Buried: Oak Ridge Cemetery, Springfield, Illinois
Sixteenth President - 1861-1865
Born: February 12, 1809, in Hardin County, Kentucky
Died: 7:22 a.m. on April 15, 1865, in Washington, D.C.
Age at death: 56
Cause of death: Gunshot wound to the head
Final words: Unknown
Admission to Oak Ridge Cemetery: Free
In his 1858 bid for an Illinois Senate seat, Abraham Lincoln engaged in a series of seven debates with incumbent Democrat Stephen Douglas. The frontier lawyer lost that election, but the fame he gained allowed him to face Douglas again in the 1860 presidential race. Lincoln won the White House, inheriting a nation bitterly divided over the slavery issue.
The Civil War began just one month into Lincoln’s first term and became the defining event of his administration. Sectional differences cast the industrial North against those in the South who favored states’ rights. Eleven southern states seceded from the Union and formed their own Confederate government, laying the groundwork for the bloody clash that began in April 1861. Lincoln was determined to save the Union above all else.
Lincoln’s final resting place at Oak Ridge Cemetery
Lincoln’s 1862 Emancipation Proclamation granted freedom to slaves in the seceding states. Despite considerable losses on the battlefields, the war continued to rage for three more years. The conflict officially ended with the surrender of the Confederacy on April 9, 1865, shortly after Lincoln’s second inauguration.
For many, the hostilities lived on. Unable to accept the South’s defeat, an actor named John Wilkes Booth plotted against the Union government, conspiring to kidnap President Abraham Lincoln, Vice President Andrew Johnson, and Secretary of State William Seward. The scheme took a more violent turn when Booth decided that Lincoln must die. He went to Ford’s Theatre in Washington on Good Friday, April 14, 1865, where Lincoln and his wife Mary Todd were attending a performance of the comedy Our American Cousin. Booth entered the presidential box when the policeman on guard stepped away from his post. Approaching from behind, he shot Lincoln once in the back of the head. Laughter and applause from the audience nearly drowned out the sound of the fatal gunshot. Booth jumped over the balcony and landed on the stage, where he yelled “Sic semper tyrannis!” before running out of the theater. A distraught Mary Todd Lincoln cried out, “They have shot the President!” as a doctor raced to the mortally injured man.
The president was taken to a boarding house across the street from the theater, but never regained consciousness. He died on April 15, 1865, at 7:22 a.m., the first American president to die at the hands of an assassin. A grief-stricken Secretary of War Edwin Stanton pronounced him dead with the famous line, “Now he belongs to the ages.”
A funeral carriage brought Lincoln’s body back to the White House. Doctors performed an autopsy and undertakers prepared his body for burial. Lincoln was dressed in the same black suit he had worn just weeks before for his second inaugural.
Funeral arrangements were extensive. The White House was heavily draped in black and church bells tolled throughout the city. Government offices and businesses closed. Lincoln’s body lay in state first at the Capitol rotunda in Washington, then in cities across the country. Inconsolable, Mary Todd Lincoln refused to join in the national funeral services.
Hundreds of thousands of Americans lined the 1700-mile route as a train carried Lincoln’s body back home to Springfield, Illinois. The “Lincoln Special,” as it was known, retraced the path the president traveled on his way to the White House in 1861. Its stops included Baltimore, Philadelphia, New York, and Chicago. When Lincoln’s body arrived in Springfield after two weeks on display, his discolored features so distressed spectators that an undertaker was called in to conceal the decay.
After a public viewing at the Illinois State Capitol, the martyred president’s remains were taken for burial at Oak Ridge Cemetery. His mahogany coffin was interred together with that of his beloved son Willie, who had died in the White House at the age of eleven. Mary Todd Lincoln was buried with them in the family tomb when she died in 1882.
John Wilkes Booth was captured twelve days after the assassination and died as a result of the struggle. Historians are uncertain whether he was wounded by his pursuers or by his own hand. Four of his co-conspirators were found guilty and hanged for their roles in the scheme.
