Lincoln and his cane?

[David Lockmiller]

(08-13-2017 02:49 PM)RJNorton Wrote:  

(08-13-2017 12:57 PM)David Lockmiller Wrote:  I could not find a specific reference as to when President Lincoln saw her perform in the role but obviously the Brady photograph does prove that she did play this role in Washington DC.

David, I tried to find that Abraham Lincoln saw Charlotte Cushman in her most famous role as Meg Merrilies (in Guy Mannering), but so far I am drawing a blank. I checked Tom Bogar's American Presidents Attend the Theatre and found that President Grant saw her in this role on March 7, 1873, at Wall's Opera House in Washington. As far as I can tell, Lincoln saw Cushman at Grover's Theatre in a performance of Macbeth on October 17, 1863. So far I have not been able to find that he ever saw her as Meg Merrilies. As you correctly say, she did perform in this role in Washington (probably many times), but I cannot find that Lincoln ever was in attendance to see her in that particular role.

With Seward, Charlotte Cushman rode out the afternoon of July 1, 1861 to Arlington Heights to see the raw entrenchments and military camps springing up in a circle around Washington. Fifty thousand volunteers were already stationed in white tents in and about the city, and in the humidity the dust from marching feet, galloping cavalry, and rumbling wagons hung like a pall. To Seward she mentioned that Algernon Chase’s son, Lewis, hoped to obtain an appointment to the Military Academy. Would Seward help? The Secretary’s reply took her a little aback, but by the time they had returned to Lafayette Square, she gratefully accepted his offer. He would help her place her request where it would do the most good.

Together, they walked across the Square, through the iron gates, and entered the guarded white portals of the building where lamps burned throughout the night. Charlotte had seen the President on his rides about Washington, tall and sober in his dusty black suit and black stovepipe hat, his cavalry guard riding beside him with drawn sabres held upright. But only when Seward ushered her into Lincoln’s second-floor office at the White House did the new President become real.

The lanky figure that rose slowly to greet her was not prepossessing. There was an obvious backwoods clumsiness about the man, a deep lack of polish. But Charlotte quickly sensed in Lincoln a warmth and sentiment that made her forget everything else. Standing beside the flag in front of his marble fireplace, tilting back in this black leather chair, Lincoln drawled is eager references to the theatre, especially Shakespeare, to plays he had seen recently when he had slipped unannounced into a box. Regrettably, he said, he had not yet seen Miss Cushman herself on stage, especially since Macbeth was his favorite play. Smiling, pointing a bony finger at her, Lincoln hoped she would not retire – and mean it – before he could see her Lady Macbeth.

Charlotte thanked him. She had only slowly discovered, she confessed—that by bitter experience—that a workhorse was nervous without his harness, that an actor was lost with nothing to do. He saw a gentle envy play momentarily across Lincoln’s face, yet something in his somber manner, his character, and quick wit made her suddenly happier about this new president.

Passing again through the gates, she still felt mixed emotions, she told Seward, about this brooding man who had gravely shaken her hand, yet a quality in him set him apart somehow from all other men she had known. Only the next week in Boston did she remember the point of her White House visit. “I was so completely taken up with him and his humour,” she wrote Seward, “that I forgot my mission and came away.”

Looking toward Rome, Charlotte answered her own heart’s dictates. . . . On the seventeenth of July, 1861, she headed home.

-- (“Bright Particular Star, The Life and Times of Charlotte Cushman,” by Joseph Leach, 1970, pages 310-312.)

So, according to Lincoln’s own words, he had not yet seen the great actress Charlotte Cushman on stage as of July, 1861, but he had had the personal opportunity to express his desire to see her one day in her famous Shakespearean role of Lady Macbeth.