Maggie Mitchell - Famous American Actress - Circa 1865
3D red/cyan anaglyph created from stereograph, courtesy of National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution; Frederick Hill Meserve Collection, at: npg.si.edu/portraits
NPG Title: Margaret Julia Mitchell
Photo Date: Circa 1865
Photographer: Mathew Brady Studio
Notes: Maggie Mitchell, famous actress and according to her own account, an intimate friend of John Wilkes Booth. I've read about a dozen of her obituaries from 1918, and have yet to find one that mentions her association with Booth, Lincoln's assassin. What they do mention is how proud she was to be invited to the White House to meet Lincoln, what a wonderful actress she was, and that she was married two times - except there evidently was a third marriage as well. Below are three articles that provide some background information on the life of Maggie Mitchell.
----------------------
Daily Kennebec Journal
Augusta, ME.
Monday Morning, September 20, 1875
"MAGGIE MITCHELL.
Description of Her Beautiful Home at Long Branch.
Maggie Mitchell owns real estate in many parts of the United States, but her home is at Long Branch; here she spends the summer, and here she dispenses a lavish and graceful hospitality to friends of her choice. Shy and pranksom as Fanchon herself, Maggie; is the reverse of sociable, in the sense of promiscuous visiting and returning of formal calls, or even the entertaining of formal callers. She is remorselessly “not at home” to people who come to gape at her, and being utterly without vanity, is apt to consider any prolonged staring at her in public places as born of rudeness and not admiration. The cottage in which she now dwells at Long Branch is the one in which Edwin Booth was married; and the large parlor in which this ceremony took place is the only one in the house which “looks natural” to the tragedian, so he says, for many and various have been the changes and improvements which Maggie has put upon the dwelling, and indeed upon the entire estate.
I have known Maggie Mitchell for many years, and rejoice in her success as a sister woman. Her artistic triumphs did not seek her out; she fought for them and won them bravely. Fanchon she created. The medium through which she became acquainted with the part was a heavy translation of the German play. She had not read “La Petite Fadette,” George Sand’s novel. The shadow dance—about whose fairy grace so great a poet as Ralph Waldo Emerson has written beautiul verses, not to mention a host of smaller rhymesters—was an after-thought of her own, and so were other beautiful and pathetic touches which brighten the charm of this delightful picture. Since 1862 Maggie has been playing “The Cricket,” and its hold on the public has not waned even now. Other performances of Maggie’s are variously admired. The most prominent of these are "Jane Eyre” and “The Pearl of Savoy,” a dramatic version of “Linda di Chamounix;” but “The Cricket” chirps forever.
Maggie is married and to her first beau—the sweetheart who lost his heart to her many years ago. The third engagement Maggie ever played in her life was at Cleveland, and on the first night of her engagement there came to the theatre the young man whose destiny it was to win her for his wife and brighten her household with lovely children. Mr. Paddock is a young man still, and fortunately for her he posesses business qualities which permit her to devote herself constantly to her art, in whose pursuit she is still as enthusiastic as she was at the outset of her career.
Although Maggie Mitchell is turned thirty, in disposition and appearance she is and perhaps always will be, a child of twelve. Her long, graceful waist, her golden flowing hair, her Cinderella feet are the adjuncts which make “the ugly Fanchon,” as she calls herself In the play, more bewitching than if her face were beautiful as Psyche’s.—Olive Logan’s Letter to N. Y. Graphic."
-----------------
The Saint Paul Daily Globe
Sunday Morning, April 21, 1889.
Fanchon’s Romance
A New and Singular Story in Maggie Mitchell’s Life.
Married Twenty-Seven Years Ago, but Separated at Once.
They Never Meet Again and She Marries Paddock Afterwards.
No Record of Her Divorce From Her First Husband.
“Washington Special to the Enquirer.
