Saying Goodbye to Lincoln

by Diana Loski

(Library of Congress)

The tragic way in which Abraham Lincoln met his end changed America in a way that even the Civil War had not. The ubiquitous belief and faith in the good of mankind, a philosophy embraced by Lincoln himself, was shaken when John Wilkes Booth shot the President during the play “Our American Cousin” on the night of April 14, 1865. Lincoln died, without ever regaining consciousness, the next morning. 

The assassination of Lincoln proved yet another terrible ordeal for the American people, after four years of devastating war.

During a Cabinet meeting that last Friday morning of his life, Lincoln spoke of a strange, recurring dream he had the previous night. He described being “in a singular, indescribable vessel…moving rapidly toward an indefinite shore.” He was optimistic about the experience, as he had dreamed it before, always preceding a significant event, including the Battles of Antietam, Gettysburg, and Vicksburg; he considered it a good omen.¹

Although Lincoln was a temperate man who ate sparsely at breakfast, on the last morning of his life, he ate heartily and with the rest of the family. His son, Robert, had served on General Grant’s staff, and had recently returned from the Appomattox. He carried a photograph of General Robert E. Lee, and showed the image to his father. Lincoln studied the ambrotype for a moment, and murmured, “It is a good face. It is a noble face.” Later, when meeting with his Cabinet, Lincoln declared that he was “glad the butchering was about over.” Unfortunately, it wasn’t quite over, as the events of the night would soon prove.²

In 1880, Lincoln’s bodyguard Ward Hill Lamon met with Ulysses S. Grant in Boulder, Colorado. Grant told him something he had never publicly divulged. “He told me that about the period of surrender of General Lee, no subject gave him deeper concern than the personal safety of the President,” Lamon wrote. “He stated that no special cause existed for this apprehension, as the war was manifestedly and inevitably drawing to a conclusion, [yet] he had been harassed by almost constant fears and anxieties for Mr. Lincoln’s life.” When Grant learned of Lincoln’s assassination, he told Lamon: “This is the darkest day of my life! I do not know what it means. Here was the Rebellion put down in a field, and it is reasserting itself in a gutter. We had fought it as a war, we have now to fight it as murder.”³

Lincoln’s funeral was the longest official one to date in American history. About twenty-five million people attended services for the slain commander-in-chief. After the funeral in Washington, a train bearing the President’s remains stopped in several cities before arriving at the final destination in Springfield, Illinois. The cities included Baltimore, Harrisburg, Philadelphia, New York City, Albany, Buffalo, Cleveland, Columbus, Indianapolis, and Chicago. A nine-car funeral train was festooned in black crepe as well as the red, white, and blue. A smaller coffin bearing the body of young Willie Lincoln, who had died in 1862, accompanied the President.

In Philadelphia, the President’s body lay in state in historic Independence Hall. In New York, a solemn procession paraded through the streets, with over 85,000 onlookers. Two young boys watched the darkly clad lines from their apartment window on Broadway. They were Theodore and Elliot Roosevelt.⁴ 

At the State House in Albany, thousands lined up to pay their respects. In Buffalo, the city officials, rather than take up valuable time in a procession, placed the body in St. James Hall, giving the public eleven hours to file past the coffin. In Cleveland, Lincoln’s body reposed in a park, where citizens from Ohio, Michigan, and western Pennsylvania waited for hours to pay their last respects. The people there were allotted fifteen hours and they took up every minute. In Columbus, Ohio, the state capitol building kept the Presidential casket for twelve hours – and thousands more filed past. While the train traveled toward Indianapolis, bonfires lit up the countryside all along the route to pay homage to the man aboard the funeral train on his final journey. Most of the vigil was in the pouring rain.

