Background, the context is the theater. This was an act that occurred in a theater, by an actor, with other actors standing by. And i wanted to look at it through the eyes of those people. And when i was working on the president s book and i was working on the lincoln chapters, i kept coming across this iconic playbill for our american cousin. I looked at it and i kept thinking, these are real people most of whose names have been lost. I mean, if you asked people on the street who the people were involved with the lincoln assassination, certainly people know lincoln, they know booth, maybe 1 in 10,000 would know laura keene. But almost no one would know the names john dyott, harry hawk, billy withers. These were major names in the events of that night. So i started looking even closer to get a sense of, who were these people . I began to find in some cases their names were spelled wrong or the names were a misrepresentation. In some cases its really difficult tracking down actors, because the census records arent always reflective of who they were because they were traveling so much that theyre not always in the censuses. They also varied their birthdates a lot. I found that the actresses, for every ten years that they would perform, they kept upping their birthdate by about five years to continue to play younger roles. So i looked at these names and the more that i found about their background i kept looking for who they were and every account that i read either followed booth out the back door to his death in that burning tobacco barn on the garrett farm, or lincoln carried out the front door to his death at the Peterson House across the street. And no one seemed concerned with the 46 people who were still trapped in that theater with the soldiers rushing in, with the crowd outside chanting burn the damn place down, and the soldiers telling them they couldnt leave. So theyre trapped in there. And really really terrified. Almost all of them without any knowledge of what was occurring. Some, yes, to a certain degree complicit. But thats something which i investigated more as i got into the book. What i wanted to really kind of clarify is what must it have felt like backstage, in an era without electric lights, so weve got a lot of the darkness. The versions that i kept reading of the assassination were all sitting in the audience looking at the stage. But if you turn that around, waiting in nervousness before the curtain to go up, and the curtain does go up, for one thing the house lights are still up. In those days they didnt black out the house because of the constant threat of fire. They would run the house lights about half. The actress would see that curtain go up. They could also monitor what was happening out in the audience. A couple of the actresses said they saw booth come in and walk back and forth several times before he actually went up to the box upstairs. So i wanted the readers to feel like, what must they have gone through . And as i said in the preface of the book, imagine for a moment that the president of the United States has been assassinated in your workplace by one of your most admired, respected, charismatic colleagues as you stood nearby . Picture the chaos that erupts around you as your mind races, fearing 4 your own safety and the fear of being thought complicit. Recollecting in panic and the illchosen words you might have uttered that could be construed at hostile to the president. As well as the times that you were seeing socializing with the assassin, as recently in fact as the drink you took with him in the bar next door a few hours ago. In fact, the more that i start plotting, the trips to the bar, theres a saloon on the south side of the fords theater, the star saloon, which was where the secessionists hung out. Theres a saloon on the north side, the greenback saloon, where the unionists hung out. There were a lot of trips to those saloons that day. Near as i can figure booth alone made seven or eight trips over there in the course of the afternoon or evening which gives you an idea of working up his courage for doing what he did. From that moment on for those people as would be the case for any of us today, your world would never be the same. You would be interrogated, perhaps imprisoned. You would have to provide testimony, keeping it scrupulously accurate and consistent, and endure interview after interview for weeks, months, years. Constantly retelling, reliving, every detail of an event that occurred in less than 30 seconds. For the rest of your life, you would move frequently, you would avoid reporters, perhaps change your name. And the words that night would define the rest of your life and headline your obituary. And precisely that scenario was the terrifying new reality for 46 people hired by fords theater the night of april 14th, 1865. And i resolved to tell their story realizing that they were, as much as anyone, walking shadows. Abraham lincolns favorite shakespearean play was macbeth. In act v macbeth realizes, lifes but a walking shadow, a poor player who struts and frets his hour upon the stage then is heard no more. And indeed, as i saw it, these were walking shadows. There were also a lot, i found, of false claimants. I would say about one in every two person who claimed to have been in the acting company or backstage that night wasnt. In fact, one of the drama critics in 1916 said, it is estimated that enough players have been credited with acting at fords theater on april 14th, 1865, to have filled the playhouse itself. In many cases too, the names were recorded erroneously when they were interrogating the stagehands, the stage crew. And those are the m599 files that are here, archives, pages and pages of the interrogation. Because so many of the stage crew were illiterate, their napes are recorded any number of different ways. One stagehand, jake rittersbach, i came across rittersbach, pitch, paul, pack, depending who heard the name spoken how. Another phenomenal thing that i found was how young the group was. This was a cast where the average age was under 30. And almost half of them were under 20. Most of the stage crew was in their 20s. The person completely in charge that night, young harry clay ford, was 21 years