A Visit to Ford’s Theatre, Reopened and Riveting

157 years after Lincoln’s murder, a history museum still stuns and saddens.

I ’m in Washington on a research project, working with material about the great dealer and collector Allan Stone at the Archives of American Art. I’m writing an art-history-centered biography of Allan, who discovered artists such as Wayne Thiebaud, Richard Estes, and John Chamberlain and represented Joseph Cornell and Willem de Kooning, again, among many other heavy hitters.

It’s been a while since I’ve been in D.C. The place has certainly made hay from Covid. I can’t say “gold-plated hay” since the $4 trillion Congress spent to fight an unstoppable respiratory virus, of all things, is entirely funny money. And almost the entire federal government “worked from home” for a year and a half, causing a run on bedroom slippers and golf clubs. Praise the Lord, the Swamp’s not saving us from the Nazis.

I learned when I got here that Ford’s Theatre, after a two-year lockout, reopened on Wednesday, the day before the 157th anniversary of Abraham Lincoln’s murder there at the hands of actor John Wilkes Booth. I’d never been. It’s a history museum, and I write about these, too. I had a great visit. It’s a vast pool of pathos and history. Lincoln, our greatest president, became a secular saint.

The Ford’s Theatre experience has four parts. First, there’s the theater itself. Opening in 1863, it was the premiere performing-arts space in Washington, a malarial and muddy city of 60,000 with an open sewer running along what’s now Constitution Avenue, and with a fierce insurgency just across the Potomac. After Lincoln’s death, the federal government bought the building, gutted it, and used it as a warehouse and as offices off and on until 1932, when the space opened as a museum of Lincoln memorabilia. It was restored as a theater in 1968 and operates today.

Second, a big space on the ground floor hosts a well-done but, in spots, awkward display of artifacts accompanied by a great graphic narrative of Lincoln’s Civil War from his election in 1860 to his death.

Third, the Petersen House is across the street. Once just a modest four-story Federal-style row house where boarders lived, the mortally wounded but still living Lincoln was carried to what was then a first-floor bedroom of a boarder, who happened to be out celebrating the end of the war by saloon-hopping. He came home in the wee hours to the surprise of his life. Lincoln died there the next morning. While Lincoln lay in bed, diagonally since it was too small, as many as a hundred people — cabinet secretaries, reporters, doctors, a devastated Mrs. Lincoln — came and went.

The bed in which Lincoln died and much of the other furniture in this room, in the parlor where death watchers gathered, and in the room where Secretary of War Edwin Stanton interviewed witnesses are all at the Chicago History Museum. Charles Gunther, a Chicago candymaker who grew rich from introducing caramel to America (and I salute him for this), collected madly, so much so that he acquired Lincoln’s deathbed and an entire Confederate jail building and claimed to own the skin of the evil serpent in the Garden of Eden. He tried to buy one of the Egyptian pyramids, too, hoping to bring it to Chicago.

So, little original furniture. The moving fourth feature of Ford’s Theatre is an entire floor dedicated to Lincoln’s funeral and the search for Booth and his fellow conspirators in the days after the murder. It’s part of what’s called the Aftermath Exhibits. They’re in the Petersen House and an adjacent, modern building where one can watch a video and graphic exhibition about Lincoln in popular culture. Arranged in the lobby of this building is a four-story pile of books on Lincoln published since his death. With over 5,000 books making a colorful sculpture, it proves that Lincoln is the most written-about American. And the pile keeps growing.

The theater itself is nice. It was closed when I went because of an understudy rehearsal of a musical called “Grace.” Understudies need to rehearse, but memo to management: You don’t do it on the day the museum reopens after a two-year hiatus. I bought a ticket to see the show. It’s a musical about African-American cooking and the family values that dinnertime promotes. I loved it.

I saw Lincoln’s box from my seat. It’s bedecked with flags and filled with replicas of the seats that would have been there. Taking the flags out of the equation, the box is big and open and hovers above the stage. The Lincolns would very much have been on display there. I think the theater space itself has been beautifully maintained.

