CHAPTER FOUR
The Petersen house was no different from hundreds of other boardinghouses that had enjoyed a thriving business during the last four years in overpopulated wartime Washington. Indeed, this style of urban living had been commonplace ever since the District of Columbia was established as the national capital. Military officers, cabinet members, senators, and congressmen—including a one-term representative named Abraham Lincoln elected from Illinois in 1846—were veterans of Washington’s traditional boardinghouse culture.
William Petersen, like many homeowners in Washington, rented out extra rooms to boarders. Born in Hanover, Germany, William and his wife, Anna, had emigrated to the United States in 1841, when they were twenty-five and twenty-two years old. Landing in the port of Baltimore, they moved to Washington and on February 9, 1849, purchased the lot at 453 Tenth Street for $850. Petersen, a tailor, hired contractors to build him a large, attractive, four-level brown brick row house with a tall basement and three main stories. By 1860, the year Lincoln was elected president and South Carolina seceded from the Union, nine boarders resided there, along with the Petersens’ seven children, bringing the household total to eighteen occupants living in eleven rooms.
At one moment the street between the Petersen house and Ford’s Theatre was quiet. At the next, sometime between 10:15 and 10:30 P.M., dozens of playgoers rushed out the doors onto Tenth Street. This was not an audience’s ordinary, leisurely exit at the end of a performance. And the play was not over yet—the last scene had not yet been performed. People began pushing one another aside and knocked one another down to squeeze through the exits, like a great volume of water bursting through a tiny hole in a dike. Some of the first men who escaped the theater fled in both directions on Tenth Street toward E and F streets, shouting crazy, unintelligible words as they ran. Within seconds they turned the corners and vanished from sight. Then hundreds of men, women, and children escaped Ford’s and gathered in the street. Many screamed. Others wept. Soon more than one thousand panicked playgoers were crowded in front of the theater. Screaming, cursing, shouting, weeping, their voices combined into a loud and fearful roar. Something had gone terribly wrong inside Ford’s Theatre.
At first it appeared that the theater might have caught fire. Fires were a constant and almost unpreventable danger in nineteenth-century urban America. Wood buildings, fabric drapes, errant candles, whale-oil lamps, primitive gas lighting, and the lack of effective firefighting equipment led to disastrous conflagrations that had nearly destroyed several major American cities. New York City, Philadelphia, Boston, and other urban centers had each suffered fantastic firestorms that spread from building to building and burned wide swaths through the hearts of their residential, commercial, and industrial districts.
Fires were so commonplace that Currier & Ives published numerous prints depicting American cities ablaze, meticulously handcoloring each calamitous scene with menacing orange and yellow flames. Fire was such a source of dread that long before the Civil War, Thomas Jefferson compared the antebellum conflict over slavery to a “fire bell in the night” that might burn down the American house.
Theater fires were especially dangerous. Wood stages, huge fabric curtains, footlights of open gas flames, and large audiences seated in close quarters with few exits could prove a deadly combination. Fifty-four years earlier, in 1811, a horrible fire in Richmond killed more than seventy-five playgoers. Those not consumed by flames or smoke leaped to their deaths, according to a rare surviving print of the disaster. In Washington, in 1862, just three years before, Ford’s Theatre had burned to the ground and a new one, guaranteed fireproof by the Ford brothers, arose in its place.
But no one fleeing Ford’s shouted the terrifying word “fire!” Instead they screamed out other strange words such as “murder,” “assassin,” “president,” and “dead” that pierced the din and could be heard above the general roar. Then random words formed into sentences: “Don’t let him escape.” “Catch him.” “It was John Wilkes Booth!” “Burn the theater!” “The president has been shot.” “President Lincoln is dead.” “No, he’s alive.”
On Pennsylvania Avenue and Tenth Street, two blocks south of Ford’s, Seaton Munroe, a treasury department employee, was walking with a friend when “a man running down 10th Street approached…wildly exclaiming: ‘My God, the President is killed at Ford’s Theatre!’” Monroe ran to Ford’s, where he found “evidences of the wildest excitement.”
In the Petersen house, Henry Safford, one of the renters, who shared a second-floor room facing Tenth Street, heard the disturbance outside. He was still awake, reading a book. From his window he had an unobstructed view of Ford’s Theatre and the street below. He saw the crowd and heard its anger and fear. Something was wrong. He raced downstairs, unlocked the front door, and descended the curving staircase that led from the door to the street. He walked past the tall gaslight lamp in front of his house, stepped into the dirt street and tried to push through the crowd. Halfway across, the mob blocked his progress to Ford’s. He could not take another step. He dared not fight his way through them. This crowd was angry, volatile, and potentially dangerous. But why?
Safford decided to return to the safety of the Petersen house. “Finding it impossible to go further, as everyone acted crazy or mad, I retreated to the steps of my house.” Before he disentangled himself from the mob, he heard their news: Abraham Lincoln had just been assassinated in Ford’s Theatre. He had been shot, the murderer had escaped, and the president was still inside.
An eyewitness from Ford’s reached nearby Grover’s Theatre by 10:40 P.M. In the audience was an employee from the War Department hardware shop, Mose Sandford:
I was at Grover’s…They were playing Aladdin or the Wonderful Lamp and had just commenced the fourth act…Miss German had just finished a song called “Sherman’s March Down to the Sea” and was about to repeat it when the door of the theatre was pushed violently open and a man rushed in exclaiming “turn out for Gods sake, the President has been shot in his private box at Ford’s Theatre.” He then rushed out. Everybody seemed glued to the spot I for one and I think I was one of the first who attempted to move…Everybody followed. I made straight for Ford’s and such another excited crowd I never before witnessed. I asked who did it and was informed Wilkes Booth. They were just bringing the President out when I arrived on the spot. The city was in one continued whirl of excitement. Crowds on every corner and 10th Street was one solid mass of excited men flourishing knives and revolvers and yelling “down with the traitors” instead of hunting for them.
Soon other boarders at Petersen’s were aroused by the disturbance. George Francis and his wife lived on the first floor, and their two big front parlor windows faced the theater. “We were about getting into bed,” Francis recalled. “Huldah had got into bed. I had changed my clothes and shut off the gas, when we heard such a terrible scream that we ran to the front window to see what it could mean.”
