The Darkest Dawn: Lincoln, Booth, and the Great American Tragedy

Epilogue: The Haunted Stage

Epilogue: THE HAUNTED STAGE “The curtain has fallen upon the most solemn tragedy of the nineteenth century,” wrote the relieved editor of the Washington National Intelligencer. “God grant that our country may never again witness such another one.”1 As the words above attest, after four years of terrible war, which had ended on the most tragic note imaginable, Americans desperately longed to put the past behind them and get on with a normal life of peace and prosperity. And yet, for millions of ordinary people, particularly in the South, it would be decades before the impact of the Lincoln assassination began to release its terrible hold on their lives. And for those directly involved in the events of April–July 1865, the curtain had certainly not rung down for them. Indeed, in many ways their ordeal had just begun. July 8, 1865 Secretary, I make my last appeal to the authorities, that is, that they will allow me to receive the remains of my mother. She lived a Christian life, died a Christian death, and NOW don’t refuse her a Christian burial. If it be in your power I know you will allow me her body immediately. Yours Respectfully, Anna Surratt This favor at your hands will be rewarded.2 Edwin Stanton did indeed have the power. But to the tearful appeal, the secretary of war turned a deaf ear. Believing to his core that all the 289 290 the darkest dawn conspirators, including the distraught young woman’s mother, deserved death, Stanton had no intention of giving up the bodies, including Booth’s, out of fear that not only the curious public but rebel sympathizers would wear out a path to their graves and transform simple stones into shrines and cowardly assassins into martyrs.3 Already, the Surratt house was becoming one of the top tourist attractions in America, as was the scene of the opening act of the tragedy, Ford’s Theater. Unlike the former site, however, the latter was still under the iron grip of the U.S. military, and neither Stanton nor President Johnson had any intention of relinquishing it. After his release from prison, the financially strapped proprietor, John Ford, tried to reopen his theater on July 10 with a sold-out performance of The Octoroon. Before showtime that evening, a file of soldiers appeared and promptly shut the owner down again.4 Outraged by the act, furious that each day his theater sat vacant he was driven deeper into debt, Ford went to see the secretary of war. Curtly informing the theater owner that there would never be another performance on the fateful stage, Stanton showed Ford the door.5 “Nothing could be more despotic,” fumed Ford’s friend Orville Browning, “and yet in this free Country Mr Ford is utterly helpless, and without the means of redress[.]”6 With no other option left, John Ford placed his property on the block. Although many were interested, including Henry Ward Beecher, who had hoped to turn the theater into a church, all found the asking price, one hundred thousand dollars, too steep.7 Even without the high-handed government decree, there is every indication that Stanton was merely expressing the sentiment of a majority of Americans. The thought of reopening the theater where Lincoln was shot, announced the New York Times, was “an outrage upon propriety.”8 Christian zealots, already convinced that the stage was an abomination where the only fare was “profanity and pollution,” were righteously indignant at Ford’s attempt to reopen. To allow him to do so, said one preacher, “could only be agreeable to the enemies of the cause in which Mr. Lincoln fell.”9 There were more menacing threats as well. “Take even fifty thousand for it, and build another . . . but do not attempt to open it again,” wrote an individual to Ford who signed his threat “one of the many determined to prevent it.”10 Wisely, John Ford did not press the issue, and when the federal government offered him fifteen hundred dollars a month to keep the building closed, the defeated theater owner at last acquiesced.11 The situation was reversed at the home of William Petersen. With the doors at Ford’s closed, hordes of frustrated tourists simply strolled across the street, where the door was more than open. At fifty cents per person, Petersen was growing rich showing an avid public the...