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Scarce John Wilkes Booth ALS 1854

Currency:USD Category:Collectibles Start Price:1,000.00 USD Estimated At:0.00 USD
Scarce John Wilkes Booth ALS 1854
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Extremely rare John Wilkes Booth autograph letter signed. Single page, octavo, datelined “Tudor Hall, Aug 8th, 1854,” to Samuel William “Billy” O’Laughlen, brother of Michael O’Laughlen, Jr., conspirator in the assassination of President Abraham Lincoln. Booth pens in full: “My Dear Fellow / In these last two weeks, I have had more excitement than I have had for a good while. First, and foremost, I went to a champagne drinking, and you had better believe that the road (home) seemed longer that night than it ever did before. 2dly we had a client [tenant] on the place whom we could not agree with. We had several sprees with him. In one he called my sister a liar. I knocked him down, which made him bleed like a butcher. We got the sheriff to put him off the place. He then warranted me and in a couple of weeks I have to stand trial for assault and battery, as you call it. I paid another visit to the Rocks of Deer Creek the other day. It looks just the same and Sunday I went to that large camp meeting with the hope of seeing you there, but I was disappointed. I saw John Em- there or that fellow that works in your shop. The Indian’s were up here the other day with their great Bear, excuse my bad writing and excuse me also for not writing to you sooner. Give my respects to all who ask after me. I have nothing more to say. Yours For Ever, / John W. Booth / (write soon).” The encounter with the “client” Booth mentions was doubtless the same episode his beloved sister, Asia, recounted in her memoir of the Booth family, “The Unlocked Book.” Their mother, after being widowed, rented the family farmland, stock, and hired slaves to an abusive man who insulted Mrs. Booth and her daughters. Young Wilkes went to redress matters and demand an apology, but ended up breaking a stick over the man’s head. Billy and Michael O’Laughlen were friends of Booth from boyhood, when they were neighbors in Baltimore during the acting family’s intermittent residence in that city. Booth’s signature is considered to be the one of rarest of all American autographs. His handwritten letters are even scarcer as the nation-wide manhunt after Lincoln’s assassination prompted many of those who possessed his papers to destroy them, fearful that they would be implicated in the conspiracy. This is one of his few surviving handwritten letters in private hands, and is revealing in that, aside from some adolescent boasting, touches upon a significant incident from his youth with a fine association. The left margin of the letter has been tipped to a strip of lined paper, with file holes. Minor soiling; otherwise, fine condition.