to provide nightly shows in Fulton Hall. Harrison’s was a permanent troupe of “artistes from the first-class Eastern Theaters,” not a “strolling company,” the Lancaster Intelligencer informed readers. The Evening Express assured those who might fear the idea of a theater in their midst—might fear, especially, the drunken brawls theater so often provoked, the sordid personalities it attracted—that Harrison would impose “the strictest decorum in the hall” and present “the best and most unexceptionable plays.” Months earlier, the same paper had called for an end to the “disorderly conduct of boys and young men at public exhibitions at Fulton Hall.”
Despite above-average ticket prices, Harrison drew a healthy crowd on February 10 with the first of his offerings, a comedy and two farces, preceded by an orchestral overture. Over the next week audiences grew, and reporters gushed. The Examiner and Herald: “Lancaster has never been famed for its support of the Stage, but this was owing more to the character of the actors who visited us, than to any want of inclination upon the part of the public to patronize a well ordered and respectable theater.” The Evening Express: “We are pleased to see a class of persons visiting Fulton Hall who heretofore rarely patronized similar exhibitions. These performances have thus far been entirely free from those objectionable features which are urged—and with good reason—against most of the entertainments of this character.”
In his second week at the Fulton, Harrison presented Our American Cousin, the comedy Lincoln had been watching ten months earlier when the actor John Wilkes Booth stole into his flag-trimmed box at Ford’s Theatre and shot the president below his left ear. Walt Whitman would note the paradox—that in the middle of the farce occurred “the main thing, the actual murder” of “the leading actor in the stormiest drama known to real history’s stage.”
Lancaster audiences understood the play’s significance, and perhaps for that reason a sizable crowd came out to see the show. Among them, almost certainly, were men and women who had gone to the city’s rail depot ten months earlier to glimpse Lincoln’s funeral train on its way from Washington to Illinois. All told, more than seven million Americans witnessed the train’s sixteen-hundred-mile odyssey. Lancastrians spent six hours that day draping their depot in black, and when the somber train finally pulled in, they removed their hats and bonnets and stood bareheaded, many in tears, and stared at the funeral car. Through its windows they could see Lincoln’s casket and two soldiers standing guard. The whole spectacle lasted a matter of minutes, but forty years later those who were there could describe it in detail.
“Why, if the old Greeks had had this man,” Whitman would write of the slain president, “what trilogies of plays—what epics—would have been made out of him!” But Americans didn’t need epics: they had the artifact itself, the guilty play.
In the aftermath of Lincoln’s assassination, people across America had lashed out against the theater, against actors in particular, reviving prejudices that went back to Plato, who believed mimesis provoked foul thoughts and dreams. Within minutes of Booth’s lurid plunge to the stage and Shakespearean cry—Sic semper tyrannis!—audience members in Ford’s Theatre were calling for the building to be burnt and its actors killed. A Washington shopkeeper who dared to suggest that the cast of Our American Cousin was not responsible for the president’s death had his neck put in a noose. In Detroit a minister barked, “Would that Mr. Lincoln had fallen elsewhere than at the very gates of Hell—in the theater.” An Illinois clergyman announced that by going to see a play, Lincoln had forfeited God’s “divine protection.”
Actors everywhere were suspect. Booth’s brother Edwin, one of the most celebrated of American players, declared his career ended. Papers in Lancaster carried this statement: “While mourning in common with all other loyal hearts, the death of the president, I am oppressed by a private woe not to be expressed in words. But whatever calamity may befall me or mine, my country one and indivisible, has been my warmest devotion. Edwin Booth.” His assurances fell on mostly deaf ears; in the next weeks death threats poured into Booth’s New York apartment, where he remained under house arrest.
Fulton Hall stayed open after Lincoln’s assassination, even as local businesses hung black bunting from their windows and rumors circulated that John Wilkes Booth was on the run in Pennsylvania, not far from Lancaster. Within twenty-four hours of the president’s death, the Fulton presented an evening of comedy and burlesque that included both a “laughable farce” and a panorama of the recent war. Wittingly or not, those who attended the show were rendering homage to Lincoln, who had loved the theater. Even in the bleakest months of his presidency, as the number of Union dead and wounded climbed, Lincoln found time to go to plays—farces, melodramas, Irish comedies, Shakespeare. He had seen John Wilkes Booth in Richard III and other works, and he had liked the actor. Whitman marveled that so powerful a leader drew such pleasure from “those human jack-straws, moving about with their silly little gestures, foreign spirit, and flatulent text.” But Whitman too loved playgoing; he admired especially John Wilkes Booth’s late father, Junius Brutus Booth, an alcoholic rogue who had thrilled American audiences in the first half of the nineteenth century with his volcanic performances.
In a sense, Lincoln’s murder both cursed and sanctified the American theater. All faiths establish holy sites in places where significant events occurred or are presumed to have occurred, in places haunted by memory, and the secular faith of the American stage in 1865 was no different. Walk into a theater after April 14 of that year, and you beheld the setting for a crime: here were the audience, the actors, the melodrama. On the night of the actual assassination, some in the crowd thought Booth’s histrionics were part of the play. “Down in front!” people shouted when others stood to see what was happening. “Sit down!” What was real that evening? Certainly not the actress Laura Keene, who emerged from Ford’s Theatre in a yellow costume spattered with blood. Witnesses gasped: she looked like a ghost.
Harrison’s reenactment of the play that killed Lincoln drew a large crowd to Fulton Hall on February 22, 1866. Yecker must have been pleased; soon he would start filling a book with records of Fulton engagements. That same month in New York City, Edwin Booth returned to the stage in his signature role, Hamlet—a part he would later reprise at the Fulton. Passions had cooled since his brother’s capture and death the previous spring, and Edwin needed money. Despite threats from the public and attacks by the press (“Is the Assassination of Caesar to Be Performed?” the New York Herald asked), his return was a triumph, and the audience that evening showered Booth with flowers and applause. Watching him step into the light, they may have felt as Marcellus does when he sees the specter of Hamlet’s father: “What, has this thing appeared again tonight?”
Likewise at the Fulton, patrons of Our American Cousin must have felt a frisson when George W. Harrison, as Asa Trenchard, the play’s hapless Yankee hero, spoke the very words actor Henry Hawk had uttered at Ford’s just before Lincoln was shot: “Wal, I guess I know enough to turn you inside out, you sockdologizing old man-trap.” Lest Lancastrians forget the horror of that moment, the Evening Express had published an account of it the day before the performance, noting how Hawk’s hilarious delivery had given way to the crack of a pistol and then chaos.
Now they were reliving the instant here in Lancaster, imagining the president in his box, the audience shouting, “Who was he?” and “Hang him!,” as the villain Booth, clad in black, leapt to the stage, and Hawk fled, afraid Booth would stab him. Later that February evening, as they made their way home along Lancaster’s gaslit streets or stopped for a glass of beer at Henry Struble’s Fulton Hall Restaurant, members of the Fulton crowd may have pondered the irony that it was an actor, of all people, who had conjured the shocking finale to the long war. As Thaddeus Stevens would observe, “In the midst of the most exquisite enjoyment of his favorite relaxation, [Lincoln] was instantaneously taken away.” That too was part of the theater’s spell.
Two weeks after Our American Cousin, the Harrison company presented Dion Boucicault’s The Octoroon, the story of a mixed-blood
