Ford's Theatre

On the night of 14 April 1865, five days after Appomattox, Abraham Lincoln sat in the presidential box at Ford's Theatre in Washington watching a comedy called Our American Cousin. At about a quarter past ten John Wilkes Booth entered the box, shot the President once behind the left ear, stabbed Major Henry Rathbone, and leapt eleven or twelve feet to the stage. Lincoln never regained consciousness and died at 7:22 the next morning in a boarding house across the street.

Jean-Léon Gérôme painted The Death of Caesar in 1867; it is in the Walters collection in Baltimore. Its nerve is in what it leaves out. The killing is over, Caesar is a small heap at the foot of an empty chair, and the conspirators are already walking away with their daggers up, while the great curved room of the Senate sits mostly empty around them.

The stage is the floor of the Senate, and the empty chair is the rocking chair in the box. Booth has landed badly on the boards behind the footlights, one hand flat, the knife still up, looking back at what he has done. Above, the box is hung with flags and a portrait of Washington; Mary Lincoln has her hands to her face, Rathbone is on his feet, and a torn flag trails from the rail down to the assassin's spur. The audience is a dark churn of faces.

Gérôme understood that the terrible thing is not the blow but the room afterward. Lincoln is not in the picture. He is everywhere in it.