000 soldiers into the state’s militia, not even knowing what his true purpose was. Ultimately, Governor Jackson’s coup failed due to the intervention of Union General Nathaniel Lyon and his forces, who ousted Jackson and caused him to flee into southwestern Missouri. In August of 1861, Nathaniel Lyon became the first Union general to die in battle when his forces lost to Confederate forces at the Battle of Wilson’s Creek near Springfield, Missouri. The victorious Confederates were aided by members of the Missouri State Guard acting under the command of Sterling Price, one of Gov. Jackson’s acolytes.

A month later, Confederate partisans enacted an attack by partially burning the supports of a rail bridge that spanned the Platte River east of St. Joseph, Missouri. This caused a derailment of a west-bound train that crashed into the Platte River, killing about 20 and wounding 100 of the crew and civilian passengers. The death of Gen. Lyon at the hands of “neutral” Missouri guardsmen, and this secessionist attack on innocent men, women, and children riding a train, made a strong impact on Redden. In the aftermath of these events, Redden, as Glyndon, wrote, “I have been very patient and very moderate on this subject, but this last outrage is too much for my feelings. If all I hear of it is true, I will never bear another word in extenuation of rebellion in Missouri, or the policy of mild measures.”

Glyndon’s moderate Union views published in the papers made “him” an enemy in secessionist circles. Efforts were made by pro-Confederate sympathizers to identify the prolific columnist. The pro-secessionist newspaper, the State Journal, eventually broke the news that the learned Howard Glyndon of the St. Louis Republican was, in fact, a 21-year-old deaf woman named Laura Redden. Though publicly unmasked, Redden was not silenced into submission. In fact, the “unchivalrous attack” made on her by secessionist enemies worked to elevate her reputation. The story of the thoughtful and intriguing young woman writing about the most important political matters of the day under a pseudonym made headlines, and soon, other papers were clamoring for pieces by “Howard Glyndon.”

In September of 1861, Redden was sent by the St. Louis Republican to Washington, D.C., to act as a war correspondent. Upon arrival in D.C., Redden made the acquaintance of Attorney General Edward Bates, a fellow Missourian. It was through an introduction from Bates that Redden first met Abraham Lincoln. Though a harsh critic of Lincoln and his administration less than a year before, Redden was quickly sympathetic to the man who bore the weight of the world on his shoulders. She wrote, “You could not to save your life, even if you were that man’s bitterest enemy, look upon that shattered giant and come away without feeling a respectful pity for the suffering that is so plainly written on his honest face.”

Her dispatches home were filled with discussions of the sights of Washington, and she continued to compose poems revolving around the events of the day. She often resided at the Willard, one of the best hotels in the city, and a common place of lodging for members of Congress and visiting dignitaries. Redden made visits to the War Department and Telegraph Offices, establishing a rapport with the clerks and employees. Her method of communication through writing made her an oddity of sorts, and she used the curiosity of others to further her journalistic and artistic pursuits.

Over the next few years, Redden became well known in the social and political circles of the capital. She interacted with many members of Congress and was even invited to the occasional White House Ball by Mrs. Lincoln. In June of 1862, Redden took up a new project in addition to her role as war correspondent. She was hired by New York publishers Baker & Godwin to write a volume of short biographies about sitting members of the House of Representatives. Redden was assisted by several of her male journalist counterparts, who wrote draft sketches of some of the representatives. But the final book was of Redden’s construction, and it was completed by the fall of 1862. Notable Men in “The House:” A Series of Sketches of Prominent Men in the House of Representatives, Members of the Thirty-Seventh Congress, contained biographies of 52 members of the House and was published under the Howard Glyndon non de plume.

In the summer of 1863, Redden traveled back to St. Louis for a visit. While back home, she was asked by music publisher Balmer & Weber to compose the lyrics for a Missouri-centric pro-Union song. Balmer & Weber were familiar with the song “Maryland, My Maryland,” written by James Ryder Randall. That was a secessionist ballad written during the early days of the Civil War, urging Maryland to join the Confederacy. Just like Missouri, Maryland was a slave state with deeply divided sympathies. Randall’s song called for Maryland to rise up against the despot on its shores, referring to Lincoln. In one verse, Randall writes that Maryland, “is not dead, nor deaf, nor dumb – Huzzah! She spurns the Northern scum.” The irony of asking Redden, the celebrated deaf poet and journalist, to write a pro-Union Missouri counterpoint to Randall’s song was not lost on the 23-year-old. Redden agreed and composed the lyrics to “Belle Missouri,” inscribed to the Union volunteers of Missouri. The song, which copied the same music as “Maryland, My Maryland” (which itself was a copy of the Christmas song “Oh, Tannenbaum”), was an unapologetic and rousing pro-Union song, ending with the call to rise up, “the loyal stripes and stars,” and “down with the traitor stars and bars.”

Redden’s time in Washington had caused her to rethink her earlier proslavery stance. In the aftermath of the Emancipation Proclamation, she witnessed scores of Black men enlist in the Union Army to fight for their country and the freedom of their brethren. Their bravery and sacrifice were not lost on Redden. In the aftermath of the Fort Pillow massacre, in which Black Union soldiers were killed after surrendering to Confederate forces who had overwhelmed the garrison, Redden composed a scathing poem criticizing those who still claimed that Black men were not willing to fight. She ended the poem with:

“Perhaps, when they hallow this common cause
With their thousands of nameless graves,
Your selfish hearts will proclaim at last.
They are men, and they are not slaves!”

In 1864, Redden was back in Washington when Ulysses S. Grant came to town to be promoted to Lt. General by President Lincoln. Like everyone else, she desired to meet the man who would now command the entire Union army. In April, she secured a pass to visit Grant at his headquarters near Culpeper, Virginia. Redden was immediately impressed by Grant, and the General also took a liking to the journalist poet and her unique way of communicating. A polite friendship arose between the two. During this time, Redden’s mother died, and she desired to secure a position of some sort for her younger brother, Alex, who was then 16 years old. General Grant assisted in enlisting Redden’s underage brother in the cavalry and then transferred to his own staff as a boy orderly.

A military pass issued to Laura Redden from General Ulysses S. Grant

It was also during 1864 that Redden undertook the task of assembling the many poems she had written over the course of the war and compiling them for publication. She named her collected volume of war poems, Idyls of Battle and Poems of the Rebellion. In August of 1864, Redden presented a manuscript of her collection to President Lincoln personally. On August 29, 1864, Redden picked the manuscript back up from the President, and Lincoln had written the following note of support: “At the request of the Author I have glanced over these poems, and find them all patriotic, and some very pretty. A. Lincoln.” In the preface to the book (also published under the Glyndon pen name), Redden included a long list of patrons and subscribers who supported her efforts. Heading the list were President Lincoln and General Grant. These two were followed by a veritable who’s who of the political elite, including Senators, Representatives, Governors, Army officers, foreign diplomats, and lawyers.

In February of 1865, Laura Redden departed America for a planned six-month visit to Europe. This tour would actually last almost four years as Redden soaked in the sights and history of Italy, the Papal States, and France. She learned the languages of her host countries, along with German and Spanish. She now acted as a foreign correspondent for several newspapers in the States and also supplemented her income by writing research articles and providing translation services.

Redden would eventually return to America and continue to write and publish poems. In 1869, she translated a French novel called Brother and Sister: Or A Little Boy’s Story, for English audiences. Redden ultimately published four books of poetry over the years: Idyls of Battle and Poems of the Rebellion (1864), Sounds from Secret Chambers (1874), Of El Dorado (1897), and Echoes of Other Days (1921). She also went to school under the tutelage of Alexander Graham Bell, who helped her relearn how to use her voice again. In 1872, a town in western Minnesota was named Glyndon in honor of Redden and her literary accomplishments. In 1876, Redden married a man named Edward Searing, and while the marriage did not last, it did result in the birth of a daughter, Elsa. In the 1880s, Redden moved to California and resided there for the rest of her life, except for a brief time when she lived with Elsa and her husband, John McGinn, in Fairbanks, Alaska. Laura Redden Searing died on August 10, 1923. She was buried at Holy Cross Catholic Cemetery in Colma, CA.

The Poet and the Assassin

Sometime during Laura Redden’s residency in Washington or during her visits to New York City in 1864 and 1865, she made the acquaintance of actor John Wilkes Booth. The exact details of their first meeting and the length of their association are not known. However, we do know that by February of 1865, Redden and Booth were on friendly terms. During this time, Booth was secretly engaged to Lucy Hale, the daughter of former New Hampshire Senator John P. Hale, one of Redden’s poetic patrons listed in her book. This was the same time when Redden was staying in New York, preparing to depart on her European journey. John Wilkes Booth was also visiting New York at the time, staying at his brother Edwin’s home. There he was joined by his eldest brother Junius, who was also visiting. Junius penned a letter to their sister Asia, then living in Philadelphia, informing her of family news. The elder brother noted that John Wilkes had stayed up all night working on an acrostic valentine for Lucy Hale and ensuring it would get in the mail on time. Then, the next day, Wilkes stayed up again until 3:30 am writing a long letter to Lucy, this time pestering his brother to act as a dictionary for him, much to Junius’s annoyance. Junius then includes the following few lines in his letter:

“The Dumb and Deaf poetess Miss Reading [sic] you & I were speaking about is here & John is acquainted with her & is practicing his fingers to talk with her – since his Acrostic he is resolved to cultivate his Muse.”

Thus, it appears that Booth was attempting to learn a bit of sign language or, more likely, the manual alphabet of finger spelling, in order to better converse with Redden. But the actor had little time to study, as on February 18, 1865, Laura Redden set sail for Europe. Before she departed, however, John Wilkes Booth wrote a farewell note to Redden. That goodbye message, written in pencil on a dark sheet of paper, reads:

“‘Parting is such sweet sorrow that I could say good night till it be morrow’
With every wish for your good and prayer for your happiness
I am toujours le meme
J. Wilkes Booth”

In this note, Booth slightly alters Juliet’s line from Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet and ends with a French phrase which translates to “always the same.”

