Aloof and eccentric even as a prairie lawyer, the unique
demands and pressures of the White House did even more to separate
Lincoln from his fellow men. At once folksy and haughty, Lincoln
was an unusual combination of backwoods boy turned autodidact who must
have presented a formidable puzzle to the Washington set.
Beyond his curious background, Lincoln was captive to
an extremely irregular schedule during his years in office, keeping
odd hours, grooming himself only sporadically, and eating whenever
he got the chance, which was rarely. This regimen was partly out
of necessity, but partly by design. In characteristic homespun
fashion, Lincoln once explained the oddities of his diet by remarking,
"well, I cannot take my vittles regular. I kind of just browse
round."
But if Lincoln to some extent cultivated his more bizarre
mannerisms, his wife was less in control of her idiosyncrasies.
After the death of their son Willie in February 1862, Mary Todd
Lincoln went into an extended period of mourning, wearing bl ack
at all times, like Britain's Queen Victoria. To alleviate her grief,
she became increasingly liberal with the budget for internal improvements
to the White House, spending $2500 on a single rug. In addition,
she purchased three hundred pairs of glov es for herself in a four-month period,
and bought several expensive evening dresses that she never wore,
ringing up a clothing debt of almost $30,000.
Many have speculated that Mary Todd Lincoln was insane
even at this early stage, although she was not committed to a sanatorium until
1875. The neglect she suffered at the hands of her husband must
have only increased as the war escalated. To make matte rs worse,
with many members of the Todd family having joined the Confederacy,
she was constantly suspected of being a traitor. While such reservations
were unfounded, the war clearly caused a significant strain on her
for various reasons.
Lincoln himself, in living with the weight of the war
for four years, aged tremendously during his time in the White House.
From the moment he departed Springfield for Washington right up
until his dying day, he lived under the constant threat of ass assination.
Nevertheless, he frequently refused the bodyguards that were assigned
to him. As he once explained in a letter of 1863, "I long ago made
up my mind that if anybody wants to kill me, he will do it. If
I wore a shirt of mail and kept myself s urrounded by a body-guard,
it would be all the same. There are a thousand ways to getting
at a man if it is desired that he should be killed."
Nevertheless, there were times when Secretary of War Stanton insisted
that Lincoln accept a military escort. The daily open carriage
rides that Lincoln took around Washington with his family were generally
attended by two dozen cavalrymen. But as Li ncoln well knew, such
protection did not grant him an immunity from attack. Through it
all, Lincoln attempted to maintain a sense of calm, and even humor,
amidst the threat and menace. In the aftermath of an assassination
attempt in which a bullet grazed his stovepipe hat, Lincoln acted
with perfect equanimity bordering on lightheartedness.
As the war wound to a conclusion, Lincoln still realized
that he was in danger. As he explained to a cabinet member before
his Second Inaugural Address, "if it is the will of Providence that
I should die by the hand of an assassin, it must be so." T hroughout
his presidency, Lincoln had been haunted by dreams of a dark character.
The most well known of these dreams is the nightmare Lincoln suffered
on the night before he was shot, in which he imagined the particulars
of a mysterious funeral occurrin g inside the White House.
April 14, 1865 dawned as an optimistic day for the Union.
Lee had surrendered to Grant less than a week earlier, and the
long war was finally at an end. With various states considering
their prospects for readmission to the United States, the St ars
and Stripes was once again raised over Fort Sumter in a symbolic
gesture of victory.
After their usual midday carriage ride through Washington,
the Lincolns prepared to attend Ford's Theater that evening, for
a performance of a play titled "Our American Cousin." Lincoln was reluctant
to spend yet another evening out, but felt it was his duty as president
to make a public appearance. Although scheduled to attend with
General and Mrs. Grant, arrangements were changed at the last minute,
and a young engaged couple, Clara Harris and Major Henry R. Rathbone,
accompanied the Lincolns inst ead.
Shortly after ten o'clock that evening, with the play
well underway, a shadowy man made his way into the presidential
box, eluding the guard who had gone downstairs to get a better view
of the stage. Leveling his pistol to Lincoln's head at point blank
r ange, the assassin fired a muffled shot and fled from the box
across the stage. Brandishing a knife as he went, the murderer
tripped and fell as he made his way across the stage, yelling "sic
semper tyrannis," or "thus always to tyrants," the state motto of
Virginia.
Lincoln's assassin was John Wilkes Booth, a twenty-six-year-old actor
sympathetic to the Southern cause. In the previous year, he had
made an unsuccessful attempt to kidnap Lincoln. Now, with the Confederacy
in shambles, Booth viewed his cause a s all the more desperate,
and became involved in an elaborate plan to murder various federal
leaders, including Vice President Johnson, General Grant and Secretary
of State Seward. While Johnson and Grant escaped the plot unscathed,
Seward himsel f narrowly averted death that very same evening after
being assailed by a gunman while in bed.
Lincoln would not prove so fortunate. Amidst the fearful screams
of a stunned theater audience, Lincoln was carried unconscious to
a nearby house. Suffering from a massive head wound that entered
the back of his head and lodged near his right eye, Linco ln was
laid up diagonally in a bed far too short for his lanky frame.
As doctors attended to him throughout the night, family, friends
and associates kept a bedside vigil, listening to his labored breathing.
It was only at 7:22 the next morning that Lin coln finally breathed
his last. With Lincoln's passing, Stanton uttered the memorable
words, "now he belongs to the ages."
After his death, Lincoln laid in state for in the East
Room of White House for a period of days. After this, an extended
funeral procession brought him west by railroad to Springfield,
in an eerie bookend to the inauguration journey that had borne him
ea st just over four years earlier. Stops were made in various
locales, and people all along the line turned out to pay their respects.
At last, on May 4, 1865, Lincoln was laid to rest at Oak Ridge
Cemetery, near Springfield, Illinois.
Meanwhile, attempting to flee justice, Booth escaped to
Maryland on horseback and was later smuggled into Virginia. But
on April 26 federal agents trapped Booth in a barn near Port Royal, Virginia,
where he was shot and killed. Thereafter, several ot her conspirators
involved in the grand assassination plot were brought to justice.
Seven men and one woman faced trials in the summer of 1865. Four
of these were later hanged, one died in prison, and the other three
were pardoned by President Johnson in 1869.
With this last chapter closed on the life of Lincoln,
the legend began its long and fruitful blossom. In recent years,
much has been made of the similarities between the lives and deaths
of Lincoln and President John F. Kennedy. The two men were first
e lected to Congress and as president 100 years apart. Each man
was keenly concerned with civil rights, and each man had a troubled
marriage, losing a child while in the White House. Both men were
shot on a Friday, in the head, by a Southerner, and both w ere succeeded
by a Southerner named Johnson. In addition, both assassins were known
by three names, born 100 years apart, and assassinated themselves
before they could be brought to trial.
Such are the coincidences that sustain the myths of both
Lincoln and Kennedy today. But at the time of Lincoln's assassination,
the event had a religious, rather than secular, significance. Because
he was assassinated on Good Friday, Lincoln was viewed for years afterward
as a martyr to and savior of the causes of emancipation and union.
And ironically, in assassinating Lincoln, Booth may have killed
the South's own last best chance at salvation. For after the death
of Lincoln, reconstruction took on an even greater tone of vengefulness.
