CHAPTER FIVE
Mary Lincoln had arrived at the White House about two hours ahead of her husband. She had not slept all night, but this was not a place where she could find rest. Elizabeth Dixon had accompanied her from the Petersen house. “At nine o’clock we took her home to that house so changed for her and the Doctor said she must go immediately to bed. She refused to go into any of the rooms she had previously occupied, ‘not there! Oh not there’ she said—and so we took her to one she had arranged for the President for a summer room to write in—I remained till eleven o’clock (twelve hours from the time I went to see her) and then left her a lonely widow, everything changed for her, since they left so happily the evening previous.”
When the cortege arrived from Tenth Street, Mary did not gather herself, go downstairs, and receive the president with honors as he entered his White House for the last time. Lincoln’s army tendered those honors without her. Abraham Lincoln’s homecoming at 11:00 A.M. on April 15, 1865, was the most dramatic moment in the Executive
AN EARLY BROADSIDE ANNOUNCING LINCOLN’S DEATH.
Mansion’s history since it was burned by the British in the War of 1812.
Although Mary refused to bear witness, Mrs. Dixon did: “As I started to go down the stairs I met the cortege bringing up the remains of the murdered President.” Shocked by the unexpected encounter, Dixon watched as soldiers dressed in dark, Union-blue frock coats carried the flag-draped pine coffin slowly up the grand staircase.
The soldiers carried the temporary coffin into the Prince of Wales Room, also known as the Guest Room, removed the flag that draped the box, and unscrewed the lid. They lifted the body and laid it on wooden boards supported by wood trestles. They unwrapped from his corpse the bloody flag that shrouded him. At the Petersen house, his clothes—suit coat, torn shirt, pants, plus pocket contents—had been tossed in the coffin. Somebody had forgotten his boots; they were still under Willie Clarke’s bed. His tie was also missing—somebody had already taken it. For the moment Lincoln lay naked on the improvised table, which looked like a carpenter’s bench. He had been dead for less than five hours, and his body was still cooling.
The physicians and witnesses were waiting. Present were Dr. Joseph K. Barnes, surgeon general; Dr. Charles H. Crane, assistant surgeon general; Dr. H. M. Notson, assistant surgeon; Dr. Charles S. Taft, assistant acting surgeon; Dr. Robert King Stone, the Lincolns’ family doctor; Dr. Janvier J. Woodward, assistant surgeon; and Dr. Joseph Curtis, assistant surgeon. Dr. Charles Leale had declined the invitation to watch them cut open the body of the man whose life he had tried to save. Civilian observers included Lincoln’s friend and former Illinois senator Orville Hickman Browning and Benjamin Brown French.
At 9:00 A.M. French had left his home and headed to the White House. His carriage arrived at the gate not long after the remains had been taken inside. “I went immediately to the room where they were and saw them taken from the temporary coffin in which they had been brought here.” French did not stay for the autopsy. Instead, at somebody’s request, he went to Mary Lincoln’s room. “She was in bed, Mrs. Welles being alone with her. She was in great distress, and I remained only a moment.” He was already thinking of how the national capital should honor the dead president. “I then gave all the directions I could as to the preparations for the funeral.”
Overcome by a severe headache, French left the White House by noon and rode to Capitol Hill. “I came through the Capitol, gave directions for clothing it in mourning…and then came home.” French’s workers used shears to cut long panels of black bunting for that purpose.
Soon after the body was laid out in the Guest Room, the doctors prepared their instruments to cut open Lincoln’s body. Dr. Curtis, the assistant surgeon, described the scene. “The room…contained but little furniture: a large, heavily curtained bed, a sofa or two, bureaus, wardrobe, and chairs comprised all there was.” He noticed that the generals and civilians in the room with him were silent or conversed quietly in whispers. He saw that at one side of the room “stretched upon a rough framework of boards covered only with sheets and towels, lay—cold and immovable—what but a few hours before was the soul of a great nation.”
He recalled the surgeon general saying that “the President showed most wonderful tenacity of life, and, had not his wound been necessarily mortal, might have survived an injury to which most men would succumb.”
Dr. Woodward would expose the brain. He reached into his medical kit for a scalpel, sliced through the skin at the back of the president’s head, and peeled the scalp forward to expose the skull. Then he
THE BULLET’S FATAL PATH.
reached for the bone saw. To get to the brain, he needed to cut off the top of Lincoln’s skull. Dr. Curtis described the procedure:
Dr. Woodward and I proceeded to open the head and remove the brain down to the track of the ball. The latter had entered a little to the left of the median line at the back of the head, had passed almost directly forwards through the center of the brain and lodged. Not finding it readily, we proceeded to remove the entire brain, when, as I was lifting the matter from the cavity of the skull, suddenly the bullet dropped out through my fingers and fell, breaking the solemn silence of the room with its clatter, into an empty basin that was standing beneath. There it lay upon the white china, a little black mass no bigger than the end of my finger—dull, motionless and harmless, yet the cause of such mighty changes in the world’s history as we may perhaps never realize.
During the autopsy, a man opened the door and walked into the room, breaking everyone’s intense concentration. Was the intruder a curiosity seeker, or, even worse, an infernal relic hunter? He was the latter, but one authorized by the highest authority. He was a messenger from the first lady.
