A pair of Washington playhouses that booked the leading Shakespeare actors of the day made this possible: the New National Theatre, just three blocks from the White House, on Pennsylvania Avenue, better known as Grover’s Theatre; and John T. Ford’s Theatre on Tenth Street, a half mile away. There was a third playhouse which Lincoln frequented far less often, the Washington Theatre, at the corner of Eleventh and O streets, a mile distant. It’s hard to know precisely how often Lincoln went to see plays during the last two years of his life. What evidence we have comes from newspaper accounts of sightings of him at Ford’s or Grover’s or from contemporary diaries. But since he often slipped into the theater late and unnoticed, many of his visits went unrecorded. Four decades after the assassination, Leonard Grover claimed that the president had visited his theater “probably more than a hundred times,” which sounds like a wild exaggeration. But if he attended even half that number of productions at Grover’s, and roughly the same number at Ford’s, that would work out to an average of one performance a week.
In his first few months of intensive theatergoing, Lincoln saw Hackett as Falstaff in both Henry IV and The Merry Wives of Windsor, Charlotte Cushman and James Wallack in Macbeth, and Edward L. Davenport as Hamlet and as an orientalized Othello (a role that Lincoln apparently never discussed or quoted, though he went to see Othello twice more when Edwin Forrest—who also avoided appearing black—played the Moor). In early 1864 he saw Edwin Booth seven times (including his Hamlet, Petruchio, Richard II, Brutus, and Shylock) in a three-week span. Though John Wilkes Booth performed often in Washington, Lincoln only went to see him once, at Ford’s, on November 9, 1863, in The Marble Heart. John Hay, who joined the small party that accompanied the president that evening, noted in his diary that the performance was “rather tame than otherwise.”
Leading actors visited the White House and Lincoln enjoyed grilling them about what he thought were unconscionable changes to what Shakespeare wrote. He asked Hackett to justify why he cut the scene in which Hal and Falstaff take turns playing King Henry IV and was unconvinced by Hackett’s explanation that it didn’t work onstage. This wasn’t simply banter or idle curiosity. It mattered to Lincoln in the way a scriptural variant might matter to a believer. He brought up the same passage when the actor John McDonough visited the White House. Lincoln pressed him hard on why actors cut the scene, maintaining that there “is nothing I have read in Shakespeare, certainly nothing in Henry VI or the Merry Wives of Windsor, that surpasses its wit and humor.” McDonough, a Democrat who had previously thought Lincoln a “buffoon,” was surprised when the president pulled from the shelf a copy of the play and recited the passage. McDonough tried justifying the cut on the grounds that if included, other lines “which might be objectionable” would have to be as well. Lincoln told him that his defense was better than Hackett’s, but not good enough, and to prove his point read aloud another potentially offensive passage that wasn’t cut, and with a lawyer’s flourish concluded: “This is not withheld, and where it passes current there can be no reason for withholding the other.” Pressing his advantage, Lincoln then demanded to know why versions of the plays that “people crowd to hear are not always those planned by their reputed authors,” especially the version of Richard III that now held the stage, that “was never seen by Shakespeare, but was written, was it not, Mr. McDonough, after his death, by Colley Cibber?”
Lincoln understood that just as he could criticize the actors’ choices in the White House, he was subject to criticism of his decisions when on their turf. One of those who opposed his policies was Forrest, who frequently performed in Washington during Lincoln’s late theatergoing years, including an extended Shakespeare run on the tercentenary of Shakespeare’s birth. Lincoln went to see his Lear that month, and during intermission invited John McCullough, who played Edgar, to visit the presidential box. He may have invited Forrest too, but if he had, Forrest declined the invitation. When Forrest returned to Washington and was performing at Ford’s on January 4, 1865, Lincoln went to see him in Richelieu, a modern play familiar to the president, who had previously seen Edwin Booth play the lead. The war was by this time nearly over, a Union victory ever more assured, though the cost—as General Sherman continued his savage, scorched-earth march through the South—was hard for many to stomach.
