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April 15, 1865:
"Today all the city is in mourning. nearly every house being in black and I have not seen a smile. No business and many a strong man I have seen in tears."
-- Dr. G.B. Todd, a physician who was in the audience of Ford's Theatre
The church bells began tolling within minutes of Lincoln's death at 7:22 on the gray, drizzly morning of April 15.
"There is a sobbing of the strong,
And a pall upon the land;
But the People in their weeping
Bare the iron hand
Beware the People weeping
When they bare the iron hand."
-- Selection from The Martyr, Herman Melville's poem mourning Lincoln, 1866
"That Dreadful House"
Around nine o'clock am, Mary Lincoln was helped down the front steps of the Petersen House and into a waiting carriage. Glancing at the shuttered Ford's Theatre across the street, the distraught widow groaned, "That dreadful house... that dreadful house."
Meanwhile, several actors from the previous night's performance had been taken into custody as a precaution. For the moment, no one knew exactly who had conspired with Booth, but it was hard to believe he could have acted alone.
Attending to the President:
Shortly before eleven o'clock am, the door of the Petersen House opened and soldiers exited, carrying the president's body in a plain pine box. They placed it in a horse-drawn wagon, which rattled over cobblestone streets to the White House, where doctors conducted an autopsy i a second floor bedroom.
One of the surgeons, Dr. Curtis, wrote this account of the autopsy: "... suddenly the bullet dropped out through my fingers and fell, breaking the solemn silence of the room with its clattered, into an empty basin that was standing beneath. There it lay upon the white china, a little black mass no bigger than the end of my finger -- dull, motionless, and harmless, yet the cause of earth mighty changes in the world's history as we may perhaps never realize." |