Staging Ground. Leslie Stainton
that went back to Plato, who believed mimesis provoked foul thoughts and dreams. Within minutes of Booth’s lurid plunge to the stage and Shakespearean cry—Sic semper tyrannis!—audience members in Ford’s Theatre were calling for the building to be burnt and its actors killed. A Washington shopkeeper who dared to suggest that the cast of Our American Cousin was not responsible for the president’s death had his neck put in a noose. In Detroit a minister barked, “Would that Mr. Lincoln had fallen elsewhere than at the very gates of Hell—in the theater.” An Illinois clergyman announced that by going to see a play, Lincoln had forfeited God’s “divine protection.”
Actors everywhere were suspect. Booth’s brother Edwin, one of the most celebrated of American players, declared his career ended. Papers in Lancaster carried this statement: “While mourning in common with all other loyal hearts, the death of the president, I am oppressed by a private woe not to be expressed in words. But whatever calamity may befall me or mine, my country one and indivisible, has been my warmest devotion. Edwin Booth.” His assurances fell on mostly deaf ears; in the next weeks death threats poured into Booth’s New York apartment, where he remained under house arrest.
Fulton Hall stayed open after Lincoln’s assassination, even as local businesses hung black bunting from their windows and rumors circulated that John Wilkes Booth was on the run in Pennsylvania, not far from Lancaster. Within twenty-four hours of the president’s death, the Fulton presented an evening of comedy and burlesque that included both a “laughable farce” and a panorama of the recent war. Wittingly or not, those who attended the show were rendering homage to Lincoln, who had loved the theater. Even in the bleakest months of his presidency, as the number of Union dead and wounded climbed, Lincoln found time to go to plays—farces, melodramas, Irish comedies, Shakespeare. He had seen John Wilkes Booth in Richard III and other works, and he had liked the actor. Whitman marveled that so powerful a leader drew such pleasure from “those human jack-straws, moving about with their silly little gestures, foreign spirit, and flatulent text.” But Whitman too loved playgoing; he admired especially John Wilkes Booth’s late father, Junius Brutus Booth, an alcoholic rogue who had thrilled American audiences in the first half of the nineteenth century with his volcanic performances.
In a sense, Lincoln’s murder both cursed and sanctified the American theater. All faiths establish holy sites in places where significant events occurred or are presumed to have occurred, in places haunted by memory, and the secular faith of the American stage in 1865 was no different. Walk into a theater after April 14 of that year, and you beheld the setting for a crime: here were the audience, the actors, the melodrama. On the night of the actual assassination, some in the crowd thought Booth’s histrionics were part of the play. “Down in front!” people shouted when others stood to see what was happening. “Sit down!” What was real that evening? Certainly not the actress Laura Keene, who emerged from Ford’s Theatre in a yellow costume spattered with blood. Witnesses gasped: she looked like a ghost.
Harrison’s reenactment of the play that killed Lincoln drew a large crowd to Fulton Hall on February 22, 1866. Yecker must have been pleased; soon he would start filling a book with records of Fulton engagements. That same month in New York City, Edwin Booth returned to the stage in his signature role, Hamlet—a part he would later reprise at the Fulton. Passions had cooled since his brother’s capture and death the previous spring, and Edwin needed money. Despite threats from the public and attacks by the press (“Is the Assassination of Caesar to Be Performed?” the New York Herald asked), his return was a triumph, and the audience that evening showered Booth with flowers and applause. Watching him step into the light, they may have felt as Marcellus does when he sees the specter of Hamlet’s father: “What, has this thing appeared again tonight?”
Likewise at the Fulton, patrons of Our American Cousin must have felt a frisson when George W. Harrison, as Asa Trenchard, the play’s hapless Yankee hero, spoke the very words actor Henry Hawk had uttered at Ford’s just before Lincoln was shot: “Wal, I guess I know enough to turn you inside out, you sockdologizing old man-trap.” Lest Lancastrians forget the horror of that moment, the Evening Express had published an account of it the day before the performance, noting how Hawk’s hilarious delivery had given way to the crack of a pistol and then chaos.
