After a century-long attack from the Puritan progeny of nineteenth-century America, the theatre by 1860 had long since come to accept as a way of life the religious public's antipathy to the stage. The story of the war between church and theatre is an old but, understandably, not a very popular one with theatre historians; nevertheless, some of the most surprising ironies in American cultural history lie in the dynamics — the death of a president, the death and burial of a respected actor, and an ultimate concession on both fronts — which by the turn of the twentieth century brought a winding down of clerical attacks against the stage and a qualified victory for the comparatively poor, scorned, unorganized theatrical forces over their powerful adversary.