John T. Ford has renovated his theater in Washington, DC, hiring James Gifford, the same architect who built Tudor Hall. In November of 1863, at the express invitation of his good friend Ford, John Wilkes Booth does a two-week engagement there. Abraham Lincoln goes to see him play Raphael Duchalet, Europe’s greatest sculptor, in The Marble Heart. Among the guests in his box that night is Mary Clay, the daughter of the US ambassador to Russia. She begins to feel that Booth is directing some of Duchalet’s threats and oaths directly at the president. She mentions this to Lincoln. “He does look pretty sharp at me, doesn’t he?” Lincoln replies.

Booth credits Lincoln with this one thing—that he loves the theater. In fact, Lincoln often uses it as an escape from the constant entreaties and interruptions of his daily life. His wife complains that he’s not watching the play at all.

On this occasion, he applauds heartily. He sends Booth an invitation to visit the White House, an invitation that is rebuffed. Lincoln hardly notices. He has other things on his mind. Ten days later he’ll be delivering the Gettysburg Address.

viii

“I’d rather have the applause of a Negro,” John says later that same night. He glories in saying such things right in the heart of Lincoln’s Washington. He’s in a bar, drunk, and everyone around him is drunk. The cigar smoke is thick as fog.

There is at least one Lincoln lover present. “You’ll never be the actor your father was,” a man with a great bushy red beard says.

John sets his glass onto the table. “I’ll be the most famous man in America,” he tells them all.

Meanwhile . . .

Edwin’s popularity continues to grow. The sculptor Launt Thompson has done a bronze of him as Hamlet. Edwin tells Adam the result is worthy of Mike Angelo. Soulful photographs, his hair long and loose about his shoulders, are sold in the New York shops, the purchasers largely but not entirely female.

He also plays Washington, DC, not Ford’s Theatre, but Grover’s. Lincoln sees John once. He goes six times to see Edwin. Secretary of State William Seward gives a dinner in Edwin’s honor. The conversation is so lively, so congenial, that when Seward walks him to the door, he says he hopes for many such occasions. He hopes for a long friendship. His nineteen-year-old daughter, Fanny, has the obligatory heart-flutter in response to Edwin’s eyes. She retires to her room to write about them at length in her diary.

Edwin and Sleeper have gone into business together. They’ve bought the Walnut Street Theatre in Philadelphia and then, adding in a third partner, the manager William Stuart, they’ve taken the lease on the Winter Garden in New York. Asia is becoming very rich as a result.