Few events have so shaken up the country than the one that took place here at Ford’s Theatre in Washington, DC on April 14, 1865. Sitting in a box overlooking the stage, President Abraham Lincoln was shot in back of the head by actor John Wilkes Booth at roughly 1015pm. The president would die across the street early the following morning, although he would never regain consciousness.

The Civil War had officially ended only a few days prior with the April 9 surrender of Robert E. Lee at Appomattox Courthouse, and President Lincoln was just beginning his second term. Succeeded by Andrew Johnson, it is hard to say whether the subsequent history of the United States would have been different under Lincoln. Would Reconstruction have created more nationwide harmony, thereby lessening the chances for more than a century and a half of struggle for Civil Rights? Would Lincoln’s leadership have mitigated the longing for the “good old days” of the Confederacy in the South? Or would the man at the center of the Civil War storm be too controversial even for his own time, leading to a quick return to violence?

It is hard to say with any confidence. (Note: this article is not taking the ever-more-popular modern opinion that Lincoln’s desire to rebuild the South and not punish Confederate leaders has led directly to many of the issues plaguing the modern US. I think that when one looks at states like Indiana and Ohio leading the way toward fascism and denial of equal rights despite their being part of the Union, one can realize that today’s mess probably has more to do with human nature and cruelty than with Lincoln and Reconstruction. But that is a story for another time.)

Today, let’s harken back to the events of April 14 and 15, 1865, and talk about the legacy of Abraham Lincoln, skipping alternative historical conjecture as much as possible.

Ford’s Theatre opened in 1863, a rebuild of a theatre that existed for merely a year until fire destroyed it in 1862. Formerly a Baptist church, the building was purchased in 1861 by John T. Ford, who opened his namesake theatre there. In April 1865, the theatre was hosting a production of Our American Cousin. On the morning of April 14, the theatre received notice that President Lincoln wished to attend that evening along with a party said to include General Ulysses S. Grant (although Grant and his wife declined the invitation). Actor John Wilkes Booth, who worked at the theatre, overheard the plans being made.

Booth was a Confederate sympathizer who ardently believed in the moral right of slavery. Standing outside the White House on April 11, he had vowed to kill President Lincoln, and now, only a few days later, he had a chance. He assembled a group of similar-minded people (more on the co-conspirators later), and they decided that in one swoop they would kill Lincoln and Grant, as well as Vice President Andrew Johnson and Secretary of State William Seward. (The first two would be done by Booth at the theatre, the latter two by others.)

Today, at Ford’s Theatre, visitors learn about all of this, as well as general background of both Abraham Lincoln and the Civil War, at a museum connected to the theatre. Timed entry can be obtained for $3.50, which includes both this site and the Petersen House that accompanies a second museum on the other side of the street. A series of exhibits discusses the day of April 14, 1865 from the perspectives of both Lincoln and Booth. A National Parks Service ranger talk in the theatre itself paints a picture of the event.

At 1010pm on April 14, John Wilkes Booth entered Ford’s Theatre. Taking a small pistol out of his pocket, he entered the president’s box at 1014, and shot during a line that elicited loud laughter from the audience. After then stabbing Major Henry Rathbone – Lincoln’s guest when Grant was unable to attend – the actor jumped down to the stage, shouting “sic semper tyrannus” (“thus always to tyrants”), a line credited to Brutus upon stabbing Julius Caesar. And he fled.

(Booth was the only one of the would-be assassins to have succeeded. Lewis Powell stabbed Secretary Seward, who survived. George Atzerodt, tasked with killing the vice president, lost his nerve.)

Sitting in Ford’s Theatre today is a surreal experience. While the building has been rebuilt (it did not reopen as a theatre immediately following the events of that night, rather ending up hosting a portion of the War Department until an accident – the top floor collapsing downward – caused 22 deaths in 1893), it is a now working theatre decorated to appear as it would have on April 14, 1865. One can see the box decorated to host the presidential party, imagining what it would have been like to see a man jump down from the box to the stage.

Your timed admission will include a specific time for a ranger talk inside the theatre, necessitating a corresponding time to leave the museum. It is worth noting that not all entry times include admission to all parts of the exhibition.

After being shot by John Wilkes Booth, President Abraham Lincoln was taken across the street to a home owned by the Petersen family. It was certain the wound was mortal; it was just a question of when the president would die. The unconscious Lincoln was laid out diagonally on a bed in the back room of the first floor of the home. When Secretary of War Edwin Stanton arrived, he basically ran the government for several hours from the home while Vice President Johnson and the remainder of the cabinet were summoned. Lincoln would die at just after 7am the following morning.

Little can be really seen inside the Petersen house. Admission to the first floor is included with tickets, but with such a small space, only 10-15 people can enter at a time, exiting from there through an elevator to the top floor of the attached museum, also included with admission. The most interesting thing, to me, is that Willie Clark, who was renting the room and bed in which Abraham Lincoln died, continued to use the very mattress following. “Everybody has a great desire to obtain some memento from my room,” he lamented when he returned the following morning.

This second museum discusses the events following the assassination, from the funerary processions to the manhunt for Booth and the trials of the conspirators, and that’s where we pick up the story.

Most of the conspirators were arrested pretty quickly on. John Wilkes Booth, however, wouldn’t make it so easy. Apparently, in running away into Maryland and then Virginia, he was surprised to find he was a fugitive at all, rather expecting to be celebrated as a hero. On April 21, as Lincoln’s body was beginning its transport back to Illinois by rail, Booth crossed the Potomac into Virginia, winding up at the farm of another Confederate sympathizer, John Hughes. He and another conspirator, David Herold, then went to the farm of the Garrett family, where soldiers found them on April 26.

Herold surrendered, but Booth refused to, and was shot and killed early that morning.

Trials of the conspirators lasted roughly seven weeks, and were conducted by military tribunal. Four people were sentenced to death, including the first woman (Mary Surratt) the US government would ever execute.

Meanwhile, the national grief, at least across the North, was palpable. While presidents had died in office before, Abraham Lincoln was the first to be assassinated. Letters came in from every corner of the country and the world. Queen Victoria wrote to Lincoln’s widow.

Lincoln’s legacy grew considerably in the years following. The capital of Nebraska, then Lancaster, was renamed Lincoln in 1869. His image graces the penny and the $5 bill, and sits at Mount Rushmore. But perhaps the largest seat of honor is DC’s Lincoln Memorial, finished in 1922. (His surviving son was able to attend the dedication shortly before his own death.)

This Greek-revival temple holds a huge statue of a sitting Abraham Lincoln, flanked by some of his most famous words. The Gettysburg Address is to the left, and his second inaugural address to the right. From here, America’s sixteenth president stares up the National Mall to the Washington Monument and the Capitol beyond.

I counted 86 stairs from the reflecting pool up to the memorial itself, but I have to assume I am off by one, making it four score and seven.

This is my favorite spot in all of Washington, and a place I reflect on Lincoln’s legacy. By pretty much every objective standard, Abraham Lincoln was at or near the top of the list of “best” president. But to me, it is less of what he did (although preserving the Union is pretty darn important), and more of how he did it. This was a man determined to do the “right” thing, and his second inaugural address sums it up in words I cannot.

“With malice toward none, with charity for all, with firmness in the right as God gives us to see the right, let us strive on to finish the work we are in: to bind up the nation’s wounds, to care for him who shall have borne the battle and for his widow and his orphan, to do all which may achieve and cherish a just and lasting peace among ourselves and with all nations.”

I can think of nothing we need more now, than another Abraham Lincoln. Now if only we could take the blood from the pillow on which he died and clone ourselves one.

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