old. His older brother john, whose name is connected with the theater, was in richmond that night. And harry clay ford, the younger brother, was in charge at age 21. It was also i found such a volatile group backstage. This was not a Cohesive Group that knew each other well. In a lot of cases these people had acted together only weeks or in some cases a few days. Some of the stage crew had only been pulled down from baltimore for a couple of days. John ford was operating five different theaters in five different cities. So hes constantly circulating his actors and circulating his stage crew among all of them, depending on the needs of a particular play on any given night. Remember too that these are actors who on any given day are memorizing, rehearsing, preparing, and performing a different play every night. Add to that the fact that their whole profession is not very well regarded by the public. Theaters kind of held in poor regard in those days. So theyre suffering under the onus of simply being in the profession that they are. Many of them were based in baltimore which added an interesting dimension to it. Because in baltimore where john fords holiday street theater was centered, this was kind of an area of secessionist thought. Much of bat history at that time, like a lot of Southern Maryland, was secessionist in sympathy. This was the same baltimore that in february of 1861 had seen the assassination attempt on president elect Abraham Lincoln as he came through baltimore. A month later the pratt street riots with the massachusetts regiment coming through to protect washington is attacked. So its an area of those who came from baltimore, being sympathetic to the south, and the remarkable thing that i kept finding and its the inescapable conclusion is that fords theater was, in many ways, a hotbed of secessionist thought. And yet working side by side, day by day, through these long rehearsals and these performances, throughout the whole civil war, there were Union Veterans working side by side with confederate veterans backstage. People for one side or the other who had had family members killed, sons, brothers, some who had still had members of their family out in the field working together side by side. So theres the tension that went with all of that. All of which begs the question, for me at least, how many Unanswered Questions are there . Who knew what . Because imagine how many letters must have been thrust into fireplaces in the days following the assassination. How many people distanced themselves as quickly as they could from booth. There were friends of his, he was charismatic. It would be like somebody like brad pitt going backstage and saying to the stagehands, lets did out and have a drink next door, boys. Because they would do anything for him. Booth was so charismatic that he had free run of fords theater. He could come and go at will, he had his mail delivered there, no one gave a Second Thought to his being there. And many cases too, there was a misrepresentation i think in the minds of many readers today of what the theater and the theater practices were like in the period of 1865. This picture was taken by someone from the Matthew Brady studio. Again, this is an archives picture from the archives of college park that was taken in the days following the assassination. Secretary of War Edwin Stanton mandated that there be a reenactment of the play, brought the actors back together, and the stagehands, and made them reenact the play, stopping at various moments so they could measure the wing space, measure the placement of various people. Imagine these actors with this comic play, delivering laugh lines and comic business out into an audience with a handful of stonyfaced soldiers and detectives. And the fear and the grief and the terror that they must have felt. And in this picture, which is actually a composite of two of the president ial box as it was a week after the assassination, and thats the scene, the stage setting for act iii scene ii which was the scene interrupted by the assassination. Extremely far downstage. Most of the stage is upstage. And its literally upstage. In those days the audience was seated level and to walk upstage was literally to walk away from the audience upstage. So the stage is slanted. When booth leaps, and that leap is an 116 leap, which booth did regularly. He would make his entrance as macbeth leaping from eight feet down onto the stage. So that 116, he vaulted kind of like a gymnast would vault a box. Lands on the stage offbalance. Knowing too the place so well, the play our american cousin booth had acted in 14 times before that. The laugh lines play well. Ive seen a production of it done. Its done today pretty rarely. But its a really kind of funny play. Its the kind of folksy humor that Abraham Lincoln would have loved. He came that night specifically because it was laura keenes benefit night. On a benefit night, the star actor gets to take home all of the Box Office Take minus a handful of expenses. And so president lincoln knew that if he went to anyones benefit night, his attendance would boost the box office for that person. And he had seen laura keene act before. And he liked her and had gone then and general grant was to have gone with him also. But begged off to go visit his family in new jersey. And also by some reports that mrs. Grant was not that keen on being there with mrs. Lincoln. A huge challenge too for all of this was timing out what occurred during that performance of our american cousin. Every account that i would read, interviews some of these actors gave 20, 30, 40 years later. Some of them lived into the 1930s, 70 years after the deed. And as i read their interviews they would say, well, soandso was just coming on from the stage during the milk maid scene. Or, it was in act ii scene i that i realized something was happening. So all of the actors and the stagehands were talking about this in terms of the script. So to get a chronology of the day, i read out loud the script. And there are about seven versions of the our american cousin script. I used the 1865 version. Read it out loud, timing, pausing for laughs. And documenting every five minutes what would have been occurring so that i could