CHAPTER SIX
Two days after the president died, the coffin was ready. Soldiers carried it to the second-floor Guest Room and placed it on the floor. They approached the president and lifted him from the table where he had lain since Saturday afternoon. The soldiers carried him to the coffin—it looked too small. The casket appeared no taller than the president. Lincoln was six feet, four inches tall, and the coffin was just two inches taller. They lowered his body into the casket, and it was definitely a snug fit. If they had tried to bury him in his boots, the body would have been too tall. The soldiers lifted the coffin and carried it down the stairs. Gaslights illuminated the silent, eerie journey. Noah Brooks described the scene: “On the night of the seventeenth the remains of Lincoln were laid in the casket prepared for their reception, and were taken from the large guest-chamber of the house to the famous East Room, where so many brilliant receptions and so many important public events had been witnessed; and there they lay in state until the day of the funeral.”
They carried the coffin to the center of the room and rested it upon the catafalque. It was magnificent, more impressive than any coffin Abraham Lincoln had ever seen—finer than the crude one he helped build for his mother when he was a little boy, finer than the simple one that buried the hopes and body of young Ann Rutledge, and finer than the child-size coffins for his sons Eddie and Willie.
In life Abraham had eschewed his wife Mary’s love of frills and finery. He would have never chosen such a stately and expensive coffin for himself. It had cost almost as much as he paid for his house at Eighth and Jackson streets in Springfield. He would have preferred the pine box they put him in at the Petersen house.
And the decorations. Lincoln had always laughed at Mary’s obsession with decorating the White House—as had the newspapers and official Washington. But no one who entered the East Room over the next two days mocked its lavish vestments of death. When the public and press saw it, they were so impressed they named it the “Temple of Death.” Lincoln, claimed one of his friends, had foreseen this tableau in one of his prophetic dreams.
Ward Hill Lamon recalled a small gathering at the White House a few days before the assassination where only he, the president, Mary Lincoln, and two or three other people were present. Lamon observed that Lincoln was in a “melancholy, meditative mood, and had been for some time.” Mary commented on his demeanor. Then the president spoke:
“It seems strange how much there is in the Bible about dreams…If we believe in the Bible, we must accept the fact that in the old days God and his angels came to men in their sleep and made themselves known in dreams. Nowadays dreams are regarded as very foolish, and are seldom told, except by old women and by young men and maidens in love.”
Mary asked her husband if he believed in dreams. “I can’t say that I do, but I had one the other night which has haunted me ever since…somehow the thing has gotten possession of me, and, like Banquo’s ghost, it will not down.” Lincoln then narrated his troublesome dream:
About ten days ago, I retired very late. I had been up waiting for important dispatches from the front. I could not have been long in bed when I fell into a slumber, for I was weary. I soon began to dream. There seemed to be a death-like stillness about me. Then I heard subdued sobs, as if a number of people were weeping. I thought I left my bed and wandered downstairs. There the silence was broken by the same pitiful sobbing, but the mourners were invisible. I went from room to room; no living person was in sight, but the same mournful sounds of distress met me as I passed along. It was light in all the rooms; every object was familiar to me; but where were all the people who were grieving as if their hearts would break? I was puzzled and alarmed. What could be the meaning of all this? Determined to find the cause of a state of things so mysterious and shocking, I kept on until I arrived at the East Room, which I entered. There I met with a sickening surprise. Before me was a catafalque, on which rested a corpse wrapped in funeral vestments. Around it were soldiers who were acting as guards; and there was a throng of people, some gazing mournfully upon the corpse, whose face was covered, others weeping pitifully. “Who is dead in the White House?” I demanded of one of the soldiers. “The President,” was his answer; “he was killed by an assassin!” Then came a loud burst of grief from the crowd, which awoke me from my dream. I slept no more that night.
Mary Lincoln recoiled. “That is horrid! I wish you had not told it. I am glad that I don’t believe in dreams, or I should be in terror from this time forth.”
“Well,” replied the president, “it is only a dream, Mary. Let us say no more about it, and try to forget it.”
Some accused Lincoln’s old friend Lamon of embellishing, even of concocting the dream. Its Lincolnesque qualities cannot be denied, but Lamon did not write about it until a number of years after Lincoln’s death. Whether or not Lincoln had foreseen his own coffin lying in state in the East Room, he was haunted by other coffins he had seen there, and other places in wartime Washington. And he had carried with him to Washington the memories of other coffins and funerals of long ago.
In May 1861, Elmer Ellsworth, a flamboyant twenty-four-year-old friend of Lincoln’s, was shot and killed after he hauled down a Confederate flag at a hotel in Alexandria, Virginia. Ellsworth had worked in Lincoln’s Illinois law office, delivered exciting political speeches to advance Lincoln’s career, and commanded a famous quasimilitary unit, Ellsworth’s Zouaves, a drill team that had thrilled spectators with its exotic costumes and precision choreography. After Lincoln’s nomination in May 1860, people from all over America—including autograph hounds—had inundated Springfield with letters. Lincoln tried to comply with the requests, and he asked Ellsworth to draft a number of replies in his own hand for Lincoln’s signature. Dozens of letters from that period survive, each bearing the identical message in Ellsworth’s neat script—“It gives me pleasure to comply with your request for my autograph”—and each then signed “A. Lincoln” by the nominee himself. Lincoln had grown fond of his enthusiastic, impetuous protégé, and invited him to travel aboard the special train that took the president-elect to Washington in February 1861.
In May 1861, Colonel Ellsworth’s Zouaves were sworn into military service while Lincoln watched, and on May 24 Ellsworth and his troops crossed the Potomac River to take possession of Alexandria, Virginia. For days a defiant rebel flag, visible from the White House, had flown over the town. After landing, Ellsworth led his men in the direction of the telegraph office, but he could not resist stopping at Marshall House, the hotel upon which the offending flag waved atop the roof. The colonel burst inside, climbed the stairs, and hauled down the flag. As he descended to the lobby, the proprietor, James W. Jackson, fired a shotgun blast at his chest, killing him instantly. Ellsworth was still clutching the Confederate flag that had cost him his life. In vengeance, one of his Zouaves killed Jackson on the spot. To this day, a bronze plaque marks the site on Alexandria’s King Street, not in memory of the slain Union officer, but in honor of the secessionist hotel proprietor who was “killed by federal soldiers while defending his property and personal rights.” The plaque goes on to honor Jackson as a “martyr to the cause of Southern Independence.”