Perhaps it was nothing more than an intoxicated reveler celebrating the end of the war, they thought. George had seen a lot of that: “For a week before the whole city had been crazy over the fall of Richmond and the surrender of Lee’s army. Only the night before, the city was illuminated, and though it had been illuminated several times just before this time, it was more general, and was the grandest affair of the kind that ever took place in Washington.” But tonight was different. They looked out their windows: “We saw a great commotion—in the Theater—some running in, others hurrying out, and we could hear hundreds of voices mingled in the greatest confusion. Presently we heard some one say ‘the President is shot,’ when I hurried on my clothes and ran out, across the street, as they brought him out of the Theatre—Poor man! I could see as the gas light fell upon his face, that it was deathly pale, and that his eyes were closed.”
While George Francis, Mose Sandford, and more than a thousand other people loitered in the street, Henry Safford had returned to the Petersen house. He climbed the stairs and, at this moment, elevated above the heads of the people going mad in the streets, he observed from the first-floor porch the confusing scene. He noticed a knot of people at one of the theater doors and then watched as they pushed their way into the street. An army officer waved his unsheathed sword in the air, bellowing at people to step back and clear the way.
Someone suggested bringing Lincoln next door to Taltavul’s. No, the owner pleaded, don’t bring him in here. It must not be said later that the president of the United States died in a saloon. Someone else ran across the street and pounded on the door of a house to the south of Petersen’s. No one answered. In command of that little group was Dr. Charles A. Leale, a U.S. Army surgeon attending the play who was the first doctor to enter the president’s theater box.
Leale described the scene: “When we arrived to the street, I was asked to place him in a carriage and remove him to the White House. This I refused to do fearing that he would die as soon as he would be placed in an upright position. I said that I wished to take him to the nearest house, and place him comfortably in bed. We slowly crossed the street, there being a barrier of men on each side of an open passage towards the house. Those who went ahead of us reported that the house directly opposite was closed.”
Safford watched the little group that was carrying the body of Abraham Lincoln. They were not going to the president’s carriage. It looked like they wanted to bring him somewhere else, into a house on Tenth Street. “Where can we take him?” Safford heard one of the men shout.
Henry Safford seized a candle and held it up so the men could see it. “Bring him in here!” he yelled. He waved the light. “Bring him in here!” He caught their attention.
“I saw a man,” said Dr. Leale, “standing at the door of Mr. Petersen’s house holding a candle in his hand and beckoning us to enter.”
George Francis, still outside, watched in amazement: “They carried him on out into the street and towards our steps…The door was open and a young man belonging to the house standing on the steps told them to bring him in there.”
Lincoln’s bearers changed direction and, turning slightly to their right, walked northwest from Ford’s Theatre to the Petersen House. Huldah Francis watched them get closer and closer until they were right below her window. Transfixed by what she saw, “Huldah,” George Francis explained, “remained looking out of the window” to the last possible moment, “until she saw them bringing him up our steps when she ran to get on her clothes.” As she hurried to pull off her nightclothes and get dressed for the surprise visitors, the men, struggling to support Lincoln’s limp body in a prone position, carried him up the curving staircase. George Francis raced back to the house to rejoin his wife. When
THE PETERSEN HOUSE, WHERE LINCOLN DIED.
he got there, he expected to find Abraham Lincoln lying in his bed.
The gas streetlamp in front of the house, just a few feet from the stairs, allowed the whole crowd to see what was happening. One man, an artist named Carl Bersch who lived one house north of Petersen’s, watched from his room. “My balcony being twelve or fourteen feet above the sidewalk and street, I had a clear view of the scene, above the heads of the crowd. I recognized the lengthy form of the President by the flickering of the torches, and one large gas lamp post on the sidewalk. The tarrying at the curb and the slow, careful manner in which he was carried across the street, gave me ample time to make an accurate sketch of that particular scene.”
From his all-seeing perch, Bersch watched and drew while Henry Safford invited Leale’s party across the threshold.
“Take us to your best room,” Dr. Leale commanded. All eyes in the street looked up to that doorway as the president’s wounded, apparently unconscious body disappeared from sight, into William Petersen’s boardinghouse. The time was 11:00 P.M.
Safford led Dr. Leale and the men carrying Lincoln into the front hall. The confined space could barely accommodate the horizontal president and his bearers. On the right, a narrow staircase led up to the second floor. On the left was a closed door. Leale had asked for the “best room.” Obeying this criterion, Safford should have opened that door and burst into the two-room suite occupied by George and Huldah Francis. Their front parlor faced Tenth Street, and behind that room, separated from the parlor by folding wood doors, was a spacious bedroom. Safford clasped the handle, tried to turn it, but the door was locked. He then headed deeper into the dim hallway and stopped at a second door on the left, the one to the Francis’s bedroom. Also locked! Behind that door, Huldah Francis was dressing.
Just one room was left, the smallest one on the first floor. If it was locked, they would have to carry the president up the cramped staircase to the second floor. When Stafford reached the door, he rotated the knob. It was unlocked and the room was unoccupied. The boarder, Private William Clarke, had gone out for the evening to celebrate the end of the war. Leale ordered the bearers to carry Lincoln into the room and lay him on the bed.
Lincoln’s eyes betrayed the severity of his wound. Dr. Leale noticed it before they had undressed him: “When the President was first laid in bed a slight ecchymosis of blood was noticed on his left eye lid and the pupil of that eye was dilated, while the pupil of the right eye was contracted.”
A few minutes after the president was laid in Willie Clarke’s vacant bed, Mary Lincoln appeared in the doorway of the Petersen house. Her companions, Major Rathbone and Miss Harris, had pried her out of the theater box, helped her descend the same winding staircase that her husband had just been carried down, and escorted her through the wailing mob in the street and into the house. George Francis, now back home, witnessed her arrival: “She was perfectly frantic. ‘Where is my husband! Where is my husband!’ she cried, wringing her hands in the greatest anguish.”
As Mary Lincoln scurried down the hall, the billowing skirt of her silk dress swished against the banister post and the narrowly spaced walls. Moments later, she reached the back room where her husband was lying prone on a bed. Dr. Leale and two other physicians, Dr. Charles Sabin Taft and Dr. Albert F. Africanus King, who were also in the audience at Ford’s and who had rushed to the president’s box, were bent over Lincoln, preparing to strip him of his clothes and conduct the kind of thorough examination impossible on the floor of a theater.
George Francis recalled the moment when Mary entered the room: “As she approached his bedside she bent over him, kissing him again and again, exclaiming ‘How can it be so? Do speak to me!’”
Leale was reluctant to examine Lincoln in his wife’s presence: “I went to Mrs. Lincoln and asked her if she would have the kindness to step into the next room for a few minutes while we examined him, removed his clothes, and placed him more comfortably on the bed. Mrs. Lincoln readily assented.”
