Grovers Theater

[RJNorton]

(03-07-2014 09:13 PM)Tom Bogar Wrote:  I would caution anyone from giving too much credence to anything Grover said or wrote. Much of it is self-aggrandizing, exaggeration and/or downright made up from whole cloth.

Tom, unfortunately Grover's stories have made it into Lincoln books. In Diplomat In Carpet Slippers - Abraham Lincoln Deals With Foreign Affairs author Jay Monaghan tells the "drunken coachman" story as follows:

"A few days after Lincoln signed the Emancipation Proclamation, Leonard Grover sat in his office on the second floor of the National Theatre building in Washington. Pigeon-holes behind his desk were filled with bills, contracts, posters. On the wall actresses smiled at him through oval frames. A distant ripple of applause told Grover that the second act had finished. The house was full. President and Mrs. Lincoln sat in a proscenium box. Grover knew that Washington rowdies resented the Emancipation Proclamation. Would they make trouble for the President after the performance...?

"...Grover felt responsible for the President's safety. He knew Lincoln slightly and his little boy played often with Tad in the White House. When the last curtain bell rang, Grover went downstairs. The President and Mrs. Lincoln, with Congressman Schuyler Colfax, were walking out of their box. Grover showed them a side passageway to the street. Outside a crowd stood in a leering circle around the President's carriage. The driver staggered on the curb. His eyes were bleary, his face flushed. He was drunk. Lincoln helped his wife into the carriage. His long body followed her. Colfax scrambled after them and slammed the door. The coachman reached uncertainly for his seat and pulled himself up, then fell sprawling in the gutter. The bystanders laughed. Somebody threw a stone. A one-armed soldier boy on the driver's seat gathered up the lines. Grover leaped to the box, snatched the reins from the soldier and drove the carriage away."