Ellsworth’s corpse was brought to the Washington Navy Yard. Someone would have to go to the White House to inform the president. That duty fell to navy captain Gustavus Fox. He arrived at the Executive Mansion, where he went upstairs to Lincoln’s second-floor office. The news staggered the president. Fox left him alone. Lincoln walked to the window. He did not notice when Senator Henry Wilson and a reporter from the New York Herald entered his office. They approached him from behind, but he did not move. He stared through the window, his eyes fixed on the Potomac River and beyond. Startled, Lincoln made an abrupt turn and faced Wilson and the newsman. The president had thought he was alone.
“Excuse me,” he said, “but I cannot talk.” Then he burst into tears and buried his face in a handkerchief. The visitors retreated in silence. Lincoln sat down, composed himself, and spoke. “I will make no apology, gentlemen, for my weakness; but I knew poor Ellsworth well, and held him in great regard. Just as you entered the room, Captain Fox left me, after giving me the painful details of Ellsworth’s unfortunate death. The event was so unexpected, and the recital so touching, that it quite unmanned me.”
Lincoln recalled his young friend’s impetuosity. “Poor fellow! It was undoubtedly an act of rashness, but it only shows the heroic spirit that animates our soldiers…in this righteous cause of ours. Yet who can restrain their grief to see them fall in such a way as this; not by fortunes of war, but by the hand of an assassin.”
He wanted to see the body. Abraham and Mary Lincoln rode in their carriage east from the White House, down Pennsylvania Avenue, past the Great Dome, and south to the navy yard. For a long time, the president gazed at Ellsworth’s handsome face, unmarred by the shotgun pellets.
“My boy! My boy!” pleaded Lincoln to the dead man. “Was it necessary that this sacrifice be made?” The president wept.
The bloody frock coat, its breast shredded by the fatal blast, would be preserved as a relic and displayed at Union patriotic fairs. Soon the body would be sent north by train to Ellsworth’s parents and fiancée in New York. But not before, the president decided, he could honor his young martyred friend. Lincoln ordered that Ellsworth’s corpse be brought to the White House. There, the next day, at noon on May 25, the president presided over the East Room funeral. After the service, Lincoln rode in the procession that carried Ellsworth’s coffin to the railroad station for the 2:00 P.M. train to New York. Mary Lincoln kept the Confederate flag he had clutched in death. That afternoon the president wrote a letter to Ellsworth’s parents.
My dear Sir and Madam,
In the untimely loss of your noble son, our affliction here, is scarcely less than your own. So much of promised usefulness to one’s country, and of bright hopes for one’s self and friends, have rarely been so suddenly dashed, as in his fall. In size, in years, and in youthful appearance, a boy only, his power to command men, was surpassingly great. This power, combined with a fine intellect, an indomitable energy, and a taste altogether military, constituted in him, as seemed to me, the best natural talent, in that department, I ever knew. And yet he was singularly modest and deferential in social intercourse. My acquaintance with him began less than two years ago; yet through the latter half of the intervening period, it was as intimate as the disparity of our ages, and my engrossing engagements, would permit. To me, he appeared to have no indulgences or pastimes; and I never heard him utter a profane, or intemperate word. What was conclusive of his good heart, he never forgot his parents. The honors he labored for so laudably, and, in the sad end, so gallantly gave his life, he meant for them, no less than for himself.
In the hope that it may be no intrusion upon the sacredness of your sorrow, I have ventured to address you this tribute to the memory of my young friend, and your brave and early fallen child.
May God give you that consolation which is beyond all earthly power. Sincerely your friend in a common affliction.
A. Lincoln
This was not the last condolence letter Lincoln wrote during the war, nor was this the last funeral he witnessed in his White House. As word of Ellsworth’s death spread across the country, he became a popular hero celebrated in prints, sheet music, badges, and, in the most unusual mourning relic of the Civil War, an imposing and elaborate ceramic pitcher decorated with painted bas-relief panels depicting his death and the slaying of his murderer. Noah Brooks said of the Ellsworth craze: “The death of Ellsworth, needless though it may have been, caused a profound sensation throughout the country, where he was well known. He was among the very first martyrs of the war, as he had been one of the first volunteers. Lincoln was overwhelmed with sorrow…and even in the midst of his increasing cares, he found time to sit alone and in grief-stricken meditation by the bier of the dead young soldier of whose career he had cherished such great hopes.”
The Civil War had opened with a funeral and now it would close with one. Indeed, a member of the Zouaves wrote that “Colonel Ellsworth was the war’s first conspicuous victim; Lincoln himself the last.”
In October 1861, five months later, Lincoln suffered another personal loss. Edward D. Baker, an old friend from the Illinois political scene in the 1830s and 1840s, a former congressman who had moved to California in the 1850s, was now a U.S. senator from Oregon. Lincoln had named his firstborn son, Eddie, who died in 1850 when he was three years old, after him. Baker was in Washington in March 1861 for Lincoln’s inaugural ball and could have served out the war in the safety of the halls of Congress, but he wanted to see action, so Lincoln offered him a commission as a brigadier general of volunteers. Such a high rank would require that Baker resign from the Senate, so he asked the president to make him a colonel, allowing him to keep his seat.
On October 21, 1861, during the Battle of Ball’s Bluff, a confusing and embarrassing Union disaster fought not far from Washington near Leesburg, Virginia, Baker was killed. On the day before his death, on a beautiful fall afternoon, he had been idling with Lincoln on the White House lawn. The next day, when the president visited General McClellan’s headquarters, the army commander told him that Baker was dead. Lincoln reeled, and when he left McClellan’s office, he almost fell into the street.
When he returned to the White House, he gave orders that he would receive no visitors and he was unable to sleep that night. On October 24, Abraham and Mary Lincoln attended Baker’s funeral at a private home in Washington. After the funeral Lincoln joined the procession to Congressional Cemetery on Capitol Hill. In 1848, when Lincoln was a congressman, he helped organize the funeral there for former president and member of the House of Representatives John Quincy Adams, and had helped escort Adams’s remains to Congressional. The day after Baker’s funeral Lincoln canceled a cabinet meeting, and that evening he received the colonel’s father, son, and nephew.
By now death in the war was no longer a distant, abstract thing to Lincoln. It reached into his own house, as death had many times before in his boyhood, youth, and manhood in Illinois. First his mother, then his sister, then Ann Rutledge, then his little son Eddie, and the others. Baker’s death hit him hard. Yes, he had grieved for the young Ellsworth, but he had known the youth for less than two years. Baker was different—their friendship went back more than a quarter of a century. Twice in the first year of the war Lincoln had bid farewell to two friends.