I focused mostly on the history exhibition. The graphics are high-quality, with good visuals and the relics of that terrible day that Chicago’s Caramel King didn’t manage to buy. The story’s focus is, of course, Lincoln. There’s a review of his election in 1860, with less than 40 percent of the popular vote and an Electoral College win coming exclusively from the Northeast, Midwest, Oregon, and California. He got next-to-no votes, popular and otherwise, in the South, which started secession and war even before Lincoln took office in March 1865.

We learn good material about his relationship with his generals, the Emancipation Proclamation, the 1864 election, his Second Inaugural Address, Robert E. Lee’s surrender at Appomattox on April 9, and an impromptu speech Lincoln made on the 11th suggesting that newly freed slaves would get the right to vote. Wisely, the scholars and educators who organized the exhibition decided to err on the side of the public’s rustiness when it comes to Civil War history while, as wisely, avoiding a rehash battle by battle.

John Wilkes Booth, American history’s darkest villain, gets too short a shrift, in my opinion. He’s the king of skunks and Satanic, and it comes as no surprise to learn he was most famous for playing Richard III. Born in 1838 in Baltimore, he was the son of Englishman Junius Booth, who moved to America and became in his lifetime the nation’s greatest Shakespearean actor. John Wilkes was the youngest brother of Edwin Booth, a great Gilded Age stage star (and Unionist). The younger Booth made his stage debut in 1855, playing the Earl of Richmond in Richard III. By the early 1860s, he was playing the lead in cities in the Northeast and in Cleveland and Chicago. Booth was a star, said by critics to be the handsomest man in America, an athletic, edgy performer, not a smooth, subtle one like his brother.

He was also a nut. He was a strong Confederate sympathizer but, starting around 1863, obsessed over Lincoln. He had already gone to John Brown’s hanging and been pelted with garbage onstage and off for his noisy views. His family decided he was a kook to be shunned. Booth attended Lincoln’s Second Inaugural, too. We can spot him — his good looks gave him presence — in Mathew Brady’s panoramic photograph of the crowd. Booth performed off and on in Washington. He knew Ford’s Theatre so well that his mail was delivered there when he was in town.

Lincoln had seen Booth onstage before. In 1863, Booth had the lead role in The Marble Heart, a play about a sculptor who carves figures who come to life. Lincoln saw it. At one point, Booth’s character angrily argues with another. One of Lincoln’s guests in the residential box said that Booth, at that moment, looked and pointed at Lincoln. “Mr. Lincoln, he seems to have meant that for you,” one of Lincoln’s party said. Lincoln agreed: “He does seem to look pretty sharp at me.”

Based in Baltimore, Booth was in Washington a lot, as more of a stalker and conspiracist than an actor. There, he developed a cell of Lincoln haters. In mid-March 1865, Booth organized an attempt to kidnap Lincoln and smuggle him to Richmond, where the Confederate government could use him as ransom for a prisoner swap. The plan collapsed. Lincoln had planned a night at the Old Soldiers’ Home, the presidential retreat, where Booth and his team waited to grab him. Instead, Lincoln went to a reception at the National Hotel in Washington. Booth, coincidentally, was staying there as a guest and missed his prey.

When Lincoln spoke on April 11, Booth was there. “It’ll be his last speech,” Booth was heard to say, and so it was. On April 14, in the morning, Booth stopped at Ford’s Theatre to check his mail. He heard that Lincoln was expected that night for a performance of Our American Cousin, a British comedy about a hayseed American who, having unexpectedly inherited an English country house, visits the U.K. and meets his aristocratic family. It’s about a contrast in cultures. Laura Keene, the first woman theater impresario in America, was the female lead.

Booth spent the rest of the morning into the afternoon reassembling his gang of four men and one woman, the goal now Lincoln’s murder. He learned that General Ulysses and his wife planned to join the Lincolns. Mrs. Grant and Mrs. Lincoln were both pampered daughters of Border State grandees and sufficiently alike to despise each other. The Grants bailed. Mrs. Lincoln invited Clara Harris, the daughter of New York’s U.S. senator, and her fiancé, Major Henry Rathbone. As the hours passed, Booth’s party decided to decapitate the entire government and kill Vice President Johnson and Secretary of State Seward along with Lincoln.

