This evening found me leafing through an account of the Lincoln assassination in search of a specific piece of information, but, as is almost always the case, I was soon lost instead in first one passage and then another. I must’ve stared for several minutes at the image of the boots Abraham Lincoln had worn to Ford’s Theatre on April 14, 1865, and at the accompanying photograph of the worsted wool coverlet beneath which the president spent the last few hours of his life. Most absorbing tonight, though, were the accounts of what was happening at the White House in the days immediately following the assassination.
It was well past dusk as I reread accounts of Lincoln’s autopsy that had been performed in an upstairs guest room at the Executive Mansion on April 16, 1865. It would be another three days before final decisions were made about his funeral and burial. Thus, for those days the White House became a temporary mausoleum. At the far opposite end of the hallway from where that solemn work had been done was Mrs. Lincoln’s room, where she remained nearly inconsolable. Twelve-year-old Tad’s pleadings for her not to cry brought the only brief pauses in her heavy sobs. Downstairs, as workmen were constructing the large wooden catafalque on which her husband would soon lie in state, she seemed to relive with every hammer strike the sound of the shot that took her husband’s life. So wracked was she by this agony that she implored the workmen not to disassemble the structure until she had moved out of the White House. It remained in the East Room for another five weeks.
When it was time to remove President Lincoln’s body from the guest room and prepare for the state funeral, the men tasked with carrying the president’s lead-lined coffin downstairs removed their boots so that Mrs. Lincoln would not hear the heavy footfalls outside her door.
Tonight, a storm rolled in as I thought about what it must have been like inside the White House on those sad days between the death of Abraham Lincoln and the start of his long journey home. What a fitting scene it was.
Learn about another time when Mother Nature provided the perfect accompaniment to our work with the Lincoln Funeral Train.