Lincoln’s death began with the report of a very small pistol, a single-shot derringer that easily fit into the palm of a man’s hand. A sudden loud bang, a puff of blue-white smoke, and then . . . silence.
He probably heard and felt nothing after John Wilkes Booth’s bullet plowed through his brain and lodged just behind his right eye. Mary’s hysterical screams; the swirl of confusion as Booth made good his escape by first severely wounding with a knife Henry Rathbone, a Union officer who with his fiancée had accompanied the Lincolns to Ford’s Theatre that evening, and then sliding over the balustrade to make his escape; Mary now trying to hold Lincoln’s limp head up as he slumped forward in his chair—none of this registered on the unconscious president’s senses.1
He lived for another nine hours. Theater-goers gingerly carried him across the street to a tiny room in a boardinghouse, laying him out diagonally on a bed too short for his six-foot-four frame. Throughout the evening, his breathing periodically quickened, his pulse fading and becoming uneven, his limbs shaking; one of the attending physicians would then stick his finger inside the bullet wound and free the clot that had formed, as the clot caused pressure on the brain to increase and hence the labored breathing. Removing the clot relieved the pressure, and soon thereafter the process began again, the pillow under the president’s head growing slowly more bloodstained. He never awoke.
His pulse grew noticeably fainter as dawn approached, his breathing shallower; finally, at 7:22 A.M., it stopped entirely. After the initial violence of the gunshot, it was a remarkably quiet passing for a man who had witnessed throughout his life his share of prolonged and agonizing deaths: his mother’s wretched seven-day ordeal in the Indiana woods, Willie’s weeks-long up-and-down battle with typhoid, the nearly infinite varieties of violent and gruesome deaths caused by the war.2
Death had tugged at his elbow until the end. He paid his final visit to the Army of the Potomac in late March 1865, just three weeks before his assassination. During the visit, he rode to a portion of the Petersburg battlefield where the two sides had engaged in recent battle, one of many such encounters up and down the trench lines. By this point in the war, big self-contained battles were relatively unusual, replaced by a steady drip of violent little episodes that killed soldiers nearly every day.
The president and his party rode to a high portion of the ground behind the lines. Here he saw the actual disposal of dead bodies. “We passed through the spot where the fighting had been most severe, and where great numbers of dead were still lying, with burial parties at their dreadful work,” recalled an officer who accompanied the president. “Mr. Lincoln was quiet and observant, making few comments. . . . [He] looked worn and haggard. He remarked that he had seen enough of the horrors of war, that he hoped this was the beginning of the end, and that there would be no more bloodshed or ruin of homes.” The officer then related a story in which he had recently come upon a red-headed young Confederate boy on the battlefield, clad in butternut and mortally wounded by a bullet that had passed through his head; the officer gave him some water, and the boy died in his arms. “Mr. Lincoln’s eyes filled with tears and his voice choked with emotion, and he repeated the well-known expression about ‘robbing the cradle and the grave.’”3
He remained with the army several more days. On March 31, Grant mounted a general assault on the Confederate defenses, probing for a weak point. Lincoln knew this larger operation was impending, and perhaps still haunted by the sight of all those dead bodies a few days previously, he struck those around him as downcast. “The knowledge of the loss of life that must follow hung about him until he could think of nothing else,” believed the president’s bodyguard, William Crook. Toward evening, with the battle still raging and cannon fire reverberating nearby, Lincoln retired to the vessel that had carried him from Washington. “Mr. Lincoln would not go to his room,” Crook remembered. “Almost all night he walked up and down the deck, pausing now and then to listen or look out into the darkness to see if he could see anything. I have never seen such suffering in the face of any man.” The following morning, Lincoln rode along a portion of the battlefield, again strewn with the dead from both sides, between forts nicknamed “Fort Hell” and “Fort Damnation” by the men. As they rode, they passed the body of a man shot directly through the forehead and another whose arms were missing. “The president’s face settled into its old lines of sadness,” Crook observed.4
He also continued to be haunted by deaths closer to home. During a carriage ride with Mary the morning of his assassination, he told her, “We must both be more cheerful in the future; between the war and the loss of our darling Willie, we have been very miserable.” They spoke of a trip to Europe after his second presidential term ended.5
Mary never fully recovered from her husband’s death. As he lay in that boardinghouse across from Ford’s Theatre, she periodically threw herself onto his prostrate body, shrieking with grief and begging for last words from her dying husband. “She implored him to speak to her,” recalled Lincoln’s secretary of the interior Usher Linder, one of the many men present, and “after indulging in dreadful incoherences for some time was finally persuaded to leave.” She spent the rest of the evening and early morning until Lincoln’s passing sobbing in an adjoining room.6
She was thereafter a haunted and pitiable soul, isolated for weeks in her room and “completely prostrated with grief,” according to Elizabeth Keckly. When she finally left the White House, young Tad in tow, she began a lonely, peripatetic existence that would see her eventually confined to an insane asylum by her worried oldest son, Robert—worried, among other things, about his mother’s increased vulnerability to charlatans who took her money in exchange for false promises of contacting Abraham’s ghost. “My poor husband!” she sobbed to Keckly one day. “Had he never been President, he might be living to-day! Alas! All is over with me!”7
History has not been kind to Mary for her behavior in the wake of Abraham’s death, and yet it does Mary a disservice to suggest that she had always reacted to death in such an unstable fashion. When Eddy died, she behaved with propriety according to the standards of the time, and even during Willie’s death and mourning, she remained publicly stable and outwardly appropriate in her grief. But the cracks were beginning to appear in that facade, with her private hysterics that were hidden from public view but all too visible to Abraham, Elizabeth Keckly, and Mary’s family. After the assassination, the facade fell away completely, and there were intimations nationwide that she was broken and mentally unstable. Mary died in her sister Elizabeth’s Springfield home in 1882, a lonely and deeply wounded woman, “weighed down by woe,” as one obituary observed.8
So was much of America. The extensive period of national mourning that followed Lincoln’s assassination was a grand display of national bereavement, a funeral among funerals. A large service was held in Washington, D.C., after which Lincoln’s body was transported by train for services and viewings in eleven other cities before arriving in Springfield for interment in a specially constructed mausoleum at Oak Ridge Cemetery. Hundreds of thousands gathered to pass the coffin or line the tracks, heads bare, as the train rumbled by; historians estimate that an astonishing one in four Americans saw Lincoln or his funeral car.9
What would Lincoln have made of it all? He probably would have been taken aback by the sheer scale of his own funeral, perhaps even a bit amused by the whiff of pretension in the grandeur, with each city vying to outdo the others in the size of its crowds, the height of its funeral arch, the lyricism of its funeral music, the pathos of its orations. “If [he] had known how big a funeral he would have had, he would have died years ago,” Lincoln once joked about a deceased colleague in the Illinois legislature. Some similar sentiment would likely have come to his mind.10
Most of all, he probably would have felt that same perplexity, that sense of mystery and ultimate unknowability, that had so often permeated his thinking about death and its meaning. “With firmness in the right, as God gives us to see the right, let us strive on to finish the work we are in,” he told his audience in his Second Inaugural Address. “As God gives us to see the right”—that was an important qualifier. He knew the heavens were hung in black; he was never so arrogant as to believe he fully understood the reasons why.