With that, Redden sailed off to Europe. She was touring Italy when the news of the fall of the Confederate capital of Richmond and General Lee’s surrender to General Grant reached her. “I and all the Americans drank to the flag,” Redden wrote in her diary. Soon, however, the times of celebration would turn to mourning. On April 14, Redden’s friendly acquaintance, John Wilkes Booth, assassinated Abraham Lincoln at Ford’s Theatre while his conspirator, Lewis Powell, violently attacked Secretary of State William Seward and members of his household. It took some time for the news to reach Redden in Rome, and initial reports were hazy. On April 27, Redden wrote in her diary, “It is reported from the American Ambassador that Mr. Lincoln is assassinated and that Mr. Seward is dying. That it was done in Richmond. I wait to hear further advice before deciding as to the truth of it.” Further meetings of the American delegation in Rome soon revealed the truth, and Redden was greatly saddened by the national calamity. On May 10, 1865, what would have been John Wilkes Booth’s 27th birthday, Redden recorded the following in her diary:

“We heard today that Wilkes Booth had been taken – he was in a granary – and they discovered him and set fire to the building and he was killed while defending himself. What a dreadful story from beginning to end! It is very hard, when both he and Mr. Lincoln were my personal friends.”

A Farewell Photo Among Friends?

For months, I had been looking into different actresses in my attempt to identify the mysterious veiled woman found in Booth’s diary. But the knowledge that Laura Redden had interacted with Booth two months before he assassinated the President and, more importantly, that Booth composed a farewell message to Redden prior to her European voyage led to an intriguing conclusion. Could Laura Redden have given Booth a photograph of herself as her own farewell gift to him?

Exchanging carte de visite photographs was common among friends, and Booth, a vain actor, was well known to have kept many copies of his own images to give away. Laura Redden, a celebrity in her own right, would also likely have images to present as keepsakes to those she met. In one of Grant’s letters to Redden in 1864, the General thanked her for pictures she sent him of herself and her brother, Alex. It made sense that Redden would present Booth with a token of her esteem on the eve of her departure, especially since Booth himself had presented her with a goodbye note.

By doing some searches, I was able to find a few images of Laura Redden from her younger years and compared them to the veiled woman image from Booth’s diary. The following is one of my first side-by-side comparisons with two images of Redden taken in about 1871 and 1867.

I noticed a strong resemblance in the jaw line and nose, and the light colored eyes were also a match. Remember that some mild alteration has been made to Booth’s CDV. The eyes, lips, and cheeks of the veiled woman have been lightly colorized. But there were only a few images of Laura Redden in her younger years available online, and the quality of the images I found was somewhat lacking. Still, even with these rougher comparisons, I began to believe that after many false starts, I was finally on the right path.

In the end, I knew my best bet was to consult a collection of Laura Redden Searing’s papers housed in Columbia, Missouri. They had been donated to The State Historical Society of Missouri in 1998 by Redden’s great-grandson, Thomas McGinn Smith. From the historical society’s online finding aid, I knew that the collection housed several folders of images of Redden, her poetry, diaries from Europe, letters from General Grant and other dignitaries, and the farewell message penned by John Wilkes Booth. My hope was that the collection would contain an identical copy of the veiled woman image, thus proving that the image found on Booth was indeed Laura Redden. While I was eager to check out the collection as soon as possible, the distance between my home in Texas and the papers in Columbia, Missouri, made a research trip not feasible for a while.

However, last month, my parents celebrated their 50th wedding anniversary in my home state of Illinois. Rather than flying back for the celebration, my family and I chose to drive. I planned our route to include an overnight in Columbia, so that I could squeeze in a brief morning research visit to the historical society before we hit the road again. With only two hours to spend, I eagerly signed into the reading room of The State Historical Society of Missouri and started looking through the boxes of the Laura Redden Searing papers the archivists had pulled for me.

I took images of Booth’s farewell note to Redden, correspondences Redden had with General Grant, his aides Gen. Cyrus Comstock and Adam Badeau, and even the above letter from Edwin Booth, thanking Redden for sending him a copy of her poems. I hurriedly tried to read through Redden’s lengthy diary from Italy. It proved very difficult to find her passing references to hearing the news of Lincoln’s death among the pages and pages of her descriptions of the ornate churches and museums she visited. There was also a short, handwritten essay Redden composed in the post-war years called “President Lincoln’s Life Might Have Been Saved.” It contained Redden’s interview with two eyewitnesses of the tragedy at Ford’s Theatre and their opinion that Lincoln’s death could have been prevented had footman Charles Forbes acted differently that night. The eyewitness account is full of factual mistakes, such as claiming Tad Lincoln was present at Ford’s Theatre and that Mrs. Lincoln was not, and this may account for why Redden never published the piece.

But, of course, my focus was on the collection’s photographs. An old family photo album promised five images of Redden from the 1860s, but only two were actually present, and both show Redden in costume during her time abroad. While there were many pictures of Redden as an older woman with her daughter, Elsa, there were scant few images of her in her younger years. Sadly, the photograph I was most hoping for, a duplicate of the veiled woman image found on Booth, was not in the collection.

But this is not to say that I struck out. The collection contained two good-quality images of Redden in a similar pose to the veiled woman image. One dates to about 1859, around the time she started working for the St. Louis Republican, and features Redden with a long braid.

The other is undated but appears to be from the early 1860s. In this image, Redden has shorter hair, and the CDV is inscribed to one of her siblings, possibly Alex.

Here are these two images of Redden with Booth’s veiled woman between them.

While I know photographic comparisons can be very subjective, I believe these three images show the same person.

My Conclusions

Well over 100 years ago, an unnamed clerk or newspaper reporter visiting the office of the Judge Advocate General decided that one of the photographs found on John Wilkes Booth when he died was of Helen Western. Since then, generations of historians, members of the public, and even the National Park Service have taken this identification to be correct. In countless books and articles about the assassination of Abraham Lincoln, Helen Western’s name has been included as a footnote. But the identification of Western was little more than a guess, and as has been demonstrated here, an incorrect one.

A detailed (but by no means exhaustive) search was undertaken to compare the image of the veiled woman to images of actresses with whom John Wilkes Booth shared the stage, in hopes the figure would prove to be a fellow actor. This was done because three of the other images in Booth’s diary were of his contemporaries, Effie Germon, Alice Gray, and Fanny Brown. This search failed to find any strong matches.

A consultation of the Laura Redden Searing papers at The State Historical Society of Missouri failed to find an exact duplicate of Booth’s photograph. However, other images of Laura Redden as she appeared in the 1850s – 1870s all bear a striking resemblance to the veiled figure in Booth’s photograph.

We know from Booth family writings and from Laura Redden’s own diary that she had a friendship with John Wilkes Booth. Before she left for Europe on February 18, 1865, John Wilkes Booth wrote her a farewell message. It would have been a very natural development for Redden to have reciprocated Booth’s farewell note with a photograph of herself for her friend to remember her by. The actor then placed the gifted photograph in the pocket of his diary, where it found company with images of his fiancée, Lucy Hale, and three of his peers. Two months later, the photograph was still in the diary pocket when Booth assassinated Abraham Lincoln at Ford’s Theatre, and he was subsequently cornered and killed at the Garrett farm.

By the time the clerks in the JAG office began trying to identify the images found on Booth in the 1880s, Redden was no longer a Washington resident and not in the public eye as she once was. It is unlikely the younger clerks from the 1880s onward even knew the 1860s war correspondent “Howard Glyndon” and her work. With her true identity unknown, she was erroneously labeled as Helen Western.

While the search will continue to find another example of the veiled woman photograph that isn’t an exact duplicate of the CDV found on Booth, I am confident that if such a photograph turns up, it will be labeled as Laura Redden Searing. The photographic and historical evidence we have makes a strong and compelling case.

Laura Redden’s Legacy

My purpose in writing this piece is not only to correct the record regarding the identity of the woman found in the pocket of Lincoln’s assassin, but also to draw attention to the amazing life and work of Laura Redden Searing. She fought hard to occupy political and social spaces dominated almost exclusively by men. When her fictitious male pseudonym was revealed, she didn’t back down but openly embraced her duality as both Redden and Glyndon to gain agency and intellectual freedom. When deafness forced Redden to rely on the written word to communicate, she became a master of prose and verse. Despite her long muteness, her collections of poems, especially her wartime ballads, gave voice to the immense feelings of loss and triumph that filled the nation. Laura Redden deserves to be known to a new generation of historians and readers.

I invite you all to read more about, and from, Laura Redden. The following were of immense help in writing this piece:

Echoes of Other Days by Howard Glyndon (Laura C. R. Searing) – This is a large volume of Redden’s poems, including her Civil War pieces, compiled by her daughter in 1921

Sweet Bells Jangled: Laura Redden Searing a Deaf Poet Restored edited by Judy Yaeger Jones and Jane E. Vallier (available to read for free from Gallaudet University)

Fighting in the Shadows: Untold Stories of Deaf People in the Civil War by Harry G. Lang

“The Truth About Mrs. Lincoln” by Howard Glyndon – In 1882, Laura Redden Searing wrote this interesting piece for The Independent magazine, defending the late Mary Lincoln.

Lastly, I would like to give my thanks to the archivists and staff of The State Historical Society of Missouri in Columbia. Without the work of archivists going through collections and creating detailed finding aids, the work of independent researchers like me just wouldn’t be possible.

