The very next day, the tyrant Abraham Lincoln had visited his captive prize and had the nerve to sit behind the desk occupied by the first and last president of the Confederate States of America, Jefferson Davis.
Around noon, he walked over to nearby Ford’s Theatre, a block from Pennsylvania Avenue, to pick up his mail: Ford’s customarily accepted personal mail as a courtesy to actors.
Around noon, he walked over to nearby Ford’s Theatre, a block from Pennsylvania Avenue, to pick up his mail: Ford’s customarily accepted personal mail as a courtesy to actors.
The Lincolns had given the Fords enough advance notice for the proprietors to decorate and join together the two theater boxes—seven and eight—that, by removal of a partition, formed the president’s box at the theater.
Booth knew the layout of Ford’s intimately: the exact spot on Tenth Street where Lincoln would step out of his carriage, the box inside the theater where the president sat when he came to a performance, the route Lincoln could walk and the staircase he would climb to the box, the dark underground passageway beneath the stage.