Willie Lincoln, only ten years old, also bid Baker good-bye, by composing for him what can only be called a death poem, which was published in Washington’s National Republican newspaper. Willie had inherited many of his father’s traits, and in this composition, he revealed a glimmer of Abraham Lincoln’s lifelong fascination with poems of loss and death. Indeed, Lincoln not only read and recited such poetry, he wrote it. Willie’s melancholy poem foreshadowed a time when he would be not the author but rather the subject of sad poems.
In February 1862, four months after the death of Edward Baker, Lincoln suffered the most painful loss in his life. It was the single event, more than any other, that crushed his spirit and killed the joy inside him. William Wallace Lincoln, age eleven, was the president’s favorite son. Eddie had died too young and too long ago for Abraham to envision the kind of young man he might have become. Abraham and his oldest boy, Robert, were not close. Robert did not look like his father, and he was in temperament more like his mother’s family, the Todds.
Lincoln had provided Robert all the opportunities that life had denied him. This son never had to work a hard day of manual labor in his life, and the president had him educated at Exeter and Harvard. But Robert was becoming a snob who seemed at times embarrassed by the crude vestiges of Abraham’s frontier background and lack of education. Tad was a lovable, impulsive, impish, and undisciplined little boy who suffered from a speech impediment and who had inherited his mother’s mercurial and selfish nature.
William was Lincoln’s true heir. Tall and thin, he resembled his father in posture and physical gestures. Intellectual, analytical, and thoughtful, his mind worked in ways that reminded Lincoln of himself—and this pleased him. Willie was his father’s true companion in the White House. The president was not alone in his admiration. Willie’s maturity, splendid manners, and winning personality impressed all who met him, including Lincoln’s cabinet. He was a favorite of many White House regulars. Lincoln loved no one more.
In February 1862, Tad and Willie fell ill with a fever, probably contracted from contaminated water that supplied the White House. Their condition worsened, and the president watched over them with a keen eye. On the night of February 5, he left a White House reception and went upstairs to their sickbeds. His boys were not improving, and during the next two weeks, they became grievously ill. The Evening Starbegan publishing daily reports on their condition.
February 18: “NO RECEPTION TO-NIGHT—The continued indisposition of the President’s children, one of whom, Willie, we regret to say, is extremely ill, will prevent the usual Tuesday night’s reception at the Executive Mansion from taking place.”
February 19: The paper reports that Willie continues critically ill, but that Tad has not yet been dangerously sick. “Everything that skillful physicians—Drs. Hall and Stone—and ceaseless care can do for the little sufferers, is being done.”
February 20: “BETTER.—We are glad to say that the President’s second son—Willie—who has been so dangerously ill seems better to-day.”
The last report proved wrong. Willie was delirious, and he died the afternoon of February 20, at 5:00 P.M. Lincoln cried out to his secretary, John G. Nicolay: “Well, Nicolay, my boy is gone—he is actually gone!”
On the morning of February 21, all the members of the cabinet called upon the president and later that day signed a joint letter addressed to the Senate and House of Representatives asking Congress to cancel the annual Washington’s birthday illumination of the public buildings, scheduled for the next night. William H. Seward, Salmon P. Chase, Edwin M. Stanton, Gideon Welles, Edward Bates, and Montgomery Blair wrote that the president “had been plunged into affliction” by his son’s death.
On February 22, in a story headlined “Little Willie Lincoln,” the Evening Star reported the sad details of the boy’s death. After Willie was embalmed, Lincoln viewed his son’s body in the Green Room.
That same day in Richmond, which had replaced Montgomery, Alabama, as the new Confederate capital, Willie Lincoln’s death did not postpone the February 22 inauguration of Jefferson Davis, which was scheduled specifically on George Washington’s birthday. It was a glorious and auspicious day for Davis. The Confederate president saw himself not as a rebel or a traitor but as the true inheritor of the legacy of George Washington and the revolutionary generation. He believed it was the Southern Confederacy, not the federal Union, that upheld the spirit of 1776. That evening, Davis was feted at a wonderful party in the White House of the Confederacy.
In Washington, at Lincoln’s White House, an opportunistic office-seeker made the mistake of intruding upon Lincoln’s anguish to request a petty postmaster’s position. Like George Washington, Lincoln had made it a lifelong habit to control his temper, and only rarely did he show anger in public. But if pushed too far, Lincoln would on occasion explode. This was one of those moments.
“When you came to the door here, didn’t you see the crepe on it?” Lincoln demanded. “Didn’t you realize that meant somebody must be lying dead in this house?”
“Yes, Mr. Lincoln, I did. But what I wanted to see you about was very important.”
“That crepe is hanging there for my son; his dead body at this moment is lying unburied in this house, and you come here, push yourself in with such a request! Couldn’t you at least have the decency to wait until after we had buried him?”
The president asked his old friend Orville Hickman Browning to be in charge of the funeral arrangements and burial. Browning rode in a carriage to Georgetown’s Oak Hill Cemetery to inspect the family tomb that the clerk of the United States Supreme Court, William T. Carroll, had offered as Willie’s temporary resting place until the president could take him home to Illinois. It was also Oak Hill where Jefferson Davis had buried his son Samuel Emory Davis, who died of illness on June 13, 1854, when he was less than two years old.
On February 23, friends and family viewed Willie’s body at the White House. On February 24, the day of Willie’s funeral, the government offices were closed, as if an important man of state had died. All official Washington knew the boy. Members of the cabinet, foreign ministers, members of Congress, military officers, and other important Washingtonians attended his funeral.
The Evening Star published a heartbreaking description of the scene:
His remains were placed in the Green room at the Executive mansion, where this morning a great many friends of the family called to take a last look at the little favorite, who had endeared himself to all guests of the family. The body was clothed in the usual every-day attire of youths of his age, consisting of pants and jacket with white stockings and low shoes—the white collar and wristbands being turned over the black cloth of the jacket. The countenance wore a natural and placid look, the only signs of death being a slight discoloration of the features.
The body lay in the lower section of a metallic case, the sides of which were covered by the winding sheet of white crape. The deceased held in the right hand a boquet composed of a superb camellia, around which were grouped azalias and sprigs of mignionette. This, when the case is closed, is to be reserved for the bereaved mother. On the breast of the deceased, was a beautiful wreath of the flowers, already named, interspersed with ivy leaves and other evergreens; near the feet was another wreath of the same kind, while azalias and sprigs of mignionette were disposed about the body.