The absolute divorce granted to Maggie Mitchell, the popular actress, has again set agog the gossips touching her first love affair, which has about it the flavor of romance and adventure. Away back in the sixties, when the war was well under way, Washington city was an armed camp. The city then had not emerged from its old-time lethargy, and the invasion of a great army in the midst of its people, while it amazed those to the manor born, gave them the first full realization of what genuine activity and bustle meant. It was at this period, too, that Maggie Mitchell as an actress was at her best. Then she had youth to add to the captivating graces which even now, with the lapse of a quarter century, mark her great. Then, too, flushed with the financial success of her artistic endeavors, the world unfolded to her as one vast Utopia. Love's young dream was yet before her. It was no wonder Miss Mitchell was a favorite in Washington at this period. The two prominent pieces she then essayed were "Fanchon" and the "Pearl of Savoy." The ghoulish abandon with which Maggie danced the shadow dance in the one, and the pathetic love scenes of the other, awakened among the soldiers who then nightly crowded the theater some of the memories which took them back to the homes they had left behind. Maggie indeed became an idol, and a three weeks' engagement marked from the initial to its close almost a craze. It was in the russet September of 1862, when her professional career found her at Ford’s theater.
With an eye singly to her welfare, her mother accompanied her as her chaperone. Never was she so inspiring in the graceful little roles, so well adapted to her petite figure and sympathetic voice. Night after night the crowds were turned away. The day she spent largely with her mother, between whom and the daughter the tenderest tie of affection existed. But there were hours when she escaped even this zealous vigilant. In such an hour hinges the adventure which makes this recital of reminiscence and fact of interest. All actresses, great and small, have hobbies. Many run to dogs, some to kittens, and a few to prudery. Maggie loved a horse. It was her wont before the sun was fairly up to dash over the hills, then encircled with forts and menacing guns, and at break-neck speed rush helter-skelter to the amazement of those less courageous. Many times alone she scoured the beautiful outskirts. Not always thus alone, however. At times it was observed that her escort was a manly youth of sturdy outline and goodly features. Likewise it was noticed that when together speed was not so necessary. Rather did they jog along, side by side, interested both in each other and the beauties of nature such as an autumnal September can alone unfold. The climax came when, upon a return from such a jaunt, Maggie, flushed with some excitement, made a confidant of her mother. She almost shocked her when, in girlish glee, she said:
“Mamma, I was married this morning."
Treating it jocosely, her mother said: "Well, I hope you have married a saint."
"He is," she added, and then in a serious tone she gave the details.
A cloudstorm overshadowed the maternal countenance. There was no longer doubt. In a tone of command Maggie was ordered to her room, and next the youthful hero was found.
The very overturn of his matrimonial career was the malediction of the mother-in-law. The air was surfeited with womanly rage. In a condition fairly wilted he was ordered away with the injunction to never address his wife again, not even by so much as a look or token. Then Maggie became a prisoner. Always under the eye of her mother by day and guarded by a cordon of her mother's friends by night, the two lovers were kept apart. Even in the marriage there was romance. Five miles away in the direction of the north was the little town of Bladensburg, made historic because of its duels and medicinal because of its spa. It was just an easy gallop from the hotel to the sleeping village. Here the knot could be tied with no one to interdict or forbid.
A mother's acquiescence was only an incident, for would it not come after the seal of man and wife had pronounced them one? Thus it was that Maggie Mitchell, the then celebrated protean actress, and William Virgil Wallace, on the 27th day of September, 1862, were joined in holy wedlock. Thus it was that Maggie contracted her first matrimonial alliance, which the anger of a mother would not permit to be consummated, and it never was. The objection to Wallace was the fear that he was not exalted enough to win such a wife. He had talent for music in largesse, and often led the orchestra, from which ground of vantage he used his eyes to captivate his sweetheart. The sequel to the alliance was divorce. Time soon healed whatever scars the enforced separation might have imprinted upon the fair Maggie's heart.
The divorce is said to have been granted in the courts of Baltimore. Seven years later Maggie Mitchell became Mrs. Henry T. Paddock, being married on July 13, 1869. The foregoing incident of the life of this charming actress is known to but few of her friends. From some of them this account was given me vouched for fully. A few days ago I wrote the clerk of the court at Upper Marlboro, Md., to search the records and give me a transcript of the license. This is the county seat of the county in which Bladensburg is located, where upon I received the following:
Office J. W. Belt, Clerk Circuit Court, Prince George County, Upper Marlboro. Md., April 3, 1889.
Dear Sir: The marriage records of this court show that a marriage license was issued on the 26th day of September, 1862, to William Virgil Wallace and Margaret Julia Mitchell, both of New York. The officiating minister's name not given. Yours, etc., John W. Belt, Clerk. William C. MacBride, Cincinnati Enquirer.