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Joseph Booth’s Photographic Doppelgänger

Posted on May 20, 2026 by Dave Taylor

The Booth family of Harford County, Maryland, is best known for its fame and infamy. The infamous John Wilkes has gone down in history for assassinating Abraham Lincoln, with his crime sadly overshadowing the accomplishments of his relatives. Junius Brutus Booth was a famous actor who spent about thirty years traveling America as a celebrated tragedian. His namesake, Junius Brutus Booth, Jr., followed in his father’s footsteps, and while he never reached the same level of fame as his father, June was still a widely respected actor and theater manager. Edwin Booth eclipsed the fame of both his brother and father. His soft, brooding method of acting revolutionized the stage, and Edwin is still known today as the greatest talent to ever perform the role of Hamlet. Asia Booth, while never one to take to the stage herself, became a devoted chronicler of her family. She wrote books about her father and brothers, including a memoir about her misguided brother, which was published posthumously. In their own way, each of these Booths left a mark on the world.

Yet there are more Booths. They consist of the largely forgotten Booths. Mary Ann Booth, the matriarch of the Booth family, managed to keep her family afloat after her husband’s death and the near-bankruptcy she faced in the mid-1850s. Rosalie Booth, the eldest daughter, lovingly cared for her mother in her old age and supported her siblings’ endeavors throughout their lives. And then there is the youngest child, Joseph. Impulsive, moody, and not having any interest in the “family business” of acting, the youngest Booth was often an enigma to his family. In fact, prior to April 14, 1865, it was Joe, not John Wilkes, who was the black sheep of the family.

Joseph Adrian Booth was born on February 8, 1840, either at the Booth family farm of Tudor Hall in Harford County or at a home they rented in Baltimore. At the time of his birth, his siblings consisted of June (18), Rosalie (17), Edwin (6), Asia (4), and John Wilkes (1). As can be seen, his eldest two siblings were practically adults when their baby brother was born. Joseph was given the middle name of Adrian after his eldest brother June’s performance of Adrian De Mauprat in the play Richelieu. Despite being thus christened into the acting profession, Joseph never shared the spark of his three brothers. When he grew up, he performed on stage only a handful of times, mostly to cover a minor role while traveling as a valet for his brothers, Edwin and John Wilkes.

At times, Joseph was thrust into jobs at theaters, working as a treasurer at the Holliday Street Theatre and later at his brother Edwin’s “Booth Theatre.” But he never developed a passion for the stage or, in fairness, for working in general. Though his early teenage years were a bit rocky after the death of his father in 1852, his life became largely financially stable after his brother Edwin Booth returned as a celebrated star from the West Coast. Despite pressure from his family to pursue a profession, Joe discovered he could live just fine on the resources his brother provided. While it is true that Joseph eventually became a doctor, this did not occur until he was 49 years old.

There is much that can be said about Joseph Booth, especially his travels from 1862 to 1865, when he ran off without telling any of his family members where he was going. However, for the purpose of this article, we’re going to explore the visual record of Joseph Booth.

The main issue we have with the forgotten Booths is the lack of many images of them. While the public clamored for photographs of the acting Booths and the infamous John Wilkes, images of the family members who stayed out of the spotlight are much harder to find. For the longest time, only one photograph of Joseph Booth was known, and that was this one:

This image dates to the 1860s and was taken by photographer Charles D. Fredericks & Co. in New York. It shows a man standing next to a pillar, wearing a light colored suit, dark gloves, and holding a dark hat. While the full body pose makes it difficult to make out facial details, from what we can see, this figure shares the hawk-like Booth nose and far back hairline that was a trait among the Booth men. For comparison, here is a side-by-side of this image of Joseph next to a similarly posed image of John Wilkes Booth.

This particular image of Joseph Booth is in the collection of The Players, the social club that Edwin Booth founded in 1888, in New York City. Supporting the idea that this image is of Joseph Booth was an article that was published in the Baltimore American in 1896. An actor named James Young, Jr., shared his collection of images of the Booths, soon to be presented to The Players. The illustrated article contained several depictions of the Booth family members, including this image of Joseph.

Strangely enough, a CDV of this particular image of Joseph Booth is also in the National Archives in the collection of evidence regarding the assassination of Lincoln. At some point after the trial of the Lincoln conspirators, as the pieces of evidence were being held in the office of the Judge Advocate General, an image of David Herold was erroneously exchanged for this picture of Joseph Booth. How the misfiling occurred is unclear, but the image that is in the envelope labeled as “Herold’s photograph” that was used at the trial of the conspirators has been replaced with this picture of the youngest Booth sibling. This mistake was noted by author Stanley Kimmel as he was consulting the JAG files for his book, The Mad Booths of Maryland in the 1930s. Having already come across the Baltimore American article featuring the Joseph Booth image earlier in his research, Kimmel informed the War Department of the mistake. In the second edition of his book, Kimmel includes the War Department’s letter of thanks for informing them of the mistake. What happened to David Herold’s photograph is not known.

In the late 1970s, Lincoln assassination researcher John C. Brennan began looking into the life of Joseph Booth. His efforts resulted in a wonderful article in the Spring 1983 edition of the Maryland Historical Magazine entitled, “John Wilkes Booth’s Enigmatic Brother Joseph.” In the article, Mr. Brennan discussed his search for images of Joseph Booth, writing, “All the likely places having photographic collections have been canvassed in an effort to locate pictures of Joe.” Unfortunately, all Mr. Brennan could find was this one known image.

Fast forward to 2015. At the annual Surratt Society conference, Booth biographer Terry Alford presented on his book Fortune’s Fool. When discussing members of the Booth family, Dr. Alford surprised those of us in the audience by showing a new image of Joseph Adrian Booth in his slideshow.

Dr. Alford stated he had stumbled across this image as part of an auction listing that had sold during the previous year. My interest was very much piqued by this development. After returning home from the conference, I found the online auction listing. On May 4, 2014, that photograph was part of a lot of “Documents: Four Maryland items” and sold for $80 by Alex Cooper Auctions. It was a random assortment of items. Here is the full photograph, which includes notes in two unknown hands identifying the subject as Joseph Booth.

We were all so pleased to find, after long last, another picture of the youngest Booth brother. And it was such a striking image as well. Rather than a standing pose lacking in quality, here was a strong portrait image. With the written identifications on the image and the figures’ strong resemblance to his brother, Edwin, it was a slam dunk. I added this photo to my online gallery for Joseph Booth, and the folks at Tudor Hall started using this much better image in their promotional materials about the Booths.

 Then just this past week, lightning appeared to strike again. I received an email from a gentleman named David who had recently purchased a collection of unidentified carte de visites off of eBay. In an effort to identify the subjects of the photographs, David photographed the CDVs and tried using the Google Lens search tool to see if there were any matches. This is a form of Google Image search where you provide the image, and Google tries to find matching or similar versions of it. I have used this form of visual search when trying to find higher-quality versions of different illustrations. It can be a useful tool, but it is not always reliable, especially when it comes to facial recognition. Still, in this case, the image search found enough similarities between Dr. Alford’s picture of Joseph Booth and one of the unidentified CDVs that David had purchased. Here is the image:

For once, I tend to agree with the computer here. While the figure is in a different pose and wearing a different suit of clothing, he very closely resembles Dr. Alford’s find from a decade earlier. Even the visible part of the ear matches. I was ecstatic that yet another new photo of Joseph Booth had appeared. 

But David was not done. He also informed me that during his search, another image popped up as a possible match. It consisted of this unidentified daguerrotype taken by the Boston photographer Southworth & Hawes in the collection of the George Eastman Museum in Rochester, New York. 

While obviously taken a few years before the other exemplars, I was once again struck by the visual similarity of this daguerrotype with Dr. Alford’s image and the new CDV image. Once again, I found myself agreeing with the Google search that this image is a match. I truly believe that all three images depict the same person.

I was very excited and even offered to buy the CDV image from David if he was willing to sell it. Before hearing back from him on that, I likewise played around with the Google visual image search using Dr. Alford’s image. It connected me with the Southworth & Hawes daguerrotype as well, but it also found this copy of the same image as Dr. Alford’s.

While this is the exact same pose as Dr. Alford’s photo, I knew this was a completely different copy. There is a noticeable difference in picture quality between the two. But, even more apparent to me was that the photo on Ancestry lacked a small watermark that I snuck into the photo when I uploaded it to my site. At the time, I faintly put the then name of my website, “BoothieBarn.com,” in the figure’s messy hair. This image lacks that small watermark, so it had to come from a different source image. That meant another print of Dr. Alford’s photo existed somewhere.  

I came to find that this image was attached to a FindaGrave page. However, it was not connected to Dr. Joseph A. Booth, as I expected, but rather to a man named Col. Verres Nicholas Smith. 

FindaGrave is a great resource, but you always have to be careful when it comes to images you might find on there. There is very little moderation for photo uploads, and there are those who mistakenly (or purposefully) upload spurious photographs. The FindaGrave pages for many of the Booths contain images of people who look nothing like them (all from one user who clearly has face blindness). But, I’d like to think the majority of folks try to be honest in their photo uploads, so I sent a message to the user who had attached Dr. Alford’s image to Col. Smith’s page. I asked him where he came across the image and told him that it has been identified as Joseph Booth. I wasn’t sure if I would hear back, but figured it didn’t hurt to send the message.

Luckily for me, the FindaGrave user named Ed got back to me right away in a detailed email. Ed stated that he was a distant relative of Horace Greeley, the noted newspaper editor who founded the New York Tribune. He told me that Col. Smith had married Ida Greeley, one of Horace’s children. He found this different print of Dr. Alford’s photograph attached to Col. Smith in a Greeley family tree on Ancestry.com. Ed was also kind enough to send me another image of Col. Smith, this time as an older man, that was attached to the same family tree.