“During the post-mortem examination,” said Dr. Taft, “Mrs. Lincoln sent him in with a request for a lock of Mr. Lincoln’s hair.” Dr. Stone clipped one from the region of the wound and dispatched it to her room. Taft wanted one too. “I extended my hand to him in mute appeal, and received a lock stained with blood, and other surgeons present also received one.”
THE BULLET THAT ENDED LINCOLN’S LIFE.
The doctors marked the bullet for identification—Dr. Stone scratched the initials “A.L.” on it—and dropped it into a paper envelope, sealed it, and surrendered it to Secretary Stanton. It would make a prized and historic addition to the gruesome collection of wounded-tissue specimens, shattered bones, and deadly projectiles being assembled at the new U.S. Army Medical Museum. The fatal bullet from Booth’s Deringer pistol became an object of fascination not just for Dr. Curtis but for the American people. It even became the subject of a bizarre allegorical print.
This lithograph, published in Chicago within a few weeks of the assassination, depicts the bullet resting beneath a powerful magnifying glass, with an eerie, all-seeing eye peering through the lens at the figure of John Wilkes Booth—imprisoned inside the bullet! In a colossal error, the artist rendered the bullet as an elongated, conical round of the type fired by Civil War rifled muskets and not as the spherical pistol ball recovered from Lincoln’s brain. That inaccuracy does not disqualify the print as the most bizarre artwork created in the aftermath of the president’s murder.
The bullet now recovered, and the direction of its path through Lincoln’s brain confirmed, Dr. Curtis asked his superiors if he would be allowed to weigh the brain. Was it possible that an unusually large brain mass accounted for Lincoln’s genius? Curtis unpacked the scale he and Dr. Woodward had brought to the White House for this purpose. Curtis would be the first of many, over the next century and a half, to speculate on the origins of Lincoln’s greatness.
“Silently, in one corner of the room, I prepared the brain for weighing,” Curtis remembered. “As I looked at the mass of soft gray and white substance that I was carefully washing, it was impossible to realize that it was that mere clay upon whose workings, but the day before, rested the hopes of the nation. I felt more profoundly impressed than ever with the mystery of that unknown something which may be named ‘vital spark’ as well as anything else, whose absence or presence makes all the immeasurable difference between an inert mass of matter owning obedience to no laws but those governing
A BIZARRE PRINT DEPICTING BOOTH IMPRISONED INSIDE HIS OWN BULLET.
the physical and chemical forces of the universe, and on the other hand, a living brain by whose silent, subtle machinery a world may be ruled.”
Oddly, no one at the autopsy made contemporaneous notes indicating the disposition of Lincoln’s brain. Nor, as best it can be determined, did any of the doctors or witnesses ever make any oral statements regarding the fate of the brain. The Army Medical Museum would have been its natural repository. That is where the bullet, skull fragments, blood relics, instruments, probe, and more were sent. But no records survive to suggest that Lincoln’s brain or blood was placed on secret deposit there.
The reading on the scale disappointed Dr. Curtis: “The weighing of the brain…gave approximate results only, since there had been some loss of brain substance, in consequence of the wound, during the hours of life after the shooting. But the figures, as they were, seemed to show that the brain weight was not above the ordinary for a man of Lincoln’s size.”
Their work done, Drs. Curtis and Woodward stepped back from the corpse and wiped their tools clean of Lincoln’s blood, hair, flesh, brain matter, and bone chips. Their shirt cuffs exhibited the signs of their trade—blood spots and brain fluid stained the absorbent, white cotton fabric. They packed their instruments away in their medical kits and returned the bone saw, scalpels, and other devices to their proper, velvet-lined niches in the trays. They and the witnesses beheld the president’s body. It looked ghastly. The skin was pale, the jaw slack, the eyelids slightly open, the face bruised (especially in the area surrounding the right eye socket, behind which the bullet had been lodged), the scalp peeled back, the top of the skull sawn off, and the brain, now washed clean of blood and void of Booth’s profane missile, lying nearby in a basin. It was time for the embalmers to arrive. They would be responsible for repairing the damage and concealing the violations the pathologists had committed upon the president’s corpse.
Secretary of the Navy Gideon Welles described what happened: “When Mr. Lincoln’s body had been removed to the President’s House, the embalmers proceeded to prepare it for the grave. Mr. Harry P. Cattell, in the employ of Doctors Brown and Alexander, who, three years before, had prepared so beautifully the body of little Willie Lincoln, now made as perpetual as art could effect the peculiar features of the late beloved President. The body was drained of its blood, and the parts necessary to remove decay were carefully withdrawn, and a chemical preparation injected, which soon hardened to a consistence of stone, giving the body the firmness and solid immobility of a statue.”
Edwin Stanton supervised the dressing of the corpse. He went through Lincoln’s wardrobe to choose the suit. Lincoln did not own an extensive collection of clothing. He was always an indifferent dresser, as many of his photographs testify. It was an old habit from his circuit-riding days as a lawyer, when he needed to travel light. He never packed many clothes on those trips. Lincoln was the kind of man who did not replace his clothes until he wore them out.
Stanton eyed the suits. There was the one the president had worn during the day of April 14, before he changed to attend the theater. If necessary, it would do. Another good suit, tailored by Brooks Brothers, lay crumpled in the temporary wood coffin on the floor. Stanton couldn’t bury him in the suit he wore when he was shot. (A century later, this suit surfaced from obscurity and became a sensational collector’s prize.)
