The cost of a night at the theatre

Five days after Robert E. Lee surrendered his armies to Ulysses S. Grant at Appomattox Court House, President Abraham Lincoln was feeling a little like he could take a break from the onerous duties of being not only a wartime president, but a president trying to reclaim rebellious states as well as to rein in some of the most fractious mad dogs ever accumulated in an American administration.

So going to the theatre to see a farce might have seemed like a welcome night out, seeing as to how it looked like the war was winding down, and he could now get on with the work of re-integrating the people of the South back into the Union. It was Good Friday.

If you want to get a feel for the kinds of strain he had borne up under, take a look at two photographs.

1861, when he took office:

Final photo taken, just before his death:

Well, you know the story: an unemployed actor got past the one sleepy guard into Lincoln’s box, shot him and escaped, broken leg and all. Lincoln lingered through the night but died early the next morning at a house across the street from Ford’s Theatre.

It’s kind of pointless to speculate on how Reconstruction might have been different had Lincoln still been in office, instead of his truly ineffectual successor, Andrew Johnson. (We lucked out way better when Harry S. Truman replaced Franklin D. Roosevelt at the end of World War II, instead of any of Roosevelt’s previous vice presidents.) He would have had his hands full, for sure, but he already had four years of experience dealing with the likes of Stanton, Chase, Stevens and other Radical Republicans.

Plus—unlike Johnson, Lincoln had a charisma and strength of character that won him a lot of popular support, which probably would have added weight to his decisions, as well as to contests with the Radicals.

And with a different Reconstruction, what might our national history have looked like?

Oh, well, dunno. But it was truly a loss to the country then and since that Abraham Lincoln went to the theatre 150 years ago today.