Abraham Lincoln - Ford’s Theater, Washington, DC; Lincoln’s Cottage, Washington, DC;  Beauvoir, Biloxi, MS

April 13, May 24, July 9, 2014

Presidential Box at Ford's Theater

On Good Friday, April 14, 1865, Abraham Lincoln scooted forward on his plush chair in the Presidential box of Washington, D.C.’s, Ford’s Theatre to catch the punch line of a popular play, “Our American Cousin.” The comedy is about a Vermont bumbler who inherits a bunch of money from relatives in Britain and travels there to visit.  After enduring a play’s worth of insults, the Vermonter retorts to one of his abusers:  "Don't know the manners of good society, eh? Well, I guess I know enough to turn you inside out, old gal — you sockdologizing old man-trap."   (This was supposedly a very funny line.)  Lincoln, however, barely apprehended the punch line, for as the audience roared with laughter, a bullet burst into the back of his left ear, gravely wounding him.  

Cathy and I toured Ford’s Theatre one day shy of 149 years later to begin at the end of the life of one of the greatest Americans who ever lived.   Since it was cherry blossom season, we had to contend with armies of tourists.  But the staff of the theater admitted people according to tickets with assigned times, so it was easy.  Once our allotted time arrived, our group piled into the theater — both the balcony and orchestra sections were available.  And then, out onto the stage ambled, not an actor, but a National Park Service ranger who discussed the last days of Lincoln’s life.  

The Playbill

What cost Lincoln his life is shoddy security.  First, the Ford's Theatre’s owner, John Ford, tells the newspapers that Lincoln and General Ulysses Grant are coming to the play.  When he flies back to the theater, Ford exhorts his employees to decorate the Presidential box--primarily for Grant, because he is a war hero.  John Wilkes Booth, a famous actor, is unfortunately, at the theater and overhears the news.

Booth is from a famous family of well-respected actors. All of the Booths are pro-Union…except for John Wilkes who once said "slavery is the white man's gift from God."  And Booth has the malicious intent to strike a blow for the defeated South.

Booth nimbly devises a plan to assassinate, not only Lincoln, but members of his Cabinet as well.  He shares the plan with his confederates, George Atzerodt, Lewis Powell and David Herold.  This is the same bunch who tried to kidnap Lincoln earlier that year during his commute between the White House and his summer residence at the Soldiers’ Home three miles away.  But the plot was frustrated when Lincoln didn't show up.  George Atzerodt is supposed to kill Vice President Andrew Johnson while Lewis Powell and David Herold are assigned to slay Secretary of State William H. Seward.

The security at the theater is spotty.  Soldiers are stationed outside, and everybody has to exhibit passes to get in. There is no reason to think anybody inside would do the President harm.  The play starts at 8 p.m., but Lincoln arrives at 8:30 — without Grant, who is heading to New Jersey to see his daughter for Easter. Instead, Major Henry Rathbone and his fiancé, Clara Harris, accompany the President and his wife, Mary. 

A Most Heinous Act

When Lincoln’s entourage appears, the director interrupts the play for “Hail to the Chief.”  The play resumes at 8:45.  Around 9:15, Booth oozes in the back, goes into the wings under the stage, withdraws to have a drink next door, and slips back.  (All of this is well documented—1,700 people were in attendance that evening and there are about100 eyewitness accounts.) 

Booth skulks along the balcony to the to the yellow door where the presidential valet is sitting. Booth gives him his card and says he wants to pay respects to the President. Since the Lincolns are fans of the Booth family, the valet admits him.  (Another security breach.)  Booth waits in the hallway for the climax.  Then he enters the box and barricades the door.  As the climatic line approaches, Booth creeps toward Lincoln with a Derringer steady in his hand.  He positions the gun four inches from the left side of Lincoln's head. As the punch line hangs in the air, he pulls the trigger.  But everybody is laughing, so few in the audience notice.  Major Rathbone grabs Booth; Booth pulls out a knife and hacks him.  Booth then flings himself onto the stage, landing badly, and fracturing a small bone in his leg.  He displays his knife on stage and screams "Sic Semper Tyrannous":  "Thus always to tyrants."  Allegedly, Brutus said this when he killed Julius Caesar.  Booth scuttles out the door, vaults onto his horse and is gone.

