Abraham Lincoln scares me.

He comes out of almost nowhere (sorry Illinois, but I’m a Midwesterner, too, so I know how you’re feeling); he arrives in Washington just as the country splits apart; he manages to stitch it back together; and then almost immediately – as if his single, appointed duty is complete – he dies here at Ford’s Theatre.

It’s almost enough to make me believe in a divine providence. At any rate, it helps me understand how a legend is created.

Like George Washington, it’s hard to get close to Lincoln, so enveloped is he in myth. Lincoln’s sense of humor helps alleviate that feeling some, but just when I  think I might understand him a little as a politician and a leader, I remember those darker angels of his thought – the sense of purpose and doom that pervades him – and it gets a little chilly again. I feel unequal to the task, let alone unequal to the man.

The theatre, of course, doesn’t help.

Fort McHenry may be our only official National Shrine, but surely Ford’s feels like another. There is a sense of hush about the place, as if you are walking into greatness, and the sense is reinforced by the fact that the site is nearly all a re-creation. These are not the actual chairs in which the audience sat on the night of April 14, 1865. That is not the box the president was shot in. That is not the stage onto which John Wilkes Booth jumped and broke his leg before he escaped. All of those features were removed years ago, when the building was converted to offices.

But now the offices have been removed, the theatre has been reconverted – the chairs replaced, the box rebuilt, the stage re-layed – and we as a nation would do that only if we thought there was something here worth preserving. Not the real thing because it’s too late for that, but the space in which the eyes of the audience turned to the sound of assassination, the smaller space in which Lincoln slumped into his chair, the abyss across which Booth leapt into infamy. In some kinds of time, the figures hang there still, and the recreated theatre is the frame that helps us see.

Then preservation turns the horrible into the holy.

In the basement is a museum of the assassination that is one of the best in Washington for relevant artifacts, and across the street is the house in which the president died. After taking all this in, I wander out of these places into the bright daylight of a Washington morning, and try to re-orient myself, moving back from the morbid to the mundane.

What have I learned? That Booth’s gun was very small; that he timed his trigger to the moment in the stage comedy that was most uproarious, so Lincoln’s last memory was probably laughter. The president, who so enjoyed humor, was enjoying himself when he was shot, and there is some comfort in that. May we all exit laughing.

But that’s about all I feel equal to.