There was another suit in Lincoln’s closet. It was new, so the president had not had the opportunity to wear it out. This suit was one of the finest garments he had ever owned. Stanton selected it. He watched as they fitted the president with a white cotton shirt, looped the bow tie under the collar (Lincoln bought his neckties pre-tied), and dressed him in the suit. They did not put him in a coffin yet.
While the morticians embalmed and dressed Lincoln’s corpse, Benjamin Brown French dined at home at 3:00 P.M. His headache was worse. He thought of his diary. He did not want to let the events of this day pass without committing them to writing in his thick, quarto-sized, leather-bound journal. But he couldn’t concentrate, so he went to bed. He slept until 7:00 P.M., then rose, took tea, and opened his diary. What he wrote that night and in the days to come, in his distinctive, beautiful script, fills the pages of one of the great American journals.
Lincoln’s corpse was ready for burial, but it was unclear where that would occur. Mary had the right to choose the site, but given her mental state, she was in no condition to discuss the subject only hours after her husband’s death. Edwin Stanton would confer with her and Robert Lincoln later. In the meantime, whatever the final destination of the president’s remains, official funeral events would have to take place in the national capital within the next few days. Stanton may have had time to supervise the dressing of Lincoln’s body, but he had no time to plan and supervise a major public funeral, the biggest, no doubt, that the District of Columbia had ever seen. The secretary of war needed to delegate this responsibility, and there were several qualified candidates. Ward Hill Lamon, marshal of the District of Columbia, had known Lincoln for years, ever since their days as circuit-riding Illinois lawyers. Lamon had accompanied the president-elect on the railroad journey from Springfield to Washington in 1861 and had appointed himself the president’s unofficial bodyguard. Lamon, a big, strong, barrel-chested man, was once found sleeping outside Lincoln’s door at the White House clutching pistols in both hands. And it was Lamon who had organized the procession at Gettysburg on November 19, 1863, when Lincoln spoke there at the dedication of the national cemetery.
On less than a week’s notice, Lamon had planned everything, devised and printed the order of march and program of events, recruited U.S. marshals from several other states to assist him, and stood on the platform with Lincoln and announced to the crowd in his bellowing voice, “Ladies and gentlemen, the president of the United States!” But Lamon was in Richmond the night of the assassination and still had not yet returned to Washington. Stanton would have to select someone else.
Benjamin Brown French was another obvious choice. The old Washington veteran had been on hand for decades of historic events, including the deaths of other presidents, and a multitude of public ceremonies and processions. French was perfect but he was needed to play another role—decorator in chief of the public buildings, especially at the U.S. Capitol, where without doubt Lincoln’s corpse would lie in state.
Lincoln was, in addition to chief executive, commander in chief of the armed forces, and if Stanton wanted to entrust planning the funeral events to a military officer, he had several options. Major General Montgomery Meigs, quartermaster general of the U.S. Army, was a master planner with superb organizational skills. Stanton relied on him to supply the entire Union army with muskets, uniforms, blankets, food, and more, and to deliver those goods wherever and whenever needed. But the war was not over, and Stanton could not spare Meigs from his vital mission.
There was Brigadier General Edward D. Townsend, the brilliant assistant adjutant general of the army. Townsend had served the legendary General Winfield Scott, hero of the War of 1812 and the Mexican War, who in 1861 still held command of the army at the start of the Civil War. Upon Scott’s resignation, Lincoln, who knew Townsend’s qualities, offered him his choice of spots: “On reporting to the President, he asked what I desired. I replied I did not think it right to indicate for what duty I was most required, but was ready for any orders that might be given me.”
Townsend hoped for a field command, but the new general in chief, George B. McClellan, said that he was too valuable in army administration. Townsend served under Lincoln’s first secretary of war, Simon Cameron, and when he resigned the new secretary, Edwin M. Stanton, kept Townsend on, relying on him to run the adjutant general’s office during the extended absences of its titular head, General Lorenzo Thomas. Townsend whipped the office into shape and was willing to stand up to the formidable Stanton, thereby earning his respect. He would be a good choice to plan the funeral. But already Stanton had Townsend in mind for a special duty of utmost importance, one even more critical than planning the president’s funeral in the nation’s capital. He held Townsend in reserve.
Stanton turned to another government department and considered George Harrington, assistant secretary of the Treasury. Harrington, fifty years old, was experienced in the ways of Washington. He had served as a delegate from the District of Columbia to the Republican National Convention of 1860 and had won the confidence of Lincoln’s second secretary of the Treasury, William P. Fessenden. Lincoln, Stanton, and all the other members of the cabinet
GEORGE HARRINGTON, THE MAN WHO PLANNED THE LINCOLN FUNERAL EVENTS IN WASHINGTON.
knew Harrington, and on occasions when Fessenden was absent from Washington, Lincoln had appointed him acting secretary of the Treasury. Upon Fessenden’s resignation in 1865, Harrington continued to serve under the new secretary, Hugh McCulloch. Stanton believed that Harrington had the keen, quick, and thorough organizational mind essential for this assignment and chose him to take charge of all Washington events honoring the late president.
