Presidental Box Photographs

[L Verge]

I know there have been previous postings on this forum regarding Booth's leap from the Presidential Box and his boot catching on either a flag or the George Washington lithograph's frame, but I'm too lazy to search for it so am posting this here. It did my heart good to read this because I was once corrected by a well-known assassination author who heard me tell someone the story of the frame having a wedge gouged out of it - perhaps by Booth's spur. I was told that the scar on the frame happened years later and was likely cut by a knife-weilding souvenir hunter.

A Surratt member from Tennessee just sent me a reprint of a 1913 article of the Washington Star newspaper written by H. Clay Ford "...a retired theatrical manager, formerly a Washingtonian and now a resident of Rutherford, N.J. who is spending a few days here, talked interestingly of the shooting of Abraham Lincoln forty-eight years ago in Ford's Theatre, on Tenth Street.

"Mr. Ford, who is visiting his son, H. Chapman Ford, at the Thatcher Hotel on Thirteenth Street, was treasurer of Ford's Theatre the night of the tragedy, and he declared that the story that John Wilkes Booth, Lincoln's assassin, caught his foot in the folds of an American flag as he was making his escape, and that 'Old Glory' delayed the murderer is a popular misconception. A picture of George Washington served to delay Booth, Mr. Ford says.

"'I remember the tragedy as if it were but yesterday,' Mr. Ford said. 'The theatre was owned by my brother, the late John T. Ford, and I was his treasurer and in the box-office at the time. When I heard Booth's first shot, which eventually ended Lincoln's life, it occurred to me casually that the pistol used by Sir Edward Trenchard in Our American Cousin, the play that night, had gone off accidentally. Sir Edward, in the play, puts a pistol to his head at the end of the first act.

"'In a second, however, an afterthought came to me. I knew it was not the time of the evening for him to put the pistol to his head.

"'In the ticket office there was a window, from which I could see the audience. I looked out, and there was Booth on the stage, where he had leaped from the box. I knew him well. The President and his party had been seated in two boxes, which I had helped to make into one, decorating them with flags which we had borrowed from the Treasury Department. In the center of the box I had placed a picture of George Washington with the flags on both sides. It was this picture which caught Booth's foot. I know it, because his spur made a large cut in the picture. They always said 'Old Glory' delayed him, but it didn't - George Washington's picture did it. I saw the picture again in Baltimore while I was visiting the widow of John T. Ford in whose possession it now is.'"