The metallic case is very plain, and is an imitation of rosewood. On the upper section is a square silver plate, bearing, in plain characters, the simple inscription:
WILLIAM WALLACE LINCOLN.
BORN DECEMBER 21ST, 1850.
DIED FEBRUARY 20TH, 1862.
The mirrors in the East Room, the Green Room, and all the other reception rooms were covered with mourning drapery, the frames wrapped with black and the glass concealed by white crepe. It was impossible to see a reflection. It was Lincoln’s wish that Willie’s body remain in the Green Room and not be moved to the East Room for the funeral service, which was conducted by Rev. Dr. Gurley.
Gurley described Willie as “a child of bright intelligence and peculiar promise.” The minister listed his qualities: “His mind was active, inquisitive, and conscientious; his disposition was amiable and affectionate; his impulses were kind and generous; and his words and manners were gentle and attractive.” Everyone who knew the boy, Gurley continued, loved him: “It is easy to see how a child, thus endowed, would, in the course of eleven years, entwine himself around the hearts of those who knew him best.”
The president, who could usually speak with pride about his ability to master his emotions, could not contain himself. Willie, he said, “was too good for this earth…but then we loved him so. It is hard, hard to have him die!” Willie’s death seemed to summon forth his father’s accumulated, buried pain from a lifetime’s worth of losses. “This is the hardest trial of my life,” Lincoln moaned. “Why is it? Oh, why is it?” He was coming apart. No one in Washington had known Lincoln during the old New Salem days three decades ago. If any friends from that ghost town of Lincoln’s long-lost past had been present at Willie’s funeral, they would have recognized the familiar signs that made them fear for Lincoln’s mind and life thirty years ago, after the death of Ann Rutledge.
Most of the guests in the East Room joined the procession to Georgetown. At Oak Hill, Willie’s coffin was carried into the small chapel, where the Rev. Dr. Gurley performed a brief service. After the funeral guests went home, Willie’s casket was hidden below the floorboards of the chapel in a subterranean storage pit until graveyard workers carried him to the Carroll vault.
Lincoln prayed that Tad, still sick, would be spared. On February 26, the Evening Star reported that he would live: “We are glad to learn that the youngest son of the President is still improving in health, and is now considered entirely out of danger from the disease which prostrated him.” The Star went beyond reporting of the facts, and in an editorial beseeched its readers to consider the president: “Death has invaded the home of our Chief Magistrate, ‘whose heart is torn.’ Let the people stop to shed a tear with the President, who has so nobly earned their regard.”
In the days ahead Abraham and Mary mourned Willie in different ways. Mary sought relief in the world of dreams and spirits. “He comes to me every night,” she swore to her sister Emilie Todd Helm. “He comes to me…and stands at the foot of my bed with the same sweet, adorable smile he has always had; he does not always come alone; little Eddie is sometimes with him and twice he has come with our brother Alec, he tells me he loves his Uncle Alec and is with him most of the time. You cannot dream of the comfort this gives me. When I thought of my little son in immensity, alone, without his mother to direct him, no one to hold his little hand in loving guidance, it nearly broke my heart.” Soon Mary would call upon spiritualists and mediums to cross over to Willie’s realm. Mary banished from her sight all earthly reminders of her dead son. She disposed of his toys and forbade his playmates to return to the White House to play with Tad. The sight of them, she said, upset her too much.
No ghosts came to Lincoln’s bedchamber. Willie had died on a Thursday, and for several weeks, the president locked himself in his office every Thursday for a time to mourn and to conjure up memories of his son. No one dared intrude upon these reveries. And at night he dreamed of his lost boy.
Lincoln loved to read passages from literature aloud to his friends. One day in May, he recited lines from Shakespeare’s King John. “And, Father Cardinal, I have heard you say / That we shall see and know our friends in heaven. / If that be true, I shall see my boy again.” Then he wept uncontrollably.
Death also visited Jefferson Davis’s White House. On the afternoon of Saturday, April 30, 1864, an officer walking near the Confederate White House saw a crying young girl run out of the mansion and yank violently on the bell cord of the house next door. Then another girl and a boy fled the White House. A black female servant who followed them told the officer that one of the Davis children was badly hurt. The officer ran inside and found a male servant holding in his arms a little boy, “insensible and almost dead.” It was five-year-old Joseph Evan Davis. His brother, Jeff Jr., was kneeling beside him, trying to make him speak. “I have said all the prayers I know,” said Jeff, “but God will not wake Joe.” Jefferson and Varina were not home.
Joseph had fallen fifteen feet from a porch. He was found lying on the brick pavement, unconscious, with a broken left thigh and a severely contused forehead. His chest evidenced signs of internal injuries. The officer sent for a doctor and then began to rub the boy with camphor and brandy, and applied mustard on his feet and wrists. The child, he observed, “had beautiful black eyes and hair, and was a very handsome boy.” The treatment, wrote the officer in a letter a few days after the event, seemed to work: “In a short time he began to breathe better, and opened his eyes, and we all thought he was reviving, but it was the last bright gleaming of the wick in the socket before the light is extinguished for ever.”
Messengers summoned the president and Varina. When she saw Joseph, she “relieved herself in a flood of tears and wild lamentations.” Jefferson kneeled beside his son, squeezed his hands, and watched him die. The Confederate officer, whose name remains unknown to this day, described the president’s appearance: “Such a look of petrified, unutterable anguish I never saw. His pale, intellectual face…seemed suddenly ready to burst with unspeakable grief, and thus transfixed into a stony rigidity.” Almost thirty years earlier, watching Knox Taylor die had driven him into his “great seclusion.” He could not indulge in private grief now. His struggling nation needed him. Davis mastered his emotions in public, but his face could not hide them. “When I recall the picture of our poor president,” wrote the officer, “grief-stricken, speechless, tearless and crushed, I can scarcely refrain from tears myself.”
That night family friends and Confederate officials called at the mansion, but Jefferson Davis refused to come downstairs. Above their heads, guests could hear his creaking footsteps on the floorboards as he paced through the night. Mary Chestnut remembered “the tramp of Mr. Davis’s step as he walked up and down the room above—not another sound. The whole house [was] as silent as death.” The funeral at St. Paul’s Church, reported the newspapers, drew the largest crowd of any public event in Richmond since the beginning of the war. Hundreds of children packed the pews, each carrying a green bough or flowers to lay upon Joe’s grave. Later, Davis had the porch torn down.
