John Wilkes Booth was starring at the Boston Museum when he met 16-year-old Isabel Sumner in 1864.

Booth wrote Sumner letters and bought her a pearl ring with their initials engraved inside. Her gave her an autographed photo she secretly kept all of her life.

The actor’s letters were not addressed to Sumner’s parents’ home; she picked them up at the general delivery window at the post office.

They met in New York City once.

The letters Miss Sumner wrote to Booth have never surfaced, but she preserved the letters he wrote to her until the day she died. They later disappeared.

Isabel married a Boston trader in 1877. The couple had two daughters. Isabel Sumner Dunbar died of stomach cancer in 1927.

Her granddaughter Bobbie Makepiece was 14 when Dunbar died. In a 1989 interview with author Louise Taper, Makepiece remembered her grandmother as a small, pretty, blue-eyed old woman who never spoke of John Wilkes Booth.

Source: “Right or Wrong, God Judge Me: The Writings of John Wilkes Booth,” edited by John Rhodehamel and Louise Taper

The earliest reward poster naming John Wilkes Booth as “the murderer of our late beloved president, Abraham Lincoln,” included this description: Booth is five feet, seven or eight inches high, slender build, high forehead, black hair, black eyes and wears a heavy black moustache.”

The price on Booth’s head: $50,000.

John Wilkes Booth called himself “the worst letter writer in the world.”

Indeed, several of Booth’s letters to friends and business associates begin with apologies for not writing sooner.

Booth confessed he hated letter writing.

Kate Chase lived a belle-of-the-ball life in Washington, D.C. during the Lincoln administration.

The stunning daughter of Chief Justice Salmon P. Chase married immensely wealthy Rhode Island Senator William Sprague.

She dazzled Washington society with her expensive jewelry and eye-catching party gowns.

The senator drank heavily though, and Kate’s many male admirers were the source of rumors.

In 1873, her beloved father died, a financial panic wiped out the Sprague fortune and Kate gave birth to a fourth child, who was mentally handicapped.

The Spragues separated but reconciled.

Sprague’s jealous tirades made headlines. He attacked a New York senator with a gun. The Spragues divorced in 1882.

Kate went abroad with her three daughters, leaving her son in his father’s custody.

Four years later, she returned to the U.S., her beauty faded and her clothes shabby.

She went to live in poverty at Edgewood, an estate outside Washington that her late father had purchased.

She survived by raising chickens and selling milk.

Her son committed suicide in 1890.

Source: Reveille in Washington by Margaret Leech

The subtle transformation of Abraham Lincoln into a hero is obvious in this letter written by John Downing Jr. on April 26, 1865:

“Poor Mrs. Lincoln. How I pity her. She was proud of her husband, as well she might be, despite his plainness. And do you know that he was not half so plain as represented to be. His was a strong, rugged, honest face, beaming at the same time with gentleness and good nature. His smile was something to remember forever. It was positively beautiful. I never saw one like it on any other human face.”

Edwin Booth, the greatest actor of his day, went by his nickname “Ted’’ within his family.

Around 1965, a Baltimore woman was burning some old letters she found in a desk she was cleaning out when she realized the signature on the bottom of the letters was “J. Wilkes Booth.”

The letters that survived were written when the assassin was 15 or 16.

Written from Tudor Hall, the Booth’s country home near Bel Air, Md., they are the only known writings from the period before Booth began acting.

Right or Wrong, God Judge Me:” The Writings of John Wilkes Booth, edited by John Rhodehamel and Louise Taper

After the assassination, two women from Skowhegan, Maine, were arrested as they exited a train.

The women were overheard using hard language about President Lincoln, and the conductor reported them to the military.

Source: “The Terrible Tragedy at Washington: Assassination of President Lincoln, Last Hours and Death-Bed Scenes of the President,” Barclay & Co., 1865

Washingtonians watched from rooftops and sidewalks as President Lincoln’s funeral proceeded down Pennsylvania Avenue on April 19.

The hearse bearing the president’s remains was pulled by six gray horses, each led by a groom wearing a full black suit, white satin sash and a dress hat festooned with white muslin.

Source: “The Terrible Tragedy at Washington: Assassination of President Lincoln, Last Hours and Death-Bed Scenes of the President,” Barclay & Co., 1865