Lincoln, unconscious, is cascading blood.  Major Rathbone is in shock, Mary Todd Lincoln and Clare are trying to help Lincoln, but the whole theater is in pandemonium.  The first doctor on the scene is a 23-year-old who graduated six months earlier and had been a military field doctor. He and Dr. Charles Taft, who arrives later, realize Lincoln won't live, so they order him carried across the street to the Petersen Boarding House. It takes 45 minutes to transport him.

(Modern medicine might have saved his life, but he wouldn't have been able to talk and his brain functions might have been limited. He could not have served out his presidency, the guide said.)

At about the same time across town, Lewis Powell is slashing Seward with a knife, severely wounding him.  But George Atzerodt loses his nerve and gets drunk instead of attacking Vice President Johnson. 

The city is obviously in chaos with nobody sure what is really happening.  

The aftermath is that President Abraham Lincoln never regains consciousness and dies the next morning propped up in a bloody bed too small for his long frame.  John Wilkes Booth is hunted for 12 days and is finally cornered in a Virginia barn.  He is shot in the neck and dies 12 hours later.  His co-conspirators are all hanged together on a sweltering July day, even George Atzerodt who spent the night of violence in an ineffectual drunken stupor.  Major Rathbone recovers from his wounds but never forgives himself for not protecting the president.  He does marry Clara Harris, but in 1883 he fatally shoots and stabs her and is sentenced to an insane asylum.  John Ford is threatened and elects not to reopen the theater.  He sells it to the government. In 1968, the theater is established by LBJ as a living memorial to Lincoln. 

The Murder Weapon

Following the talk, the ranger kindly admitted us to the museum located in the basement even though we did not bear the proper tickets.  (He shared that even after 12 years of volunteer work, he has never entered the presidential box, but he has lingered in the hallway leading up to it.)  The museum displays relics of the time:  the actual Derringer that Booth held, the knife that Booth wielded to slash Major Rathbone, the door of the box as well as the chunk of wood that Booth used to barricade the door, and Major Rathbone’s gloves. 

As we concluded our tour of the museum Cathy discovered a little theater. “Dark and the seats have a back.  Does it get any better than this?” she said as she flopped on a bench and fell asleep.

Lincoln’s Presidency

When Abraham Lincoln won the presidential election on November 6, 1860, the South knew that its “Peculiar Institution” was finally ending.  In an attempt to hold the nation together, he told the slave-holding states that he would not terminate slavery but he also would not support its expansion.

Nevertheless, the Southern states began to secede.  On December 20, 1860, South Carolina declared that “the union now subsisting between South Carolina and other States, under the name of the ‘United States of America,’ is hereby dissolved.”  Six other Southern states followed: Mississippi, Florida, Alabama, Georgia, Louisiana and Texas.  They promptly formed their own government and called it the Confederate States of America.  The capital was established in Montgomery, Alabama;  it was later moved to Richmond once Virginia joined the Confederacy.

On March 4, 1861, Lincoln was sworn in. On April 22, South Carolina shelled Ft. Sumter, igniting the first military action of what was to become the Civil War.  On July 21, 1861, the first great land battle was fought, not 30 miles from the White House in Manassas, Virginia.  The war would stretch four years and cost more than 600,000 lives.

But throughout the bloody years of fighting, Lincoln knew that abolishing slavery needed to happen at a measured pace.  In a 1862 letter to New York Times editor, Horace Greeley, he wrote "What I do about slavery and the colored race, I do because I believe it helps to save the Union" (Wilson, 2013).  So when he began to form the Emancipation Proclamation, it was to support the Union cause.  The Proclamation announced the freedom of “all persons held as slaves” only in those states that were in rebellion.   He spared slave-holding states that remained loyal to the Union (i.e.. Delaware, Kentucky, Maryland and Missouri) or that had already surrendered.  Maryland was especially important because it surrounded Washington on three sides.  Secretary of State Seward counseled Lincoln to delay the Emancipation Proclamation until after a Union victory or public images purposes. So when the North seemingly prevailed in the battle of Antietam in September 1862, Lincoln knew he could make his announcement.

The Emancipation Proclamation went into effect on January 1, 1863.

The South accused Lincoln of employing the Proclamation to incite the enslaved. In fact, Lincoln did want the enslaved to come north and fight, or at least stop working — that would take resources away from the South.  Many did come north, and the U.S. Colored Troops were established for the first time. They could fight for their cause and they were thrilled.

But Lincoln knew that when the war ended, the Emancipation Proclamation might not hold. (This was because, once the war ended, the states would no longer be in rebellion.)  He needed something stronger.  He needed the Constitution to actually abolish slavery and establish that people were not property.  So he pushed for the passage of a new amendment to the Constitution.  He began to work on  it in the summer of 1862 at the Returned Soldiers’ Home in Northwest D.C.  It would become the 13^th Amendment. 