Henry Rathbone and Clara Harris escorted Mary to the front parlor and seated her on a large, wood-framed Victorian sofa upholstered with slick, shiny black horsehair. Rathbone felt light-headed. Moments after Booth shot the president, he stabbed the major in the arm. The wound was deep, and the cut would not stop bleeding. Rathbone sat down in the hall, and then he fainted. The alarming sight of his unconscious form lying faceup in the front hall of the Petersen house greeted the first visitors to the scene. He was in the way, and when he regained consciousness, he was picked up from the floor and delivered to his house. He would live.
The bed Lincoln was in was positioned in an awkward way, behind the door, shoved into the room’s northeast corner. The doctors dragged the bed away from the walls to create space for them to surround the president. Then they pushed all the chairs close to the bed. The lone gas jet protruding from the south wall cast weird, moody shadows and exaggerated the pained countenances of the men in the room. It was like a theatrical light raking across the stage to emphasize the drama. But this tableau, like Booth’s flamboyant scene at Ford’s less than half an hour earlier, was real. Leale ordered everyone except his two medical colleagues to leave the room. Then they stripped their patient and searched his body for additional wounds.
In the front parlor, Mary Lincoln was coming apart. When Clara Harris sat beside her on the sofa and tried to comfort her, Mary could not take her eyes off Clara’s bloodstained dress: “My husband’s blood!” she cried. “My husband’s blood.” The first lady did not know it was Henry Rathbone’s blood, not the president’s. The major’s wound had stained his fiancée’s frock. If Mary had examined her own dress, she would have been more horrified, because it did bear the stains of her husband’s blood.
As the crowd outside thickened and some in it approached the unguarded front door, Leale and company were in the back room, preoccupied with Lincoln. At that vulnerable moment, quick-thinking army junior officers and enlisted men, recognizing the danger, took the initiative and blocked the front doorway, commandeered the staircase, took positions in front of the house, and ordered the people back. Within fifteen minutes of his being carried into the Petersen house, the commander in chief was under the personal protection of the U.S. Army. All curiosity-seeking intermeddlers discovered in the house were ejected.
As soon as Maunsell Field, assistant to the secretary of the Treasury, arrived, he came face-to-face with Clara Harris: “The first person I met in the hall was Miss Harris. She informed me the President was dying but desired me not to communicate the fact to Mrs. Lincoln. I then entered the front parlor, where I found Mrs. Lincoln in a state of indecipherable agitation. She repeated over and over again, ‘Why didn’t he kill me? Why didn’t he kill me?’”
Mary Lincoln needed help fast. Clara Harris was not suited for that delicate psychological role—Mary hardly knew her. The first lady had few friends in Washington and now she asked for them all: Mary Jane Welles, wife of Navy Secretary Gideon Welles; Elizabeth Keckly, her black dressmaker and confidante; and Elizabeth Dixon, wife of Senator James Dixon. Messengers ran off in search of these women. While she waited for them to arrive at her side, Mary, in torment, sat on the sofa. The crowd was just outside the windows. She could hear their voices.
What happened at the Petersen house over the next eight and a half hours was no less than the transfiguration of Abraham Lincoln from mortal man to martyred saint.
Leale and the other physicians examined the president’s naked corpse: “After undressing him I found that his lower extremities were quite cold to a distance of several inches above his knees. I sent the Hospital Steward who had been of great assistance to us while removing him from the theatre, for bottles filled with hot water, hot blankets, etc. which we applied to his lower extremities.”
Leale knew this case was too big for him so he sent messengers to locate his military superiors: “I asked again to have the Surgeon General and also sent a special messenger for Surgeon D.W. Bliss then in command of Armory Square Hospital.”
Dr. Taft recalled that “about twenty-five minutes after the President was laid on the bed, Surgeon-General Joseph K. Barnes and Dr. Robert King Stone, the family physician, arrived and took charge of the case.” At once, Leale deferred to Stone: “I was introduced to Dr. Stone as having charge of him. I asked…if he would take charge of him [and] he said ‘I will.’ I then told Dr. Stone the nature of the wound and what had been done. The Surgeon General and Surgeon Crane arrived in a few minutes and made an examination of the wound.” Dr. Stone and Surgeon General Barnes approved of everything Leale had done. They agreed that Leale’s decisive actions had saved Lincoln from immediate death at Ford’s Theatre. As Charles S. Taft testified, “It was owing to Dr. Leale’s quick judgement in instantly placing the almost moribund President in a recumbent position the moment he saw him in the box, that Mr. Lincoln did not expire in the theater within ten minutes from fatal syncope.”
Leale recalled: “About 11p.m. the right eye began to protrude, which was rapidly followed by an increase of the ecchymosis until it encircled the orbit extending above the supra orbital ridge and below the infra orbital foramen…The wound was kept open by the Surgeon General by means of a silver probe and as the President was placed diagonally on the bed his head was held supported in its position by Surgeon Crane and Dr. Taft.”
All the doctors agreed with Leale’s on-the-spot diagnosis at Ford’s Theatre. This was no longer a medical emergency. There were no remedies or treatments, and nothing could save Lincoln. By midnight, it had become a death watch. More doctors arrived. They were superfluous, but out of professional courtesy, they were given the privilege of playacting in a charade of treatment: examining the wound, taking the pulse, and making somber, redundant, and useless pronouncements that in future would permit them to boast, “Yes, I was there. I was one of the doctors at the Petersen house.” And for years after, many of them did.
The death pageant for Lincoln had begun. It started while the president still lived, as soon as the doctors, in their collective wisdom, gave up all hope. There was nothing more they could do. An operation was impossible. Cranial surgery was in its infancy during the Civil War, and no doctor would risk removing a bullet embedded so deeply in the brain. Booth’s Deringer pistol had performed superbly. The wound was fatal, the damage irreversible. Dr. Leale had known this while his patient still lay on the floor of the president’s box at Ford’s Theatre. Now the diagnosis was unanimous. The president would die. Indeed, some were surprised he was not already dead.
The doctors agreed that from then on, they would not tinker with Lincoln’s body—no more brandy poured down his throat to see whether he would swallow it or almost choke to death; no more fruitless Nélaton-probe thrusts through the bullet puncture in his skull into his brain to trace, for curiosity’s sake, the wound tunnel and locate the missile. No, all they would do now was watch and wait.