Harrington accepted the appointment, which involved more than merely taking charge of events. It was up to him to conjure how the national capital should honor its first assassinated president. Two presidents, William Henry Harrison and Zachary Taylor, had died in office, but they had expired from natural causes during peacetime, not from murder at the climax of a momentous civil war. Their more modest funerals were of limited value in planning Lincoln’s. It had been only five years since Harrington and his fellow delegates had nominated Lincoln at the Chicago convention of May 1860.
Once Harrington got to work, Stanton could focus on what should be done with Lincoln’s corpse after the Washington, D.C., ceremonies. Would the president be interred at the U.S. Capitol, in the underground crypt below the Great Dome, once intended as the final resting place for George Washington? Or would Mary Lincoln take the body home to Illinois, for burial in Chicago, its most important city, or in Springfield, the state capital and the Lincolns’ home for twenty-four years?
On Saturday afternoon, the autopsy doctors, witnesses, and embalmers departed the Guest Room, leaving Lincoln’s body alone on an undertaker’s board. Now he would repose in the Executive Mansion for three days and two nights, dressed in the same splendid clothes he wore on March 4, 1865, when he rode in a carriage in a grand procession from the White House to the Capitol, where he swore to preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution of the United States. On that great day the breast pocket of his suit contained a folded sheet of paper bearing 701 words. “With malice toward none,” he said from the marble steps at the East Front of the Capitol. “With charity for all,” he beseeched, “let us bind up the nation’s wounds.” Now, six weeks later, his suit pocket was empty. Few visitors were permitted to view the body until the remains would be carried downstairs to the East Room on April 17 in preparation for opening the Executive Mansion to the public the next morning. Before then only relatives, close friends, and high officials crossed the threshold of his sanctuary and intruded upon his rest.
Mary Lincoln’s confidante Elizabeth Keckly was one of them. After the president was shot, Mary had sent a messenger from the Petersen house summoning Keckly to her side. Elizabeth mistakenly rushed to the White House, but guards there denied entrance to the free black woman, and she did not gain admittance until the next day. The very sight of Lizzie, as Mary affectionately called her, soothed some of the widow’s pain. They talked, and Mary told Lizzie about her terrible night at Ford’s Theatre and the morning at the Petersen house. Keckly comforted her and then asked to see Abraham Lincoln.
“[Mrs. Lincoln] was nearly exhausted with grief,” Keckly remembered, “and when she became a little quiet, I received permission to go into the Guest Room, where the body of the President lay in state. When I crossed the threshold…I could not help recalling the day on which I had seen little Willie lying in his coffin where the body of his father now lay.” Three years earlier Keckly had helped wash and dress Willie’s body. “I remembered how the President had wept over the pale beautiful face of his gifted boy, and now the President himself was dead.” Keckly lifted the white cloth shrouding Lincoln’s body. “I gazed long at the face,” she said, “and turned away with tears in my eyes and a choking sensation in my throat.”
Benjamin Brown French also went to the White House on the afternoon of Sunday, April 16, to confirm that all was going well in the East Room with the preparations for Lincoln’s April 19 funeral. Then he went upstairs to view the embalmed corpse: “I saw the remains of the President, which are growing more and more natural…but for the bloodshot appearance of the cheek directly under the right eye, the face would look perfectly natural.”
After spending an hour at the Executive Mansion, French visited Secretary of State Seward, who gave him a firsthand account of the savage knife attack he was lucky to have survived. French left Seward’s home with Senator Solomon Foot of Vermont, and they went back to the White House. French wanted to see the corpse again: “We stood together at the side of the form of him whom, in life, we both loved so well.”
Orville Hickman Browning came to the White House to view the corpse at least twice before the funeral, first for the autopsy on Saturday the fifteenth, and then on Monday the seventeenth. Browning had watched the surgeons saw off the top of his friend’s cranium and remove his brain. It was bloody, ugly work. Two days later, Browning observed how the embalmer’s artistry had improved Lincoln’s appearance. The president, he wrote, “was looking as natural as life, and if in a quiet sleep. We all think the body should be taken to Springfield for internment, but Mrs. Lincoln is vehemently opposed to it, and wishes it to go to Chicago.”
Except for these visitors and a few others—and the ever-present military honor guards standing in motionless vigil—the corpse was alone. Lincoln had finally won the solitude he craved during his presidency, when patronage seekers, influence peddlers, and lobbyists camped out near his door and harassed him so thoroughly that he felt under perpetual siege in his own office. Lincoln fought back by having a White House carpenter build a partition in the anteroom to conceal him from public view as he crossed between his second-floor office and his living quarters.
The construction of this private passage amused the great Civil War journalist George Alfred Townsend.
It tells a long story of duns and loiterers, contract-hunters and seekers for commissions, garrulous parents on paltry errands, toadies without measure and talkers without conscience. They pressed upon him through the great door opposite his window, and hat in hand, came courtsying to his chair, with an obsequious “Mr. President!” If he dared, though the chief magistrate and commander of the army and navy, to go out the great door, these vampires leaped upon him with their Babylonian pleas, and barred his walk to his hearthside. He could not insult them since it was not in his nature, and perhaps many of them had really urgent errands. So he called up the carpenter and ordered a strategic route cut from his office to his hearth, and perhaps told of it after with much merriment.
Now that traffic had ceased, and for the first time in four years, the human jackals did not skulk about the second floor, staking out his office. Once, when sick with smallpox, Lincoln had joked, “Now I have something I can give to everyone!”
