John Wilkes Booth thought he saw a message in the play. Though he played Marc Antony, he saw himself as an avenging Brutus murdering the tyrant Caesar and restoring the republic. It was a role that would eventually consume him, and on the night of April 14, 1865, he shot Lincoln from behind on the balcony of Ford’s Theatre. Then he jumped onstage waving a gun crying out “sic semper tyrannis,” an echo of what Brutus is thought to have shouted as he murdered Caesar.Thus always to tyrants. In the balcony the President slumped in his chair, a bullet in his head. Nine hours later, the great emancipator was dead.
By the time Charlotte heard the news in Rome, it was a week later. She was horrified. She had known and worked with John Wilkes Booth, and disliked him intensely, calling him reckless, drunken, a “dare-devil.” Her grief for Lincoln was profound. His death made her feel how far away she was, and “brought the war home” to her. “My heart feels as if it was cramped in a vise,” she wrote, circling again and again back to the tragedy, in anger and disbelief; it was everywhere.
She also worried about Edwin Booth and his daughter, Edwina. They were hiding out in a hotel room in New York. Edwin was afraid they would be killed by a mob if they left, anticipating that his brother’s crime would attach itself to him and his family “forever and forever!” Drinking heavily and suicidal, Edwin seemed only to want to disappear. But friends convinced him to speak out publicly against his brother’s actions. Finally, he published a letter on behalf of the rest of the Booth family, declaring their loyalty to the Union and grief over Lincoln’s death, which went some way toward appeasing the mob.
After the assasination, John Wilkes Booth had fled the theatre, hiding with other conspirators on a farm outside Virginia. On April 26, 1865, he was captured and killed by government troops. A doctor was called to identify the body, and he lifted the traitor’s head to look on the back of his neck. As a teenager, this doctor had been assisting in his father’s surgery when John Wilkes Booth came in for an operation to remove a fibroid tumor in his neck. But after the operation the wound was reopened and healed badly, leaving a long scar that looked like a burn. The doctor reported that it had been Charlotte Cushman who had accidentally ripped open the would during a violent onstage embrace.
As the nation quickly realized, the assasination had been part of a broader conspiracy. Members of the same group had also attacked William Seward and other members of the cabinet, trying to destabilize the government. Young Fred Seward bravely fought off the assassin sent to kill his father but was badly injured in the attack. He survived his injuries, but Mrs. Seward never recovered from her terror and died weeks after the conspirators were hanged. Charlotte was “much broken down with anxiety” about Seward and his family and was further devastated when, a year later, young Fanny died of tuberculosis.
In her anger and grief over the assault on her government, Charlotte composed an open letter on behalf of American expatriates in Italy, which she presented at a memorial to Lincoln at the American Legation in Rome: “We have heard with mingled emotions of horror and regret too deep for utterance, the appalling intelligence of the cruel and cowardly attack,” she wrote. “In common with every true-hearted American, at home and abroad, we regard the loss of Abraham Lincoln as a national bereavement of unsurpassed magnitude.”
Lincoln’s death, and the subsequent end of the war in April 1865, made Charlotte wish she were closer to home, to share her country’s grief and recovery. She was also feeling physically sick again, like a “worn out broken wrinkled lunatic.” “I think,” she wrote to her friend Helen Hunt, “I may perhaps be carrying my own death warrant. Yet, after all, who does not.”
Charlotte’s homesickness finally overwhelmed her when, in 1869 she was diagnosed with breast cancer. Charlotte decided that aggressive surgery was the best option and Emma Stebbins took time away from her work to care for her. The press reported on her illness and surgeries with morbid curiosity. Her surgeon was the famous Scottish doctor Sir James Simpson, who had pioneered the use of chloroform for anesthesia. But during the lumpectomy to remove tumors in her breasts, Charlotte refused anesthetic. She was not being brave; she had been researching her condition in medical journals and learned that although chloroform was the drug of choice—even used on Queen Victoria during the birth of Prince Leopold—it could have lethal side effects.
Although the surgery seemed successful at first, the tumors came back. Charlotte did not lose hope and kept up-to-date on the latest treatments, reading medical journals in German that friends in the field sent to her. She wrote to her doctor asking about a new herbal remedy using the bark of a tree, which had only just been discovered in Ecuador, and wrote to the secretary of state in America asking him to put her in touch with the Ecuadorian ambassador.
Though she scaled back to be Charlotte’s caregiver, Emma Stebbins continued working on The Angel of the Waters. It would celebrate the completion of the Croton Aqueduct, which would bring clean drinking water to much of the city. The Angel—which Emma modeled after Charlotte—symbolized health and healing.
The era of the Jolly Bachelors had ended with the war, and Charlotte dreamed of a home in American big enough for Ned and Emma Cushman’s children. “Newport is the place to live,” Charlotte wrote to a close friend. “New York to work and Boston, if you