A young actor, William J. Ferguson, was holding the promptbook that night and is the source of what happened at that performance. Decades later, Ferguson recalled that “sentiment among stage folk during the war was sharply divided,” and among “those who strongly disapproved of the President’s war policy was Edwin Forrest”:
I was standing at the “prompt stand” following the manuscript, when Forrest came to the line: “Take away the sword. States may be saved without it.” Turning to look directly at the President, he declaimed intensely: “Take away the sword. States must be saved without it.” By the alteration of a single word the tragedian was able to give voice to the bitterness of his own feelings.
A more thin-skinned president would not have taken a public rebuke so kindly; yet Lincoln reportedly gave a “patient smile” to the “glaring tragedian,” and returned to Ford’s later that month to see Forrest perform as Lear—the last Shakespeare production he would ever see. A young French writer, Auguste Laugel, a friend of Senator Charles Sumner’s, was invited to join Lincoln, Mrs. Lincoln, their young son Tad, and Sumner at that performance. Laugel seems to have spent as much time watching Lincoln as he did the play, and his closely observed account captures Lincoln’s unshakable habit of measuring what he was hearing against Shakespeare’s original: Lincoln “seemed extremely familiar with Shakespeare, and in several places remarked on the changes made in performance.” The president “listened attentively, although he knew the play by heart.” Laugel also allows us a glimpse of what led Lincoln to watch the great actors of his day perform Shakespeare. The performances touched him deeply, spoke to the loss and guilt that were nearly overwhelming. Laugel writes that “his boy of eleven was beside him, and the father often clasped him very tenderly, as the child leaned his head upon his shoulder; and when the little fellow, as he often did, asked for explanations, Lincoln invariably made answer, ‘My child, it is in the play.’” Laugel also saw how “certain allusions made by King Lear to parental grief brought a cloud over the President’s forehead.”
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THE THREE HUNDREDTH anniversary of Shakespeare’s birth—April 23, 1864—fell shortly before the Battle of the Wilderness, where Ulysses S. Grant and Robert E. Lee would square off in a grinding war of attrition. That day, up in Boston, Ralph Waldo Emerson hosted thirty or so men of letters at Revere House to honor Shakespeare. In New York City, plans for the anniversary celebration centered on laying the cornerstone for the statue of Shakespeare that now stands at the south end of the mall in Central Park; actors, not writers, took the lead, offering benefit performances that day at the Winter Garden, Niblo’s Garden, and the Brooklyn Academy of Music to help pay for the statue.
Edwin Booth may have hoped that his brothers—Junius, who had returned from California, and John Wilkes, who had finished an engagement in New Orleans and was on his way to Boston—would join him onstage for the benefit at the Winter Garden. But Edwin acted without them that night, as Romeo, and his sold-out benefit, along with Hackett’s performance as Falstaff at Niblo’s, raised roughly a tenth of the cost of the $30,000 statue. Edwin tried enlisting his brothers for a follow-up benefit in July, writing to a friend, “My brother W[ilkes] is here for the summer, and we intend taking advantage of our thus being brought together, with nothing to do, and will, in the course of a week or two, give a performance of Julius Caesar . . . for the benefit of the statue we wish to erect in Central Park.” Edwin added that he would “take the part of Brutus instead of Cassius,” inviting all sorts of now unanswerable questions about how the leading roles were assigned. Not long after, Edwin wrote that “Julius Caesar did not take pla
ce on account of J. Wilkes’ absence” and “is now postponed until the 9th of August when I hope it will be cool enough to proceed with it.”
But the joint performance was postponed yet again. It wasn’t until November 25, 1864, that the three Booth brothers shared the stage for the first and only time in a benefit performance of Julius Caesar at the Winter Garden. Edwin was cast as Brutus, Junius as Cassius, and John Wilkes as Antony. The repeated delays sharpened the topical edge of the play now that Lincoln had been reelected in early November, an outcome that had been in doubt over the summer. Lincoln’s enemies were now accusing him of aspiring to be “President for Life,” and Edwin recalled arguing with his brother over John Wilkes’s “belief that Lincoln would be made King of America.”