No one at the Petersen house was aware of this yet, but a second assassin had struck in Washington that night. At 10:15 P.M., a crazed man with superhuman strength had invaded the home of Secretary of State William H. Seward. The assailant stabbed and slashed Seward—who was bedridden from injuries he had suffered during a recent carriage accident—almost to death, wounded a veteran army sergeant serving as Seward’s nurse, and knifed a State Department messenger. The unknown killer had also, while beating Seward’s son Frederick with a pistol, crushed his victim’s skull and rendered him senseless. Seward’s home was off Lafayette Park near the White House, just a few blocks from Ford’s Theatre.
Runners carried the news of the attack on Seward to Secretary of War Edwin M. Stanton and Secretary of the Navy Gideon Welles, who were at their homes preparing for bed and had not heard about the assassination of the president. Each man raced by carriage to Seward’s mansion. There, they first heard rumors of another attack, this one upon the president at Ford’s Theatre. Together, Stanton and Welles drove a carriage to Tenth Street and arrived at the Petersen house before midnight. Stanton barreled his way through the crowded hallway. Reeling at the sight of the wounded president, the secretary of war concluded that Lincoln was a dead man. There was nothing he could do for him. Except work. There was much to do. Stanton steeled himself for the long night ahead. He would not spend the night mourning at Lincoln’s bedside.
Welles volunteered to play that role. As news of the assassination spread through Washington, many important public officials made pilgrimages to the Petersen house. Welles decided that at least one man should remain, never to leave Lincoln’s side until the end, to bear witness to his suffering. Stanton could lead the investigation of the crime, interview witnesses, send telegrams, launch the manhunt for Booth and his accomplices, and take precautions to prevent more assassinations later that night.
Welles, on the other hand, would lead the death vigil. And he would record in his diary what he saw: “The giant sufferer lay extended diagonally across the bed, which was not long enough for him. He had been stripped of his clothes. His large arms were of a size which one would scarce have expected from his spare form. His features were calm and striking. I have never seen them appear to better advantage, than for the first hour I was there. The room was small and overcrowded. The surgeons and members of the Cabinet were as many as should have been in the room, but there were many more, and the hall and other rooms in front were full.”
Could it be, Welles wondered, that something the president had said at the White House earlier that day prefigured the assassination? Had Lincoln’s strange dream foretold this tragedy? At the 11:00 A.M. cabinet meeting, the president said that he expected important news
THE PETERSEN HOUSE DEATHBED VIGIL, SKETCHED BY AN ARTIST FROM THE ARMY MEDICAL MUSEUM.
soon. He had experienced, the previous night, a recurring dream that he believed always foretold the coming of great events. Welles preserved the remarkable story in his diary. Lincoln told his cabinet that “he had last night the usual dream which he had preceding nearly every great and important event of the War…the dream…was always the same.” Welles asked Lincoln to describe it.” [I] seemed,” the president recounted, “to be in some singular, indescribable vessel…moving with great rapidity towards an indefinite shore.”
The president said he had this dream preceding the bombardment of Fort Sumter and the battles of Bull Run, Antietam, Gettysburg, Vicksburg, and more. Had a premonition of his own assassination come to Lincoln in a dream? As Gideon Welles sat beside his dying chief, he did not know that, several days earlier, Lincoln had dreamed a far more vivid nightmare of death.
By midnight the Petersen house had become the cynosure of official Washington. Like a major planet exerting an invisible but irresistible gravitational force, the brick home attracted the luminaries who orbited the national capital. Throughout the night, as word spread that the president had suffered a fatal wound, dozens of people—generals, army officers, cabinet secretaries, members of Congress, government officials, and personal friends—made pilgrimages to Tenth Street to augment the bedside vigil and to behold for the last time the stillliving form of Abraham Lincoln. Throughout the night and into the early morning, a steady procession of mourners went to and from the Petersen house. Some, content to gaze upon the president’s face for a few minutes, left shortly after they had done so. Others remained and would not leave until the end. They wanted to watch Abraham Lincoln die.
Elizabeth Dixon was the first of Mary’s friends to arrive, and the gruesome scene horrified her: “On a common bedstead covered with an army blanket and a colored woolen coverlid lay stretched the murdered President his life blood slowly ebbing away. The officers of the government were there & no lady except Miss Harris whose dress was spattered with blood as was Mrs. Lincoln’s who was frantic with grief calling him to take her with him, to speak one word to her…I held and supported her as well as I could & twice we persuaded her to go into another room.”
Mary never saw many of the visitors who came to the Petersen house that night. The door on the left side of the front hall that opened to the Francises’ front parlor remained half-closed through much of the vigil. Most visitors sped past it on their way to the room at the end of the hall. Some, out of respect, did not wish to intrude upon Mary’s privacy and grief. Others, aware of her unpredictable volatility and proneness to anger, avoided her. After Edwin M. Stanton arrived and decided to occupy the Francis bedroom as his headquarters, and he shut the folding wood doors dividing that space from the front parlor, Mary was sealed off from the activity in the rest of the house. For most of the night, and through the early morning hours of the next day, Mary remained in semiseclusion, converting the front parlor into her private chamber of solitude, mourning, and, at times, derangement.
For Tad Lincoln, brought home from Grover’s Theatre by the White House doorkeeper, the night of April 14 was filled with terrors. By the time Tad got there, Robert Lincoln had already left to join his parents. Without his mother or older brother to comfort Tad, or even explain to him what had happened to his father, the frightened little boy spent the night alone with servants in the near-empty mansion. All he knew was that a crazy man had burst into Grover’s Theatre, screaming that President Lincoln had been shot, and that the theater manager had also announced the disaster from the stage.
Until the next morning, when Mary and Robert returned to the White House and informed him that his beloved “Pa” was dead, Tad relived the fear and pain he had suffered three years before, when his best companion, his brother Willie, had died. During the long Petersen house death vigil, not once did Robert or Mary go to Tad—even though the White House was just a five-minute carriage ride away and the coachman Francis Burke was ready to whip the president’s carriage through the Tenth Street mob and gallop there. Nor did Robert or Mary order a messenger to retrieve Tad and carry him to the Petersen house and his dying father. It was the first troubling sign of how, in the days to come, Mary’s crippling descent into a mad, gothic, self-absorbed grief caused her to neglect the needs of her inconsolable and lonely little boy.
When Senator Charles Sumner, never close to the president but a confidant of the first lady, heard the news he dismissed it as a wild rumor. When a messenger burst in on him and blurted out, “Mr. Lincoln is assassinated in the theater. Mr. Seward is murdered in his bed. There’s murder in the streets,” Sumner said he did not believe the news about the president or the attack on Secretary of State Seward.
