Assassination Vacation

Vowell recounts seeing the musical about the Founding Fathers, 1776, at Ford’s Theater, where Lincoln was assassinated. Although the interior of Ford’s Theater had “collapsed” (22), by 1968 the National Park Service had restored the theater’s interior to what it was when Lincoln was assassinated. She sees the irony in being present at Ford’s Theater during Act II of 1776, which focuses on the debate over enslavement between the Founding Fathers, since it was a similar debate that motivated the pro-enslavement John Wilkes Booth to assassinate Abraham Lincoln.

At the Lincoln Memorial, two of Lincoln’s speeches—the Gettysburg Address and the Second Inaugural—are engraved on the wall. Vowell describes the Second Inaugural as “prophetic, biblical, merciful, tough” (26). She also wonders how Booth could kill the person who gave such a speech. Even so, Vowell reflects that, given the number of death threats Lincoln received, “the fact that Lincoln got to serve his whole first term is a kind of miracle” (28).

Next, Vowell has a meal at Wok & Roll, a Chinese restaurant in Washington, DC that exists at the site of Mary Surratt’s boardinghouse, where Booth and his co-conspirators plotted Lincoln’s assassination.