The letter, once opened, announced even greater news. Master Tad Lincoln and chaperone would represent the family there. The mere arrival of the White House messenger told them that the president was coming tonight! It was a coup against their chief rival, Grover’s Theatre, which was offering a more exciting entertainment: Aladdin! Or His Wonderful Lamp.

The Fords did not even have to read the note to know the good news it contained. There had been no time to mail it, so its sender, Mary Lincoln, used the president’s messenger to bypass the post office and hand-deliver it. That morning another letter arrived at the theatre. Earlier that morning Henry Clay Ford, one of the three brothers who ran the theatre, ate breakfast and then walked to the big marble post office at Seventh and F and picked up the mail. Accepting correspondence on behalf of itinerant actors was a customary privilege Ford’s offered to friends of the house. Around noon he walked over to Ford’s Theatre on Tenth Street between E and F, a block above Pennsylvania Avenue, to pick up his mail. Nothing unusual about that-Booth, a voluptuous connoisseur of young women, never had trouble finding female company. Twenty-six years old, impossibly vain, preening, emotionally flamboyant, possessed of raw talent and splendid élan, and a star member of this celebrated theatrical family-the Barrymores of their day-John Wilkes Booth’s day began in the dining room of the National, where he was seen eating breakfast with Miss Carrie Bean. He was the son of the legendary actor and tragedian Junius Brutus Booth, and brother to Edwin Booth, one of the finest actors of his generation.

Manhunt by James L. Swanson