If, however, Miss Mitchell was divorced by the circuit court in Baltimore, its records do not so show. I examined them to-day under the direction of a deputy clerk. A search between the dates of the marriage with Wallace in 1862 and the date of the marriage with Paddock in 1869 fails to note any entry of divorce from Wallace. I also searched to see it the marriage had been set aside by suit in Miss Mitchell's maiden name. It did not appear. Hence the divorce must have been obtained elsewhere.
It will be recalled that when it was first announced that Mrs. Paddock had sued for divorce there were allegations from Chicago of a previous marriage. The foregoing, however, is probably the only truthful recital of her first love affair. She never, however, lived with Wallace in the wifely relation.
W.C. MacB.”
[Additional Note: I found this same marriage record in the "FamilySearch" genealogical database provided by The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. -PT]
----------------------
Theatre Magazine, Volume 26
August 1917
Echoes of the Past
"Like Lotta the incomparable, Maggie Mitchell retired from the stage when in her prime and is now happily alive in New York at the advanced age of eighty-five. The present generation of theatre goers presumably never heard of her as it has been more than forty years since she last appeared. She was a famous actress when Lincoln was president and you will find her listed in “Whos Who in America.” Maggie Mitchell was twice married, first to Henry Paddock, then to Charles Abbott. Her sister Mary Mitchell was a member of the Boston Museum Stock Company way back in the early 70’s…..Who will ever forget the sparkle of Maggie Mitchell in such plays as “Mignon,” “Fanchon,” “The Pearl of Savoy” and others linked with her career.
She celebrated her eighty-third birthday by going from her Long Island summer home to New York City to see Cyril Maude in “Grumpy.” Likewise when “The Song of Songs” was put on she made the trip to see John Mason in it, for he made his debut in her company and she has always been interested in him. She went on stage in 1833 when an infant in arms and four years later spoke her first lines. Her debut as an adult was made at the Boston Museum Company followed by a tour of the country and her name was a household name."
--------------
Red/Cyan (not red/blue) glasses of the proper density must be used to view 3D effect without ghosting. Anaglyph prepared using red cyan glasses from The Center For Civil War Photography / American Battlefield Trust. CCWP Link: www.civilwarphotography.org/
Maggie Mitchell - Famous American Actress - Circa 1865
3D red/cyan anaglyph created from stereograph, courtesy of National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution; Frederick Hill Meserve Collection, at: npg.si.edu/portraits
NPG Title: Margaret Julia Mitchell
Photo Date: Circa 1865
Photographer: Mathew Brady Studio
Notes: Maggie Mitchell, famous actress and according to her own account, an intimate friend of John Wilkes Booth. I've read about a dozen of her obituaries from 1918, and have yet to find one that mentions her association with Booth, Lincoln's assassin. What they do mention is how proud she was to be invited to the White House to meet Lincoln, what a wonderful actress she was, and that she was married two times - except there evidently was a third marriage as well. Below are three articles that provide some background information on the life of Maggie Mitchell.
----------------------
Daily Kennebec Journal
Augusta, ME.
Monday Morning, September 20, 1875
"MAGGIE MITCHELL.
Description of Her Beautiful Home at Long Branch.
Maggie Mitchell owns real estate in many parts of the United States, but her home is at Long Branch; here she spends the summer, and here she dispenses a lavish and graceful hospitality to friends of her choice. Shy and pranksom as Fanchon herself, Maggie; is the reverse of sociable, in the sense of promiscuous visiting and returning of formal calls, or even the entertaining of formal callers. She is remorselessly “not at home” to people who come to gape at her, and being utterly without vanity, is apt to consider any prolonged staring at her in public places as born of rudeness and not admiration. The cottage in which she now dwells at Long Branch is the one in which Edwin Booth was married; and the large parlor in which this ceremony took place is the only one in the house which “looks natural” to the tragedian, so he says, for many and various have been the changes and improvements which Maggie has put upon the dwelling, and indeed upon the entire estate.