In December 1862, Lincoln received word that Lieutenant Colonel William McCullough, the former clerk of the McLean County Circuit Court in Bloomington, Illinois, had been killed in action on December 5, and that his teenage daughter was overcome with grief. On December 13, in Fredericksburg, Virginia, the Army of the Potomac suffered terrible casualties in a series of futile infantry charges against Confederate troops sheltered behind stone walls. It was an illconceived, costly, senseless, and even shameful performance by General Ambrose Burnside. Two days before Christmas, on a day Lincoln might have taken Willie—gone ten months now—to his favorite toy store on New York Avenue, and while Mary worked downstairs with the White House staff making final arrangements for serving Christmas Day dinner to wounded soldiers, the president thought of another child and wrote a condolence letter to Fanny McCullough.
Lincoln sat at the big table in his second-floor office, reached for an eight-by-ten-inch sheet of lined paper bearing the engraved letterhead “Executive Mansion,” and began to write. What came from his pen was more than a polite and perfunctory note. In one of the most moving and revealing letters he ever wrote, Lincoln set down his hard-earned knowledge of life and death for an inexperienced girl. It was as if Lincoln had composed the letter not to one sad girl but to the American people.
Washington,
December 23, 1862
Dear Fanny
It is with deep regret that I learn of the death of your kind and brave Father; and, especially, that it is affecting your young heart beyond what is common in such cases. In this sad world of ours, sorrow comes to all; and, to the young, it comes with bitterest agony, because it takes them unawares. The older have learned to ever expect it. I am anxious to afford some alleviation of your present distress. Perfect relief is not possible, except with time. You can not now realize that you will ever feel better. Is not this so? And yet it is a mistake. You are sure to be happy again. To know this, which is certainly true, will make you some less miserable now. I have had experience enough to know what I say; and you need only to believe it, to feel better at once. The memory of your dear Father, instead of an agony, will yet be a sad sweet feeling in your heart, of a purer and holier sort than you have known before.
Please present my kind regards to your afflicted mother.
Your sincere friend,
A. Lincoln
Two days later, on their first Christmas without Willie, Abraham and Mary Lincoln, remembering their lost boy, and recalling Fanny McCullough and all the men who fell at Fredericksburg, and perhaps all the fallen men from all the battles, left the White House on Christmas Day and rode in their carriage from hospital to hospital, visiting wounded soldiers.
There was more grief to come. No wartime funeral in Washington had prepared the population—or the president—for the sensational catastrophe of June 17, 1864. It happened while Lincoln was returning to the capital aboard a special 8:00 A.M. train from Philadelphia, where the day before he had attended the Great Central Fair to benefit the U.S. Sanitary Commission, an organization that aided wounded soldiers.
On the morning of the seventeenth, as Lincoln’s train steamed south to Washington, more than one hundred young women were at work in the so-called “laboratory” of the U.S. Arsenal, making small-arms ammunition. The room was filled with unstable, combustible black powder. Outside the building, someone had set out several pans of fireworks to dry in the sunlight. At ten minutes before noon, a pan of fireworks ignited and cast a spark through an open window into the laboratory.
The president, a lifelong newspaper addict, must have read in the afternoon editions of the Evening Star what happened next: “After the powder on the benches caught, the fire spread down rapidly, blinding the girls and setting fire to their clothes. Many of them ran to the windows wrapped in flames, and on their way communicated the fire to the dresses of others.”
The fire, followed by a terrific explosion, caused male workers on the grounds to sprint to the laboratory from all directions. Some of the men wrapped the fleeing, burning girls in tarpaulins to extinguish the flames. Other men gathered the girls up in their arms and ran for the river: “One young lady ran out of the building with her dress all in flames, and was at once seized by a gentleman, who, in order to save her, plunged her into the river. He, however, burned his arms and hands badly in the effort. Three others, also in flames, started to run up the hill, the upper part of their clothing was torn off by two gentlemen near by, and who thus probably saved the girls from a horrific death, but in the effort, they too were badly injured.”
Desperate arsenal workers searched the debris for survivors. They knew these girls and had flirted with some of them. In an undated photograph taken some time before the explosion, a group of the women, dressed in bright, pretty hoopskirts and joined by several of the men, posed on the front porch of the laboratory. Now, in the ruins, they found only the dead. “The bodies were in such a condition that it was found necessary to place boards under each one in order to remove them from the ruins…they were carried out and placed upon the ground.” Unsupported, the burned corpses would have crumbled and broken into pieces. The “charred remains of those who had perished,” the Evening Star reported, “were laid upon the ground and covered over with canvass.”
The Star’s reporter rushed back to newspaper row to file his story in time to make the 2:30 p.m. edition: “When our reporter left the scene of the disaster nineteen bodies had been taken from the ruins, but they were so completely burnt to a crisp that recognition was impossible.” The survivors were “frightfully” wounded.
A little after 4:00 p.m., the coroner arrived to examine the dead. “The canvas covering the remains was then removed, and the most terrible sight presented itself to the view of those standing around. The charred remains of seventeen dead bodies lay scattered about, some in boxes, some on pieces of boards, and some in large tin pans, they having been removed from the ruins in these receptacles. In nearly every case only the trunk of the body remained, the arms and legs being missing or detached. A singular feature of the sad spectacle was that presented by a number of bodies nearly burned to a cinder being caged, as it were, in the wire of their hooped skirts…Many of the bodies seem to have been crisped quite bloodless.”
The scene was like a battlefield field hospital littered with the grisly evidence of amputations. “In a box was collected together a large number of feet, hands, arms and legs, and portions of the bones of the head, which it would be impossible to recognize.”
One woman was identified by her boots. Another still wore a fragment of blouse or skirt, and “her remains were subsequently recognized by a portion of dress which remained upon her unconsumed. The whole top of her head was, however, gone, and the brain was visible; and but for the fragment of dress it would have been impossible to recognize her.”
The youth of the victims—one was just thirteen years old—and the horrific nature of their hideous injuries shocked the city. “Seventeen Young Women Blown to Atoms” said the headline of the Daily Morning Chronicle the next day.
The funeral service, an outdoor ceremony to be held on the site of the tragedy, was scheduled for Sunday, June 19. The arsenal’s master carpenter needed time to make proper coffins. He also built a wood pavilion measuring twenty by fifteen feet and standing three feet off the ground. Upon it fifteen coffins lay side by side. Twenty-five thousand people, including President Lincoln—described by the press as “mourner in chief”—and Secretary of War Stanton, assembled on the arsenal grounds. After the service, the burial procession left the arsenal at 3:00 p.m., moved up Four and a Half Street, and then along Pennsylvania Avenue to the Congressional Cemetery. Lincoln’s carriage followed the hearses. He had come this way before, first for John Quincy Adams and then for Colonel Edward Baker.