“Young man,” he said, chastising the messenger, “be moderate in your statements. Tell us what happened.”
“I have told you what has happened,” the man said insistently, and then repeated his story.
When the senator arrived at the Petersen house, he sat down at the head of the bed, held Lincoln’s right hand, and spoke to him. One of the doctors said, “It’s of no use, Mr. Sumner—he can’t hear you. He is dead.”
The senator retorted: “No, he isn’t dead. Look at his face; he is breathing.”
That may be, the doctor admitted, but “it will never be anything more than this.”
Sumner remembered the night’s other victim and asked Major General Halleck, army chief of staff, to drive him to the secretary of state’s mansion. There he found Mrs. Seward sitting on the stairs between the second and third floors. She seized him with both hands and spoke: “Charles Sumner, they have murdered my husband, they have murdered my boy.” Sumner hoped it was not true. He knew firsthand that it was possible to survive a vicious assault. Before the war, a pro-slavery Southern congressman, Preston Brooks, had almost caned Sumner to death in a brutal surprise attack on the Senate floor. Trapped by his desk, Sumner could not rise to fight back or escape and he suffered grievous head wounds. He lived, but recuperation was long and painful, and he did not return to the Senate for three years.
Many people tried to get inside the Petersen house that night. They pressed against the front wall and stood on tiptoe to peek through the front windows, but the panes were set too high above street level to allow a clear view into the front parlor. Other people strained toward the stairs, tempted to ascend them and try to get inside. At any moment the crowd might have gone wild, with hundreds of people forcing their way through the doorway. The curved shape of the public staircase and its protective iron railing served as a barricade against frontal assault, impeding any mob attempt to rush the house head-on.
News of the assassination stunned Washington. The local New York Times correspondent said it best: “A stroke from Heaven laying the whole of the city in instant ruins could not have startled us as did the word that broke from Ford’s Theatre a half hour ago that the President had been shot.” The Petersen house had become an irresistible magnet, drawing people from all over the city. Soon Major General C. C. Augur, commander of the military district of Washington, and Colonel Thomas Vincent arrived and became impromptu doorkeepers. They admitted only a privileged few into 453 Tenth Street. They denied entry to many: citizen strangers, minor government officials, low-ranking military officers who had no business there, and newspaper reporters.
The motives of the callers varied. Some wanted to express their love for the president. Others wanted to help. Many sought a small place in history—to see the wounded president, to claim they had stood beside his deathbed, to boast to their children and grandchildren that they had been there, or, in the case of the journalists, to be the ones who first reported what happened there. The gatekeepers turned almost all of them away. Indeed, not one journalist made it past them.
Sometime around 2:00 A.M., the doctors decided to probe Lincoln’s brain for the bullet. Dr. Leale described what happened:
The Hospital Steward who had been sent for a Nelaton’s probe arrived and an examination of the wound was made by the Surgeon General who introduced it to a distance of about two and a half inches when it came in contact with a foreign substance which laid across the tract of the ball, this being easily passed the probe was introduced further when it again touched a hard substance which was at first supposed to be the ball but the porcelain bulb of the probe did not show the stain of lead upon it after its withdrawal it was generally supposed to be another piece of loose bone. The probe was introduced a second time, and the ball was supposed to be distinctly felt by the Surgeon General, Dr. Stone and Dr. Crane. After this second exploration nothing further was done except to keep the opening free from coagula, which if allowed would soon produce signs of increased compression. The breathing became profoundly stertorous, and the pulse more feeble and irregular.
Throughout the night, Dr. Leale watched Mary stagger from the front parlor into the bedroom: “Mrs. Lincoln accompanied by Mrs. Senator Dixon came into the room several times during the course of the night. Mrs. Lincoln at one time exclaiming, ‘Oh, that my Taddy might see his Father before he died’ and then she fainted and was carried from the room.”
Mary’s pleadings moved Secretary of the Interior John P. Usher: “She implored him to speak to her [and] said she did not want to go to the theatre that night but that he thought he must go…She called for little Tad [and] said she knew he would speak to him because he loved him so well, and after indulging in dreadful incoherences for some time she was finally persuaded to leave the room.”
One of the last Petersen house visitors was Benjamin Brown French, commissioner of public buildings and grounds. Operating from an office in the U.S. Capitol, French was in charge of all the major public federal buildings in Washington, including the White House and the Capitol. A larger-than-life personality and longtime veteran of the Washington political and social scene, he had, for decades, known everyone of importance in the national capital. Unbeknownst to them, he had recorded his impressions in a secret diary.
President Franklin Pierce, a friend of Jefferson Davis, had appointed French commissioner in 1853 but forced him out in 1855. Once Lincoln arrived in Washington in 1861, the savvy veteran lobbied for reappointment. He secured several inconclusive meetings with the president and Mary Lincoln, but the president nominated someone else. When the Senate failed to confirm that appointment, Lincoln, after dangling French in suspense, finally signed his commission on January 29, 1862. Although French owed his position to the president, he disliked the first lady and clashed frequently with Mary over her misuse of White House expense accounts. On April 14, French went to bed around 10:00 P.M., and during the night no one had thought to send a messenger to summon him to the Petersen house. French slept well until daylight: “I awoke and saw that the streetlamps had not been extinguished. I lay awake, perhaps 1/2 an hour, & seeing that they were still burning, I arose and saw a sentry passing before my house. I thought something wrong had happened, so I dressed & went down & opened the front door.”
Downtown at the Petersen house, Dr. Leale knew Lincoln would not live much longer: “As morning dawned it became quite evident that he was gradually sinking and at several times his pulse could not be counted two or three feeble pulsations being felt and followed by an intermission when not the slightest movement of the artery could be felt. The inspiration now became very prolonged accompanied by a guttural sound. At 6:50am the respirations ceased for some time and all eagerly looked at their watches until the profound silence was disturbed by a prolonged inspiration, which was soon followed by a sonorous expiration.”
As Benjamin French stood in front of his house on Capitol Hill, a soldier came along and said, “Are not the doings of last night dreadful?” French asked what he meant by that. The soldier replied, “Have you not heard?” and told French that the president had been shot in Ford’s Theatre “and Secretary Seward’s throat cut in his residence.” French hurried to the East Front of the Capitol, ordered the building closed, and sped to the Petersen house. There he found Lincoln, who was still alive, in the back bedroom. “[He] was surrounded by the members of his cabinet, physicians, Generals, Members of Congress, etc. I stood at his bedside a short time. He was breathing very heavily, & I was told, what I could myself see, that there was no hope for him.”