There’s a good timeline in the museum for both Booth and Lincoln that day. Booth rented a getaway horse. He concocted an escape route to Virginia. He spent the late afternoon drinking with actor friends at the Star Saloon, next to the theater. One joked that Booth would never be as famous as his father. “When I leave the stage for good,” he replied with a crocodile smile, “I’ll be the most famous actor in America.” Lincoln’s day was filled with mundane meetings. Midafternoon, he and Mrs. Lincoln took a carriage ride. “Dear husband,” she told him, “you almost startle me with your great cheerfulness.” Lincoln said that, with the war over, they’d spend more time together.

Booth meticulously scoped out his route to Lincoln’s box. He arrived early, drilling a hole in the door so he could see that the play had fully absorbed Lincoln and his party before he entered. He also had a wedge to block the door from the inside. He’d hidden it in the box earlier that day. Lincoln’s party had brought a bodyguard who, during intermission, went to the Star Saloon and stayed there, not even bothering to say he was “working from home.”

Booth knew the play, too. He knew the laugh lines. He opened the door seconds before the male lead, the bumbling American, called one of his highbrow lady cousins “you sockdologizing old man-trap,” not a Rowan & Martin’s Laugh-In favorite, to be sure. You had to be there, I guess. It’s a highfalutin word that means “nagging,” I’ve read, though I think it’s a malapropism, spoken by an American out of his depth, for “doxologizing,” which means pious to a fault.

As the audience roared, he aimed his derringer at the back of Lincoln’s head and fired. Booth dropped the gun. Major Rathbone grabbed him as he was about to jump from the box onto the stage. Booth stabbed him. One of Booth’s spurs caught a flag draping from the box to the stage. He landed inartfully, cracking a bone in his leg.

Knowing the theater, Booth understood that the presidential box hovered above the stage, about a 45-degree angle from what we’d call the orchestra section. Landing on the stage, the youngest of the Booth actor stars, the athletic, edgy, handsome one, shouted “Sic semper tyrannis,” or “thus always to tyrants,” though some heard “so the South is avenged” instead.

The pistol’s in the show, in a place of infamy near wall panels profiling Booth’s accomplices. Lincoln’s wool overcoat, specially made for him by Brooks Brothers, is in a case. Its silk lining is stitched with an eagle holding a banner in its beak that reads “One Country, One Destiny.” The dress Mrs. Lincoln wore is there, too. Booth’s dagger is on view, as well as his address book, which doubled as his diary. Booth wrote there that he expected to be a hero. Rathbone’s gloves, stained with his own blood, are on view.

Within seconds, pandemonium reigned. No one knew what happened. Mrs. Lincoln was screaming. There was a stampede out the door but a stampede to Lincoln’s box as well. Laura Keene insisted on cradling Lincoln’s head in her lap. She displayed her bloodied dress in subsequent one-woman shows. Souvenir hunters were seen clipping locks of Lincoln’s hair and beard. Lewis Powell, tapped to kill Seward, only wounded him with a dagger before Seward’s son fought him off. George Atzerodt changed his mind about killing Johnson, got drunk instead, rented a hotel room, and passed out.

I would have done something unorthodox — no surprise — and broadened and thickened Booth’s role in the exhibition. The murder itself is presented with a reticence that surprised me, given that the crime changed American history. Material on what happened in the box is tucked in a corner. The biggest element in the big wall case is the door to the box. I think some people miss the whole case entirely.

Artifacts, relics, and ephemera, including, I think, Mrs. Lincoln’s opera glasses, are in an adjacent case with poor lighting, a problem throughout the entire space. A painting by Carl Bersch, Lincoln Borne by Loving Hands, depicts a crowd carrying Lincoln from the theater to the Peterson House. Bersch saw the scene and sketched it, later painting a big studio oil. It’s in a case so badly lit that no one could see it. They need a lighting consultant to tweak things.