The same family tree uploaded an image of the back of this photo, on which contained the words, “‘Col.’ Nicholas Smith / U.S. Consul at 3 Rivers [illegible] / about 1891 (Widower) / was married to Horace / Greely’s daughter. Had a / son & two daughters.”

Comparing this older photograph of Col. Smith and Dr. Alford’s photograph of Joseph Booth gave me a sinking feeling in my gut. While the older man has gained a mustache and imperial Napoleon III-style beard, the similarities in the remaining features are uncanny. It would be incredibly difficult to argue that these images don’t show the same man taken years apart. Armed with Ed’s lead, I started researching this Col. Smith fellow. 

What I found proved my fears to be true. A drawing of Colonel Smith was included in an article about him in 1887. It was once again a dead ringer for the images we had come to believe to be Joseph Booth.

Moreover, I found many instances where Col. Smith’s appearance was described in the press. As strange as it sounds, he became well-known for being an exceptionally handsome man. Many articles described Col. Smith’s beauty, with the most referenced comparison being a famous actor of the day:

  • “In appearance he greatly resembles Edwin Booth, and is often taken for that gentleman. One night he entered a box at the theater, when he was immediately the object of all eyes. ‘There is Edwin Booth,’ they all exclaimed, as they leveled their opera glasses at what they supposed to be the great actor.” – The Tennessean, April 30, 1875
  • “He is a fine specimen of refined manly beauty. Our lady readers will believe this when we say that he is ‘a perfect image’ of Mr. Edwin Booth” – Brooklyn Eagle, May 1, 1875
  • “He resembles Edwin Booth, and has often been taken for the great actor, but upon close inspection is always conceded to be a better looking man.” – The Landmark, May 7, 1875
  • “His beauty is of the Edwin Booth type, if that may be called a type of its own.” – Chicago Tribune, May 8, 1875.
  • “Nicholas Smith, Ida Greeley’s husband, is followed in the streets because of his likeness to Edwin Booth, whom he imitates in make-up.” – Springfield Daily Republican, January 28, 1876
  • “He has a clear-cut, handsome face, somewhat after the style of Edwin Booth’s, and dresses himself like a Puritan captain.” – Buffalo Courier, July 3, 1881
  • “His face is as sharp and shaven as Edwin Booth’s.” – The Times-Democrat, February 12, 1883
  • “At Saratoga one summer it was reported that a lady said to him: ‘Colonel Smith, how much you resemble Edwin Booth.’ The Colonel drew his form up to full height, as he responded in a tragic tone of offended dignity: ‘Madame, I am a much handsomer man than Edwin Booth.’” – Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, July 4, 1885
  • “He is tall, strong and athletic, with full and regular features crowned by a wealth of white hair, worn a la Edwin Booth, whom he markedly resembles in expression, although he is a much larger man.” – Brooklyn Eagle, November 30, 1887
  • “He somewhat resembles Edwin Booth and prides himself upon his often being mistaken for the great actor.” – Reading Times, July 13, 1888

Taken together, it seems clear that Dr. Alford’s photograph and the subsequent matching images found by David the eBay collector are not of Joseph Booth but of “Col.” Verres Nicholas Smith. The written identification of Joseph Booth on Dr. Alford’s image was incorrect.

What probably happened was that someone saw this photograph, which was unidentified, and noticed the figure’s strong resemblance to Edwin Booth. Yet, while the future looked a lot like Edwin Booth, there were enough differences to tell that it was clearly not the famous tragedian. Nor did the photo perfectly match Edwin’s father, Junius, or brothers June and John Wilkes, of whom many exemplars of comparison exist. Therefore, someone decided that it must be the forgotten brother, Joseph Booth, of whom only one photo was known to exist. They mistakenly identified the image as Joseph and, due to the strong Booth-ness of the figure’s features, we readily accepted it as the lost Booth brother.

But, in fact, this was an image of Nicholas Smith, a man whose resemblance to Edwin Booth was well documented in the papers, and for whom we have matching identified images in the papers, and in his later life. Rather than being able to announce new pictures of Joseph Booth, I must, unfortunately, report that the number of Joseph Booth photographs has dwindled back down to one. The only confirmed photo we have of Joseph is the standing pose from The Players.

Over the course of my research, I assembled a large amount of information about our would-be Joseph Booth, Nicholas Smith. He lived an interesting life, not without controversy. For those interested in reading more, here is a biography about the man who, during his prime, was claimed to have been the handsomest man in the world:

Verres Nicholas Smith was born in Shelbyville, Kentucky, on December 25, 1836. In his younger years, he sometimes went by V. N. Smith or V. Nicholas Smith. When he was about three years old, his father died. His mother, Mary, did not remarry, and in the 1850 census, she is listed as a farmer with real estate property valued at over $11,000. She passed away in 1854. In 1855, Nicholas went to live with his older sister Kezia, who had married a man named Hamilton P. Johnson. The family left Kentucky and took up residence in Leavenworth, Kansas, in the midst of Bleeding Kansas. It is said that, originally, Hamilton Johnson was a strong pro-slavery man, but after his move to Kansas, he changed his mind and ended up freeing the men and women he had enslaved. It appears that Nicholas Smith also came out against the practice of slavery during this period. 

In the late 1850s, Smith traveled to the East Coast, where he attended Dartmouth College for a time, as well as Harvard Law School. It does not appear that Smith actually graduated from either school, though he was enumerated in the 1860 census as being back in Leavenworth with his sister’s family as an “attorney at law.” For about a four-month period in early 1861, Smith tried his hand at being a newspaper editor for a Lawrence, Kansas, paper called The Republican. This paper heavily supported Kansas Senator James Lane, and it was through this advocacy that Smith became a familiar figure in state politics. 

Yet even at this young age, Smith was known for his eccentricities. As an editor, he wrote in very flowery and Roman-esque prose. “Nick was never heard to use short words when long words would answer,” recalled an associate. “His literature was a little too classical for his audience, and regular ‘corn-field talk’ would have done better,’ recalled another. Smith was also very particular about his appearance. He dressed in the finest clothes he could find and went out of his way to keep them immaculate. Once, Smith refused to cross the street to enter the newspaper office because the road was very muddy and he didn’t want to soil his boots. It also became a regular sight to see Smith, dressed in a white suit, riding his horse with newspapers wrapped around his legs so that his pants would remain clean. For these eccentricities of speech and dress, many in his area of Kansas began calling Verres Nicholas Smith by the nickname “Very Ridiculous Smith.”

That “Very Ridiculous” was handsome, however, no one could deny. Here is a lengthy description of Nicholas Smith’s beauty written in 1886:

“[He] is a handsome man, and he knows it. He has enjoyed this reputation for twenty years, and it does not worry him in the least. His presence is irresistible. His eyes are dark, and have a ravishing glow that would melt the pen of Thomas Moore into a new houri haunted ecstasy… There is an admixture of Greek distinctness and Oriental richness in the lines of his face, the profile being clear-cut and regular and the contour of the oval pattern so much admitted in Asiatic maidens. Smooth-shaven, with rounded cheeks and a pale wine-glow to his skin that helps to brighten the effect, [Smith’s] handsome face is strikingly framed in a profusion of curled and tossed… hair that he evidently cultivates with great care and that is not parted at all, but falls forward upon his forehead in bewitching little beau-catchers, as they are called when girls wear them, that droop to either side… Fully six feet in height, well built, well dressed, and…fully equipped for heart conquests among the other sex, and if all that is said about him be true, is one of the most successful fascinators now before the public.”

At the end of April 1861, Smith sold his interest in his paper. Never one to be humble, Smith  reassured his readers that the new editor was “as clever a fellow as I am.” For the next two months, Smith remained around Lawrence, interacting with members of the anti-slavery political elite as the Civil War began. Likely through the influence of Senator James Lane, Smith received a commission in the regular army. He accepted the position of a Captain in the 19th U.S. Infantry. He reported to Indiana, where he was assigned to recruiting duty in Evansville for a time. He was later transferred from Indiana to Louisville, Kentucky, not far from where he was born, to continue on recruiting and disbursing duties.

While stationed in Louisville, Smith made the acquaintance of Lucinda Pope. She was the daughter of a wealthy farmer and merchant named William Pope. The two courted and married on January 29, 1863, while Captain Smith was still in the service. 

As an Army captain, Smith left much to be desired. In April 1863, Union Maj. General David S. Stanley arrived in Louisville. Not long after, Gen. Stanley wrote a letter to the adjutant general’s department about different reports he had heard from locals and other officers regarding Captain Smith’s conduct:

“It is complained of him that his associations are entirely with people of rebel proclivities. He has married since coming here, and his father in law and wife are outspoken rebels, and ‘tis said… that old Pope his father-in-law would not allow him to visit his house in uniform. He goes habitually in citizens dress, and was married in that costume. No officers of the army being invited to the ceremony.”

In addition to his new wife and in-laws being on the side of the Confederacy, Captain Smith was also not one to work very hard in his recruiting duties. Years later, the newspapers joked that during his two years of service, “he recruited two men at an expense of $6,000 to the Government.” His service record supports that there were issues with Captain Smith’s accounting books. In February 1863, an order went out relieving recruitment officers of the 19th Infantry from their duties and requiring them to return to their regiment. Captain Smith did not obey this command, choosing instead to stay in Louisville. When officers followed up with him after he failed to report, Smith claimed he had been away from Louisville for several weeks on mustering duty and had not seen the order. He was then again ordered to report to his regiment back in Evansville, Indiana. Yet, Captain Smith did not leave, and Maj. General Stanley wrote in his letter that Smith was proven to have said, “he could not go to such a horrid place as Evansville and if ordered there he must resign.”

