Lincoln and the Theatre

Abraham Lincoln was assassinated at Ford’s Theatre and became almost instantaneously upon his death on April 15, preserved in memory. During their Easter sermons, Christian ministers did not hesitate to suggest that Lincoln, who was shot on Good Friday, died to redeem the sins of the United States in a similar way to how Jesus died to save humanity from its sins. The symbolic portrayals of Lincoln did not end in the Christian churches. Passover having ended, rabbis in synagogues suggested Lincoln as a Moses figure who did not reach the Promised Land with his people whom he had freed. The irony of the situation, as Harold Holzer points out, is that Lincoln “died in a sinful playhouse.” Lincoln did not see the theatre in this light. He loved the theatre and it presented him with an opportunity to relieve stress. He was most fond of Shakespeare’s plays and saw several of them as President in which John Wilkes Booth’s brother Edwin Booth, a highly acclaimed tragedian actor, played roles.

The play Our American Cousin has become famous in American history although most Americans have never seen the play performed nor do they know that it was a satirical play (based on negative European stereotypes) about Americans (an opera about the play and the Civil War has recently come out called Our American Cousin which was written by the American composer Eric Sawyer and poet John Shoptaw). Be that as it may, the night Lincoln was shot by John Wilkes Booth while Lincoln attended the play, Our American Cousin, it had become very popular and had been performed for “upwards of one thousand nights” by April 14, 1865.

There was another play on the bill listed for Saturday, August, 15, 1865, which was not performed which is worth pointing out: The Octoroon; or, Life in Louisiana by Dion Boucicault. This play was also a hit in the United States, first opening in New York in 1859. In a nutshell the plot of the play goes like this: the nephew (George Payton) of a Louisiana plantation owner returning home from France discovers the plantation will have to be sold because of his late uncle’s mismanagement. George falls in love with one of the slaves (Zoe, the octoroon) who is the daughter of his uncle—George is unaware of her racial status. Another man (Jacob McClosky) who helped ruin Payton’s uncle’s finances wants Zoe for himself (though she rejects him) and plans on selling the plantation and the slaves and acquiring Zoe during the sale and taking her as a mistress. This plot would have been thwarted by a letter from a debtor of Payton’s uncle but McClosky literally kills the messenger, a slave boy (Paul). An Indian (Wahnotee) discovers the body of his good friend but Wahnotee’s English is so bad that he cannot explain what he has seen. Later after George finds out that he can’t legally marry Zoe, Zoe is sold to McClosky on a steamboat. Finally it is realized that the slave boy Paul is missing. Wahnotee arrives on the boat, drunk, and tells them the boy is dead. McClosky calls for Wahnotee to be lynched. Another character asks accusingly if there will be one law for whites and another for Indians. The delay in trying to give Wahnotee a fair trial brings forth pictorial evidence that McClosky is the real killer. McClosky is later killed ignobly by Wahnotee to blindly avenge his friend Paul. The play was not without controversy (not about the Indian of course).

Based on press reports some people thought the play, which opened after John Brown’s raid on Harper’s Ferry, was an abolitionist work. Others felt it was pro-slavery. Modern commentators point out that the play had different endings. In Britain, the play had a happy ending with a so-called “mixed-race” marriage, which would have been referred to as miscegenation (after 1863-the word was coined by Democratic journalists at the New York World in a pamphlet hoax which tried to harm Lincoln’s reelection bid) in the American South, between Zoe and George. In the United States, the play ended with the death of all the major actors in the play on board a steamboat which explodes (not that far-fetched of an idea, 1/3 of all steamboats built in the 1850’s exploded).

On the anniversary of Lincoln’s assassination, we should probably spend less time thinking about the play that Lincoln saw before his death with its well worn European notions of Americans as bumpkins and more time pondering the more engaging play which was not put on because of Lincoln’s death. The fact that Irish born Boucicault deliberately changed the ending of The Octoroon depending on the differing sensibilities about race amongst his audience tells us something about both the British and American theatergoers. That people continue to ignore the depiction of the Indian in the play as well as questions about justice for Indians in the USA (much the same way too many people don’t know what to make of the “metaphysics of Indian-hating” in Melville’s The Confidence-Man, tells us something about ourselves.