At Fourth Street, the small funeral procession of thirteen-year-old Sallie McElfresh joined the main procession. “Her body,” reported the Daily Morning Chronicle, “was encased in a splendid coffin, decorated with wreaths, which was carried in a beautiful modern child’s hearse.” Lincoln could not have avoided seeing Sallie’s tiny coffin.
At the cemetery, two large burial pits—each one six feet long, fifteen feet wide, and five and a half feet deep—had been dug six feet apart on the west side of the cemetery. The dead had been divided into two groups, the known and the unknown, and they would be buried that way. Male employees of the arsenal handled the ropes and lowered each coffin, one at a time, into its grave. The crowd was dense, and as it pressed forward many women had their dresses torn in the scrum. Police held the throng at bay to allow the families to approach the pits. There, reported the Evening Star, “was another scene of anguish—the relatives, or many of them, giving way to loud cries, and hanging over the chasm, calling the deceased by their names.”
The ministers read services for the dead, and the crowd repeated the chant “Farewell, sisters, farewell.” Standing nearby, Lincoln did not speak publicly that day. It was the biggest funeral he had ever seen. Yes, seven months earlier he had spoken at the dedication of the new national military cemetery at Gettysburg, a battlefield where thousands had perished, but that was not a funeral, and the men he honored there had been long buried. The arsenal tragedy was fresh, its wounds raw. Not one of the Washington papers commented on Lincoln’s demeanor at Congressional Cemetery or described how he reacted when the girls were lowered into the ground. Surviving accounts do no more than note his presence. Later, as best can be told, Lincoln never spoke or wrote of what he saw this day.
That evening the president, accompanied by his secretary John Hay, went to Ford’s Theatre to attend a concert of sacred music. Abraham Lincoln often went to the theater when he wanted to forget.
While Lincoln’s body lay in the East Room on the night of April 17, and while thousands mourned and prepared for the next day’s public viewing, elsewhere in Washington one man gloated over his harvest of Lincoln blood relics. Mose Sandford, one of the men at the War Department hardware workshop who had built Lincoln’s temporary pine-box coffin to transport his body from the Petersen house to the White House on the morning of April 15, wrote a letter to a friend, describing how he plundered Lincoln’s possessions from the temporary Petersen house coffin. “I found one of the sleeves of his shirt one of his sleeve buttons,” he wrote, “black enameled trimmed with gold and the letter ‘L’ on the out side with ‘A.L.’ underneath that I sent to the Sect of War. The Bosom of his shirt was the next thing which met my eye as it had considerable blood upon it so I just confiscated the whole of it.” He even took the screws that had held down the box’s lid.
On April 17 Jefferson Davis, on the way to Charlotte, spent the night in Salisbury, North Carolina. Seventy-two hours had elapsed since Lincoln was assassinated, and still Davis had no news of the events in Washington.
Nor did he know that on this night, and the next morning, Union general William T. Sherman contemplated what should be done about Davis’s future. On the seventeenth, Sherman met with most of his generals to discuss Confederate general Joe Johnston’s army in North Carolina and to analyze the meeting Sherman had attended the day before with Johnston at the Bennett house to discuss that army’s possible surrender. But Sherman and his staff also talked about the Confederate president.
“We discussed…whether, if Johnston made a point of it, I should assent to the escape from the country of Jeff. Davis and his fugitive cabinet; and some one of my general officers, either Logan or Blair, insisted that, if asked for, we should even provide a vessel to carry them to Nassau from Charleston.”
Like Abraham Lincoln, Sherman would not have been disappointed if Jefferson Davis escaped the Union’s pursuit and fled the country.
In Salisbury, Davis received a letter signed by several Confederate officers begging his permission to disband their command and send their men home. They wanted to quit the war. If Davis agreed, news of it would spread like a contagion and infect the whole army. Soon every man would want to go home, and the South would lose the war. The Confederate president replied: “Our necessities exclude the idea of disbanding any portion of the force which remains to us and constitutes our best hope of recovery from the reverses and disasters to which you refer. The considerations which move you to the request are such, if generally acted on, would reduce the Confederate power to the force which each State might raise for its own protection. On the many battle-fields within the limits of your State the sons of other States have freely bled…”
Didn’t these men know that Davis also worried about his own wife and children? Moreover, the Confederacy’s survival was at stake. He continued writing. “My personal experience enables me fully to sympathize with your anxieties for your homes and for your families, but I hope I have said enough to satisfy you that I cannot consistently comply with your request, and that you will agree that duty to the country must take precedence of any personal desire.”
Davis’s morale remained high. Burton Harrison witnessed it firsthand: “During all this march Mr. Davis was singularly equable and cheerful; he seemed to have had a great load taken from his mind, to feel relieved of responsibilities, and his conversation was bright and agreeable…He talked of men and of books, particularly of Walter Scott and Byron; of horses and dogs and sports; of the woods and the fields; of trees and many plants; of roads, and how to make them; of the habits of birds, and of a variety of other topics. His familiarity with, and correct taste in, the English literature of the last generation, his varied experiences in life, his habits of close observation, and his extraordinary memory, made him a charming companion when disposed to talk.”
Although they had evacuated Richmond more than two weeks earlier, Harrison observed that Davis’s entourage shared his optimism: “Indeed…we were all in good spirits under adverse circumstances.”
On the morning of April 18, the White House gates opened to admit the throng that had waited all night to file into the East Room to view the president’s remains. Upstairs, Mary Lincoln and Tad remained in seclusion in her room. He would have liked to have seen the people who came to honor his father. He would, perhaps, have found more comfort in the consoling company of these loving strangers than in the secluded and unwholesome bedchamber of his unstable mother.
For the past three days the newspapers had been saturated with accounts of the president’s assassination and death. Today was the people’s first chance to come face-to-face with his corpse. While the public viewing was under way, as thousands of people walked past the coffin, with the White House funeral less than twenty-four hours away, George Harrington was trying to locate Bishop Matthew Simpson, who was in Philadelphia, to let him know he was expected to speak tomorrow at the president’s funeral.
The Philadelphia Telegraph Office responded to Harrington’s telegraph: “Bishop Simpson was not at home and his daughter says she cannot answer it. She says he is going to Washington tonight? Respectfully / H.B. Berry / Manager / American Telegraph Office.”
