Fast Forward to 1956

Chitty was working at the University of the South at Sewanee (now known as Sewanee: The University of the South), Tennessee, in 1956. Having recently completed a master's degree in history at Tulane University, Chitty had spent many hours collecting oral histories from residents of the area.

One day, according to Chitty's own recollections,

"There appeared at my home in Sewanee James Holman Rees of nearby Fayetteville, who had been told that I, a local historian, might give him answers to some of his questions. He wanted to know if I had ever heard that Booth stayed in Sewanee, if Booth ever pawned a watch in Sewanee, and if I knew that he had married a local woman from Payne's Cove, about 10 miles away. My answer to all three questions was 'No.' I pointed out that the University of the South had not even opened until 1868, three years after Booth had died on the Garrett farm.

"Rees said that he had personally seen in our Franklin County courthouse in Winchester the marriage record of "Jno. W. Booth" to Louisa J. Payne.

The Marriage Record
Chitty was interested, enough so that he obtained a certified copy of the marriage registration and confirmed the fact that the justice of the peace who had performed the ceremony, a Cleburn C. Rose, lay buried in Cherry Cemetery, Rowark's Cove, about halfway between Sewanee and Payne's Cove. The story was that Booth had courted Louisa, who agreed to marry him, but that the night of the wedding, he told her his true name and identity. She insisted, as a devout Christian, that they be married again under his correct name.

The Pawned Watch
Chitty also checked out the watch story. At that time, in 1956, there were two daughters of Preston S. Brooks, Jr.--granddaughters, in fact, of the South Carolina U.S. Congressman, Preston Brooks, Sr., who had severely caned Senator Charles Sumner of Massachusetts on the floor of the U.S. Senate in an 1856 argument about the issue of slavery. Their names were Amy Brooks Eggleston and Polly Brooks Kirby-Smith. Chitty asked each lady, separately, about the legend in their family that their father owned and showed to them as children a gold watch that he said had belonged to John Wilkes Booth. They both said that their father had never seen John Wilkes Booth himself; instead, he had bought the watch from an unnamed person to whom Booth had pawned it. Both sisters and a niece who was still living into the 2000s asserted that the watch had been stolen from a trunk on the back porch of the family home many years before.

The Testimony of McCager Payne
On a second visit with Chitty in the late 1950s, Rees shared newly acquired information. Rees had just gone to visit Payne's Cove, which lies at the foot of the mountain near Pelham, Tennessee. The audio record of that interview is in the University of the South Archives. Rees said that as a young man in the mid-1920s, he received a suggestion from his father to talk with the elderly night watchman at his mill, one McCager Payne (1863-1932). Payne claimed that his stepfather was John Wilkes Booth.

Payne's story was that in 1872, when he was nine years old, his mother Louisa Payne, a young widow, had married and briefly lived with John Wilkes Booth at Sewanee. Louisa was the daughter of a widow who had a laundry business cleaning and mending the clothes of University of the South students. In 1871 or 1872, a quiet-mannered stranger with dark hair came to town. He was neatly dressed and appeared well educated, but he did carpentry work. He gave his name as John Booth and said he was a distant relative of the infamous actor. After a short courtship, John Booth and Louisa Payne were married.

Payne said that he had seen Booth show Louisa the scar on his leg caused by the fracture sustained by Booth's jump from the presidential box to the stage, and that Louisa would bathe Booth's injured leg in hot water to relieve the pain. Booth told the nine-year-old, "If you ever tell anyone, I'll kill you."

Shortly after the marriage, in July of 1872, the three left Sewanee for Memphis, where Booth told Louisa he expected to collect a large sum of money that was waiting for him as a reward for killing Lincoln; he was worried about being pursued, however. Booth found rooms in a small hotel and got a job in a factory. One day, his wife overheard one in a group of men saying, "There is where the skunk lives."

One day, according to a newspaper story by one Florence Wilson in 1938, published in the Nashville Banner, "Booth returned home in a cab greatly excited and told his wife he would have to leave home...He dressed himself in his best clothes, packed a few belongings, and left." He promised Louisa and "'Cager" that he would keep in touch with them. She never heard from him again. A few months later, in February, back in Sewanee, she gave birth to a baby girl whom she named Laura Ida Elizabeth Booth.

Louisa Payne Booth only lived another five years after the birth of her child. In 1877, she was burning leaves in her yard when her clothes caught fire; she died from the burns. On her deathbed, "'Cager" said, she called the children to her, eight days after the fire, and told Laura Ida that her father was John Wilkes Booth.

Laura Ida herself became an actress and married two actors in succession.

The Assassination of President Abraham Lincoln

Just a few weeks after President Abraham Lincoln's second inauguration in March of 1865 and only five days after Confederate general Robert E. Lee surrendered at Appomattox on April 9 of that year, ending the terrible U.S. Civil War, Lincoln was shot and killed by John Wilkes Booth at Ford's Theatre in Washington, D.C. on April 14.

It was the night before Easter, and the President and Mrs. Lincoln sat in the presidential box watching the show. Suddenly, from behind them in the corridor of the theatre, John Wilkes Booth burst into their box, shot the president in the head, and leaped from the box down onto the stage. Despite having fractured a bone in his foot in the fall, Booth shouted "Sic semper tyrannis!" ("Thus always to tyrants") and ran out of the theatre, mounting a horse he had tied outside and fleeing.

Booth was a member of a popular stage family; his brother Edwin was the most celebrated Shakespearean actor of his time, and Booth himself was pop idol material: handsome, dashing, and gifted on stage. But passions about the divisions in the U.S. ran high at that time, and John Wilkes strongly favored the Southern side, the Confederacy.

Arthur Ben Chitty and the Mystery of John Wilkes Booth

ARTHUR BEN CHITTY

Arthur Ben Chitty was born in 1914, the first child of Arthur Benjamin Chitty and Hazel Talitha Brown of Jacksonville, Florida. 

Educated in the public schools of Jacksonville, Chitty matriculated at the University of the South when he was 16 years old, completing his college studies in English in three years and earning membership in Phi Beta Kappa. 

Chitty worked for some years in his father's grocery business before enlisting in the U.S. Navy during World War II and serving as a recruiter stateside. After the war, he was called to the University of the South to serve as its first alumni and public-relations director. 

In the summer of 1946, he married Mary Elizabeth Nickinson (Betty Nick), whom he had met while serving at the Naval Air Station in Pensacola, Florida; her father, Lt. Commander Edward Phillips Nickinson, had been called out of retirement to be the wartime commander of the naval base. He and his wife enjoyed a richly rewarding intellectual partnership for over 50 years, working together on many historical and literary projects together, he providing the creative flair and questing intellect, and she providing an editor's caution, a librarian's encyclopedic knowledge, and a passion for accuracy.