French gazed at his wounded president and patron with a mixture of personal and professional concern. If Lincoln died, he would have much to do in the next few days. It would be his responsibility to decorate all the public buildings in the city with the appropriate symbols of mourning. As he hovered over the deathbed in the crowded little bedroom, perhaps he already wondered where, in all of Washington, could he hope to find enough black mourning crepe and bunting.
French left Lincoln’s bedside and entered the front parlor, where he found Mary and Robert Lincoln. “I took Mrs. Lincoln by the hand, and she made some exclamation indicating the deepest agony of mind. I also shook hands with Robert, who was crying audibly.” French noticed three women who sat near Mary Lincoln: her friend Elizabeth Dixon, wife of Senator James Dixon of Connecticut; Elizabeth’s sister, Mrs. Mary Kinney; and Kinney’s daughter Constance.
After a few minutes somebody asked French to take the president’s carriage and fetch Mary Jane Welles, wife of the secretary of the navy and another of Mary Lincoln’s friends.
When he arrived at the Welles home, he could not persuade Mary Jane to come out. “Mrs. Welles was not up, & a lady at the house said she was too unwell to go, so I returned to the carriage, but, before we could get away, someone said from the upper window that Mrs. Welles would go. I returned to the house and waited for her to dress and take a cup of tea & some toast, & then the carriage took us round to the President’s House—I, supposing she was to go there and be ready to see Mrs. Lincoln when she should get home. She thought I was mistaken, and that she was to go 10th Street.” French got out of the carriage, ordered the coachman to drive Mary Jane Welles to the Petersen house, and entered the White House. He instructed the staff to close the house, and then he went home to Capitol Hill for breakfast.
Lincoln was close to death now, and Mary returned to the bedroom. Dr. Taft recalled the scene: “Her last visit was most painful. As she entered the chamber and saw how the beloved features were distorted, she fell fainting to the floor. Restoratives were applied, and she was supported to the bedside, where she frantically addressed the dying man. ‘Love,’ she exclaimed, ‘live but one moment to speak to me once—to speak to our children.’” Secretary of the Treasury Hugh McCulloch said that Mary Lincoln’s presence “pierced every heart and brought tears to every eye.”
Elizabeth Dixon witnessed Mary’s collapse: “Just as the day was struggling with the dim candles in the room we went in again. Mrs. Lincoln must have noticed a change for the moment she looked at him she fainted and fell upon the floor. I caught her in my arms & held her to the window which was open…She again seated herself by the President, kissing him and calling him every endearing name—The surgeons counting every pulsation & noting every breath gradually growing less & less—They then asked her to go into the adjoining room.”
Dr. Leale noted how Mary’s cries unnerved Edwin M. Stanton: “As Mrs. Lincoln sat on a chair by the side of the bed with her face to her husband’s, his breathing became very stertorous and the loud, unnatural noise frightened her in her exhausted, agonized condition. She sprang up suddenly with a piercing cry and fell fainting to the floor. Secretary Stanton, hearing her cry, came in from the adjoining room and with raised arms called out loudly, ‘Take that woman out and do not let her in again.’ Mrs. Lincoln was helped up kindly and assisted in a fainting condition from the room. Secretary Stanton’s order was obeyed and Mrs. Lincoln did not see her husband again before he died.”
Jefferson Davis awoke on the morning of April 15 ignorant of last night’s bloody crimes in Washington. There was no direct telegraph line between the capital and Greensboro. Davis did not know John Wilkes Booth and had not sent him to kill Lincoln. Davis did not know that Lincoln had been marked for death, that Booth had met with Confederate secret agents in Montreal, Canada, that the actor had assembled a list of Confederate operatives in Maryland and Virginia to help him, and that one of his soldiers, Lewis Powell, a brave combat veteran captured at Gettysburg, had joined Booth’s plot and nearly killed the secretary of state. Nor did Davis know that Booth was on the run, fleeing for the heart of the Confederacy, the prey of what would soon become a nationwide manhunt.
That morning Davis had no idea that, last night in the Union capital, events beyond his knowledge or control would now reach out to affect his fate. Within hours his longtime archenemy, Vice President Andrew Johnson, an implacable foe of the planter class, would ascend to the presidency. The South could expect no mercy from him. Worse, this morning’s newspapers accused Davis of being the mastermind behind the great crime. Many editorials demanded his death by hanging or horrible torture. A patriotic envelope, published as a souvenir, carried a blood-red vignette of Davis bound on a scaffold facing the guillotine. The stakes were higher now.
All of this had happened without Davis knowing about any of it. And for several more days, he would not know that Lincoln was dead or that the government of the United States would soon scheme to charge him with murder and put him on trial for his life. Lincoln’s murder was like a violent storm on a distant horizon, its mighty thunderclap taking time to travel a great distance before it caught up with Davis.
Davis did evacuate Greensboro on April 15 but the move wasn’t prompted by news of Lincoln’s assassination. It was coincidence and the overall military situation. Secretary of the Navy Mallory tried to convince Davis that he should do more than relocate the temporary capital—he should flee the country: “It was evident to every dispassionate mind that no further military stand could be made…But it was no less evident that Mr. Davis was extremely reluctant to quit the country at all, and that he would make no effort to leave it so long as he could find an organized body of troops, however small, in the field. He shrank from the idea of abandoning any body of men who might still be found willing to strike for the cause, and gave little attention to the question of his personal safety.”
If Davis’s staff had known that Lincoln had just been murdered, they might have been even more forceful in demanding that Davis flee to Mexico, the Bahamas, or Europe to escape the North’s vengeance. But they did not know and went about their packing up for the next stage of their journey south.
They would no longer enjoy the luxury of railroad transportation. There were no trains at Greensboro, so that afternoon Davis; Colonels Harrison, Lubbock, and Wood; and some of the cabinet members rode horses, while other dignitaries climbed aboard wagons and ambulances. “Heavy rains had recently fallen,” Burton Harrison wrote, “the earth was saturated with water, the soil was a sticky red clay, the mud was awful, and the road, in places, almost impracticable.” The presidential party plotted their route and planned to spend successive nights at Jamestown, Lexington, Salisbury, and Concord, where they would be guests of Victor C. Barringer.