A year earlier the politics of the times were mercurial enough for Lincoln to be depicted as Brutus. In October 1863, the Southern Illustrated News reprinted a racist parody from the London Punch featuring Lincoln as an American Brutus, wrapped in a toga made of the Stars and Stripes, regretting his decision to free the slaves. But by late 1864 the political winds had shifted, and Lincoln was now imagined more as the tyrannical Caesar. By then, the Albany Atlas and Argus had declared that “Caesar had his Brutus, Charles I his Cromwell . . . and we the People recommend Abraham Lincoln to profit by their example.” In a similar vein, the Richmond Dispatch maintained that to “slay a tyrant is no more assassination than war is murder.” Lincoln’s exercise of his executive powers was viewed by his opponents as tyrannical in its trampling upon congressional authority and the rights enshrined within the Constitution. By the time of his reelection in 1864 the list of charges against him had grown long. As early as 1861, in calling up the militia and blockading Southern ports after Fort Sumter was fired upon, Lincoln was attacked for declaring war without securing congressional approval. His critics also argued that in allowing the military to arrest civilians, Lincoln had suspended habeas corpus, first locally in 1861 (after Union troops had been attacked in Baltimore), and then again in 1863, on a national scale. The Constitution allows its suspension “in cases of rebellion,” so from Lincoln’s perspective arresting traitors under arms was legitimate. Lincoln’s administration, potentially infringing on First Amendment rights, also closed more than three hundred opposition newspapers deemed treasonous. And as the war dragged on, Lincoln refused to exchange prisoners (his accusers overlooking his demand that captured black Union soldiers be exchanged as well, which the Confederacy refused to do). Lincoln was also accused of abusing his powers by demanding that the Confederacy remain within the Union, subjecting free people even as he emancipated enslaved ones. All these charges cut to the heart of the basic rights and freedoms of American citizens—and who counted as one. By staging Julius Caesar in the immediate aftermath of Lincoln’s reelection in November 1864, the Booth brothers inevitably foregrounded the issue of how defenders of liberty should best respond.
Between the initial plans for a joint performance and the staging of Julius Caesar in November 1864, John Wilkes had become radicalized. His tour earlier that year of slave states now occupied by Union forces undoubtedly contributed to this. It’s likely, either while performing in New Orleans in March (where he narrowly avoided arrest for singing a banned rebel song in public) or in Boston in July, that Booth met with and was recruited by Confederate agents. In October 1864, a month before he performed in Julius Caesar in New York, he traveled to Montreal, where he consulted with Confederate officials and received funds to help cover the costs of a plot in which he and his fellow conspirators would kidnap the president while he was riding with only a small guard in Washington’s streets, or subdue and bind him while he was seeing a play at Ford’s Theatre, then smuggle him across the Potomac to the Confederacy. The kidnapping was to take place in late January. After abducting Lincoln, Booth’s acting career in the North would be over, so while in Canada, he arranged for his wardrobe and scripts to be put aboard a ship that would attempt to run the Union blockade. It never made it.
Booth was not the only desperate supporter of the Confederacy undertaking violent acts long considered beyond the pale. A group of Confederate agents lit multiple phosphorus fires throughout New York City the very evening that the Booth brothers were performing Julius Caesar, hoping to terrorize the city or burn it to the ground, just as General Sherman had recently put Atlanta to the torch. One of the buildings set on fire was the Lafarge Hotel, which abutted the Winter Garden. While the plot is barely remembered today, the New York Times then called it “one of the most fiendish and inhuman acts known in modern times.” Only the arsonists’ poor training—they closed the doors and windows in the rooms which they had set alight, cutting off the oxygen needed for the flames to rage out of control—prevented the two thousand playgoers gathered to see Julius Caesar from burning to death or being crushed in a stampede in what might well have been remembered as the greatest theatrical disaster in the nation’s history. The following morning, when the brothers met for breakfast, an argument broke out over the attack; when Junius said that the perpetrators should be strung up, and Edwin reiterated his support for Lincoln, John Wilkes responded by justifying the arson as a legitimate act of retaliation for Union atrocities.