Eventually the divine’s family dispatched a telegram from Philadelphia to Harrington: “Bishop Simpson is absent from home he will be in Washington City tomorrow morning. E M Simpson.” Then another telegram arrived, this one from Simpson: “Just received your invitation. Am willing to assist. What part of the services am I expected to take. M. Simpson.” If his train was not delayed, he would arrive the next day, just in time. He would prepare his text through the night and during his train ride. There would be no time once he arrived in Washington.
By this point, Harrington was becoming overwhelmed by a last-minute deluge of requests for funeral tickets, press passes to the White House, and permission to march in the procession. For every request Harrington disposed of, another came in the door.
Not all of Harrington’s correspondents demanded special favors. Some offered helpful advice. “Pardon me for suggesting that as few carriages as possible ought to be allowed in the funeral cortege of the President. There are one hundred thousand aching hearts that will be following his remains to the grave. This cannot be done if long lines of vehicles occupy the space, without adding to the volume of humanity desirous of participating.” The anonymous letter was signed “Affectionately.” The same writer also sent a note to Stanton on April 18 suggesting that streetcar noise might disturb the next day’s funeral events: “The running of cars upon the street railroads, between 17th Street and the Congressional Cemetery, should cease tomorrow between 11 a.m., and 4 p.m. The rolling of cars, and the jingle of bells will contrast strangely with the solemnity of those sacred hours.”
As the final visitors filed past the coffin, carpenters loitered nearby, impatient to start work the moment the last citizen exited the White House and the doors were shut and locked behind them. If the public had its way, the viewing would have continued through the night. Thousands of people were turned away so the crews could begin preparing the East Room for the funeral. Disappointed mourners would have one more chance to view the remains, after they were transferred to the Capitol.
Harrington had come up with an ingenious solution to the seating dilemma. He would not seat the guests in chairs at all. He had calculated that, allowing for the space required for the catafalque and the aisles, it was impossible to squeeze six hundred chairs into the East Room. He decided that only a few of the most important guests, including the Lincoln family, needed to have individual chairs. But if he built risers, or bleachers, for the rest, he could pack slightly more than six hundred people into the East Room, the minimum number of important guests he needed to seat. The White House was abuzz with activity—men carried stacks of fresh lumber into the East Room, where carpenters sawed, hammered, and nailed them into bleachers.
On the morning of April 19, cities across the North prepared to hold memorial services at the same time as the Washington funeral. Military posts across the nation marked the hour. At the White House, journalist George Alfred Townsend was among the first guests to enter the East Room that morning. As one of the most celebrated members of the press, he was allowed to approach Lincoln’s corpse. His account of the event invited his readers to do the same:
Approach and look at the dead man. Death has fastened into his frozen face all the character and idiosyncrasy of life. He has not changed one line of his grave, grotesque countenance, nor smoothed out a single feature. The hue is rather bloodless and leaden; but he was always sallow. The dark eyebrows seem abruptly arched; the beard, which will grow no more, is shaved close, save for the tuft at the short small chin. The mouth is shut, and like that of one who has put the foot down firm, and so are the eyes, which look as calm as slumber. The collar is short and awkward, turned over the stiff elastic cravat, and whatever energy or humor or tender gravity marked the living face is hardened into its pulseless outline. No corpse in the world is better prepared according to its appearances. The white satin around it reflects sufficient light upon the face to show that death is really there; but there are sweet roses and early magnolias, and the balmiest of lilies strewn around, as if the flowers had begun to bloom even in his coffin…
Three years ago, when little Willie Lincoln died, Doctors Brown and Alexander, the embalmers or injectors, prepared his body so handsomely that the President had it twice disinterred to look upon it. The same men, in the same way, have made perpetual these beloved lineaments. There is now no blood in the body; it was drained by the jugular vein and sacredly preserved, and through a cutting on the inside of the thigh the empty blood-vessels were charged with a chemical preparation which soon hardened to the consistence of stone. The long and bony body is now hard and stiff, so that beyond its present position it cannot be moved any more than the arms or legs of a statue. It has undergone many changes. The scalp has been removed, the brain taken out, and the chest opened and the blood emptied. All that we see of Abraham Lincoln, so cunningly calculated in this splendid coffin, is a mere shell, an effigy, a sculpture. He lies in sleep, but it is the sleep of marble. All that made this flesh vital, sentient, and affectionate is gone forever.
The morning of the funeral, requests were still being made by politicians and leading citizens hopeful that the funeral train would pass through their locale. C. W. Chapin, president of the Western Railroad Corporation, sent an urgent telegram to Massachusetts congressman George Ashmun, one of the last men to see Lincoln alive at the White House the evening of April 14, pleading with him to use his influence to divert the funeral train to New England: “In no portion of our common country do the people mourn in deeper grief than in New England,” he wrote. “This slight divergence will take in the route the capital of Connecticut and also important points in Massachusetts.”
To thwart gate-crashers, funeral guests were not allowed direct entry to the Executive Mansion. Instead, guards directed the bearers of the six hundred coveted tickets, printed on heavy card stock, next door, to the Treasury Department. From there they crossed a narrow,
ONE OF THE FEW SURVIVING INVITATIONS TO LINCOLN’S WHITE HOUSE FUNERAL.
elevated wooden footbridge, constructed just for the occasion, that led into the White House. A funeral pass became the hottest ticket in town, more precious than tickets to Lincoln’s first and second inaugural ceremonies or balls, and more desirable than an invitation to one of Mary Lincoln’s White House levees. The only ticket to surpass the rarity of a funeral invitation had not been printed yet and would be for an event not yet scheduled—the July 7, 1865, execution of Booth’s coconspirators, for which only two hundred tickets would be issued.
Just hours before the funeral, George Harrington was still receiving last-minute ticket requests: “Surgeon General’s Office / Washington City, D.C. / April 19. / Dear Sir / Please send me by [messenger] tickets for myself & Col. Crane my executive Officer. JW Barnes, Surgeon General.” Harrington could not deny tickets to the chief medical officer of the U.S. Army and senior doctor at the Petersen house, or to his deputy.
As the guests entered the Executive Mansion, none of them knew what to expect. The East Room overwhelmed them with its decorations and flowers and the catafalque. It was an unprecedented scene. Two presidents had died in office, William Henry Harrison in 1841 and Zachary Taylor in 1850, but their funerals were not as grand or elaborate as this. No president had been so honored in death, not even George Washington, who, after modest services, rested in a simple tomb at Mount Vernon.