Rough travel conditions would not intimidate Davis. He was not a creature softened by effete, cocooned salons. He was ready for the physical challenge that lay ahead. He had endured journeys far more arduous than this journey away from Richmond promised to be. As a seven-year-old child, he rode a pony 500 miles up the Natchez Trace from Natchez, Mississippi, to Nashville, Tennessee, where he met General Andrew Jackson; in 1833, while an army officer, he and his unit of dragoons (a heavy, mounted cavalry) traveled 450 miles through difficult territory to a remote post on the Arkansas frontier; in 1834, Davis and the dragoons made a 500-mile round trip from their fort into Comanche territory, enduring 100-degree heat, exhaustion, and dehydration; in 1845, Jefferson and Varina traveled from Vicksburg to Washington, D.C., through the northern route into Ohio, where severe winter weather and ice on the Ohio River required them to continue by sled; he traveled to Mexico for the war, experienced hard travels there, made a 1,000-mile trip home to Mississippi, and then returned to Mexico; in December 1862, as president of the Confederacy, he embarked on a twenty-seven day, 3,000-mile inspection tour of the South; later, he made other long, wartime journeys through his embattled country; and in Richmond he often went on dangerous, 20-mile night rides on horseback to visit Lee’s headquarters and other military posts. A lifetime of difficult journeys had accustomed Davis to the hardships of the road.
At the Petersen house, the Reverend Dr. Gurley called everyone around the deathbed. “Let us pray,” he said as all present in the room kneeled. “He offered a most solemn and impressive prayer,” recalled Dr. Leale. “We arose to witness the struggle between life and death.” Abraham Lincoln drew his last breath at 7:21 and 55 seconds. At 7:22 and 10 seconds his heart stopped beating. He was dead.
No one knew it yet, but the mourning that began in the back room of a boardinghouse in downtown Washington would continue well beyond Lincoln’s death. What began there could not be contained. Soon, the assassination would set in motion strange forces, a national phenomenon, the likes of which America had never seen. In the days to come, the footsteps of millions of Americans would join the small procession that began, in the words of Walt Whitman, that “moody, tearful night” when a handful of their fellow citizens made a pilgrimage to look upon their dying president. By morning almost sixty people had come and gone from the Petersen house.
Dr. Taft recalled that “immediately after death, the Rev. Dr. Gurley made a fervent prayer, inaudible, at times, from the sobs of those present. As the surgeons left the house, the clergyman was again praying in the front parlor. Poor Mrs. Lincoln’s moans, which came through the half-open door, were distressing to hear. She was supported by her son Robert, and was soon after taken to her carriage. As she reached the front door she glanced at the theater opposite, and exclaimed several times, ‘Oh, that dreadful house! That dreadful house!’”
Lincoln’s death was not the last sadness to haunt the Petersen house. By 1870, William and Anna Petersen’s two youngest children, Anne and Julia, had died, and on June 18, 1871, the Metropolitan Police found William Petersen lying unconscious on the grounds of the Smithsonian. He had poisoned himself. He was taken to the hospital, where he died the same day from an overdose of the drug laudanum. Before succumbing, Petersen told the police he had been taking the substance “once or twice a week” for several years. The coroner ruled his death accidental. He was fifty-four years old. Given the notoriety of his house six years earlier, the Washington Evening Star noted his sad end.
Exactly four months later, Anna Petersen died. Her body was laid out in the house, and the funeral was held two days later. Just ten days after her funeral, the firm of Green & Williams sold at public auction the entire contents of the house. An ad in that day’s Evening Star stated that the furnishings would be sold on the premises. Crowds assembled outside the Petersen house, just as they had on that terrible night six and one-half years before. Once again, strangers crowded the halls and first-floor rooms. The auctioneer led the customers and the curiosity seekers from room to room. In the front parlor, he sold “1 horsehair covered sofa” for $15.25. The price was high, up to three times the value for a like item. But this was the sofa where a shattered, sobbing Mary Lincoln spent most of the night of April 14 and the morning of April 15, 1865. In the back bedroom, the auctioneer put up a lot listed in the inventory as “1 bedstead & 2 Mattresses,” appraised at $7. The bidding soared to $80, the highest price paid for any item in the house. This was the bed where Lincoln died.
The bed, along with most of the other contents of the death room, including the chairs, the washstand, and even the gaslight jet that was mounted to the wall, were purchased by Colonel William H. Boyd of Syracuse, New York, for his son Andrew, a young Lincoln enthusiast and early collector who had published, in 1870, a pioneering bibliography of early writings about the president.
In 1889 and 1890, Andrew Boyd corresponded with the Chicago candy millionaire Charles F. Gunther, an obsessive collector who would stop at almost nothing to acquire unique historical treasures like the Confederate Libby Prison in Richmond, which he purchased, dismantled stone by stone, and reassembled for the 1893 Columbian Exposition in Chicago. Gunther decided he had to possess Lincoln’s deathbed and the accompanying furniture and paid Boyd one hundred thousand dollars for the bed alone.
In the 1920s, the Chicago Historical Society acquired Gunther’s hoard and constructed an exact replica of the room in which Abraham Lincoln died, right down to the reproduction wallpaper and the prints hanging on the walls. It was a sensational attraction, and for decades awestruck Chicago schoolchildren pushed a button that triggered a dramatic sound recording which, from a hidden loudspeaker, narrated the events of April 14 and 15, 1865. Alas, several years ago, the museum broke up the riveting display, dismissing it as no longer in fashion.
Stanton ordered the army to remove Lincoln’s corpse from the Petersen house and transport it to the White House. Soldiers brought a wood box and placed the president’s body inside it. They carried the makeshift coffin into the street and placed it in a horse-drawn hearse. Major General C. C. Augur, head of the military district of Washington, D.C., and commander of the presidential escort, ordered all officers in the procession, including General D. H. Rucker, Colonel Louis H. Pelouze, and Captains Finley Anderson, C. Baker, J. H. Crowell, and D. C. Thomas, to march on foot and not ride horses. It was as if they were preparing to enter a battle. During the Civil War, officers, even generals, often led their troops forward into combat on foot, with swords drawn. They walked as a sign of respect for their fallen commander. They removed their hats and marched bareheaded. In the field officers always wore their hats into combat. Now they doffed them as an additional sign of deference.
