Lincoln’s Happiest Day: His Final Hours Before the Play

Good Friday, April 14, 1865

The president eased his six-foot-four frame out of bed so as not to wake his wife and stepped into a morning that felt, for the first time in years, curiously like joy. A long time ago she asked him to call her Molly. As if a softer name than Mary Todd might cover the moods that visited without warning. He tried to be her helpmate — frontier hands, bookish mind, a soft voice that carried hard truths when necessary — but consolation wasn’t her remedy. Nineteenth-century doctors called it “nervousness.” Today we would call it depression. The label didn’t matter.

He crossed the hall and opened the door to the porch. Dogwoods were out across the lawn, white blossoms flashing like handkerchiefs, and the air sat at a kind sixty-three degrees. The White House in spring can feel like a safe harbor between storms. For years, trouble had arrived daily at this address, hung up its coat, uncocked its rifle, and made itself at home. This morning it had business elsewhere.

Inside the Oval Room (Oval Office would come much later), work was waiting. A president never walks alone, even when he is the only one in the room. Newspapers lay folded on the table — The Washington Star trumpeting “LEE SURRENDERS!” in bold type above a dispatch from Appomattox, the ink still fresh from the presses that had run all night; The New York Herald speculated on Grant’s next moves with a map of Virginia. Dispatches waited in neat stacks — yellow telegrams from the War Department, one from Stanton confirming “the Rebel army is dispersing.”

He read quickly, the way a ship captain glances at charts he has reckoned a thousand times. When he finished, his gaze drifted, almost idly, to the back page of the Star. There, in small type beneath the advertisements for patent medicines and dry goods, was the evening’s theater listing:

FORD’S THEATRE — TONIGHT — OUR AMERICAN COUSIN — LAURA KEENE’S 1,000TH PERFORMANCE — STATE BOX RESERVED.

He smiled faintly. Molly had mentioned it. A night out. Something light.

At breakfast his eldest, Robert, home from General Grant’s staff, joined him. The plate in front of the president was spare, as always. One egg. Coffee hot enough to steam his spectacles. John Hay, the secretary who watched everything, liked to say that the pleasures of the table had “few attractions” for his chief. Lunch would be a biscuit and fruit, perhaps a glass of milk; supper, when there was time, the farmer’s fare he preferred — corned beef and cabbage. When they had guests to the White House, they ate better. Mary’s Kentucky table put on venison, wild turkey, quail — though not everyone approved. Prince Napoléon, a nephew of the other Napoleon, sniffed once that Mrs. Lincoln had the manners of a petit bourgeois and wore tin jewelry, and called a dinner “bad French.” The president took no offense. He liked plain.

He set down his cup. “I had the dream again,” he told Robert. “A singular, indescribable vessel, moving with great rapidity toward an indefinite shore.” He had it, he said, before every major battle. An omen, though of what he never claimed to know. The soldier son listened like a man checking the wind. His father’s face, which so often held the weight of the world like a shelf, looked — for once — lit from within.

They spoke of April 9, when Lee surrendered. A question had shadowed him since Springfield. Could the country survive the war and still become a place worth loving? He had given his answer out loud from a White House window three nights earlier, on April 11, in a speech argued that Black Americans — at least those who were educated and those who had served — should have the vote. Ending slavery once and for all required more than parchment; it required the country’s participation. If the nation was to be worthy of loyalty, it had to behave like something worth giving your loyalty to.

At three in the afternoon he and Mary went out in an open carriage. “Shall we invite anyone?” she asked, half out of habit, half to test whether he would surrender the day back to the people’s business. “No,” he said quickly. “I prefer to ride by ourselves today.” The city slid past, smelling of wet earth and horses. His mood carried a buoyancy she scarcely recognized. “Dear husband,” she laughed at last, “you almost startle me by your great cheerfulness.”

He nodded, letting the sentence stand there between them a moment before answering. “And well I may,” he said. “I consider that this day the war has come to a close.” He paused, then added the line that bound the public to the private: “We must both be more cheerful in the future — between the war and the loss of our darling Willie — we have both been very miserable.” The words worked like a hand on a door that had been shut for too long.

They talked about the evening. Mary had tickets to Grover’s Theatre, but she preferred Our American Cousin at Ford’s, as he had guessed; he sent a messenger to reserve the State Box. He ate lightly again at dinner. But the dream hovered at the edge of his thinking, not dark, not bright, simply insistent.

The gas lamps at Ford’s glowed. Our American Cousin had just the sort of foolishness an exhausted city could enjoy. The house laughed easily. The president was doubled over at times. About ten minutes past ten, a figure so familiar the sight of him raised no alarm moved along the corridor toward the State Box. John Wilkes Booth knew the architecture as an actor who played on this stage. He was admitted. Inside, the famous line set itself up like a cue. The audience rose to it, happy to be led. Laughter swelled. Booth raised his Derringer.

There is a temptation, at this instant, to turn the lens to the gunshot, to write the page the nation was already turning before it mourned. But the day’s meaning was not in how it ended. It was in the quiet surprise of how it felt before it ended. A husband tried to cheer a wife who had asked to be called Molly. A president tried to cheer a country he insisted on loving enough to change. The same man sat at both tables, and for a few spring hours the private relief and the public hope brought a welcome smile to his weathered visage because his love — for a woman he could not always help and a republic he refused to abandon — seemed, at last, to be returning the favor.