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told Westfall that Booth had been the one he had restrained in the Rotunda. Westfall asked French if he remembered the incident and then showed him a photograph of Booth; both agreed that Booth was the man. French concluded that Booth "meant to rush up behind the President & assassinate him, & in the confusion escape into the crowd again & get away. But, by stopping him as we did, the President got out of his reach," while admitting that "all this is mere surmise." 34 A little over a month later, surmise became all too real as Booth determined to kill Lincoln. The play actor wrote, produced, directed, and stage managed the greatest—and most ignominious—role of his career: presidential assassin. He chose the stage with which he was most familiar, Ford's eatre, not Lincoln's stage of the Capitol inaugural platform. In Booth's tortured mind, he would be the star, his would be the lines history would remember: "Sic semper tyrannis," "e South is avenged!" But Booth of course was wrong. He would not be remembered as an heroic avenger but as a demented villain. It was the martyred Lincoln that history would venerate. As a final indignity to Booth, the date of the assassination, Good Friday 1865, would forever link the martyred President with the sublime mystery of providential fate addressed in his second inaugural. DONALD R. KENNON, prior to his retirement in May 2015, was chief historian and vice president of scholarship and education for the U.S. Capitol Historical Society. He credits the society's founding president, the late Fred Schwengel, for instilling in him a love for all things Lincoln. NOTES 1. With apologies to Michael Burlingame, who titled the section on Lincoln's second inaugural "A Sacred Effort" in his invaluable two-volume biography of Lincoln (Michael Burlingame, Abraham Lincoln: A Life, 2 vols. [Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2008], 2:765-72). We both, of course, are quoting Frederick Douglass's estimation of the second inaugural address. 2. Frederick Douglass, Life and Times of Frederick Douglass (Boston: De Wolfe and Fiske, 1892), p. 444. Douglass had situated himself so that he could see and hear the entire inau- gural proceedings. He observed the ceremony was "wonder- fully quiet, earnest, and solemn. . . . e address sounded more like a sermon than like a state paper" (p. 441). 3. John Eaton in collaboration with Ethel Osgood Mason, Grant, Lincoln, and the Freemen: Reminiscences of the Civil War with Special Reference to the Work for the Contrabands and Freedom of the Mississippi Valley (New York: Longmans, Green, and Co., 1907), p. 89. 4. Burlingame, Lincoln, 2:765. Ronald C. White, Jr., who has written a book-length study of the second inaugural address, calls it simply "Lincoln's greatest speech" (Ronald C. White, Jr., Lincoln's Greatest Speech: e Second Inaugural [New York: Simon and Schuster, 2002]). 5. Washington, D.C. Evening Star, Mar. 4, 1865, and New York Herald, Mar. 6, 1865. 6. Washington, D.C. Evening Star, Mar. 4, 1865. 7. Ibid. 8. Sacramento Daily Union, Apr. 10, 1865. 9. "News from the Library of Congress," Jan. 16, 2008, http://www.loc.gov/today/pr/2008/08-012.html (accessed June 18, 2015); and Kitty Eisele, "Uncovered Photos Offer View of Lincoln Ceremony," Feb. 18, 2008, NPR, http://www. npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=19094867 (accessed June 18, 2015). 10. "e Reported Plot to Assassinate the President," Philadelphia Inquirer, Mar. 8, 1865, which reported the arrest of omas Clement of Alexandria, Virginia, for bragging in "gross and profane language" that he had come to Washington to kill the President. THE CAPITOL DOME 18

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