Touring Abraham Lincoln’s Tomb at Oak Ridge Cemetery
The Lincoln Tomb State Historic Site is located at Oak Ridge Cemetery in Springfield, Illinois. It is open Labor Day through February, 9:00 a.m. to 4:00 p.m. (closed Sunday and Monday), and March through October, 9:00 a.m. to 5:00 p.m. daily. It is closed on major holidays. Admission is free.
From the South: Take I-55 North to the Sixth Street exit. Follow Sixth Street through downtown Springfield. Take a left onto North Grand Avenue. From North Grand Avenue, take a right onto Monument Avenue to reach Oak Ridge Cemetery.
From the North: Take I-55 South to the Sherman exit. From the exit, follow Business Route 55 (Veterans Parkway). Take a left onto J David Jones Parkway. Go approximately one mile, then take a left into Oak Ridge Cemetery.
Lincoln’s tomb is clearly visible from the cemetery’s main road.
The receiving vault where Lincoln’s body was first held
For additional information
Site Manager
Lincoln Tomb State Historic Site
Oak Ridge Cemetery
1500 Monument Avenue
Springfield, IL 62702
Phone: (217) 782-2717
www.illinoishistory.org
“Over the next quarter century, Springfield’s city fathers buried and reburied their most famous citizen.”
—Richard Norton Smith
The most revered of presidents has suffered posthumous indignities that Jeb Stuart wouldn’t wish on his worst Yankee enemy. To begin with, there was Lincoln’s funeral, which at twenty days was prolonged even by the lugubrious standards of the day. Too prostrate with grief to accompany her husband’s remains to Illinois, Mary Lincoln found solace by quarreling with her Springfield neighbors, whose plan to entomb Lincoln in a downtown city lot she loudly vetoed. She insisted that Lincoln be interred in rural Oak Ridge Cemetery, a parklike setting modeled after such recently consecrated beauty spots as Boston’s Mount Auburn and Brooklyn’s Greenwood.
Alternatively, Mrs. Lincoln would consign her husband to the basement crypt in the Capitol that had originally been reserved for George Washington.
In defense of the much maligned widow, there is something about a funeral that brings out the worst in people—within hours of John F. Kennedy’s assassination, an Iowa congressman and self-proclaimed watchdog of the treasury named H.R. Gross questioned the cost of placing an eternal flame over Arlington’s Section 45, Grave S-45.
Anyway, with Mary holding all the cards, the Lincoln Monument Association quickly folded. Its members may have entertained second thoughts after a band of would-be bodysnatchers broke into the Lincoln tomb on election night, 1876. The conspirators planned to hide the presidential remains in an Indiana sand dune pending the release of their leader, who was in jail on counterfeiting charges. The intruders nearly succeeded in extricating the Great Emancipator’s coffin before being surprised by agents who had infiltrated the gang.
This simple tombstone marks the second place Lincoln’s body was interred
Over the next quarter century, Springfield’s city fathers buried and reburied their most famous citizen.
At one point Lincoln’s casket was concealed under construction materials, leaving admirers to pay homage before an empty tomb. In September 1901, a small group assembled at Oak Ridge; among those in attendance was a thirteen-year-old boy named Fleetwood Lindley, who had been hastily summoned to the scene by his father. A pungent odor filled the tomb as a blowtorch-wielding plumber removed the section of Lincoln’s green lead casket above the president’s head and shoulders. Young Lindley crowded forward with the others to get a better look.
What they saw, thirty-six years after the fact, was the handiwork of a Philadelphia undertaker, who had used white chalk to disguise the decomposing corpse during its cross-country rail journey.
Notwithstanding this macabre cosmetic touch, Lincoln’s features were plainly recognizable to the boy. To be sure, the presidential eyebrows had vanished and yellow mold and small red spots, the latter guessed to be remnants of an American flag, disfigured the black broadcloth suit in which Lincoln had taken his second inauguration oath in March 1865. But the figure in the coffin was unmistakably Abraham Lincoln. His identity established and the crowd’s curiosity gratified, Lincoln was lowered for the final time into a cage of steel bars and smothered under ten feet of Portland cement. Before his death in 1963, Fleetwood Lindley claimed distinction as the last living person to have gazed upon the features of Abraham Lincoln.
—RNS