Lincoln’s Cottage

Lincoln's Cottage

On Memorial Day weekend we visited the site where Lincoln developed both the Emancipation Proclamation and the 13^th Amendment;  the location is now known as Lincoln’s Cottage and is at the campus of the Armed Forces Retirement Home (AFRH).  When we arrived, we learned that you need to purchase tickets ahead of time, something we had overlooked.  The final two tours at 2 p.m. and 3 p.m. tours were overbooked — Memorial Day may have had something to do with that.  But somehow they managed to squeeze us into the 2 p.m. tour led by Kelsey.  (We believe our notebooks made us appear to be serious presidential scholars, so they made an effort to squash us in.)

Kelsey launched the tour by revealing that there is not much furniture in the cottage.  “It is a museum of ideas not things,” she explained.  Cathy’s response was,  “No teacups, woohoo!”  (Too many of our visits have been about furniture and tableware and iron pots rather than the presidents.)  The Gothic Revival house does have some period furniture, but the focus is on Lincoln’s influences and the way he thought. The house is as close to the Lincoln era as possible, but it's mostly empty.

A Towering Man

George Washington Riggs, founder of Riggs Bank, constructed the cottage, but sold the property to the government after his daughter died.  Side note: The original marble-columned Riggs Bank (now a PNC Bank) is on Pennsylvania Avenue across from the Treasury Department and can be found on the back of the $10 bill.

Presidents were invited to the Soldiers Home as a way to curry favor (read: funding) for the Soldiers’ Home from them. 

Lincoln's Briefcase

During the summers of his presidency, Lincoln commuted to the cottage every day.  The home is on an elevation and is six degrees cooler than the city.  It is about three miles from the White House and three miles from the Capitol.  His commute was 30-35 minutes with a cavalry escort that he sometimes ditched.  (This was not a good idea: Washington was full of Southern sympathizers.  He was shot at once and a bullet rent a hole through his hat.  And of course, John Wilkes Booth and his band were intent on kidnapping Lincoln during his commute.) 

Within sight of the Cottage is the U.S. Soldiers’ and Airmen’s Home National Cemetery,

which was established after the First Battle of Bull Run in 1862.  As the carnage increased, the bodies of 30-40 young Union soldiers were being buried every day.  (According to eminent Civil War historian Shelby Foote, the slaughter was so vast because the military tactics did not keep up with the deadly technology.)  Lincoln witnessed many of the burials from the front of the Cottage perhaps 300 yards distant.  He was witnessing the embodiment of his war policies and it weighed heavily on him, according to another tour guide, Jimmie Cooper.  Sometimes when he couldn’t sleep, Lincoln would repair to the cemetery and pace the graves.  Once he saw a woman visiting a grave in the middle of the night and he recited a short poem to her.  (Side note: Lincoln composed poetry and there is a book of his collected poems in the giftshop.)

During our tour, Kelsey related an anecdote that was revealing of Lincoln’s character.  In August 1862, the first summer at the cottage, Charles Scott, a colonel in the Union army, showed up to see Lincoln.  He and his family had been on a ship that collided with another ship.  His wife drowned. He wanted to take her body back home to New Hampshire, but it had already been removed to Virginia. Kelsey said it was "almost impossible to get her body back from the South" during the war.  Scott asked Secretary of War Edwin Stanton to help but was refused. So Scott hunted down Lincoln at the cottage and gained an audience.  Lincoln was displeased with the intrusion and asked, “Why do you come here?”  He told Scott that death was pervasive in this time of war and that Scott should have gone to the War Department for help. When Scott told Lincoln that Stanton had refused to assist, Lincoln told him that Stanton knew what he was doing.

Overnight, Lincoln had a change of heart and found Scott in D.C.  Lincoln directed Stanton to arrange for the recovery of her body and apologized to Scott, saying there was “no excuse for my conduct.”  He also asked Scott not to "tell your children about my conduct last night."

After the tour, we strolled to the nearby National Cemetery across the street from the Soldiers’ Home campus.  At the cemetery are planted neat rows of small white grave markers, 14,000 in all, reminiscent of those at Arlington National Cemetery.  It was at this cemetery, established before Arlington, that Major General John A. Logan — who is also buried there — declared the first Declaration Day on May 30, 1868, to be held every year at that time.  This became known as Memorial Day.

