Last performance at Ford's

[Rhatkinson]

I finished reading "Murder at Ford's Theater" while I was waiting for a jury to return a verdict today and came across an interesting tidbit in the footnotes that I was unaware of.

If you had asked me when was the last time Harry Hawk uttered the famous, "don't know the manners of good society..." line on stage, I would have said April 14, 1865. However, Hawk actually spoke the line one other time at Ford's. It appears that the detectives forced the cast of the play to perform it after the assassination (the book does not give the exact date, but I would assume it to have been in April or May of 1865 since several of the actors were brought over to Ford's from Old Capitol Prison). The purpose apparently was to study the timing of the assassination and they performed the play in its entirety up until that line, when the play was then halted for good, and the theater silenced for the next 100 years.

I can't imagine how spooky that must have been for Hawk especially to be on the stage in front of a mostly empty theater saying that line so close to the assassination.

Heath