April 14 Thursday – On this the 22nd anniversary of the assassination of President Lincoln, Walt Whitman gave a lecture at Madison Square Garden, including a reading of his most popular poem, “O Captain! My Captain!” (which he sometimes regretted writing.) Sam was there.

“The theater was barely a quarter full, but this was a flattering turnout nonetheless. In the audience …was James Russell Lowell, sharing a box with Professor Charles Eliot Norton of Harvard…. Also in the audience were John Hay, former private secretary to Lincoln, and future secretary of state; the popular fiction writers Frank R. Stockton, Edward Eggleston, Frances Hodgson Burnett, and Mary Mapes Dodge; the sculptor Augustus Saint-Gaudens; Jose Marti, the Cuban writer and revolutionist; Daniel Coit Gilman, president of Johns Hopkins University; Mark Twain; and Andrew Carnegie, who subscribed $350 for his box” [Kaplan, Whitman 29]. (Editorial emphasis on names.)

The midnight supper at Daly’s Theatre, ran through the wee hours. Actor John Drew, in My Years on the Stage (1922) quotes the New York Herald (Apr. 15) about the event:

Mr. Augustin Daly’s supper, given to his company and a few invited guests on the stage of his theatre yesterday morning, was a remarkable event in several ways. It commemorated the one-hundredth night of a Shakespearian revival of more than usual splendor and it brought together many remarkable men.

The company sat down at one-half past twelve [Apr. 14] and rose at five in the morning. A great circular table occupied the entire stage. Its center was a mass of tulips and roses. Around its outer edge sat forty participants. Think of a supper at which General Sherman acted as toastmaster, at which Horace Potter made an unusually clever speech, Mark Twain told a story, Bronson Howard and Wilson Barrett spoke, at which Miss Ada Rehan made a neat and charming response when her name was called, at which the ever young Lester Wallack commended in the heartiest way the brother manager whose guest he was, at which Willie Winter read a poem of home manufacture. Imagine all this and add to it countless witty stories that were told around the board, think of the wine glasses that clicked, think of the champagne that bubbled, think of the pretty women, think of the weird surroundings (the dark cave-like auditorium and the brilliantly lighted stage).