Once the train arrived at the Indiana capital, a funeral cortege carried the casket through the streets. It was Sunday, and churches emptied so that the people could instead pay their respects to Lincoln. In Chicago, thousands more marched in solemn procession alongside the Presidential coffin to show their devotion to the statesman from Illinois. The entire funeral trip lasted from April 19 to May 3, 1865. Lincoln was buried in Springfield on May 4, 1865. Over one million Americans had reverently attended funeral services or watched the many processions. It was a significant number, as the population of the nation at that time was approximately one-tenth of what it is today.⁵

The final procession to Oak Ridge Cemetery in Springfield, Illinois contained an entourage of thousands. Politicians, statesmen, military units, disabled veterans and Union generals all marched toward the cemetery. Some who had fought at Gettysburg, most notably the 24^th Michigan Infantry Regiment, who had sustained heavy casualties in battle just outside of that Pennsylvania town, participated in the event. General Joe Hooker was the grand marshal of the last procession, and divided the enormous queue of dignitaries into eight segments, or divisions.⁶

Lincoln’s hearse was pulled by six black horses. Behind it walked Lincoln’s riderless horse, Old Bob, draped in a black blanket. Following in a carriage was Robert Lincoln, with his second cousin Elizabeth Todd Grimley. Mary Lincoln, the widowed First Lady, was still too paralyzed with grief to attend the public funeral. She remained in solitude in the Executive Mansion, in Washington.7

The slain President was eventually buried in Oak Ridge Cemetery, but his resting place was by no means final. He was moved shortly afterward when a plot to steal his corpse was discovered. For several years, Lincoln’s remains were hidden in the cellar of the cemetery caretaker. When Mary Lincoln died in 1882, she too was placed in the cellar alongside her husband.⁸

Finally, in 1901, Robert Lincoln requested that his father’s casket be opened and his body viewed, to ensure that he had not been stolen. A group of men entrusted with the task did so, and were surprised, upon opening the coffin, as they peered into the perfectly preserved, serene face of Abraham Lincoln. So much embalming had been done to keep him for the long trek to Springfield that the body was still intact. Several threads of shiny red and blue material were noticed on his black suit – remnants of the flag that had covered his body from 1865.⁹

The casket was then closed and sealed, and the bodies of Abraham and Mary Lincoln were lowered into a vault in Oak Ridge Cemetery. They were covered with cement, never again to be in danger of kidnapping. Sons Willie, Tad, and Eddie were also buried there. Only Robert, eventually the sole surviving son of the Lincolns, was not laid to rest there when he died in 1926. His grave is in Arlington National Cemetery, just downhill from Robert E. Lee’s former home.¹⁰

Lincoln always knew his life was in danger during the fratricidal war. If family members were willing to kill one another, why not him as well? Still, Lincoln refused to allow himself to believe that someone hated him enough to want him dead. “I do not want it understood that I share your apprehensions,” he told Ward Hill Lamon. “I never have.”¹¹

Mr. Lamon was in Virginia on governmental business on the night Lincoln was shot at Ford’s Theater. “I wanted him to promise me he would not go out after night while I was gone,” Lamon sadly remembered, “particularly to the theater. He [Lincoln] turned to Mr. Usher [the Secretary of the Interior] and said, ‘Usher, this boy is a monomaniac on the subject of my safety. I can hear him or hear of his being around, at all times of the night, to prevent somebody from murdering me. He thinks I shall be killed; and we think he is going crazy.” Lincoln added, “What does anyone want to assassinate me for? If anyone wants to do so, he can do it any day or night if he is ready to give his life for mine.” He finally ended with, “It is nonsense.”¹²

Secretary Usher defended Lamon's stance, and urged Lincoln to listen to him. Sadly, Lincoln did not listen, perhaps because he could not bear to change his views on the goodness of the American people, or his wish to let the people down who were expecting to see him at the theater that night. 

There was just one crazed assassin who did indeed exchange his life for Lincoln’s, although Booth tried his hardest to escape the hand of justice. While it may have been a nonsensical idea to Lincoln, it nevertheless happened, and the nation was never the same because of it.

It is uniquely American that someone great, who began with such obscure beginnings and a troubled young life, riddled with poverty, failure and death, would stand so capably at the helm of a nation during its greatest distress – and then meet with such a terrible and untimely end. His story secures for all time the epic struggle he eventually won, even though he lost his own life in the process.

In 1870, an Indiana Congressman named Robert Dale Owen described Lincoln in this manner: “Some men stand still, amazed, when the tempest darkens around them; others grow and rise to the height of the occasion; but few have ever grown and risen as did this man, his mind maturing and his views expanding under the stirring of his times.”¹³

America continues to survive her tempests, always in remembrance of a legacy left by a President who was taken far too soon, and in a most terrible way, one hundred and sixty years ago.

In their sorrow, the American people thronged in the rain and sunshine, in great cities and along the routes of the funeral train, to bid goodbye to their beloved President..C.