Gen. Stanley was at a loss for such poor behavior of an officer. Yet he was not without a solution:

“You know such a specimen of humanity brings disgrace on the regular army, and his example is ‘nuts’ for the secessionists. You can use this information as you desire. The only desire anyone in the army here has is to see the fellow moved to the front, to give him an opportunity to learn the principles of outpost duty. As he had never been in the field, this would only complete his elegant military education… One thing is certain, all loyal people are tired of seeing the fellow here.”

Gen. Stanley’s suggestion was acted upon, and on May 11, a new order came in specifically relieving Captain Smith of all duties in Louisville and ordered him to report to the front without delay. Smith responded with a letter of his own writing, “For some time past I have been physically unfit for duty and would have applied for a leave of absence had not my duties been so light and I unwilling to be wholly without employment. But as it is impossible for me, in my present state of health, to go into the field, I have to ask a leave of absence for three months.” Captain Smith included a certificate signed by an army surgeon verifying that Captain Smith was suffering from “external hemorrhoids with irritable rectum.” Unfortunately, the surgeon only recommended a leave of twenty days for his ailment, so Capt. Smith was forced to reduce his leave request. But headquarters denied even a twenty-day reprieve for this wayward soldier, who should have reported back in February, and it was now June. Fearful of having to do real work, Captain Smith submitted his resignation from the Army. Despite it being in the middle of wartime, where drafts were being instituted to keep up the supply of soldiers, even the Union had had enough of Captain Smith. His commanding officers supported Smith’s resignation request, asking the War Department to approve it because Captain Smith was “a burden on the service.”

Secretary of War Edwin Stanton accepted the request, and Captain Smith’s resignation took effect on July 16, 1863.

This would prove to be the end of Nicholas Smith’s military career. While in his later years he would be known as Col. Smith, he never actually attained this rank. Nicholas Smith was as much a colonel as Col. Sanders of Kentucky Fried Chicken fame.

Smith’s whereabouts during the remaining war years are a bit uncertain. He likely remained in Louisville with Lucinda for a time, but eventually he returned to Leavenworth, Kansas. Between 1865 and 1869, Nichaols and Lucinda had three children, all of whom sadly died before the age of three. Lucinda Smith also died in 1871 at the age of 30, leaving Smith a widower.

Still involved in Kansas politics and with connections to those in Washington, Nicholas Smith secured a nomination from President Johnson to be minister to Athens, Greece in 1866. If approved, the 29-year-old would have been the first ambassador to Greece. However, four months later, the President withdrew his nomination. One newspaper account stated this was because the Senate Committee had signaled they were against his nomination due to rumors he had “resigned a Captaincy in the regular army rather than fight the rebels.” However, other papers stated the Senate was against the establishment of a consulate in Athens due to the cost, and the withdrawal was no reflection on Smith. It wasn’t until two years later that the U.S. appointed its first ambassador to Greece.

In the late 1860s and early 1870s, Nicholas Smith became an established figure in Leavenworth. He started a law practice, but as a Kansas paper later recalled, “there was nothing in the firm beyond the gilded sign which creaked on the iron rod at the foot of the stairs. Other work the ‘colonel’ could not or would not do. That would have been deucedly ignoble.”

In time, Smith headed east to New York. There, he became ingratiated into high society, welcomed in by his good looks, elegant manners, and pristine wardrobe. “Col Smith is undeniably the handsomest man anywhere. He is gifted also with that wonderful manner which, for the time being, makes the person to whom he is talking, be it man or woman, think him or herself the one object in the world in which or in whose opinions and ideas he is most interested. He is a picturesque talker, full of that peculiar mixture of originality, chivalry, and honesty which seems to distinguish the natives of the border states.” Smith eventually made the acquaintance of Ida Greeley, also well known for her looks and sophistication.

Ida Greeley

Many a suitor had tried to woo this daughter of the noted newspaper editor who had died in 1872, but none had been successful. Nicholas Smith’s charms won the day, and the two were married on May 1, 1875. The newlyweds took a European honeymoon where they rubbed elbows with the Prince of Wales and, allegedly, Queen Victoria herself. Just a few years after their marriage, the story would emerge that the Queen, upon seeing “Col.” Nicholas Smith at her court, “pronounce[d] him the handsomest man in the world.”

Ida and Nicholas had three children together, the first of whom they named Horace Greeley (without the Smith last name) in honor of Ida’s father. Nichols quickly settled nicely into the Greeley estate in Chappaqua, New York, hoping to once again be able to live the life of a gentleman of leisure. However, the Greeley estate was not as it once was, with the elder editor having lost most of his fortune before his death. Smith, himself, had spent all of his late wife Lucinda’s money over the course of courting Ida. While a friendly newspaper report stated that Nicholas, “made up his mind to marry Miss Ida Greeley, if he ever could get to her, before he ever saw her, from the newspapers accounts of her goodness and devotion to her parents,” it’s likely her assumed wealth also played a role in Smith’s courtship.

Work was anathema to Smith. For a time, he did try his hand at being a professional lecturer. He would trade on his well-known good looks and the Horace Greeley name (though the editor never met his son-in-law) to get crowds in seats, but his lecturing career was uneventful. He also wrote some articles and poems for various magazines, but the payment for these was low, and Smith soon began racking up debts on the Greeley name. 

In 1878, Smith attempted to run for public office. He was nominated by the short-lived Greenback Party for U.S. Representative for New York’s 12th district, located in New York City. The incumbent at the time, Democrat Clarkson Potter, did not run for re-election, and it was believed that the race would be close between Smith and a Democrat named Cobb. In the end, an upset occurred with the Republican candidate, Alexander Smith, receiving the most votes. Unfortunately, this other Smith died the day after election day, just a few hours after being informed he had won. Newspapers back in Kansas and Kentucky clarified to their audiences that it was not their hometown beauty who had died. Nicholas Smith had placed a distant third in the race. A month after the election, an article in The New York Times reported that Col. Smith had refused to pay his bill for the printing of his campaign materials.

Before the elder Greely’s death, he had loaned about $49,000 to Cornelius Vanderbilt, Jr., who had been estranged from his business magnate father. After marrying Ida, Smith began regularly pestering Vanderbilt to repay the debt with interest. Vanderbilt was involved in a legal battle with his brother over his father’s estate, but, in 1879, received his share and moved to pay the Greeleys. Yet Vanderbilt refused to include Smith in the transaction since he was not a true Greeley heir and due to Smith’s “repeated and vigorous attempts to get control of the business of settlement and the funds connected therewith.” 

When it came to the funds specifically earmarked for Ida and her sister, Vanderbilt attempted to protect the ladies from what he felt was Smith’s influence by providing them notes only in their names that they could invest. “These notes, Smith claims, are not negotiable, and he is, therefore, unable to get immediate possession of the money, which, as a friend of Mr. Greeley and his daughter, I feel the Colonel ought not be allowed to do,” Vanderbilt told the newspapers. In the end, however, Smith managed to convince his wife and her sister against Vanderbilt’s plan, and the notes were turned into cash.

On April 11, 1882, Ida Greeley Smith died of diphtheria at the age of 33. Nicholas Smith once again found himself a widower, this time with three young children. He sent the children off to Leavenworth to live with his sister. After she died in November, Smith found a family back home in Shelby, Kentucky, who took in the children. For the next few years, different stories emerged accusing Smith of squandering what remained of the Greeleys’ money, or about rumors he was wooing yet another heiress in hopes of regaining his financial station. He was said to have chased after actress Mary Anderson in an effort to win her heart, but this was unsuccessful. 

In 1887, Smith became the subject of national newspapers when he acted as best man at the wedding of a wealthy china dealer named Edward Ovington. While Ovington had only known Smith for a short period of time, he was charmed by the man and, believing him to be of similar class and wealth, invited him to act as his best man, which Smith did. Knowing that Ovington was wealthy and well-connected, Smith also tried to get the newlywed to endorse a note for him to the tune of $2,000 or $3,000. This Ovington refused. Smith then presented a bill to Ovington of $180 for the costs he incurred as part of his best man duties. Ovington was insulted by the command, but eventually acquiesced to send Smith $100, feeling $180 was too extravagant a cost for the services rendered. But this was not enough for Smith, who continued to hound Ovington for the rest. Fed up with his former best man, Ovington then took the matter to the press, where Smith was lambasted as “a groomsman for money.” 

Smith’s financial situation was dire indeed. He had lost practically all of the Greeleys’ money, forcing Horace Greeley’s sister to live and work at a hotel. Meanwhile, “no business has been predicated of him. He has not been identified with any forms of labor or any public movements.” Unwilling to work, Smith hit a low point in 1888 when he was arrested at the hotel where he was living in New York for failing to pay for his room and meal bills for the past five months. After spending a night in jail, Smith was released on bail paid for by former (and future) New York Senator Tom Platt.

It appears that Senator Platt and other politicians known to Smith took pity on him and once again attempted to find him an ambassadorship. In 1889, President Harrison appointed Smith to become consul of the United States at Three Rivers, Quebec, Canada. For this position, Smith was paid $1,500 a year. Smith brought his three children to Quebec with him, and for a time, he seemed happy with the ambassadorship. Yet he still lived beyond his means. In 1890, the furniture at the consul’s home was seized for non-payment. The accusation was that the U.S. government had sent the money to furnish the home, but that Smith had pocketed it and refused to pay the Canadian furniture dealer.  Then, in 1892, Consul Smith insulted the French Canadians. In describing the residents of Three Rivers in an official dispatch home, Smith wrote, “Seven persons and a pig, which is made to feel at home, constitute the average family.” He went on to insult the sanitary conditions of his Canadian home, accusing the city of being a cesspool for flies and cholera. As a result of his words, a mob of residents in Three Rivers proceeded to break the windows of the consulate where Smith resided.

