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John T. Raymond (1836-1887) was a successful actor and comedian closely associated with performing Mark Twain adaptations. He was a charter member of The Lambs, joining the Club pre-1877.

Raymond was born John O’Brien in Buffalo, New York, April 5, 1836. His grandfather, Wilson Thompson, was a noted Baptist minister. He attended public schools and worked as a clerk in a produce commission house. He was a stagestruck teenager and made his acting debut when he was 17. A common practice of the era was to choose a stage name separate from family names; he billed himself as John T. Raymond. He legally changed his birth name to his stage name in 1881, just six years before his death.

He made his debut on June 27, 1853, in Rochester, New York, as Lopez, in The Honeymoon, at the Rochester Theatre. He then became a member of the stock company. Raymond traveled the theatrical circuit pre-Civil War to Baltimore, Charleston, Mobile, New Orleans, and Philadelphia. In 1858 he had his earliest success with E.A. Sothern—also a charter member of The Lambs—in Tom Taylor’s Our American Cousin. The show was a smash and Raymond toured with the show across the United States and his first trip to Europe. Raymond made a name for himself in New York in 1861, when he appeared at Laura Keene’s Theatre, succeeding Joseph Jefferson in the role of Asa Trenchard in Our American Cousin. The play is remembered today as the one that President Abraham Lincoln was attending when he was assassinated (Raymond wasn’t in the cast that night).

Raymond had been a professional actor for 20 years before he saw major popular success. On Sept. 16, 1874, he stepped onstage at the Park Theatre, located on Broadway near 22nd Street, and into the role that would come to mark the rest of his life. He embodied the villainous southwestern Colonel Mulberry Sellers in a dramatization of Mark Twain’s The Gilded Age, a character that became completely identified with his own breezy optimism. The Gilded Age, based on a novel (1873) Twain co-wrote with friend Charles Dudley Warner, was so popular that the term came to be associated with the era of history that lasted from the 1870s to around 1900.

It was this role as Colonel Sellers that made his name a household word. A Times critic wrote “The medium of his triumph may have been the feeblest play he ever appeared in, certainly it would be hard to name as poor a one that has been equally successful.”

The role not only made Raymond a star, it also created a new stereotype for the stage: the villain as greedy American. “A story, unfortunately, may be both true to nature and picturesque without being dramatic. But the character of Colonel Sellers, enthusiast, land speculator, humbug—a type of the boastful American new to the stage—became in Raymond’s personification, a delightful, fascinating, exquisitely humorous creation. His relation to the drama in which he figured was slight; and after the third act even lost his own identity, for in the fourth the colonel became a comic drunken man, who told Mark Twain’s already antiquated stuttering story to a superfluous (character), while in the fifth he argued with judge and jury as a burlesque witness in a burlesque law court scene… How much of Raymond’s portrayal of Colonel Sellers was art, and how largely the actor’s own personal peculiarities entered into the embodiment, has never been exactly determined. In all the characters he assumed later in his career they were reminiscent of the hero of The Gilded Age.“

Raymond had the honor of meeting and performing for President Abraham Lincoln on more than one occasion. In 1883 he regaled a reporter of the Washington Star with his warm memories of the president:

“Mr. Lincoln would often come down there at night and sit in the office. He would come in, sit there for an hour and chat, and very often go through the stage entrance into his box, sit there quietly and unobserved, see the performance, and then go back home. He always expressed himself as delighted to get away from business and take an hour of recreation at the theatre. The characteristics of the man were so noble, so simple and grand! He seemed to enjoy when he came to the theatre, his freedom from business and cares of the State.”

“I remember, one night we were playing Po-ca-hon-tas, a burlesque, with Mrs. John Wood. In those days, when they caught a pickpocket in the streets here, the soldiers would placard him, ‘This is a pickpocket,’ and sent him around the streets to the tune of ‘The Rogues March,’ so the people know him. We were burlesquing that on the stage. Little Tad Lincoln, the son of the president—he is now dead, poor boy!—A jolly little fellow, everybody liked him, came down very often with his father, and he was there that night. He was hanging around the stage, and for the fun of the thing I put him in a ragged dress and set him on the stage in the mob in one of the scenes. Mr. Lincoln, who was in his box, saw the boy. Well, he laughed heartily and long, threw his hands up in the air, and let one of them drop over the side of the box. The audience saw the hand and recognized it. There was no hand in the world like Mr. Lincoln’s—so long and bony. They recognized it and shouted for him. He had to come to the front of the box and bow. When Tad went into the box Mr. Lincoln threw his arms around him, and the scene between the father and the boy was most delightful. The pleasure, the affection, of the father was so intense, so spontaneous, and it was glorious to see him. Why, at that time if anybody had wanted to seize Mr. Lincoln, they could’ve done it readily. He always came to the theater alone. He would go to the box office and then pass on in. Sometimes he stood on the stage a few minutes. He seemed to enjoy everything he saw, and was a most hearty laugher.”

Raymond was married twice, both to actresses he performed alongside. His first wife was Marie E. Gordon, a respected actress who also modeled for painters and sculptors. She sued him and was granted an absolute divorce in 1879 in Brooklyn. His second wife, Courtney Barnes, a daughter of stage star Rose Eytinge, also appeared in the cast of Our American Cousin. They married in 1881 and in 1882 the couple had one child, John Irving Raymond.

He suffered from poor health and heart ailments, but continued to work and tour the country. Raymond collapsed backstage while working, and friends urged him to quit touring. He was on the road when he suffered his final, fatal illness. John T. Raymond died in a hotel in Evansville, Indiana, on April 10, 1887. He was 50. The cause was pericarditis, a heart ailment common in the era. His death was carried on the front page of the New York Times, in two full columns.

His body was brought to New York, and his widow held a wake in their home, attended by scores of actors and actresses. The Actors’ Fund took charge of the funeral arrangements; A. M. Palmer, a Brother Lamb and president of the Fund, led the mourners at the Raymond home, 8 East 32nd Street. The funeral at the Church of the Transfiguration—the Little Church Around the Corner—was filled with Lambs and his friends. Originally Courtney Raymond told the press that her husband would be interred in Green-Wood Cemetery; but Raymond was brought to the Actors’ Fund burial ground in Evergreen Cemetery in Brooklyn. Poet, editor, and close friend William Winter delivered a touching eulogy, later published as “Raymond” in newspapers:

Raymond

His restless spirit, while on earth he dwelt,
Wreathed with a smile whatever grief he felt,
And ‘twas his lot, though crowned with public praise,
Ample and warm, to walk in troubled ways.
Glad was his voice, that all men loved to hear,
While few surmised the pang, the secret tear;
Yet did that thrill of pathos flush the grace
Of playful humor in his speaking face,
Inform his fancy and inspire his art
To cheer the senses and to touch the heart.
Jocund and droll, incessant, buoyant, quaint,
His vigor fired the forms his skill could paint,
Till, over-anxious lest effects were tame,
He left his picture, to adorn it’s frame.
A mind more serious never did engage
Through simulated mirth with the comic stage,
Nor strong ambition conquer and control
A sturdier will and more aspiring soul.
If haply, much constrained, his purpose bowed
To woo the fancy of the fickle crowd,
Yet did his judgment spurn the poor renown
Of shallow jester and of trivial clown.
A true comedian this, by fate designed
To picture manners and to clear mankind.
So RAYMOND lived; and naught remains to tell,
Save that too soon the final curtain fell.
Peace to his dust, where love and honor weep,
In endless sorrow, o’er their comrade’s sleep.

Winter also composed Raymond’s epitaph on his gravestone:

—Kevin C. Fitzpatrick research & writing.