I think the scholarly team working on the exhibition struggled with giving Booth too splashy a role, distributing his involvement to keep from glamorizing him. In doing so, they finesse his outsized obsessions and his outsized talent as an actor. When the Park Service, which owns Ford’s Theatre, opened its Lincoln memorabilia museum in 1932, there was a heated debate among federal agencies over whether Booth’s derringer should be displayed. It’s a raw thing to see. It’s small. As an object, it’s handsome and high-style. It’s far from the case dealing with the actual crime, too removed.

No one wants to valorize Booth. That said, as an extreme case, he expresses a huge swath of his day’s opinion — even outside the Confederacy — hating the war or hating the idea of black empowerment or both. Lots of people in the North, for lots of reasons, were stealth Copperheads. Among Lincoln’s most subtly, deftly heroic achievements was his negotiation of these haters. Mostly, he defanged them.

Military victory is one thing. Lincoln won political and psychological victories, too. People need to know this history. Booth was a megalomaniac and a poisonous extremist. He’s a lunatic-fringe type and not unique. Lee Harvey Oswald was terrible, but the other presidential killers, and I’d also count the ones that failed such as Squeaky Fromme and John Hinckley, are more freaks than incarnations of wickedness. Stephen Sondheim’s Assassins is something the Ford’s Theatre historians should absorb if they ever do a reinstallation. Thinking about parallels to Booth in my lifetime, I find that the closest are the honchos who gave us September 11, among them Bin Laden and Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, both, like Booth, pure, activated evil.

I know Ford’s Theatre just reopened to visitors, and the history exhibition looks nice. I was delighted to see a long line of people in front, waiting to visit. Little things need to be fixed, aside from the lighting. A Purell dispenser is blocking part of the panel detailing Booth’s day on April 14. In the Aftermath gallery across the street, a screen flanked by the Gettysburg Address has a sign explaining that the film meant for that space was “temporarily unavailable.” And why is the room where Lincoln died empty except for his bed?

I know lots of stuff wandered away over the years, but we know, roughly, how the room looked the night of Lincoln’s death. Can’t the look be reproduced?

All of these are small quibbles. Washington is packed with history. Visitors should spend time at Ford’s Theatre as well as at the city’s many good museums. It’s essential to an understanding of the zeitgeist of our capital city as well as our history. It’s easy to forget what real tumult is. For Americans, the stakes were never higher than in Lincoln’s time and place.

The collateral damage of Booth’s crime was big and small. Booth was shot after a twelve-day manhunt. His accessories went to the gallows. A conspiracy theory surrounding Secretary of War Stanton lingered for years. Was he involved? He was a master at back-door orchestration, the Dick Cheney of his era, but I think this theory has been debunked.

Bad presidents, kings, and popes come in many shapes and sizes, but Andrew Johnson was the worst man for the job he inherited. We still live with his botched rule. Mrs. Lincoln, never having both oars in the water, had a fraught few years until her death in 1883. Clara Harris and Major Rathbone married. A few days after the murder, she wrote a long letter to her sister packed with details of the shooting.

Rathbone was endlessly badgered in public for not having stopped Booth. Ultimately deranged, he murdered his wife in 1883 and tried to kill his children as well as himself. He died in a mental asylum in 1911. Lincoln’s adult son, Robert, was almost immediately on the scene and with his father when he died. He became a railroad executive. Robert notoriously was with James Garfield when Garfield was shot in 1881, and steps away from William McKinley when he was fatally shot at the World’s Fair in Buffalo in 1901. I suspect that Roosevelt, Taft, Harding, and Coolidge kept him off their dance card. He died in 1926.

The first floor of Petersen House needs to be redone to present the pathos and panic — the surreal atmosphere — of Lincoln’s last hours. As is, it’s too antiseptic. “Now he belongs to the ages,” Stanton said when Lincoln died. Or, alternatively, and with a touch of a Victorian mawk, he might have said, “Now he belongs to the angels.” No one’s sure. Overall, Ford’s Theatre conveys the reality and spirit of the most tragic day in American history.