Posts Tagged With: Poetry

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.

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.

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.

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.