A Detour into the Dark Heart of the Confederacy

In July 2014, Tom journeyed to the retirement home of Jefferson Davis, the only president of the Confederate States of America. The white mansion with fading green shutters, known as Beauvoir, is in Biloxi, Mississippi. An expansive porch with rocking chairs looks out on the Gulf of Mexico. 

Our tour guide held forth on Davis’ time at the house, his family, the furnishings (yes, even the tea cups!), the use of the house as a retirement home for 2,000 Confederate veterans and their widows — 800 of them are buried in a cemetery on the property.  But not a peep about Davis’ role in the Civil War. 

Beauvoir

Prior to the Civil War, Davis was a congressman and a two-term U.S. senator who also served as the Secretary of War under Franklin Pierce. On Jan. 12, 1861, Sen. Jefferson Davis rose in the Senate chamber and announced that he was resigning. During his speech he laid bare the case for the South, reminding the Senate that the framers of the Constitution had never intended the enslaved to be free:  “…for there (in the Constitution) we find provision made for that very class of persons as property; they were not put upon the equality of footing with white men -- not even upon that of paupers and convicts; but, so far as representation was concerned, were discriminated against as a lower caste, only to be represented in the numerical proportion of three-fifths. So stands the compact which binds us together.”

I asked the guide if African Americans ever visited the home (which is owned and operated by the Sons of the Confederacy) and was told that yes and, by the way, there were black Confederate soldiers who had lived at the retirement home.  I did a double take. “Black Confederate soldiers?”  After the tour, I visited the library in the visitor’s center and asked the librarian about that statement.  She assured me that was indeed true and handed me two books on the subject.  

The story is this.  As the war dragged on, the Confederacy was running short of soldiers.  By 1864, some in the Confederacy were seriously advocating the use of their enslaved population.  Gallagher (1997) reprints a Harper’s Weekly cartoon from December10, 1864 showing a Southerner trying to convince a confused enslaved person to take a rifle.  The caption reads:  “Here! You mean, inferior, degraded Chattel, jest kitch holt of one of them ‘ere muskits, and conquer my freedom for me!”  In March 1865, a desperate Confederate Congress approved the use of the enslaved as troops, but only a few thousand were mustered (www.history.com).  The South surrendered the next month. 

And Back to the Bright Light of the Union

In November 1863—a year and a half before his death—Lincoln made a short trip to Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, to participate in the dedication of a national cemetery at the site of that July’s Battle of Gettysburg.  Lincoln wasn’t the main speaker but he had prepared a few words.  They went like this:

Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent a new nation, conceived in liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.

Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation, or any nation so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure. We are met on a great battlefield of that war. We have come to dedicate a portion of that field, as a final resting place for those who here gave their lives that that nation might live. It is altogether fitting and proper that we should do this.

But, in a larger sense, we can not dedicate, we can not consecrate, we can not hallow this ground. The brave men, living and dead, who struggled here, have consecrated it, far above our poor power to add or detract. The world will little note, nor long remember what we say here, but it can never forget what they did here. It is for us the living, rather, to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced. It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us—that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion—that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain—that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom—and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.

 How to Get There

Ford’s Theater

Ford’s Theater is located in downtown Washington D.C. easily accessible by Metro. 

Tours of the theater are free but you must pick up tickets admitting you at certain times.

Tickets are required for the museum as well.  More information can be found at

http://www.fordstheatre.org/

Lincoln’s Cottage

The visitors center is free but tickets are required to tour the cottage.   We strongly recommend a tour of the cottage and strongly recommend that you buy advance tickets ($15 adult, $5 children).  Don’t be caught short like us! More information is at http://lincolncottage.org/

Jefferson Davis Home

Beavoir is located on the Gulf of Mexico, 2244 Beach Blvd.  Tickets are $12.50 for adults and $7.50 for children.  More information is at http://www.beauvoir.org/

References

Burns, K.  1990.  The Civil War, a film by Ken Burns.  Public Broadcasting System.

Gallagher, G.W.  1997.  The Confederate War.  Harvard University Press, Cambridge, MA.

Keneally, T.  2003.  Abraham Lincoln.  Serpentine Publishing Co, Middlesex, England.

Wilson, R.  2013.  Lincoln at Petersburg.  American History.  October 2013.  pp.  32-37.  Vol 48, No. 4.

history.com/this-day-in-history/confederacy-approves-black-soldiers

sunsite.utk.edu/civil-war/davisexit.html 

ushistory.org/us/32e.asp