One hundred a fifty years ago today!
It was one hundred and fifty years ago on this date that our sixteenth president, Abraham Lincoln, was shot and mortally wounded at Ford's Theater in our nations capital. The details of that event are generally pretty well known but the events of the day are perhaps not so well remembered.
It was a fairly normal day for the president and his White House as he arose fairly early, staring down lovingly at his still sleeping wife as he quietly left their second floor sleeping quarters, what is now known as the Lincoln bedroom. He proceeded to the kitchen where he enjoyed a single egg as was his usual custom. He then went to his office on the first floor where he received visitors and wrote correspondence in reply to the many letters and pleas that flooded across his desk. It has been wrongly said that he pardoned a union soldier that day but it was not true as a modern day historian forged a change on some correspondence to make it appear that it happened on April fourteenth. None the less, Mr. Lincoln saw fit to pardon and spare the lives of many federal soldiers during the war years as his great compassion for human life was manifested in that way. He often said that they were more good to the cause above ground than underneath it.
After a working lunch he decided to take an afternoon carriage ride with his wife Mary around the Washington area. They both enjoyed this time away together and it has been said that the president and his spouse talked, as they often did, of what they might do after their White House years. The president talked at length about the possibility of visiting the Holy Land. After the ride ended they both spend some time with family at a late afternoon meal.
As the day ended, the president met with his cabinet for a brief time as discussions were heating up about what to do with the defeated south. Lincoln favored a quick end to the post war period with few punishments and a rapid reuniting of the nation. This view was opposed by the radical Republicans who wanted a period of punishment for the south with rapid expansion of the rights of the former slaves who existed there. As the argument went on Lincoln called a halt by stating that he had to leave for the theater as he was, as customary, already late. It is interesting to note that the president had sent his personal bodyguard away on a personal mission in the south just a day or so before April fourteenth, leaving him in the hands of those who turned out to be untrustworthy in the end. John Wilkes Booth was drinking in a nearby bar when the Lincoln's military bodyguard joined him there just after the presidential party had been seated.
The play had already begun when it was interrupted by the Lincoln's arrive and the traditional playing of Hail to the Chief. They went upstairs to the presidential box and settled in to watch the rest of the production. General Grant and his wife had begged out of joining them and they were accompanied by a young major and his spouse in the box. The Lincoln's held hands and were very loving to one another to the point that Mary said that people would notice. The president said, in effect, that he didn't care if they did. Mary became cold and Lincoln gave her his topcoat. He then sat back down, took her hand and laughed heartily at a line from the proceedings going on below. At that moment, John Wilkes Booth stepped forward from the shadows and shot him in the back of the head. There was a brief scuffle in the box with the major and then Booth jumped from there to the stage floor and made his escape. The mortally wounded Lincoln was taken across the street to a boarding house where he lingered until early the next morning when he quietly passed away. At his death, Edwin Stanton, a member of his cabinet made the statement that “now he belongs to the ages.”
The Lincoln that we know today is probably not close to the Lincoln who died on this day a century and a half ago. The closest we will come to knowing him was the film “Lincoln” that came out a few years ago that earned Daniel Day-Lewis a well deserved academy award for his gripping portrayal of a man who has become, like so many of our other icons, shrouded in history. We are indeed fortunate here in Illinois to be able to travel to Springfield, Lincolns home town, and have encounters with the man and his times as so much has been preserved there for us to see. If you have not visited the Lincoln presidential library and museum, you have missed something very worthwhile indeed. It is perhaps the mark of the greatness of the man that, unlike so many others who recede after fifty or one hundred years, he still haunts and inspires us with his writing and his wit one hundred and fifty years after his passage from the scene. Perhaps the only other public figure to rival him in this respect might be George Washington, who also continues to fascinate and inspire over two hundred years after his death. We will not be finished with this current round with Mr. Lincoln and his passage until up in May when the nation will pause to remember his funeral in Springfield, an event that is sure to garner worldwide attention for this homely but brilliant frontier lawyer who has had so much to do with who we are as a nation even today.
Perhaps it would be well to end this piece with the final words from Abraham Lincolns second inaugural address:
“With malice toward none, with charity for all, with firmness in the right as God gives us to see the right, let us strive on to finish the work we are in, to bind up the nation's wounds, to care for him who shall have borne the battle and for his widow and his orphan, to do all which may achieve and cherish a just and lasting peace among ourselves and with all nations.”
It was a peace that Abraham Lincoln never quite lived to see. And his unfortunate passage opened the door for others to enact things and make decisions about a defeated but unbowed section of the nation that still echo down through the ages and affect us to this very day.
Regards,
Joe
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