The only sounds now were ones Lincoln would have recalled from childhood—wood saws cutting, hammers pounding nails, carpenters at work. Workmen in the East Room were building the catafalque upon which his elaborate coffin, not yet finished, would rest during the public viewing and state funeral. These sounds were the familiar music of his youth, made by his carpenter father, Thomas. It was the echo of his own labor too, when he had a rail-splitting axe placed in his hands at the age of nine. But the noise frightened Mary Lincoln; the hammer strikes reminded her of gunshots.
Strangely, not once during the days and nights that the president’s corpse lay in seclusion at the White House did Mary make a private visit to her husband. Her last nightmare vision of him, bleeding, gasping, mortally wounded, dying in the overcrowded, stuffy little back bedroom of the Petersen house, had traumatized her and she could not bear to walk the short distance from her bedchamber to the Guest Room and look upon his face now. History does not record whether her son Robert defied her morbid imprisonment of Tad in her frightening mourning chamber and whether he took his little brother to the Guest Room to view their father, just as, three years before, Abraham had carried Tad from his bed to view his brother Willie in death.
Elizabeth Keckly, one of the few people allowed into Mary Lincoln’s room, witnessed her tortured paroxysms. “I shall never forget the scene—the wails of a broken heart, the unearthly shrieks, the terrible convulsions, the wild, tempestuous outbursts of grief from the soul.” Keckly worried about Tad. “[His] grief at his father’s death was as great as the grief of his mother, but her terrible outbursts awed the boy into silence. Sometimes he would throw his arms around her neck, and exclaim, between his broken sobs, ‘Don’t cry so, Momma! Don’t cry, or you will make me cry too! You will break my heart.’”
Outside this room, away from the Executive Mansion, the nation was in upheaval. The assassin John Wilkes Booth had escaped, and Stanton was coordinating an unprecedented manhunt to capture him. Secretary of State Seward and his son Fred were fighting for their lives after Lewis Powell’s botched assassination attempt. Stanton suspected that numerous conspirators, their plans still secret and their strength yet unknown, might still lurk in Washington. Perhaps some of Booth’s conspirators still at large planned to commit additional bloody crimes—like the murder of Lincoln’s entire cabinet. As a precaution, Stanton assigned an around-the-clock military guard to every one of them.
Jefferson Davis was still on the run. Stanton worried that the “rebel chief,” who was not satisfied to escape Richmond with his life, had ignored General Lee’s surrender at Appomattox and, from his mobile command post, was attempting to rally the South to fight on and continue the Civil War. Confederate armies were still in the field and some of its ships still at sea. Hurriedly published newspaper extras shouted the latest news several times a day. Many stories suggested that Lincoln’s murder was part of Davis’s plan to reverse the outcome of the war.
The newspapers also reported what had been done to Lincoln’s corpse. “The Body of the President Embalmed!” shouted a headline in one broadside extra. The number of deaths during the Civil War had advanced the art and social acceptance of embalming. Once a novelty viewed with distaste and even suspicion, the practice had become commonplace when the broken bodies of so many fallen soldiers were shipped from distant battlefields back home to waiting parents and widows.
On Sunday morning, April 16, “Black Easter,” ministers across the land mounted their pulpits and, within a few hours, began to transform Abraham Lincoln from a mortal man into a secular saint. While the preachers were delivering their sermons that day, George Harrington began organizing the grandest funeral ceremonies in American history. He took pen, paper, and ink and wrote out in longhand his proposal for honoring the first American president slain by an assassin. The document was brief and only a draft. But it would, over the next three days, set in motion the intertwined actions and coordinated movements of more than one hundred thousand men. In an inspired moment, Harrington had dreamed up a grand idea out of thin air and then captured it on paper. This was his plan:
Proposed arrangements for the Funeral and disposition of the Remains of the late President, submitted for approval.
The Executive Mansion, under proper police and guards, to be thrown open during Tuesday, the 18th…for the public to show their respect,—the remains to be in the East Room, under a guard of commissioned [Harrington originally wrote “competent” but struck out that word and replaced it with “commissioned”] Officers of the Army.
On Wednesday, the procession to form at 11 o’clock, the religious ceremonies to commence at 12, and the procession to move at 2 P.M.
The remains to be escorted to the Capitol, and there deposited in the Rotunda, to remain under a suitable guard, to be provided by the proper military authorities.
The delegation especially appointed from Illinois to receive the remains and escort them thither, to be called the “Body Guard,” to have them in official charge after they shall have been deposited in the Capitol.
The remains to be taken to the depot on Thursday morning, by military escort, a guard of honor, consisting of such Senators and Members of the House of Representatives as may be designated for that purpose by those bodies respectively, and also such other civilians as the Cabinet may determine to accompany the remains to their final resting place. The whole to be accompanied by such military escort as the proper authorities may designate.
In five short paragraphs, Harrington had his template—even if the arrangements raised as many questions as they answered. For how many hours should the White House be kept open for the public to view the remains? How many people per hour could squeeze through the doors—and how many thousands more would try? Who should receive invitations to the funeral? The East Room was the biggest chamber in the White House, but it could never hold everyone who would demand the right to attend. Without even calculating the dimensions and square footage, Harrington knew the room could hold fewer than a thousand people at a standing reception, and the funeral guests would be seated, thus consuming additional, scarce space. And where would he get all those chairs? The entire Executive Mansion did not contain enough furniture to seat hundreds of people. And when arranging the chairs, Harrington would have to be careful to reserve enough space for the catafalque, and for aisles. That was just for the White House events. After the funeral, who would march in the procession to the Capitol? How would this procession be organized? Who would keep order in the streets? George Harrington needed help.
