Backstage at the Lincoln Assassination: The Untold Story of the Actors and Stagehands at Ford's Theatre

Backstage at the Lincoln Assassination: The Untold Story of the Actors and Stagehands at Ford's Theatre by Thomas A. Bogar

An actor pulls a trigger in the presidential balcony, leaps to the stage shouting, "Sic semper tyrannis!" ("Thus always to tyrants!") and escapes -- leaving the president fatally wounded. In the panic that follows, forty-six terrified stagehands, actors, and theatre workers scatter from Ford's Theatre, solders take up stations by the doors, and the audience surges into the streets chanting, "Burn the place down!"

This is the untold story of Lincoln's assassination: the story of what the backstage workers and onstage actors witnessed when President Abraham Lincoln was shot.

The theatre in which John Wilkes Booth committeed the most infamous crime in American history was crammed, as usual, with actors, stagehands, doorkeepers, prompters, musicians, costumers, callboys -- the whole multifarious crew required to put a play on the nineteenth-century stage. Yet until now the rich backstage history of that awful night has lain forgotten. Theatre historian Thomas A. Bogar recovers those stories of lives forever altered -- or even shattered -- and tells the full story of Lincoln's assassination. In this exciting, true-life thriller, you'll learn: How John Wilkes Booth's theatrical training helped him prepare for the assassination; Why the police arrested and harassed dozens of innocent people, but missed capturing the assassin or questioning his accomplices; How Booth was closely connected to the cast and crew of Our American Cousin, an ensemble of Confederate sympathizers; And what eyewitnesses saw when the president was shot and Booth leaped to the stage.

Highly original, exquisitely detailed, and beautifully written, Backstage at the Lincoln Assassination not only draws back the curtain on an unt5old story of one of the most dramatic events in American history, but tells of the aftermath -- and what happened to those eyewitnesses who worked in a live production that ended in death.

Regnery History, Hardcover, 1st Edition, 1st Printing, 2013