A Thousand Words a Battle: Ford’s Theater

Ford’s Theater
April 9, 1865

Ford’s Theater – Chris Heisey

Good Friday was cloudy but balmy as President Lincoln and his wife, Mary, climbed into an open air carriage for a ride in the countryside surrounding Washington D.C. on April 14, 1865. Five days earlier, Lee had surrendered to Grant essentially ending a Civil War that had killed some 700,000 Americans across the past five Aprils.

“I never saw him so supremely cheerful—his manner was almost playful,” Mrs. Lincoln wrote in November 1865. During the drive, he was so gay that I said to him laughingly, ‘Dear Husband, you almost startle me by your great cheerfulness.’”

“And well I may feel so, Mary, I consider this day, the war has come to a close. We must both, be more cheerful in the future,” the President told her. “Between the war and the loss of our darling Willie, we have both been very miserable.”[1]

As the buggy ride alone with his wife with little security detail was his idea, so it was that evening out to Ford’s Theatre to see the British comedy, Our American Cousin. The couple arrived to the play late as they had to pick up Major William Rathbone and his fiancé Clara Harris who the Lincoln’s were last minute hosting as Ulysses and Julia Dent had declined their invitation earlier in the day. Upon entering the packed theatre and moving along the top balcony to the private presidential box stage right, the comedy was briefly halted as the orchestra struck up the thunderous anthem Hail to the Chief.

The play was a rousing, hilarious 19th Century production soon interrupted again by a sudden crack of a gunshot shot followed by the daring leap the box of John Wilkes Booth—the famous actor now turned first American presidential assassin. Hurling himself some 10-feet downward to the stage floor, Booth exclaimed, “Sic temper tyrannis” (thus to always tyrants). After a 12-day hunt for Lincoln’s killer, Booth was killed in a remote eastern Virginia tobacco barn on April 26, shot through the neck, breathing his last breathes in paralyzed, gasping agony.[2]

As the Lincolns had cheerfully ridden about Washington on the afternoon of April 9, the actor was penning a letter to the editors of The National Intelligencer, a Washington newspaper. “Many I know—the vulgar herd—will blame me for what I am about to do, but posterity, I am sure, will justify me,” Booth began, adding “Right or wrong, God judge me, not man. Be my motive good or bad, of one thing certain I am sure, the lasting condemnation of the North.”[3]

Just days after Lincoln succumbed, a U.S. Marine stationed in Mound City, Illinois, Wesley Sever, wrote home to his mother in graphic detail:

 We are all in an uproar in this place about the death of the president and one or two has been shot for using disloyal sentiments and there will be more shot if they do not keep their mouths shut. . . . It is hard for Lincoln to die now when he was just on the eve of seeing this rebellion trodden under foot when everybody was rejoicing in his administration and when everything look bright for him. I would like to have my say with that Booth. I’ll bet ne never would want to kill another president. I would take a pair of shears and cut him in pieces as you would a piece of cloth. Then I would dig out his eyes and pour in boiling hot oil. I’d fix him well. . . . Mother give my love to all the folk and believe me your affectionate son.[4]

Nearly to the April day, Emma Le Conte, a diarist in Columbia, South Carolina, penned in her diary her sentiments about the killing of Lincoln:

Hurrah! Old Abe Lincoln has been assassinated! It may be abstractly wrong to be so jubilant, but I just can’t help it. After all the heaviness and gloom of yesterday this blow to our enemies comes like a gleam of light. We have suffered till we feel savage. There seems no reason to exult, for this will make no change in our position- will only infuriate them against us. Never mind, our hated enemy has met the just reward of his life. The whole story may be a Yankee lie. . . . Could there have been a fitter death for such a man. . . ? The first feeling I had when the news was announced was simply gratified revenge. The man we hated has met his proper fate. I thought with exultation of the howl it had by that time sent through the North and how it would cast a damper on their rejoicings over the fall of our noble Lee. . . . Andy Johnson will succeed him-the rail splitter will be succeeded by the drunken ass. Such are the successors of Washington and Jefferson, such are to rule the South. Sic temper tyrannis—it has run through my head all day.[5]

— Chris Heisey

Part of a series.

[1] Mary Lincoln to Francis Carpenter, 15 November 1865, President Lincoln Assassinated!! The Firsthand Story of the Murder, Manhunt, Trial, and Mourning, Harold Holzer, editor (New York: Penguin Random House, Inc., 2014), 356-358.

[2] James Swanson, Manhunt: The 12-Day Chase for Lincoln’s Killer (New York: Harper Collins, 2010), 42-46. 338-339.

[3] John Wilkes Booth to the Editors of The National Intelligencer, Washington, D.C., Right or Wrong, God Judge Me: The Writings of John Wilkes Booth, John Rhodehamel and Louise Taper, editors (Chicago and Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 1997), 147-149.

[4] Swanson, 200.

[5] Emma Le Conte, When the World Ended: The Diary of Emma Le Conte, Earl Schenck Miers, editor (Oxford University Press, New York, 1957), 91-93.



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