The whole affair caused a minor international incident with Ottawa calling for Consul Smith’s removal. This was done, but rather than kick Smith from the State Department completely, the ambassador was merely transferred from Canada to Liege, Belgium. During his time in Belgium, Smith is credited with introducing the Belgians to the concept of Kentucky-style cornbread. The Belgians, meanwhile, introduced Smith to the concept of using dogs as draft animals like horses. At the end of 1894 or the beginning of 1895, Smith’s consulship in Liege came to an end, and he returned home to America.

In the 1900 census, Nicholas Smith and his three children (now aged 22 – 17) were all residing in a rented home in Brooklyn, New York. No occupation for Smith is listed. Two years later, Smith made the newspapers once again. He was evicted from his home for failing to pay rent for himself and his two daughters.

In addition to the back rent, his landlady wanted funds to fix her parlor ceiling, which had experienced water damage when the Col. had left the sink above the parlor running with the plug still in it. When the landlady’s husband asked why Smith had allowed the sink to overflow, he allegedly responded with, “My dear sir. I had just washed my hands. You wouldn’t expect me to put clean hands into soiled water just to pull out a paltry plug, would you?” The newspapers discovered that Smith had many unpaid bills throughout the city, he also owing the local grocer and newspaper seller.

In the end, Smith’s three children had to take responsibility for him. His son, Horace Greeley, became a doctor; his eldest daughter, Nixola, became a noted newspaper columnist and reporter; and the youngest, Ida, was an actress for a time. Smith spent his final years living with his children.

In 1908, Smith wrote to a newspaper in response to an editorial questioning the legitimacy of the many articles of folks who claimed to have known Abraham Lincoln. Smith decided to connect his own name to the Great Emancipator by claiming he witnessed Lincoln’s first inauguration and was presented to the president two days later at the White House. According to Smith, he and Lincoln spoke of their shared home of Kentucky. In another, much earlier account, Smith claimed that upon meeting the President, “Lincoln placed his paternal hands on [Smith’s] cheeks and said: ‘ Capt. Smith, you are a pretty man; you ought to have been a woman.’” Whether there is any truth in Smith’s claims regarding Lincoln is for you, dear reader, to decide for yourself.

The end came for Nicholas Smith on August 15, 1919. He died at the summer home of his daughter, Ida Smith Geissler, in Fort Salonga, on New York’s Long Island. He was 82 years old and had been suffering from Bright’s disease for some time. His original hometown of Shelby, Kentucky, ran a glowing obituary of Smith, omitting any details that might appear to speak ill of the dead, justified or otherwise. He was not buried next to either of his wives who had predeceased him. Rather, his body was cremated and returned to Kentucky, where he was placed next to his parents in Frankfort Cemetery.

FindaGrave.com

Thus was the life and career of Verres Nicholas Smith, a man whose elegant dress and fine manners allowed him to continually “fall up” into society and politics. He was made a Captain in the Army and an American Ambassador despite having no work ethic. He married into two wealthy families and squandered the fortunes of both. His was a life of flashy appearances with no substance beneath. Had he not been blessed with such a handsome and Booth-like visage, it’s unlikely he would have made any mark on history. But, as one newspaper account related after his dust-up in Quebec, “There is only one Col. Nicholas Smith, and we’ve got him… Smith, Smith is beyond comparison. He is absolutely a new kind of an ass, and we can not afford to have him marred, even if we have to go to war with Canada.” 

“Very Ridiculous,” indeed.

My deepest thanks to Ed Dunscombe and David Cress for helping to solve the mystery of the Joseph Booth/Nicholas Smith photographic mix-up. 

Categories: History | Tags: , , , , | 11 Comments

“You have Doubtless heard of Booth the Murderer of President Lincoln” – Pvt. Emory Parady’s Letter Home by Steven G. Miller

Posted on April 28, 2026 by Dave Taylor

Thanks to my good friend Steve Miller for allowing me to republish the following short article and its included letter. The article contains a letter that was written by Emory Parady to his parents on April 28, 1865. Parady was a member of the 16th New York Cavalry and part of the detachment that traveled to Virginia in search of John Wilkes Booth.  In his letter, Pvt. Parady recounted the capture and death of Lincoln’s assassin. It’s a fascinating first-person account of the assassin’s end, written just two days after the event. I appreciate Steve sharing this part of his collection with us.

The month of April 1865 had been a busy one for Pvt. Emory Parady, a trooper in the Sixteenth New York Cavalry stationed in Vienna, VA, just outside Washington City. On the 9th of that month, he had celebrated his 21st birthday. The war was winding down, and it looked like he would soon be released from service. Any danger was likely passed.

Then, on the morning of the 15th, the regiment had gotten the terrible news that the president had been shot the night before. Parady and several hundred fellow members of the Sixteenth were deployed to capture John Wilkes Booth, the announced assassin. On the following day, the day before Easter, Parady and others were sent to Washington to help in the manhunt and to prepare for the state funeral on the 19th.

Parady was aware that his father, Edward Parady/Paradis, would be particularly upset by news of the assassination. The president was a great family favorite, and Emory had a four-year-old brother who had been christened Lincoln Parady. He might have been comforted by the fact that Emory had ridden as an escort to Lincoln’s body.

On the 24th, Pvt. Parady had volunteered as a member of a search party organized at the Lincoln Barracks. Lieut. Edward Doherty of the 16th, had received orders to proceed down the Potomac River accompanied by two War Department detectives. They had a fresh lead on Booth’s whereabouts.

The 29-man group landed in the Northern Neck of Virginia, and over the next several hours, they looked for Booth’s trail. Through a combination of hard-riding, determination, and good luck, they found Booth on the night of April 25-26th at the farm of Richard Garrett in Caroline County. He was trapped but would not surrender to the troopers. He was shot while resisting arrest and died a couple of hours afterward.

Back at the Lincoln Barracks on the 28th, located near the White House, Parady was able to write a letter to his parents detailing the death of the assassin. Perhaps that could give them some solace in the wake of the distressing events of the previous two weeks. This eyewitness account contains some important information concerning the identification of the man in the barn and the way he was killed. It presents clear and detailed contemporary evidence that confirms my opinion that the patrol ran down the correct man, not some Booth lookalike. Parady spelled out the circumstances of the shooting, gave us specifics on the time, place, action, and even the fact that the body had the ink-tattooed initials “J.W.B.” on the hand.

The text of this letter follows:

“Washington D.C. Apr. 28th, 1865

Dear Father & Mother

I will write again in hopes of hearing from you as it is so long since I’ve had intelligence it causes me much anxiety. Bert is the only one I heard of for a long time{.} he was well & stated he had not heard from you for several weeks & thought he would give up writing as he had no answers{.}

You have doubtless heard of Booth the Murderer of President Lincoln{.}

We caught him & Harrold on the morning of the 26th in a Barn. Fortunately they were locked in or they would {have} escaped when we surrounded the House as we thought they were there & after threatning the owner of the Places lif {sic} one of his sons (a soldier from Lees army) came up & told they were there or at least two suspicious characters & locked up in the Barn one by the name of John Wm. Boyd his reason for choosing that name was on account {of} the initials J.W.B. on his left hand{.} Harrold surrendered & Booth would not on any conditions{.} his only terms were if we moved back 50 paces from the Barn he would come out & fight us & told us if we shot him to shoot him through the Body through the heart says he {‘}Boys make a stretcher{.’}

We told him we would fire the Barn if he did not come out & give up his arms{.} he was armed with two Revolvers a Carabine seven shooter & two Bowie Knives the longest one was Bloody on both sides of the blade{.} we fired the {barn} as it was dark between 3 & 4 in the morning & he had the advantage of us as he could see us & we could not see him but as soon as the fire lit up he tried to stamp it out & found he could not so he walked ran back to the midle of the floor & was in the act of raising the caribine when crack went a Pistol & I with with {sic} Col Baker Chief detective rushed in & caried him out{.} he was shot through the Neck about 2 inches lower than Mr. Lincoln was{.} his last words were Mother! Mother My Mother{.} he could just whisper{.}

well I will close as I feel very dull today & if I when I see you I will tell you more about it{.} we were on the chase three days & three nights without sleep & hardly any thing to eat so you may judge I am not very livly today{.} We caught him across the Raphannock three miles from Port Royal.

no more at present
from Emory

address as before
Write soon”

Categories: History, Steven G. Miller | Tags: , , , , | 5 Comments

Who Attended Ford’s Theatre? by Joe Barry

Posted on April 14, 2026 by Dave Taylor

On this 161st anniversary of the assassination of Abraham Lincoln at Ford’s Theatre, researcher and author Joe Barry shares with us a project he is working on to create a singular list of people who claimed to have attended that fateful performance. I’m grateful to Joe for sharing his research with us and for taking up the mantle of trying to document this event in such a way.

Who Attended Ford’s Theatre the Fateful Night of April 14, 1865?

by Joe Barry

Albert Berghaus illustration of inside Ford’s Theatre from Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper, May 20, 1865

Good Friday, April 14, 1865 was one of the most consequential days in American history. The exact details of President Abraham Lincoln’s assassination have been contested by scores of eyewitnesses who offered contradictory testimony, and whose fading memories over the succeeding decades added further confusion. In light of this challenge, a comprehensive spreadsheet of the attendees at Ford’s Theatre provides an opportunity to clarify the record. Towards this goal, the first such list can be found here.

