Darkest April

by Diana Loski


Abraham Lincoln (1809-1865)

(Library of Congress)


Oh, memorable  day!  Oh, memorable night!  Never before was joy so violently contrasted  with sorrow!1 

The  United States has seen its unfortunate share of assassinations, yet never has  the nation shown greater grief and mourning than over the first one: the  shocking murder of its 16th President, Abraham Lincoln.

Lincoln knew there were multiple  threats on his life from the moment he was elected.  He grew fatalistic about the threats, and he  refused to let the possibility change his practices or habits.  He had given an oath to protect the  Constitution and the people, and he was determined to do it.

On March 14, 1865, just one month  before his assassination, Lincoln was so worn with worry and exhaustion that on  that day he had to conduct a Cabinet meeting in his bedchamber.  With the fall of Petersburg, and then  Richmond, at the beginning of April, Lincoln grew exuberant.  He had no idea that, as the terrible war was  coming to an end, so was his life.2 

On Friday, April 14, elated with the  knowledge that, with General Lee’s recent surrender at Appomattox Court House,  the war was coming to a close, he and his wife, Mary, decided to celebrate by  attending the theater, which had advertised the comedy Our American  Cousin.  Accompanied by friends  Clara Harris and Major Henry Rathbone, the Lincolns arrived late and the play  had already started.  Sometime after 10  p.m. on that awful night, John Wilkes Booth, a narcissistic actor, gained  entrance to the Presidential box.  During  a moment of hilarity on the stage, Booth fired a single shot into the back of  Lincoln’s head.   Lincoln immediately  collapsed into unconsciousness – a comatose state from which he never awoke.

Several doctors, among them Charles Leale,  the first one to reach the President in his box, and Charles Taft, who was  lifted up into the box by members of the crowd, saw after a brief examination  that the wound was mortal.  Not wishing  to have him die in a theater, they decided to move Lincoln to a house across  the street.  They took Lincoln to the  Petersen House, which, in addition to housing the Petersen family, also had  boarders.  Placing the fallen President  on a small bed of one of the boarders on the second floor, they placed him  diagonally on the bed, removed the foot board, and then his clothing to see if  there were other wounds.  They then  covered him with blankets.  Gideon Welles  remembered, “ His slow, full respiration lifted the clothes with  each breath he took.  His features were calm  and striking.”3 

Mary Lincoln entered the room with  Clara Harris, her companion from Ford’s Theater.  Robert Lincoln, too, came to the house.  Mary collapsed into fits of agonized weeping,  and was soon removed from the vigil.  She  then was allowed back into the chamber, and removed again when her grief  overwhelmed her.  Robert remained with  his father through the night.  Most of  Lincoln’s Cabinet arrived, with other statesmen such as Senator Charles Sumner,  upon whom Robert Lincoln sometimes leaned for support.  One who was absent was William Henry Seward,  who had been assaulted in his home that same night by an assassin and friend of  Booth’s.  Windows were opened due to a  stifling closeness from the silent crowd.   Outside, an equally somber mass stood in the mist and rain.  That night, there was a late-rising moon that  was obscured, due to the clouds.4 

Lincoln gave his last breath, with a  slight smile that formed on his lips, at 7:22 a.m. on Saturday, April 15,  1865.  It was the day before Easter Sunday,  a “bleak and cheerless April morning.”  At Lincoln’s passing, the gathered group  inside the house remained in stunned silence for several minutes.  Then Secretary of War Edwin Stanton asked Dr.  Phineas Gurley, a Presbyterian minister and friend of the President, to say a  prayer.  The men all knelt as the pastor  prayed.  Then, Stanton rose and said,  with tears falling on his cheeks, “Now he belongs to the ages.”5  