It was one thing to sketch an outline of the funeral events on a piece of paper but quite another to fill in all the details and then execute them. Harrington knew that Lincoln’s funeral ceremonies would be the largest and most elaborate series of public events ever held in the nation’s capital, and possibly the entire nation. He could not possibly organize all of them himself—a public viewing at the White House on April 18; a private White House funeral attended by hundreds of dignitaries on April 19, followed immediately by a grand, synchronized, and incomparable procession from the White House to the U.S. Capitol; a lying in state and public viewing in the Capitol rotunda under the Great Dome on April 20; and the departure of the president’s remains from Washington on April 21. Only one institution in the country possessed the men, command structure, and logistical experience to conduct such an event—the U.S. Army.
That afternoon, Harrington called a crucial meeting at the Treasury Department for 5:00 P.M., and he summoned by messenger several of the most important army officers in Washington, including Major General and Chief of Staff Henry W. Halleck, Major General and commander of the military district of Washington C. C. Augur, and Assistant Adjutant General and skilled War Department administrator William A. Nichols. Harrington also invited Benjamin Brown French to attend.
“I had agreed to meet Assist. Secretary Harrington at the Treasury Dept. at 5, to aid in making the programme of Arrangements for the funeral,” French recalled, “so I remained at the President’s until that hour, then went to the Treasury Dept.”
One by one, messengers arrived at Harrington’s office bearing responses. Among the acceptances were those from W. A. Nichols, assistant adjutant general: “I have the honor to acknowledge the receipt of your note of this date, stating that the Sec’y of War had designated me as one, on part of the Army, to confer in relation to the funeral ceremonies of the late President. As requested I will be present at the meeting fixed at the hour of 5 o’clk P.M. to-day”; from H. W. Halleck, army chief of staff: “I was notified by the Secy of War to meet you at 7 o.c. this evening & so wrote to Genl Augur, but will meet you as soon after 5 as I can”; and from C. C. Augur, commander of the military district of Washington: “I have received your note, and will be at the place you indicate at 5. P.M. today.”
When Harrington’s chosen men convened at the Treasury Department next door to the White House, the footsteps of their heavy boots echoed through the marble-paved halls. They had much work to do and little time. Gathered around Harrington’s desk, they had just sixty-eight hours to plan Abraham Lincoln’s state funeral.
They met for an hour, adjourned at 6:00 P.M., and agreed to reconvene in one hour. “[We] agreed,” French wrote in his diary, “to return at 7 to meet with several Senators, Members of the House & Military officers.” When the commissioner of public buildings returned he found, among others, two assistant secretaries of the Treasury, George Harrington and Maunsell B. Field (who had been at the Petersen house); Senator Solomon Foot of Vermont; Richard Yates, former Illinois congressman, Civil War governor, and now U.S. senator; former congressman Isaac N. Arnold from Illinois; Governor Richard J. Oglesby; Major Generals Henry W. Halleck and C. C. Augur; Brigadier General George W. Nichols from the adjutant general’s office; Admiral William B. Shubrick; and Lawrence A. Gobright, longtime Associated Press correspondent in Washington. They spent another hour talking about the arrangements and agreed to meet again the next day at 2:00 P.M.
Harrington appeared strained under the burden. Before Easter evening was over, he wrote a letter to his patron, former Treasury secretary William Pitt Fessenden, updating him on various events but ending by saying, “What shadows we are and what shadows we pursue…the whole charge of the funeral fixed for Wednesday has been put on me. Heavens I have enough to do without this.”
Although Harrington complained privately about his duties, he knew, at least, that they would end once the Washington ceremonies concluded. As soon as Lincoln’s corpse was ready to depart the national capital, his work would be done. Stanton had taken upon himself the responsibility for the next stage of the president’s journey.
The next day, Monday, April 17, Harrington was overwhelmed by letters, telegrams, and personal visitors who hounded him and beseeched him, seeking advantage. Some sought tickets to the funeral, others the right to march in the procession. Some wanted a license to sell mourning goods to the government, while others alerted him to special deliveries of flowers and asked him to confirm their arrival. Some supplicants did not wait for invitations and simply announced that they were coming.
The War Department sent over a document laying out the military’s role in the procession, but the draft was blank where the civic portion of the parade would be described. Ward Hill Lamon would organize and lead that, and Harrington had one day to get the information to Nichols so the War Department could publish a printed handbill with the order of march for both the military and civic processions.
Harrington lamented that so much was still left undone: “Nothing has been done to provide for the admission of persons who are to be at the President’s House, and to have a right to places in the carriages. Of course those who have cards to the Green & East Rooms will pass but it is important that all of them can get into the carriages—Nor has any arrangement been made as to the number of carriages to be admitted into the President’s grounds—nor for the admission of the delegations from Illinois and Kentucky. Who has charge of the carriages for the procession?”