But first, how many people attended that evening? To determine a ceiling on the attendance, there are differing estimates of the maximum capacity of Ford’s Theatre. The National Park Service states that although owner John T. Ford claimed the theater could hold 2,500, the actual capacity was closer to 1,900. Given eyewitness testimony that audience members were able to change their seats, we know it was not at full capacity, and therefore the National Park Service estimates 1,700 attended that night. However, the National Park Service also conducted a deep historical study of Ford’s Theatre in 1963 to assist its restoration into the theater and museum we enjoy today. This study cited a capacity of 1,624 (602 in Orchestra level, 422 for the Dress Circle, and around 600 in the Family Circle). Therefore, a basic—if not completely satisfying—answer is there were well over 1,000 attendees at Ford’s Theatre on April 14, 1865.[1]

Ford’s Theatre Orchestra level diagram, National Park Service

Although the broad outlines of the assassination are well-known, particular details remain in debate:

  • What did John Wilkes Booth say, and did he say it in the president’s box, mid-flight, on stage, or while fleeing?
  • Did Booth injure himself upon landing on stage?
  • How did the audience respond in terms of rushing the stage and how orderly or disorderly were they?
  • What was the status of the employees backstage? Did Booth knock down and slash conductor William Withers, or merely brush past him? Did Edman “Ned” Spangler assist in Booth’s escape?
  • Who was present with the dying president in the box? Did Laura Keene cradle Lincoln?
  • Who helped Lincoln from the box to the Petersen House across the street?

For each of these questions, there is a general consensus formed by the majority view, as well as several outliers who challenge the consensus. This list allows us to place the eyewitness claims in one place, to evaluate sources, to find patterns based on their identity and location in the theater, and other details that may affect the veracity of their account.

Orchestra, Dress Circle, and Family Circle bench seats, National Park Service

Of course, a full Ford’s Theatre attendee list will include a lot of dubious and contradictory testimony. Skepticism is natural, healthy, and nothing new. In fact, with so many obituaries of attendees appearing in newspapers of the 1920s and 1930s, one reporter in 1932 joked: “Another man died the other day who helped carry the assassinated Lincoln from Ford’s theater in 1865. Now its somebody’s turn to say they crossed the Delaware with Washington.”[2]

This list benefits from valuable sources such as Timothy Good’s We Saw Lincoln Shot: One Hundred Eyewitness Accounts, Thomas Bogar’s Backstage at the Lincoln Assassination: The Untold Story of the Actors and Stagehands at Ford’s Theatre, The Lincoln Financial Foundation’s folders of eyewitness testimony, online sources such as Newspapers.com and Ancestry.com, and physical archives nationwide.

Work still remains to complete the details of the accounts, and to verify the sources. There is no pride in authorship, and the best results will come from a combined effort to chronicle as many people as possible. It is helpful, though, to have a common document to unify the research so that everyone can benefit from the shared effort. The list will be continually updated.

Given the number of attendees at Ford’s Theatre on April 14, 1865, hundreds of more accounts remain to be found from both online and archival sources. To be sure, there is a finite number of details we can glean from the existing record, barring any new discoveries. Still, many people researching their ancestors’ genealogies will find this a valuable resource. The joy is in hunt; here is to further research and discoveries!

Orchestra ticket stub for April 14, 1865, Freeman’s Auctions

[1] George J. Olzewski, “Restoration of Ford’s Theatre, Washington, D.C.,” National Park Service (Washington, D.C., 1963), 37-39; “Frequently Asked Questions: The Assassination,” Ford’s Theatre, https://www.nps.gov/foth/learn/historyculture/faq-the-assassination.htm, accessed March 29, 2026.
[2] “Evansville Courier and Press (Evansville, Indiana), Jun. 25, 1932, p. 4.

As an example of the work Joe is doing, here is a video of the supposed last witness to the assassination of Lincoln, Mr. Samuel Seymour of Maryland. Please note that the video is in a vertical format for social media.

If you’d like to read the article from American Weekly referenced by host Garry Moore in the clip above, check out this post about Mr. Seymour.

Categories: History, Joe Barry | Tags: , , , | 7 Comments

“The Day Lincoln Was Shot” in Massapequa, NY, on 4/15/26

Posted on April 12, 2026 by Dave Taylor

I have just been informed that on this coming Wednesday, April 15, 2026, Abraham Lincoln expert Richard Sloan will be hosting a rare public viewing of the 1956 CBS television special “The Day Lincoln Was Shot” at the Massapequa Public Library in Massapequa Park, New York (on Long Island). While I will be including this event in my weekly Lincoln assassination news and events dispatch on my Patreon tomorrow, I wanted to give this viewing a bit of wider attention. Last year, Richard conducted a similar showing of this rare drama from the Ford Star Jubilee program at the Lincoln Forum in Gettysburg. Here’s a photo from that presentation that the Lincoln Forum put on Instagram:

As you can see, Richard’s presentation was very well attended and, from reports I heard, very well received. This is no surprise, as Richard is an expert on depictions of Lincoln in movies and television. He has previously graced this website with an excellent article about different movie lobby cards featuring Lincoln.

I, for one, have never seen “The Day Lincoln Was Shot” due to its rarity and would jump at the chance to take in Richard’s showing if I could. If you’re lucky enough to be in the NYC region, make plans to be at the Massapequa Public Library at 2:00 pm on this Wednesday, April 15. You can register for this free event here.

And, if you’re interested in learning about more Lincoln assassination events going on around the world, sign up for the LincolnConspirators Patreon. For just $3 or more a month, you get a weekly newsletter keeping you apprised of Lincoln assassination news and upcoming programs.

Categories: History, News, Richard Sloan | Tags: , , , | 2 Comments

Lincoln Assassination Tours Reviews

Posted on March 29, 2026 by Dave Taylor

On Saturday, March 14, 2026, Lincoln Assassination Tours took its first bus-load of participants over the escape route and manhunt for John Wilkes Booth. We had a lovely group representing Washington, D.C., Maryland, Virginia, West Virginia, Delaware, Pennsylvania, New Jersey, Massachusetts, Tennessee, Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Florida, Arizona, and California. I was especially delighted by our 93-year-old guest, who had last taken a Booth escape tour in 1985 and was very excited to share the experience with his granddaughter. Despite a hiccup with the bus’s microphone system that forced me to use my teacher voice for the next nine hours, it was a perfect day of history and site exploration. I’m very grateful to my tour supervisors, Jen Taylor and Bob Bowser, and our bus driver, Charles, for making this day run so well.

At the end of the tour, I asked the participants to provide feedback and to leave us reviews on Google and TripAdvisor, if they felt so inclined. We also had photographer Jim Dresbach on the tour to snap pictures of the group at our various stops. I have taken a sampling of the feedback we received and Jim’s pictures and created a new page on the Lincoln Assassination Tours website called Reviews. On that page, you can read testimonials from participants, look through our reviews, and check out some pictures from this first outing of many.

While at the time of this posting, we only have single tickets left for our April 18 and April 19 tours, I am in the planning stages for our proposed fall tour dates. I hope to announce our September and October dates as soon as we complete our spring tours.

In the meantime, check out our new page of Reviews to see what real particpants have to say about their time on a Lincoln Assassination Tour.

Categories: Lincoln Assassination Tours | 1 Comment

The Avenger and the Actor by Steven G. Miller

Posted on February 16, 2026 by Dave Taylor

The avenger of Abraham Lincoln, Boston Corbett, and actor William Holston

The Avenger and the Actor:

Did Sgt. Boston Corbett have an actor in his family in 1865?

By Steven G. Miller

The news of Lincoln’s assassination came as a blow to many groups, both North and South, but none, perhaps, took it as hard as the theatre community. The assassin was “one of theirs” and a well-known member of the famous family of the stage. There were threats made against theatres, and actors rightly feared for their personal safety. Playhouses in Washington were closed immediately for fear of retribution, but the shock and taint of possible association with Lincoln’s killer also caused theatre owners in the country’s largest city, New York, to shut their doors temporarily.

Theatre historian Thomas Allston Brown’s 1870 History of the American Stage reported that: “The assassination of President Abraham Lincoln occurred April 14. At a meeting of the managers of the New York theatres the following day, it was decided to close all places of amusement until Wed., April 26.”[1]

Of course, the Manhattan managers had no way of knowing that Wilkes Booth would be captured and killed on the very day they planned to reopen. In a bit of irony worthy of Shakespeare, the curtains went back up on Broadway a few hours after the assassin played out his final scene. Actors could now get back to work, but still with one wary eye on the mood of their audience.

The news broke on the 27th that Booth was dead and that the shooter, Sergt. Boston Corbett was a resident of New York City in his civilian life. On the following day, a small item appeared in the (New York) Evening Post in their entertainment news. This blurb combined a connection between the reopening of Wallack’s and the man who shot Lincoln’s assassin.

The Post stated:

“Mr. (William) Holston, lately of the Olympic Theatre, has left that establishment, and been engaged at Wallack’s, where he will appear Wednesday night. Mr. Holston, by the way, is the cousin of that loyal soldier, Sergeant Boston Corbett, who shot the assassin Booth and is equally with him an admirer of the late President.”[2]

This snippet was overlooked in the deluge of news about the death of the president, the search for Booth, and the subsequent trial of the Conspirators. It was only recently rediscovered, and this is likely the first mention of it in over 160 years.

Who was the actor Holston?

William Holston (Smithsonian National Portrait Gallery)

William Holston was a comedian and character actor who was gaining popularity in America in 1865. He was born in Camden, England, in 1830. Stage historian Brown wrote of him in 1870:

“HOLSTON, WILLIAM—This English actor made his debut in London, Eng. Sept. 15, 1856 at the Lycian Theatre as Blocus in “Perdita, or the Royal Milkmaid,” he came to America and appeared with considerable success at the Olympic and afterwards at Wallacks’ Theatre. Returned to England, where he is at present.”[3]

Was Holston related to Sgt. Boston Corbett? If so, how?