Augur gave the command and the escort got under way. There was no band or drum corps to beat the slow tempo of the age-old military funeral march. The officers set the pace with the thud of their own steps on the dirt street. Corporal James Tanner, who had transcribed in shorthand the testimony Stanton had extracted from witnesses through the night, had gone home after the deathbed climax. About two hours after Lincoln died, Tanner was back in his room in the house one door south of the Petersen house. He looked outside. “I stepped to the window and saw the coffin of the dead President being placed in the hearse which passed up Tenth street to F and thus to the White House. As they passed with measured tread and arms reversed, my hand involuntarily went to my head in salute as they started on their long, long journey back to the prairies and the hearts he knew and loved so well, the mortal remains of the greatest American of all time.”
On the street the scene was less solemn. Dr. Charles Sabin Taft had lingered at the Petersen house for two hours because he had not wanted to leave while the body still lay there. When the army officers and soldiers carried Lincoln’s coffin outside, into view of the immense crowd, Taft followed them out the front door into the street, where he witnessed a violent, horrifying scene: “A dismal rain was falling on a dense mass of horror-stricken people stretching from F Street to Pennsylvania Avenue. As they made a passage for the hearse bearing the beloved dead, terrible execrations and mutterings were heard.”
But not everyone in that crowd loved Abraham Lincoln. A few rebel sympathizers yelled insults at the president as the coffin passed them by, and enraged mourners turned on them and even killed some. According to Dr. Taft, “one man who ventured a shout for Jeff Davis was set upon and nearly torn to pieces by the infuriated crowd.”
Noah Brooks did not learn of the assassination until the morning. He could not believe it—yesterday morning he had been at the White House having breakfast with the president. He began walking the streets of the gloomy capital, taking in the mood of the people and the sights of a city draping itself in mourning clothes. He felt himself drawn to the place of the great crime: “Wandering aimlessly up F Street toward Ford’s Theatre, we met a tragical procession. It was headed by a group of army officers walking bareheaded, and behind them, carried tenderly by a company of soldiers, was the bier of the dead President, covered with the flag of the Union, and accompanied by an escort of soldiers who had been on duty at the house where Lincoln died. As the little cortege passed down the street to the White House, every head was uncovered, and profound silence which prevailed was broken only by sobs and by the sound of the measured tread of those who bore the martyred President back to the home which he had so lately quitted full of life, hope, and cheer.”
Now that Lincoln’s body had been taken away, the drama at the Petersen house was done. The house was empty now, but for the Petersen family and its tenants, and the evidence of what had happened there: bloody handkerchiefs, pillowcases, sheets, and towels, plus water pitchers, mustard plasters, and liquor bottles. And muddy
THE BLOODY DEATHBED SHORTLY AFTER LINCOLN’S BODY WAS REMOVED.
footprints. Disgusted by the mess made of his house, William Petersen collected some of the stained linens and heaved them out a rear window. The front door faced east, and the morning light flooded the hallway all the way to the back bedroom. Two of Petersen’s tenants, Henry and Julius Ulke, brothers and artists, entered the empty death chamber. Bloodstained pillows, sheets, and a coverlet—later someone stole it and it was never seen again—lay on the bed. They were still wet. The Ulkes recognized a historic opportunity. They retrieved Henry’s camera, set up its tripod at the southwest end of the room, and aimed the lens at the bed. To compose the best possible photo, they pushed the bed back to its original position in the northeast corner of the room. Henry Ulke uncovered the big lens and exposed his glass-plate negative for up to one minute, saturating it with the scene. Then he made one or two more plates.
Why did the Ulkes photograph the death room? Being commercial photographers, they must have intended to print multiple albumen-paper copies from their negatives and market them to the public. Soon, the Washington papers would be filled with advertisements offering photos of Lincoln, and John Wilkes Booth, for sale. An exclusive photograph of Abraham Lincoln’s deathbed made shortly after his body had been removed, before the bloody sheets and pillows had been taken away, would be a commercial coup. Such an image would transport viewers into the Petersen house and allow them to imagine what it must have been like to be at the dying president’s side.
Strangely, no evidence survives to suggest that the Ulkes ever attempted to market the photograph. No contemporary newspapers copied it as a woodcut, no carte de visite examples with letterpressprinted captions—a telltale sign of commercial exploitation—have ever been found, and only two or three original prints from the negatives have been located, the first one not until almost a century later.
Several artists sketched the death room, several others made oil paintings, and printmakers published more than fifteen different artworks depicting Lincoln in his deathbed, surrounded by mourners. Perhaps the Ulkes decided that their photograph of the empty bed was too stark and graphic, unlike the more romanticized prints that sanitized Lincoln’s death. In the days to come, Stanton would suppress other photographs connected to the assassination, and it is possible he learned of this one and judged it too shocking a memento. Seaton Munroe might not have approved of the graphic image. In the days after the assassination, he complained about the lust for blood relics: “Even then I could fancy the relic hunter plying his vocation, and bruing his ready handkerchief in the clotted blood, that he might preserve, exhibit, and mayhap peddle his gruesome trophy! I have lately seen in print an account of the preservation and partition of the blood-stained dress of Laura Keene.”
BLOOD RELIC: A PILLOW FROM LINCOLN’S DEATHBED.
William J. Ferguson, a prior visitor to the Petersen house, had seen the spindle bed in the photograph before. He returned to the house on the night of April 14. “I joined Mr. Petersen’s son—a lad with whom I chummed; and went with him through the basement of the house to the stairs at the rear. Climbing them, we came to the floor of the room where Mr. Lincoln had been taken. It was a room formerly occupied by a Mr. Matthews, still a member of our company. I had delivered parts during the season to him and others in the room. On one of these visits I saw John Wilkes Booth lying and smoking a pipe on the same bed in which Mr. Lincoln died.”
The complete story of the Ulkes and their remarkable photograph remains a mystery. In an odd twist, a few years after the assassination, Henry Ulke painted an official oil portrait of Edwin M. Stanton that hangs today in Washington at the National Portrait Gallery.
Soon other artists created assassination oil paintings, including the first, Carl Bersch, who painted the scene of Lincoln being carried across the street from Ford’s to the Petersen house, to “make it the center and outstanding part of the large painting I shall make, using the sketches I made earlier in the evening, as an appropriate background. A fitting title for the picture would, I think, be ‘Lincoln Borne by Loving Hands on the Fatal Night of April 14, 1865.’ Altogether, it was the most tragic and impressive scene I have ever witnessed.” Once in the collection of the White House, this haunting painting was transferred to the National Park Service in 1978. The morbid work, judged unsuitable for the eyes of future presidents, made its way back to Ford’s Theatre, where it hung for almost thirty years until it was banished to storage.