April 14, 1865: why did the Lincolns have guests?

[Tom Bogar]

It varied. Sometimes Lincoln attended alone, dropping in to the manager’s office unannounced, chatting for a few moments, and then slipping into a curtained box where no one else would know of his presence. If the evening’s bill was an opera, he took Mary, who enjoyed them—and the attention that came with attending them—more than he did. (In fact, she had decreed that a love of theatregoing was an indispensable quality in any man she married.) For his first theatre visit as president, on January 23, 1862, to the Washington Theatre for Verdi’s Il Trovatore he took Mary and General Irvin McDowell. For plays, he preferred male company and brought personal secretaries John Nicolay and John Hay, correspondent-confidant Noah Brooks, Secretary Seward (sometimes both Sewards), or, occasionally, his son Tad. And on many occasions he brought others, like Harris, as Roger has noted. On October 5, 1863, he attended the Davenport-Wallack performance of Othello at Ford's Theatre with Secretaries Seward and Stanton. Another time he and Mary brought Massachusetts Senator Charles Sumner. For Edwin Booth's Richard III at Grover's, the entire Lincoln family, with Seward and House Speaker Schuyler Colfax attended. On another occasion he braved an ice storm to walk to Grover's for Meyerbeer’s five-act, three-hour epic, Les Huguenots, with Sumner and Baron Gerolt, the elderly Prussian minister. In early February, 1865, just back from an inspection trip down the Potomac to Fortress Monroe, Lincoln sought comic relief at Ford’s in the company of Generals Grant and Burnside, to see comedian John Sleeper Clarke, brother-in-law of the Booths, in J. Stirling Coyne’s Everybody’s Friend.