I have known Maggie Mitchell for many years, and rejoice in her success as a sister woman. Her artistic triumphs did not seek her out; she fought for them and won them bravely. Fanchon she created. The medium through which she became acquainted with the part was a heavy translation of the German play. She had not read “La Petite Fadette,” George Sand’s novel. The shadow dance—about whose fairy grace so great a poet as Ralph Waldo Emerson has written beautiul verses, not to mention a host of smaller rhymesters—was an after-thought of her own, and so were other beautiful and pathetic touches which brighten the charm of this delightful picture. Since 1862 Maggie has been playing “The Cricket,” and its hold on the public has not waned even now. Other performances of Maggie’s are variously admired. The most prominent of these are "Jane Eyre” and “The Pearl of Savoy,” a dramatic version of “Linda di Chamounix;” but “The Cricket” chirps forever.
Maggie is married and to her first beau—the sweetheart who lost his heart to her many years ago. The third engagement Maggie ever played in her life was at Cleveland, and on the first night of her engagement there came to the theatre the young man whose destiny it was to win her for his wife and brighten her household with lovely children. Mr. Paddock is a young man still, and fortunately for her he posesses business qualities which permit her to devote herself constantly to her art, in whose pursuit she is still as enthusiastic as she was at the outset of her career.
Although Maggie Mitchell is turned thirty, in disposition and appearance she is and perhaps always will be, a child of twelve. Her long, graceful waist, her golden flowing hair, her Cinderella feet are the adjuncts which make “the ugly Fanchon,” as she calls herself In the play, more bewitching than if her face were beautiful as Psyche’s.—Olive Logan’s Letter to N. Y. Graphic."
-----------------
The Saint Paul Daily Globe
Sunday Morning, April 21, 1889.
Fanchon’s Romance
A New and Singular Story in Maggie Mitchell’s Life.
Married Twenty-Seven Years Ago, but Separated at Once.
They Never Meet Again and She Marries Paddock Afterwards.
No Record of Her Divorce From Her First Husband.
“Washington Special to the Enquirer.
The absolute divorce granted to Maggie Mitchell, the popular actress, has again set agog the gossips touching her first love affair, which has about it the flavor of romance and adventure. Away back in the sixties, when the war was well under way, Washington city was an armed camp. The city then had not emerged from its old-time lethargy, and the invasion of a great army in the midst of its people, while it amazed those to the manor born, gave them the first full realization of what genuine activity and bustle meant. It was at this period, too, that Maggie Mitchell as an actress was at her best. Then she had youth to add to the captivating graces which even now, with the lapse of a quarter century, mark her great. Then, too, flushed with the financial success of her artistic endeavors, the world unfolded to her as one vast Utopia. Love's young dream was yet before her. It was no wonder Miss Mitchell was a favorite in Washington at this period. The two prominent pieces she then essayed were "Fanchon" and the "Pearl of Savoy." The ghoulish abandon with which Maggie danced the shadow dance in the one, and the pathetic love scenes of the other, awakened among the soldiers who then nightly crowded the theater some of the memories which took them back to the homes they had left behind. Maggie indeed became an idol, and a three weeks' engagement marked from the initial to its close almost a craze. It was in the russet September of 1862, when her professional career found her at Ford’s theater.
With an eye singly to her welfare, her mother accompanied her as her chaperone. Never was she so inspiring in the graceful little roles, so well adapted to her petite figure and sympathetic voice. Night after night the crowds were turned away. The day she spent largely with her mother, between whom and the daughter the tenderest tie of affection existed. But there were hours when she escaped even this zealous vigilant. In such an hour hinges the adventure which makes this recital of reminiscence and fact of interest. All actresses, great and small, have hobbies. Many run to dogs, some to kittens, and a few to prudery. Maggie loved a horse. It was her wont before the sun was fairly up to dash over the hills, then encircled with forts and menacing guns, and at break-neck speed rush helter-skelter to the amazement of those less courageous. Many times alone she scoured the beautiful outskirts. Not always thus alone, however. At times it was observed that her escort was a manly youth of sturdy outline and goodly features. Likewise it was noticed that when together speed was not so necessary. Rather did they jog along, side by side, interested both in each other and the beauties of nature such as an autumnal September can alone unfold. The climax came when, upon a return from such a jaunt, Maggie, flushed with some excitement, made a confidant of her mother. She almost shocked her when, in girlish glee, she said:
“Mamma, I was married this morning."
Treating it jocosely, her mother said: "Well, I hope you have married a saint."
"He is," she added, and then in a serious tone she gave the details.
A cloudstorm overshadowed the maternal countenance. There was no longer doubt. In a tone of command Maggie was ordered to her room, and next the youthful hero was found.