On April 17, Stanton requested an interview with Mary and Robert Lincoln to ascertain the family’s wishes for the final disposition of the remains. Would they be laid to rest in Washington, Illinois, or some other place? Some federal officials, including Benjamin Brown French, argued in favor of entombment in the U.S. Capitol. From Kentucky came an urgent telegram imploring consideration of Lincoln’s birthplace as a suitable final resting place. Chicago, where Lincoln had practiced law in the federal courts, and where he received the Republican nomination for the presidency, put in a bid. The Illinois congressional delegation, acting via telegraph with officials back home, lobbied hard for burial in Springfield. Some of them, without the Lincoln family’s consent, had already begun an extravagant scheme to purchase an entire city block and erect a stupendous monument on the site.
Mary was appalled when she discovered what she thought was a hometown conspiracy to hijack the martyr’s remains and wrest control of her husband’s body from her. She threatened to thwart her former neighbors’ grandiose plans, and emotional telegrams went back and forth between Springfield and Washington. Influential Illinoisans in the national capital, including Orville Hickman Browning, sought to lobby Mary in person, but she refused to receive them at the White House. President Lincoln would be buried wherever she, and no one else, designated. Perhaps, she hinted, it might be Washington. Or perhaps Chicago. Or maybe somewhere else.
Stanton had to find out. If Lincoln’s body was to travel to some distant place, it would be the War Department’s and the United States Military Railroad’s job to transport him there. Such a journey would take time to plan, and the Washington funeral was just two days away. Mary and Robert could feud with Springfield all they wanted; Stanton need not involve himself in that dispute. He only needed to know where he had to send the train. The Lincolns agreed to receive Stanton and told him they had decided on Illinois. And it would be Springfield, not Chicago.
Now the secretary of war could plan the route and devise the timetables. The train could proceed directly to Illinois on the shortest and most direct route, stopping along the way only to replenish water for the steam engine and fuel for the fire. But the most efficient route might not be the most desirable one. Lincoln had established a precedent four years earlier when he journeyed east as president-elect. Instead of a hurried run to Washington, D.C., he took a circuitous route through several of the major Northern states that had elected him so that he could see the American people, and they could see him. Lincoln hoped to reassure the country, sustain support for the Union and the Constitution, and avoid civil war.
His train stopped many times. He gave impromptu, unscripted speeches; greeted delegations of important officials; mingled with ordinary citizens; accepted tributes and well wishes; and participated in public ceremonies. Lincoln presented himself to his fellow citizens as a man of the people elevated temporarily to high office. For Lincoln, his inaugural train symbolized neither personal triumph nor glory, but the simplicity and integrity of the republican form of government established by the Constitution and laws of the United States. This journey represented a living bond between Lincoln and the American people.
Now he was dead. In their grief, Americans had not forgotten the inaugural train of 1861. Telegrams began to pour into the War Department from the cities and towns that had wished him Godspeed on his journey east four years ago, beseeching Stanton to send him back to them. Once the news spread that Lincoln would make the long westward journey home to Illinois, a groundswell of public opinion clamored for the government to re-create Lincoln’s inaugural trip in reverse. Edwin Stanton liked the idea. The assassination of President Lincoln was a national tragedy. But the American people could not come from all over the country and converge on Washington to view the president’s body, attend the funeral, or march in the procession. Why couldn’t Abraham Lincoln go to them?
It was possible. It would require a special train fitted out properly to transport the body, a military escort to guard Lincoln’s corpse around the clock to ensure that the remains were treated with the utmost dignity, coordination between the military railroad and the major commercial lines, cooperation between the War Department and state and local governments, and the resources and will to do it. Stanton believed it could be done. There was only one obstacle—the president’s grieving, mercurial, and unpredictable widow. Executing this unprecedented plan would be impossible without her explicit consent.
Stanton broached the delicate subject with the first lady. Might she consider assuaging the American people’s profound sadness by consenting to an extended route that would take her husband through the great cities of the Union? From Washington, the War Department could divert the train north through Maryland, Pennsylvania, New Jersey, and New York State, then make the great turn west, passing through Ohio and Indiana and into northern Illinois, then make a final turn south from Chicago, down through the prairies and home to Springfield. This route would take many days to travel, longer than a fast run to Illinois. The exact duration of the extended trip would depend upon the number of times the train stopped for water, fuel, and public ceremonies along the way. Stanton promised that if she said yes, he and his aides would handle all the details. It would be his final service to the president who once called him his “Mars,” his god of war.
There was one more thing. The people wanted to see their Father Abraham, not just his closed coffin. They wanted to look upon his face. That meant an open casket. Mary had consented to an open coffin at the White House and the U.S. Capitol. But an open coffin at multiple ceremonies, all the way from Washington to Springfield, a distance of more than 1,600 miles? In warm weather, without refrigeration, it would test the limits of the embalmer’s art. Mary thought the idea seemed morbid and ghoulish, but a grand, national funeral pageant that affirmed her husband’s greatness appealed to her. She consented.
This epic train journey symbolized the importance of railroads in Abraham Lincoln’s life. From early in his political career, Lincoln believed the government should invest in “internal improvements” to advance settlement and commerce. In Illinois in the 1830s and early 1840s, that meant navigable waterways. His youthful experiences on the Sangamon River, of floating a flatboat down the Mississippi River to New Orleans, and of living in a small river town, New Salem, created in him an enduring fascination with water transportation. Indeed, he even patented a device to raise trapped vessels over shoals. Later, after he became a lawyer, Lincoln represented the Illinois Central and other railroads in a number of cases, earning substantial fees. In one dispute, the Effie Afton case, he had to choose between water and rail. A river vessel had struck and damaged a railroad bridge. Each side blamed the other for the accident. Lincoln represented the railroad. Trains were the future. He knew they were the key to conquering the American continent.
