Late-breaking news from the Lincoln assassination

After one hundred and forty-seven years, the apparently never-before-read report of the first physician to reach Lincoln after he was shot has surfaced.

From The Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library and Museum press release: 

Papers of Abraham Lincoln researcher Helena Iles Papaioannou came across something unexpected while searching the records of the Surgeon General in the National Archives in Washington, DC. Papaioannou discovered a copy of a twenty-one-page report by Dr. Charles A. Leale, the army surgeon who was the first to reach the presidential box to care for a wounded Abraham Lincoln on the night of April 14, 1865. Leale wrote out his story just hours after the President died the next morning, but the text of that first report had remained undiscovered, until now. The newly discovered report is not in Leale’s hand, but is a “true copy” written in the neat and legible hand of a clerk. For nearly a century and a half, it has been tucked away in one of hundreds of boxes of incoming correspondence to the Surgeon General, until Papaioannou discovered it.

Page 3 of Dr. Leale's report; full report available here

Charles A. Leale was 23 years old and had held a medical license for all of six weeks when he took his seat 40 feet away from the presidential box to watch Our American Cousin.  Remarkably, this evening would be the second time in three days he would be mere yards away from both Lincoln and John Wilkes Booth.  On April 11, he had been in the crowd outside the White House when Lincoln had given what would be his final speech, from the second story window over the main door of the White House, about his hopes for Reconstruction and endorsing voting rights for blacks.  Elsewhere in the crowd were Booth and his co-conspirator Lewis Powell, to whom Booth raged,“That means nigger citizenship. Now, by God, I’ll put him through. That is the last speech he will ever make.”

It seems incredible to us that a large crowd of random people would have free access to the very front steps of the White House to call the President to come to a window and speak, but of course no one had ever attacked a president before.

Leale's report is a quick and compelling read, as much for the medical specifics he details as for the simple narrative of the still-shocking events of the awful evening:

When I reached the President he was in a state of general paralysis, his eyes were closed and he was in a profoundly comatose condition, while his breathing was intermittent and exceedingly stertorous.  I placed my finger on his right radial pulse but could perceive no movement of the artery.

By the way, there's no mention of Laura Keene entering the presidential box and cradling Lincoln's head in her lap.  Leale later said that this had happened, but it's nowhere in his report filed the day Lincoln died.

Lincoln's papers are scattered all over the world.

So, big kudos to The Papers of Abraham Lincoln for finding this.  It's a joint project of  the Lincoln Presidential Library and the Illinois Historic Preservation Agency.  They've been at it for eight years, and will be for years to come:  locating and digitizing every document they can find that was written either by or to Lincoln.  Of course, Leale's report is neither of these, but it's hard to imagine a more important exception to make.  I believe the earliest document they've found is a heavily deteriorated page of math problems from a school workbook he had as a teenager in the 1820s, and just this spring they came across a cache of previously unknown documents held in a collection in Japan.  These include a letter he wrote in 1833 for Ann Rutledge's father on a business matter, and a very short bio of himself he wrote in the 1850s that includes this gold nugget: “Born Feb. 12, 1809, in Hardin county Kentucky.  Education, defective."  Next month the search moves to Australia, where they know of one document (a Presidential letter appointing a Camden, New Jersey, postmaster) and have hopes of finding more.

Other than that, Miss Keene, how'd you like the audience?

I should pay closer attention.  Here at City Lit we have closed our Hallowe'en show, The Legend of Sleepy Hollow, and our next production, a world premiere adaptation of Shirley Jackson's novel We Have Always Lived in the Castle, doesn't open until late February.  In the meantime, we have booked the stage out to a series of itinerant companies for their productions.  First up is a company we like a lot, Project 891.  But I hadn't even noticed that the show they're producing here is a Civil War-related play!

It's Our Leading Lady by noted high-camp farceur Charles Busch, about Laura Keene, the producer and star of the performance of Our American Cousin at Ford's Theatre on April 14, 1865.  I'm not familiar with it, except by reputation, but I'm told that the first act is a backstage comedy showing us Keene's company in rehearsal for that performance, focusing on Keene as larger-than-life diva; Busch's play turns more serious in Act Two after John Wilkes Booth has interrupted the performance.

Laura Keene, circa 1856

Comedically seems like the right way to approach Laura Keene.  Though she is a genuinely important figure in 19th Century theatre--she was the first female actor-manager in America, she helped establish New York City as a commercial theatre center,and she came up with the idea of Saturday matinees so women could attend the theatre unescorted--there is a certain amount of dark farce to her cameo role in the Lincoln assassination.  She was backstage waiting to make an entrance when the shot was fired, and is credited with doing much to calm the crowd in the immediate chaos that followed.  But then she seems to strive to make the evening's big event about her:  she commandeered a jug of water, which she used as her ticket past the throng of excited rubber-neckers into the presidential box where Lincoln and Major Rathbone were being treated by doctors who had been in the audience.  Accounts differ as to what happened next, but the most reliable witness seems to be Dr. Charles Leale, who had just performed mouth-to-mouth resuscitation on Lincoln and was the doctor who pronounced Lincoln's wound to be fatal:  "Laura Keene appealed to me to allow her to hold the president's head.  I granted the request, and she sat on the floor of the box and held his head in her lap."   This was within five minutes or so of the shot. 

You've got to give Charles Busch credit for recognizing the self-serving grande dame at the bottom of Keene's remarkable presence of mind that night, and for being brave enough to make it the subject of a comedy.  It's hard to see how shifting Lincoln's wounded head could have provided the president with either comfort or medical benefit.  But it did put Laura Keene back at center stage where she was used to being, and there's certainly something darkly comic about her drive to do that.

Our Leading Lady runs November 4 through December 4.  Don't call City Lit for tickets; it's not our show.  Project 891's box office number is 773-853-3210.