The very overturn of his matrimonial career was the malediction of the mother-in-law. The air was surfeited with womanly rage. In a condition fairly wilted he was ordered away with the injunction to never address his wife again, not even by so much as a look or token. Then Maggie became a prisoner. Always under the eye of her mother by day and guarded by a cordon of her mother's friends by night, the two lovers were kept apart. Even in the marriage there was romance. Five miles away in the direction of the north was the little town of Bladensburg, made historic because of its duels and medicinal because of its spa. It was just an easy gallop from the hotel to the sleeping village. Here the knot could be tied with no one to interdict or forbid.
A mother's acquiescence was only an incident, for would it not come after the seal of man and wife had pronounced them one? Thus it was that Maggie Mitchell, the then celebrated protean actress, and William Virgil Wallace, on the 27th day of September, 1862, were joined in holy wedlock. Thus it was that Maggie contracted her first matrimonial alliance, which the anger of a mother would not permit to be consummated, and it never was. The objection to Wallace was the fear that he was not exalted enough to win such a wife. He had talent for music in largesse, and often led the orchestra, from which ground of vantage he used his eyes to captivate his sweetheart. The sequel to the alliance was divorce. Time soon healed whatever scars the enforced separation might have imprinted upon the fair Maggie's heart.
The divorce is said to have been granted in the courts of Baltimore. Seven years later Maggie Mitchell became Mrs. Henry T. Paddock, being married on July 13, 1869. The foregoing incident of the life of this charming actress is known to but few of her friends. From some of them this account was given me vouched for fully. A few days ago I wrote the clerk of the court at Upper Marlboro, Md., to search the records and give me a transcript of the license. This is the county seat of the county in which Bladensburg is located, where upon I received the following:
Office J. W. Belt, Clerk Circuit Court, Prince George County, Upper Marlboro. Md., April 3, 1889.
Dear Sir: The marriage records of this court show that a marriage license was issued on the 26th day of September, 1862, to William Virgil Wallace and Margaret Julia Mitchell, both of New York. The officiating minister's name not given. Yours, etc., John W. Belt, Clerk. William C. MacBride, Cincinnati Enquirer.
If, however, Miss Mitchell was divorced by the circuit court in Baltimore, its records do not so show. I examined them to-day under the direction of a deputy clerk. A search between the dates of the marriage with Wallace in 1862 and the date of the marriage with Paddock in 1869 fails to note any entry of divorce from Wallace. I also searched to see it the marriage had been set aside by suit in Miss Mitchell's maiden name. It did not appear. Hence the divorce must have been obtained elsewhere.
It will be recalled that when it was first announced that Mrs. Paddock had sued for divorce there were allegations from Chicago of a previous marriage. The foregoing, however, is probably the only truthful recital of her first love affair. She never, however, lived with Wallace in the wifely relation.
W.C. MacB.”
[Additional Note: I found this same marriage record in the "FamilySearch" genealogical database provided by The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. -PT]
----------------------
Theatre Magazine, Volume 26
August 1917
Echoes of the Past
"Like Lotta the incomparable, Maggie Mitchell retired from the stage when in her prime and is now happily alive in New York at the advanced age of eighty-five. The present generation of theatre goers presumably never heard of her as it has been more than forty years since she last appeared. She was a famous actress when Lincoln was president and you will find her listed in “Whos Who in America.” Maggie Mitchell was twice married, first to Henry Paddock, then to Charles Abbott. Her sister Mary Mitchell was a member of the Boston Museum Stock Company way back in the early 70’s…..Who will ever forget the sparkle of Maggie Mitchell in such plays as “Mignon,” “Fanchon,” “The Pearl of Savoy” and others linked with her career.
She celebrated her eighty-third birthday by going from her Long Island summer home to New York City to see Cyril Maude in “Grumpy.” Likewise when “The Song of Songs” was put on she made the trip to see John Mason in it, for he made his debut in her company and she has always been interested in him. She went on stage in 1833 when an infant in arms and four years later spoke her first lines. Her debut as an adult was made at the Boston Museum Company followed by a tour of the country and her name was a household name."
--------------
Red/Cyan (not red/blue) glasses of the proper density must be used to view 3D effect without ghosting. Anaglyph prepared using red cyan glasses from The Center For Civil War Photography / American Battlefield Trust. CCWP Link: www.civilwarphotography.org/