In  the streets that surrounded Ford’s Theater and the Petersen House, there was an  immense crowd of humanity to learn the fate of their President, “ men, women and  children thronging the pavements and darkening the throughfares,”  remembered journalist Noah Brooks. “It seemed as if everybody was  in tears.”  The group witnessed that  morning “ a tragical procession ” as  members of the military bore the President’s body to the White House.  “Instantly, flags were…at  half-mast, all over the city, the bells tolled solemnly, and with incredible  swiftness Washington went into deep, universal mourning.”6 

As the procession reached the White  House, another large crowd waited.   Despite the falling rain, “every head was uncovered, and  the profound silence which prevailed was broken only by sobs and by measured  tread of those who bore the martyred President back to the home which he so  lately quitted full of life, hope, and cheer.”7 

Mary Lincoln took to her bed, and  remained there for many days, unable to attend the funeral.  Friends and dignitaries came to the White  House to offer condolences, but most of them she refused to see.  Robert helped with funeral arrangements.  Tad, the youngest of the Lincoln sons, was  left to himself.  On Easter morning, he  asked one of the staff if his father had gone to heaven.  When the attendant assured Tad in the  affirmative, he replied, “Then I am glad he has gone  there, for he was never happy here.  This  was not a good place for him.”   All through the day, workers sawed and hammered, making a bier for the  casket.  The noise haunted Mary  Lincoln.  Her deep grief and insomnia had  made her physically ill, and she begged them to cease that particular labor.8

Abraham Lincoln (1809-1865) (Library of Congress)

Ford's Theater

(Library of Congress)



On Monday evening, April 17, the embalmed body of Abraham Lincoln was carefully placed in the casket and taken to the East Room, where he would lie in state for the following day.  On Tuesday, April 18, the devastated public, the “largest mass of people” imaginable, came to pay their respects.  Robert, the only one of the immediate family to attend, stood at the foot of the casket, looking ashen and stoically forlorn.  Accompanying him were two of his uncles, Ninian Edwards (in whose parlor Abraham and Mary met and courted in Springfield) and Clark Smith. Two of his mother’s cousins, Lyman and John B. Todd, were also present.  Behind Robert were Lincoln’s Cabinet, minus the still desperately wounded Secretary Seward who remained at home.  Lincoln’s two secretaries, John Nicolay and John Hay, also stood by the bier near Robert.  At the opposite end was the broken-hearted general, Ulysses S. Grant.  His eyes were moist with tears as he remained resolutely by his commander’s side.  He later said that the day of Lincoln’s death was “the saddest day of my life.”9

Wednesday, April 19, the day of Lincoln’s funeral, dawned cloudless and sunny.  After the lengthy state funeral, with 600 in attendance at the White House, the casket, covered in flowers and placed on boughs of evergreen, was loaded onto a carriage, and led by a solemn military escort up Pennsylvania Avenue.  The streets were cleared of traffic, but crowds thronged the sidewalks.  Even the roofs of buildings, and windows throughout, were filled with onlookers.  The long, mournful queue, which comprised carriages of dignitaries, including a pageantry of Lincoln’s cabinet, senators, military personnel, and a large contingent of marching, wounded Union soldiers, passed by the home of Secretary Seward, who sat, propped up with pillows, by his window to watch the procession.  The belfries of every church along the way tolled sorrowfully as the remains of the President passed.  After two hours, the procession finally arrived at the Capitol building, and throughout the long night, the body was flanked by a military honor guard.10

At 8 a.m. on Thursday, April 20, the doors of the Capitol opened and thousands more filed through, in a double line, passing by both sides of the coffin of their slain President.  All day long and into the night, the endless, sorrowing crowds of humanity came to pay their last respects.  “While this solemn pageant was passing,” Noah Brooks recalled, “I was allowed to go alone up the winding stairs that lead to the top of the great dome of the Capitol.  Looking down from that lofty point, the sight was weird and memorable.  Directly beneath me lay the casket in which the dead President lay at full length, far, far below; and, like black atoms moving over a sheet of gray paper, the slow-moving mourners…crept silently in two dark lines.”11