It had been an unusually fraught performance, but also a critical and box-office success. Sam Chester, who acted in the production, thought that John Wilkes’s Antony “completely electrified the audience.” After the assassination, the New York World reported that “many who witnessed” the benefit recalled that John Wilkes “interpolated, at some inappropriate point in the oration over Caesar’s body, the words ‘sic semper tyrannis’”—‘thus always with tyrants’—words he would reportedly repeat after shooting Lincoln (and which in his fugitive diary he falsely claimed to have cried out before he fired that fatal shot). Even as he was watching his brothers, as Brutus and Cassius, recruit conspirators, he was busily assembling a real conspiracy of his own, one that he failed to persuade Sam Chester to join. A seemingly oblivious Edwin hoped to get his brothers to participate in yet another benefit for the Shakespeare statue, this time with a performance of Romeo and Juliet; he would play Mercutio alongside Junius’s Friar Lawrence and John Wilkes’s Romeo, and he wanted it to coincide with Shakespeare’s next birthday, April 23, 1865. Aside from a pair of benefits for friends, the performance of Julius Caesar was the last time that John Wilkes Booth appeared onstage.
After the November benefit, Booth focused his energies on kidnapping or killing the president. He spent his days drinking, pursuing women, meeting with confederates to establish safe houses and escape routes between Washington and Virginia, procuring horses and weapons, and practicing shooting. When in New York City he liked to do so at Charles Ottignon’s shooting gallery on Broadway, where he used Lincoln’s photograph for a target. While plans to kidnap the president were still in the works, Booth went to hear Lincoln deliver his second inaugural address, on March 4. Lincoln didn’t flinch from placing responsibility for the costly war on the Confederacy: “Both parties deprecated war, but one of them would make war rather than let the nation survive, and the other would accept war rather than let it perish.” He could not have been clearer about the cause of so much bloodshed: “Slaves constituted a peculiar and powerful interest. All knew that this interest was somehow the cause of the war. To strengthen, perpetuate, and extend this interest was the object for which the insurgents would rend the Union even by war.” Photographs of that event show John Wilkes Booth standing above and to the left of Lincoln. Later, while drunk, Booth bragged to Sam Chester, “What an excellent chance I had to kill the President, if I had wished, on Inauguration Day.” It was a fantasy he had harbored since at least January 1863, when Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation had declared slaves in Confederate states “then, thenceforward, and forever free”—anathema to a white supremacist like Booth. Booth had been performing in St. Louis at this time, and according to the wife of actor Con T. Murphy, during rehearsals, “Booth suddenly seized thi
s big pistol and forced it against my husband’s breast, saying ‘By God, Murphy, if you were only Lincoln! What a chance I’d have.’” When her husband told her about the incident that evening, he added, “I do believe John Wilkes Booth is losing his mind over slavery and the President.’”
Booth hated Lincoln, a man he preferred not to name. When told that the president admired his acting, Booth reportedly said that he would have “preferred the applause of a nigger.” His sister Asia recalled him complaining of voting irregularities: Lincoln “should never have been President, the votes were doubled to seat him. . . . He is made the tool of the North, to crush out, or try to crush out slavery, by robbery, rapine, slaughter and bought armies.” Booth’s amateurish plot to kidnap Lincoln began unraveling, and by early April, with the fall of Richmond to Union troops, it had been abandoned, and most of his accomplices quietly slipped away. The script was hurriedly rewritten: the plot now turned on killing the president and others. On April 11 Booth went to the White House to hear Lincoln give an address promising limited suffrage for black men. Booth declared afterward that this was the last speech Lincoln would ever make. The next day he visited Ford’s Theatre and told Henry Clay Ford: “We are all slaves now. If a man were to go out and insult a nigger now he would be knocked down by the nigger and nothing would be done to the nigger.” The theater’s ticket seller, Tom Raybold, suggested to Booth that he “should not insult a nigger then.” Two days later, on Good Friday, April 14, 1865, Booth urged clerks at a local hotel to go see the play at Ford’s that evening, saying that there “is going to be some splendid acting tonight.”
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