In March 1865, Boston’s father, Bartholomew Corbett, who was living in London, wrote a tribute to his older sister, Elizabeth, who had recently died. This piece was widely reprinted, usually under the headline, “An Extraordinary Yorkshire Woman.” Of the eighty-plus reprintings of this article – throughout the British Isles, various parts of the Empire, or American cities like New York, Chicago, and Boston – the author of the piece is usually not identified. In one, however, he is: Her obituary lists her as, “ELIZABETH HOLSTON (maiden name Corbett, sister of the naturalist, late of 61 Piccadilly).” 61. Piccadilly was the long-time location of “Corbett’s Natural History Museum.”[4]

My research into the Corbett family shows that Elizabeth Corbett married a tailor named James William Holston, who preceded her in death. The actor, however, was her grandson. His parents were James W. Holston, Jr., and his wife, Harriet. William Holston’s grandmother was Boston Corbett’s aunt. In other words, William Holston was Boston Corbett’s first cousin once removed.[5]

Were Boston and William in contact?

This is unclear, but it’s highly unlikely that they were. Obviously, William was aware of his cousin, and they were both in Manhattan between 1865 and 1870, but there is no mention of Holston in any of Corbett’s papers or any additional newspaper articles.

Corbett’s puritanical attitude would have made any communication uncomfortable, at best. His beliefs were discussed in an untitled article in the Cincinnati Enquirer, October 7, 1886. It referred to “a letter Boston Corbett is said to have written to an old comrade who had proposed to give a public entertainment upon an intense episode of the civil war.” “Keep out of the theater,” writes Corbett to his friend. “If Lincoln had never gone to the theater he would not have lost his life. Most of those who go there lose life, and soul, too.”

Another obvious question arises: Did Holston appear on stage with any members of the Booth family? There is no evidence he did, but Holston was in an 1870 performance in Baltimore which was co-produced by Edwin and Wilkes’ brother-in-law, John Sleeper Clarke. The New York theatrical paper, the Clipper, reported it:

“Of Baltimore Dramatic Affairs,” New York Clipper, March 26, 1870.

“Our correspondent, under date of March 18th, thus discourses: — Manager Ford, of the Holliday Street Theatre, has been delighting his patrons during the week with the resumption of specie payment and a trip to the great city of London at a very nominal charge. The “Lights and Shadows of the Great City of London,” as witnessed by so many Baltimoreans up to date, consists of a series of paintings of high excellence and fidelity to nature, executed by John Johnson, of London, and illustrating the prominent public buildings, squares, bridges, etc., of that metropolis. In conjunction with these views is a thrilling and emotional drama, the joint production of Henry Leslie, of London, and John S. Clarke, of Baltimore. The cast, an unusually strong one, is as follows: . . . William Holston, of England (first appearance), as Ralph Heron.”

Was Sleeper aware of the connection? Did Bos’ know of it? Is the answer buried out there in a newspaper archive waiting to be ferreted out? We may never know.

Just as a matter of interest, I became curious as to what Holston might have been up to on April 14th and 15th. Was he in preparation for the opening of the play at Wallack’s? Or, was he already engaged? It turns out that Holston was performing at The Olympic, as hinted at in the notice of his family connection to Sergt. Corbett. Both the Tribune and the Daily Herald mentioned it.

The blurb in the Tribune on April 15th said:

“Olympic Theater. “London Assurance” will be represented this afternoon for the least time at the Olympic during the present season. In the evening Mr. W. Holston’s benefit will take place. He is announced to appear in two parts which have elsewhere gained him much reputation—those of Jabe Bunny in “Black Sheep” and Daddy Hardacre, in the piece of the same name.”

An advertisement in the Daily Herald of the 14th lists a Saturday matinee for “London Assurance” and the evening “benefit of Mr. Holston.” Undoubtedly, the Saturday performances were cancelled, and Mr. Holson’s benefit, which would depend on ticket sales, was another victim of Booth’s attack. Perhaps he found some small comfort in knowing that a relative was responsible for killing the assassin responsible for the crime perpetrated on the American nation, Holston’s profession, and his personal finances.

What happened to Holston after 1865?

Holston travelled between America and England between the years 1865 and 1874. He appeared on the stage in New York, London, Newark, NJ, Springfield, MA, and Liverpool.

In 1874, he joined a theatre troupe that travelled to India for a series of engagements.[6] While there, unfortunately, his health took a dramatic turn for the worse. The record of what happened is not clear. He returned to England to recuperate, and on August 26, 1875, the New York Tribune reported:

“Mr. William Holston—an actor who won many admirers by his comical eccentricity when he was at Wallack’s—has been dangerously ill in Calcutta. He is now in retirement after a perilous surgical operation; but hopes are entertained that he will recover his health.”

His health did not get better, however, and he died on January 21, 1876. The Liverpool Intelligence lamented, “Mr. William Holston, well known both to metropolitan and provincial theatre goers as an excellent actor in character died in London last Friday.”[7]

Conclusion:

From the evidence that has surfaced, it appears that Boston Corbett, the soldier who shot Lincoln’s assassin, was related to William Holston, an actor who was scheduled to appear on stage in New York City in April 1865. Holston’s premier was delayed by the tragic news that Lincoln had been attacked in a theatre by a well-known actor. William Holston was the first cousin once removed to Corbett, and let it slip to a drama reporter that he was connected to the avenger. Later on, Holston appeared in a play that was stage-managed by Booth’s brother-in-law, John Sleeper Clarke. Holston doesn’t appear to have mentioned the connection to Cousin Boston again and, perhaps, wisely chose not to reveal his relationship to members of the Booth family.

[1] Brown, Thomas Allston, History of the American Stage; Consisting of Biographical Sketches of Nearly Every Member of the Profession that has appeared on the American Stage from 1733 to 1870. NY: Dick and Fitzgerald, 1870, pg. 255.
[2] Untitled, New York Post, April 28, 1865.
[3] Brown, ibid., pg. 182.
[4] “Obituary,” Morning Examiner (London, England), March 11, 1865.
[5] Bartholomew Corbett (1781-1866) and Elizabeth (Corbett) Holston (1772-1865) were siblings. Thomas (later, Boston) was the 4th of 5 children born to Bartholomew and Elizabeth (Wild) Corbett. Elizabeth (Corbett) Holston and her husband, James Holston (1781-1857), had 3 children. Their son, James William Holston (1810-?), was the father of William Holston (1830-1876), the actor. In other words, the actor was the first cousin once removed to Boston/Thomas Corbett.
The preceding information was gleaned from Ancestry.com, FamilySearch, and the records of Green-Wood Cemetery in Brooklyn, among other sources. Much of the material was published in Miller, Steven G., “Pursuing the Mysterious Family of Thomas (Boston) Corbett,” Lincoln Herald, Volume 118, Number 4, Winter, 2016.
Note: It’s tricky to keep all of the members of the family who were named Elizabeth straight. For instance, Boston (Thomas) was the son of Elizabeth Corbett. His aunt was Elizabeth (Corbett) Holston, and Boston even had an older sister named Elizabeth!
[6] An article titled “The Rise and Fall of the Calcutta Stage,” by “Mr. Dangle,” appeared in The Theatre magazine, Vol 1, No. 1, page 90. It discussed the efforts to bring a theatre company to India during 1874 and later. Called “The Corinthian Theatre Company,” it was organized by Mr. G. B. W. Lewis. The upshot of it was that “Mr. E. English arrived in Calcutta with a comedy and burlesque company, (which) contained the following artists… William Holston.”
[7] “Death Mr. Wm. Holston,” Liverpool Intelligence, January 26, 1876.— Mr. William Holston, well known both to metropolitan and provincial theatre goers as an excellent actor in character died in London last Friday.”

My deepest thanks to my friend Steve Miller for this excellent piece. You’re the best, Mr. Steve.

Categories: History, Steven G. Miller | Tags: , , | 7 Comments

The Many Coats of Abraham Lincoln with Reignette Chilton

Posted on January 28, 2026 by Dave Taylor

When Abraham Lincoln was assassinated at Ford’s Theatre, he was wearing two coats. His outer layer was a custom greatcoat from the celebrated clothier Brooks Brothers. President Lincoln originally wore this greatcoat with the phrase “One Country, One Destiny” embroidered on the inside at his second inauguration, just a month before his murder. In 2019, researcher and author Reignette Chilton published a book called Lincoln’s Greatcoat: The Unlikely Odyssey of a Presidential Relic. In that book, Ms. Chilton documented the greatcoat’s journey from being a private possession of a White House doorkeeper’s family to a national treasure that long greeted visitors upon their entrance to Ford’s Theatre.

In January of 2026, Ms. Chilton released a new book delving into the other coat Lincoln wore on the fateful night of April 14, 1865. Beneath the elaborate Brooks Brothers greatcoat, Lincoln wore a regular suit coat, known as a frock coat. In the over 160 years since his death, three different frock coats have become associated with the tragedy at Washington. They exist in the collections of the Smithsonian, Ford’s Theatre, and the Chicago History Museum. But which is THE coat Lincoln was wearing when the fatal bullet was fired? In Lincoln’s Frock Coat: The Enduring Mystery of an Assassination Relic, Ms. Chilton dives deep into each frock coat and the evidence behind the claims. The journeys of these frock coats involve members of the Lincoln family, trusted White House staff, noted artists, wealthy collectors, auctioneers, lawyers, and more, as supporters of two of the coats fought bitterly to be recognized as the true assassination relic. It’s a historical mystery expertly solved through primary sources and comprehensive analysis.

I was fortunate to conduct a virtual interview with Reignette Chilton to discuss her background, research, and fascinating books, with an emphasis on the mysterious Lincoln frock coats. Reignette had so many interesting stories to share that we talked for over an hour and a half, and even then, we only scratched the surface of these relics. I hope you enjoy the interview.

If this interview has whetted your appetite for more (and I hope it has), go out and buy or borrow Lincoln’s Frock Coat: The Enduring Mystery of an Assassination Relic to learn which coat deserves to be called the last frock coat Lincoln ever wore.

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