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At just before 8 p.m. on Tuesday night, looking straight out from the Petersen House on 10th Street in Washington, it was briefly possible to filter out the peripheral sounds and sights of the city and imagine the scene 150 years ago almost to the minute, when President Abraham Lincoln’s carriage pulled up in front of Ford’s Theater and delivered him to his fate.

A few hundred people – tourists, some schoolchildren, history buffs – had been drawn to site of America’s first presidential assassination. They milled in front of the arches of the theater, mingling among the smattering of volunteers in Union uniforms. There were a few early theatergoers who had snagged tickets to a memorial performance – not of “Our American Cousin,’’ which Lincoln was watching, but “Now He Belongs to the Ages,’’ which included excerpts from his speeches.

Official Washington paid little heed; President Obama issued a proclamation, but when he attended a gospel singing performance in the East Room of the White House on Tuesday night, he never mentioned the anniversary. Outside Ford’s Theater, there were no speeches, or even politicians, except for a Lincoln impersonator with a top hat.

But the more touching scenes were in the Petersen House, where Lincoln, unconscious, was carried across the street. A steady trickle of visitors climbed the stairs, wound through the parlor where Mary Todd Lincoln awaited news of her husband’s fate, and paused in the back bedroom where the president died at 7:22 a.m. on April 15, 1865, staring silently at the bed.

“Hating and wishing ill to none, he had never comprehended the hell of demoniac passion which seethed and surged around him,’’ Horace Greeley, the famed editor and abolitionist wrote the next year at the end of “The American Conflict,’’ his early history of the Civil War.

Next door, there was a temporary exhibit of artifacts; the tiny Deringer that John Wilkes Booth used to kill Lincoln, the topcoat cuff links and hat he was wearing that night, the pocketknife he always carried.

Why a pocketknife, one visitor asked the guide? “So he could cut apple slices,’’ came the reply.

By the time visitors emerged, the police had cut off 10th Street to traffic as the exact hour of the anniversary approached, their red lights flashing. Suddenly the Washington of 1865 had receded, and modern-day reality had once again intruded.