A New Face for Lincoln's Washington

My great-grandfather Isaiah King, who served in the Civil War as a private in the 5th Massachusetts (Colored) Cavalry, described his chance meeting with Abraham Lincoln in a 1932 interview with the New Bedford (Mass.) Evening Standard.

Great-granddaddy was seated at a banquet in Richmond where they were celebrating the Union army's victorious entrance into the capital of the Confederacy when he saw "a tall gangly looking man in a tall silk hat walking up through the aisles between the tables, stooping a little as if he were afraid of touching the ceiling . . . I asked a waiter who that farmer was and learned that it was our president."

Great-granddaddy's finding himself in the presence of America's 16th president was nothing like my sighting of the nation's 44th president this week at Ford's Theatre on 10th Street NW, where Lincoln lost his life.

Lincoln, as my great-grandfather told the story, came into their midst with little fanfare.

In our case, we were told by an announcement over the public address system that the motorcade carrying President and Mrs. Obama had just left the White House for the celebration of the Lincoln bicentennial and the grand reopening of Ford's Theatre, and that we should take our seats and behave ourselves.

In his day, Lincoln apparently associated freely with great-granddaddy and his armed comrades.

We, on the other hand, were moved into the theater, one by one, through metal detectors. (That was a minor inconvenience, considering that the presence of such a contraption at Ford's Theatre on the evening of April 14, 1865, might have changed the path of American history.)

Metal detectors, however, had not been invented. Neither had automobiles, which -- for presidential security reasons -- were as scarce on 10th Street at the grand reopening celebration as they were on Lincoln's last night at the theater.

But this is not a "what if" reverie.

It is, rather, a marvel at the America we have become in the 200 years since Lincoln's birth.

The black-tie gathering in the refurbished theater told only part of the story. Yes, it was an audience filled with luminaries (yours truly excluded). But Ford's Theatre has always had such a draw. It comes with the territory for official Washington.

What made Wednesday's occasion a standout, however, was the new face of the black-tie gathering.