Still, years later, Lincoln retained his sentimental affection for waterways. When Vicksburg and Port Hudson fell to the Union, he rejoiced that “the Father of Waters again goes unvexed to the sea.” He enjoyed riding aboard warships and steam-powered paddleboats—joking to sailors that he was a “fresh water man” with little firsthand knowledge of the sea—and on the last day of his life he inspected ironclads at the Washington Navy Yard. And though in the White House he dreamed of mysterious journeys by sea, Lincoln had made the most important journeys of his life by railroad: to Washington after his election to Congress; to the federal courts in Chicago; east for political speeches in the 1850s; to New York City in 1860 to speak at Cooper Union; to Washington again as president-elect in 1861; to the battlefields of Antietam in 1862 and Gettysburg in 1863. And now, home to Illinois.
At the Treasury Department, George Harrington began adding up the number of people from the government departments, the military, civil organizations, and diplomatic missions who should receive an invitation to the White House state funeral. He divided potential guests by category, then tallied a raw count—630 people. He would worry about the individual names later.
Officials from various cities contacted Harrington and tried to influence the route of the train, or at least obtain White House funeral tickets. In an April 17 letter from the collector’s office at the U.S. Custom House in Philadelphia, one official reminded Harrington that the president had in that city once vowed to sacrifice his life for liberty. Now he must come back: “It is the general desire of the Citizens of Philadelphia that the remains of President Lincoln should pass through this city and remain a day in ‘State’ in Independence Hall, on its way to Illinois. It was in this city and at Independence Hall that he raised the flag of the Union with his own hands, and expressed his willingness to be assassinated on the spot rather than sacrifice the principles of Liberty on which he conceived the government to be based. I trust that the wishes of our people will be gratified. Very Truly Yours Wm. B. Thomas.”
Unsurprisingly, New Yorkers proved quite assertive in announcing their participation. Typical was a telegram dispatched from New York to Harrington on April 17: “A committee of thirteen members of the Union League club on behalf thereof will attend the funeral of the late President. The committee will be in Washington at Willard’s Hotel tomorrow Tuesday by the morning train from this city. / Otis D. Swan / Secty of Union League Club.” And just in case Harrington did not get the message, the Union League dispatched another one to another assistant secretary of the Treasury, Simeon Draper: “You will oblige the Union League Club by notifying Assistant Secretary Harrington that a committee of thirteen members of the club on the behalf thereof will attend the funeral of President Lincoln at Washington Wednesday / Otis D. Swan / Secty of Union League Club.”
Attorney General James Speed forwarded to Harrington a silly telegram that arrived at the Department of Justice from Louisville on April 17: “A wreath of rare flowers for the bier of our loved & lamented President is sent by Express by the German Gymnastic Association of this city / [Signed] Phillip Speed.” It was absurd, as if the harried assistant secretary had any time to devote to something so trivial as the safe delivery of a particular arrangement of exotic flowers.
The letters and telegrams kept coming: “As chairman of the Committee of colored citizens of Washington, who desire to participate in the funeral ceremonies of our late President and friend Abraham Lincoln I have to solicit the favor of being placed in such a position in the line of procession as you may assign. Hoping an immediate answer I am sir your humble servants, James Wormley, Chairman / G. Snowdin / H. Harris / Committee.”
One correspondent sought to exploit Lincoln’s death for commercial gain, urging Harrington to purchase mourning goods from a recommended source: “Washington, April 17 1865. / Hon. George Harrington, Assistant Sec. of Treas. / My dear sir:/ Allow me to introduce my friend Wm. S. Mitchell Esq. a merchant of this city who is desirous of furnishing articles connected with the funeral ceremonies. He is an honorable gentleman, and the best guarantee of his patriotism is the fact that he is a cherished friend of President Johnson. / I have the honor to be / your humble & obd servt / Daniel R. Goodloe.” The government would spend huge sums on funeral goods, but in the collection of voluminous bills and receipts compiled after the Washington events, the name of the enterprising William S. Mitchell cannot be found.
By nightfall of the seventeenth, Harrington still labored on the details. As soldiers prepared to carry Lincoln down the staircase to lie in the East Room, the War Department had still not finished organizing the funeral procession from the White House to the Capitol. The procession would begin in less than forty hours, and the final order for the line of march had not been printed yet. Officials were still making last-minute changes. Assistant Adjutant General Nichols tried to locate Harrington that night by writing to Maunsell Field, one of the Petersen house visitors, at the Treasury Department: “The Hon. Mr. Harrington directed the publishing of the order of the Funeral Ceremonies. If he is in the Dept. please ask him to cause the names of Messrs George Ashmun & Simon Cameron to be inserted with the names of the Pall bearers—if not in—please request the Chronicle & Intelligencer to insert their names on the order under the caption of ‘Civilians.’”
While Harrington worked and planned, Abraham Lincoln spent his last night in the White House. He had lived there four years, one month, and nine days. He had reposed there in death for four nights.