GONE WITH THE WIND

In pursuit of John Wilkes Booth.

- JILL LEPORE

If Abraham Lincoln had leaned back in his rocking chair that night at Ford’s Theatre and turned around—hearing a footfall or a rustle, or glimpsing, out of the corner of his eye, a stage light glinting off the mouth of the derringer—he would have recognized his murderer. Lincoln loved theatre; in his four years as President, he attended more than a hundred plays. “This is act vee one eye,”he’d whisper to his little son Tad, reading out the Roman numerals on the playbill. And he loved Ford’s: in December, 1863, he’d sat in its Presidential Box for two consecutive nights of “Henry IV”— “pause us till these rebels now afoot / Come underneath the yoke of government”—and that November, ten days before he delivered the Gettysburg Address, he’d seen John Wilkes Booth perform at Ford’s. “From these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion,” Lincoln said at Gettysburg, “that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth,” little knowing that he was engraving his own Shakespearean epitaph.