On Friday morning, April 21, one week after Lincoln’s last visit to Ford’s Theater, Lincoln’s remains, and those of his beloved son, Willie, who had died in early 1862, were placed on the funeral train for the final journey to Springfield, Illinois.  The journey, with several stops in cities along the way, consisted of 1600 miles and took nearly two weeks to complete.  On the train were Robert Lincoln, Secretaries Hay and Nicolay, members of Lincoln’s Cabinet, senators, numerous governors, Union generals, and Lincoln’s first law partner and lifelong friend, John Stuart. The train passed by multiple cities and stopped at some of the larger ones:  Baltimore, Harrisburg, Philadelphia, New York City, Albany, Buffalo, Cleveland, Columbus, Indianapolis (with an unscheduled stop at Michigan City, Indiana, due to the outpouring from the citizenry), Chicago, and finally Springfield.12

Besides the additional throngs of mourners who came to these cities to see Lincoln once more, there were innumerable crowds who waited along the tracks to catch a glimpse of the funeral train.  Among them were two statesmen in Lancaster, Pennsylvania: former President James Buchanan and Congressman Thaddeus Stevens.13

The train pulled into the depot in Springfield, Illinois at 7 a.m. on Wednesday, May 3, 1865.  Lincoln’s final journey, which lasted twelve days by train, had ended.  On May 4, the public was admitted for a final viewing, followed by another  funeral, attended by some 75,000 in all, and burial at the gravesite. 

From the moment that the attending physician at the Petersen House whispered, “He is gone,” the United States was never the same again.  Over a century and a half since Lincoln was upon the earth, his memory has never faded, and the sorrow of that dark April is still remembered.14

It’s not just Lincoln the man who deserves remembrance, the principles for which he stood – and for which he was martyred – are the necessity of the ages.  It’s not only his death that marked the darkest period in American history, it was the threat of what he strived to keep for the nation and spread to the world that might have been destroyed with him. 

“The pyramids in time may sink beneath the desert sands,” remembered one contemporary, “the temples of earth crumble in the dust…the fame of Caesars vanishes in the darkness of oblivion, but surely as long as the race endures it will behold the familiar figure of the martyred son – strange, gaunt, silent, colossal, with agony written in the lines of his kindly face.”15

“It’s not just merely for to-day, but for all time to come that we should perpetuate for our children’s children this great and free government,” Lincoln said in an address to an Ohio regiment in 1864.  “I beg you to remember this, not merely for my sake, but for yours.”16

It is liberty that Lincoln was determined to preserve, not just for his generation, but for all who followed.  He wanted it, not just for our nation, but for the world.  He lived just long enough to see its survival.

“Lincoln was a humanitarian as broad as the world,” Russian author Leo Tolstoy said in 1908.  “He was bigger than his country – bigger than all the Presidents together.  We are still too near to his greatness, but after a few centuries more, our posterity will find him considerably bigger than we do.”17

We are halfway there.
 
a black and white photo of a military parade


End Notes: 

1.  Keckley, p. 81.  Elizabeth Keckley was a former slave and  seamstress, who was also a friend to Mary Lincoln.

2.  Oates, p. 417. 

3.  Steers, p. 127. 

4.  Brooks, p. 230. 

5.  Kunhardt, p. 124.  Sandburg, p. 716.  Steers, p. 124. 

6.  Brooks, p. 231. 

7.  Ibid. 

8.  Phillips, p. 277.  Baker, pp. 247-248.  Mary Lincoln remained closed up in the White House until May 22,  nearly six weeks after her husband was assassinated.

9.  Sandburg, p. 730.  Kunhardt, p. 125. 

10.  Kunhardt, pp. 130-131. 

11.  Brooks, p. 236. 

12.  Sandburg, p. 730.  Kunhardt, p. 140. 

13.  Kunhardt, p. 140.  Brooks, p. 235. Sandburg, p. 730. 

14.  Steers, p. 127.  Kuhnhardt, p. 133. 

15.  Good, p. 196. 

16.  Lincoln, p. 709. 


17. Goodwin, p. 748. 

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