This Day in History

The Civil War had just ended and the President and his wife decided to spend a night at the theater.  American history would take a violent turn that night with the first assassination of a U.S. president.

I visited Ford's Theater back in 2005 and saw the President's Box where Lincoln sat, and the bed in the Peterson Boarding House across the street where he was taken and died the next morning.

During a visit to the Ford Museum in Michigan in 2009 I found the chair Lincoln was sitting in at Ford's Theater that night:

Being a bit of a Civil War buff it's always bothered me that right at the moment when Lincoln could finally savor the long-fought victory and the preservation of the Union, it was all taken away from him by a crazy actor.  Hollywood didn't exist back then, but apparently crazy has run in the acting field for a long time.