get a timeline for the night. And it gave me a nice sense of coming and going. And finally, by the end of all the research that i did, i was able to pinpoint for each of these people where they were at the moment of the shot and what they were doing. What i didnt count on was the strange acoustics. So many people in the dark, back stage, heard the shot and thought it was so many different things. And i open act i my theater background. I open chapter 1 with a description of the perception of those shots. In the half light backstage, where sound meant so much more than sight, hardly anyone took it for a gunshot. Actor ned emerson, leaning against a piece of scenery in the stage left wings, studying his lines, thought it came from the apparatus of scene shifting. Or from out in 10th street, part of the weeks continuing celebration of the wars end. John matthews, waiting behind the scenery to go on in the next scene, thought it might be a piece of stage business introduced to frighten the character of lord dundreary. To one actress waiting in the wings it sounded like the pop of a champagne cork. To someone else, it resembled a lone hand clap out in the audience. Call boy will ferguson, standing by the down stage right prompters desk, thought a stack of books that he had preset for the next scene had fallen to the floor. Keene he should was sure she knew better and was incensed. She sent her personal dresser to demand that the stage hands stop firing weapons backstage. And left alone onstage is harry hawk, one person. And my contention is that booth was so familiar with the script that not only did he know that there was a huge laugh line coming with a burst of sound that might cover the sound of a gunshot, but he knew that only one person was left on the stage to possibly impede his escape. Let me try to introduce as quickly as i can who some of these people were by way of resurrecting these walking shadows. The most important figures for my money are the ford brothers. And again, the eponymous theater of fords theater, we may think of john t. Ford but harry the most interesting one. Poor harry ford was arrested and released three times. His interrogation, and part of the fun and the challenge of doing this book was reading those interrogation reports in the 19th century handwriting here at archives. The interrogation of harry ford lasts 30 pages. They grilled him about everything from the way that the box was rented out to the events of the day. And harry ford, again, is one thats distancing himself from John Wilkes Booth. Because they were Close Friends. They had known each other for years. Hes one of the few people who could joke with John Wilkes Booth. When booth had come at noon that day to get his mail, there was harry ford joking with him about the way that lee had surrendered and saying, oh, were going to bring general lee and keep him in the box tonight along with the president. And knowing that he was goading booth on to become irritated. And harry ford had rented rooms with his brother dick above the saloon next door so he could keep close tabs on the theater. And yet hes so caught up in all, this needlessly. So much time was spent interrogating people who really were innocent and others were never questioned at all who, for my money, were very close to being fully complicit. The least known of them is dick ford. Dick is older, hes 25 years old. He lives with harry above the saloon next door. Hes more shy, reticent, defers to harry. And the night of the assassination, dick fords up in baltimore. John was down in richmond checking on family members. So he asked dick to go up to baltimore and check on the theater there. And at 10 14, the moment of the shot, his train was just pulling back into washington. Just approaching the new jersey avenue depot. And immediately, knowing his sense of responsibility, dick ford rushes back to the theater. Because as treasurer, he would have to account for the money at the end of the evening. Just as he gets to the theater b. 10 20, he sees a man being carried out from the theater. In fact, i found out in doing the research that he was carried out on a shutter. There had been a shutter stored near the box. They were carrying the president out on that. Dick ford turned to the crowd around him and said, what drunken loafer is that . Thinking some drunk was being carried out of the theater. Then he finds out who it really was and rushes back in in panic. John ford had applied for a pass to go visit family down in richmond and to get some props and scenery from the theater down in richmond that was going through straitened circumstances during the war. And for my money was smart enough to suppress his own personal southern sympathies. John ford at the outset of the war is an open secessionist sympathizer but he realizes for the sake of business that he would have to suppress those. But a number of the things that he wrote his letters here at archives, National Library of congress, and the Maryland Historical society, show pretty clearly what his sympathies were. But he suppressed them in the course of the war. And a fort was even erected on his front lawn of his home on gilmore street in baltimore. During his own time in richmond he remained ignorant what had occurred. The soldiers tried to make sure people in richmond did not hear what happened, until two days afterwards, on jon fords 36th birthday, sunday he finds out what has happened, rushes back to baltimore. He is arrested. He is taken to old capital prison. The old capital prison compound sits now where sat then where the Supreme Court does now and the Jefferson Building of the library of congress. And theyre kept together in one of the larger but very hot rooms upstairs with very little in the way of creature comforts. John ford thankfully for all of us who are monitoring the history of the event kept a diary when he was there in the old capital prison. He kept kind of a jailhouse manifesto running of this struggle that he had with stanton. Stanton as secretary of war was determined that theater will never reopen. And john ford was determined that it would reopen. And it was costing him thousands and thousands, tens of thousands of dollars. The equivalent as near as i could fi