Now they were reliving the instant here in Lancaster, imagining the president in his box, the audience shouting, “Who was he?” and “Hang him!,” as the villain Booth, clad in black, leapt to the stage, and Hawk fled, afraid Booth would stab him. Later that February evening, as they made their way home along Lancaster’s gaslit streets or stopped for a glass of beer at Henry Struble’s Fulton Hall Restaurant, members of the Fulton crowd may have pondered the irony that it was an actor, of all people, who had conjured the shocking finale to the long war. As Thaddeus Stevens would observe, “In the midst of the most exquisite enjoyment of his favorite relaxation, [Lincoln] was instantaneously taken away.” That too was part of the theater’s spell.
Two weeks after Our American Cousin, the Harrison company presented Dion Boucicault’s The Octoroon, the story of a mixed-blood Louisiana free woman who is sold back into slavery to save her family from debt. Harrison followed this with the antebellum hit Uncle Tom’s Cabin, well on its way to becoming the single most produced play in the history of the American theater. Slavery may have ended elsewhere in America, but it flourished onstage, and Yecker hoped to profit from it.
The novelty of his new theater soon faded, though, and by the end of Harrison’s inaugural season, in April 1866, ticket sales had plunged. One of Harrison’s actors returned for a six-day run in May, but audiences were so sparse he closed three days early. As it happened, Yecker’s fifth child was born the next day. He couldn’t afford to keep his theater dark, not even in the sticky heat of a mid-Atlantic summer, and so he improvised. In June he brought in a pair of pianists; in July, a minstrel show; in August, another acting company. For the next year Yecker kept up the pattern: theater troupes alternated with comedians, singers with magicians, lecturers, trained dogs, acrobats, and dioramas, among them the Great Lincoln Memorial Tableaux, a series of sixty “lifelike and thrilling” panoramas devoted to the late president’s memory and the pursuit, capture, trial, and execution of his killer. But audiences continued to dwindle, and the Fulton increasingly fell to local use: church fairs, commencement ceremonies, fundraisers for a monument to honor the city’s fallen soldiers and sailors.
Yecker was thirty-two and handsome, with brooding, almost melancholy eyes and dark hair, which he combed back from his face in immaculate waves. In the few photographs of him that survive, he is a model of bourgeois respectability in a tailored suit, crisp white shirt and bow tie, glistening black shoes. It’s hard to know what drove this immigrant saddler to create a theater in the middle of his adopted city. Civic pride? A thirst for adventure? The conviction that he could make money as a showman? If so, he was reckoning against the odds. A fellow nineteenth-century theater manager said he could recall “scarcely a single instance . . . of a persevering manager dying in comfortable circumstances.”
In his 1855 Autobiography, Phineas Taylor Barnum had set forth ten rules for entrepreneurial success, among them “select the kind of business that suits your natural inclinations.” Yecker, like Barnum, chose entertainment, the presentation of “varieties.” “Work at it if necessary early and late,” Barnum advised, “in season and out of season, not leaving a stone unturned, and never deferring for a single hour that which can be done just as well now.” P. T. Barnum had made a fortune in show business, largely by peddling humbug—a black woman whom he advertised as the 161-year-old former nanny of George Washington, the desiccated remains of a supposed mermaid, an African American man who dressed in a suit of black hair, grunted on cue, and shambled across the stage like a monkey. Barnum labeled him “What Is It?”
Yecker had little interest in hawking tricks, but he shared Barnum’s eye for spectacle and grasp of middlebrow taste, and both men understood the need for propriety, personal as well as professional. Yecker attended Mass on Sundays and during his first years at Fulton Hall continued to operate his harness shop, turning out bridles and martingales for his neighbors even as he tried to lure them into his theater with the promise of escape.
Fulton Hall did not tower as high as Saint Mary’s Roman