The scene lives on only in the written accounts of those who were there, and in artists’ sketches and newspaper woodcuts. Somebody should have taken a photograph. Sadly, no photographs were made in the East Room before or during the funeral. It could have been done. Alexander Gardner had photographed more complex scenes than this, including the second inaugural, where he took crystalclear close-ups of the East Front platform and one of his operators had managed to take a long view of the Great Dome while Lincoln was reading his address. Edwin Stanton failed to invite Gardner or his rival Mathew Brady to preserve for history the majesty of Abraham Lincoln’s funeral.
At exactly ten minutes past noon, a man arose from his chair, approached the coffin, and in a solitary voice broke the hush. The Reverend Mr. Hall intoned the solemn opening words of the Episcopal burial service: “I am the resurrection and the life, saith the Lord; he that believeth in me, though he were dead, yet shall he live; and whosoever liveth and believeth in me shall never die.”
Then Bishop Matthew Simpson, who had arrived on time, spoke. He was followed by Lincoln’s own minister, the Reverend Dr. Gurley, who delivered his sermon.
It was a cruel, cruel hand, that dark hand of the assassin, which smote our honored, wise, and noble President, and filled the land with sorrow. But above and beyond that hand, there is another, which we must see and acknowledge. It is the chastening hand of a wise and faithful Father. He gives us this bitter cup, and the cup that our Father has given us shall we not drink it?
He is dead! But the God whom he trusted lives and He can guide and strengthen his successor as He guided and strengthened him. He is dead! But the memory of his virtues; of his wise and patriotic counsels and labors; of his calm and steady faith in God, lives as precious, and will be a power for good in the country quite down to the end of time. He is dead! But the cause he so ardently loved…That cause survives his fall and will survive it…though the friends of liberty die, liberty itself is immortal. There is no assassin strong enough and no weapon deadly enough to quench its inexhaustible life…This is our confidence and this is our consolation, as we weep and mourn today; though our President is slain, our beloved country is saved; and so we sing of mercy as well as of judgment. Tears of gratitude mingle with those of sorrow, while there is also the dawning of a brighter, happier day upon our stricken and weary land.
While the three ministers held forth for almost two hours, more than a hundred thousand people waited outside the White House for the funeral services inside to end. In the driveway of the Executive Mansion, six white horses were harnessed to the magnificent hearse that awaited their passenger. Nearby, more than fifty thousand marchers and riders had assembled in the sequence assigned to them by the War Department’s printed order of procession. Another fifty thousand people lined Pennsylvania Avenue between the Treasury building and the Capitol. According to the New York Times, “the throng of spectators was…by far the greatest that ever filled the streets of the city.”
MOURNING RIBBON WORN IN WASHINGTON BY POST OFFICE WORKERS FOR THE APRIL 19, 1865, FUNERAL PROCESSION.
Most of the people outside the White House wore symbols of mourning: black badges containing small photographs of Lincoln, white silk ribbons bordered in black and bearing his image, small American flags with sentiments of grief printed in black letters and superimposed over the stripes, or just simple strips of black crepe wrapped around coat sleeves. Some mourners had arrived by sunrise to stake out the best viewing positions. By 10:00 a.m. there were no more places left to stand on Pennsylvania Avenue.
THE HEARSE THAT CARRIED LINCOLN’S BODY DOWN PENNSYLVANIA AVENUE.
Faces filled every window, and children and young men climbed lampposts and trees for a better view. The city was so crowded with out-of-towners that the hotels were filled and many people had to sleep along the streets or in public parks.
By the time the White House funeral services ended and the procession to the Capitol got under way, the people had been waiting for hours. It was a beautiful day. Four years earlier, on inauguration day, March 4, 1861, General Winfield Scott had placed snipers on rooftops overlooking Pennsylvania Avenue to protect president-elect Lincoln, who had received many death threats from boastful would-be assassins. No marksmen were needed today. This afternoon the only men on rooftops were spectators seeking a clear view of Lincoln’s hearse.
At 2:00 p.m., soldiers in the East Room surrounded the coffin, lifted it from the catafalque, and carried Abraham Lincoln out of the White House for the last time. They placed the coffin in the hearse. Funeral guests designated to join the procession took their places in the line of march. Everything was ready. Soon, for the first time since the morning of April 15, when the soldiers took him home, Lincoln was on the move again. This second procession on April 19 dwarfed the simple one that had escorted him from the Petersen house to the White House.
Cannon fire announced the start of the procession: Minute guns boomed near St. John’s Church, City Hall, and the Capitol. At churches and firehouses, every bell in Washington tolled. They tolled too in Georgetown and Alexandria. In later years, witnesses recalled the sound of the day as much as the sight of it. Tad Lincoln emerged from seclusion to join the procession, and he and his brother Robert rode in a carriage behind the hearse. The mile-and-a-half trip between the White House and the Capitol took Abraham Lincoln past familiar places—the Willard Hotel, where he had spent his first night in Washington as president-elect; Mathew Brady’s studio, where he had gone to pose for many photographs. His hearse also carried him past the National Hotel, where he had once spoken from the balcony to a regiment of Union soldiers, and where his assassin had spent his last night on the eve of the murder. The procession was immense and included every imaginable category of marcher: military officers from the army, navy, and Marine Corps; enlisted men; civil officials; judges; diplomats; and doctors—“physicians to the deceased,” read the printed program. One corps of marchers suggested the cost of the war: wounded and bandaged veterans, many of them amputees missing arms or legs, many on crutches. The procession was immense and took two hours to pass a given point. Indeed, when the front of the column reached the Capitol, the rear had still not cleared the Treasury Department.
George Alfred Townsend described the arrival of the remains at the Capitol:
“The cortege passed to the left [north] side of the Capitol, and entering the great gates, passed the grand stairway, opposite the splendid dome, where the coffin was disengaged and carried up the ascent. It was posted under the bright concave, now streaked with mournful trappings, and left in state, watched by guards of officers with drawn swords. This was a wonderful spectacle, the man most beloved and honored in the ark of the republic…Here the prayers and addresses of the noon were rehearsed and the solemn burial service read.”
When the soldiers carried the flag-draped coffin up the stairs, they walked past the very spot where Lincoln had delivered his second inaugural address. That day began stormy, but as Lincoln began to speak, the sun burst through the clouds. On the day of his funeral it was beautiful and clear. The crowds watched in silence as the soldiers carried the coffin inside and laid it upon a catafalque in the center of the rotunda. Many of the people waiting to enter the Capitol to view the corpse had been there six weeks earlier and had heard Lincoln deliver his inaugural address. They marveled at this terrible reversal of fortune.