A crowd of roughly seventeen hundred were on hand to watch the sold-out evening’s show. Our American Cousin had already enjoyed nearly five hundred performances at London’s Haymarket Theatre. Now it was showing in Washington, DC, at Ford’s Theatre. Among those in the audience was twenty-three-year-old doctor Charles Leale, who had received his medical degree six weeks earlier and was now working at the U.S. Army General Hospital in Washington’s Armory Square, as surgeon in charge of the wounded commissioned officers’ ward. He was enjoying a well-deserved night off.
It was April 14, 1865. Leale took his seat in the theater. President Lincoln attended that Good Friday performance with his wife, Mary; Major Henry Rathbone; and Rathbone’s fiancée, Clara Harris. The president and his entourage entered to cheers. The Lincolns bowed and took their seats. The mood was lighter than it had been for years. The war was over.
Losses and blockades had taken their toll early in 1865, and more and more Confederate troops had begun deserting. Though not yet ratified, the Thirteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution had passed the Senate in April 1864 and the House on January 31, 1865; Senate members represented states in the North; border states that did not leave the Union; and two new states, West Virginia and Nevada. “Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction.” The amendment still needed to be ratified in order for it to go into effect. The prior spring, in March 1864, General Ulysses S. Grant had been appointed general in chief of the Army—the first person ever to hold that post in the United States—giving him command of the nation’s entire military.
Grant’s military secretary, Ely S. Parker, was a diplomat, engineer, attorney, and a citizen of the Tonawanda Seneca Nation. The pair had known each other since 1860, when Parker frequented a store run by Grant’s father and where Grant, who at that time had drunk himself temporarily out of his military career, was working. By 1863 and the Battle of Vicksburg, Grant had turned his life and career around. When Parker was denied the opportunity to enlist in the Union Army, he contacted Grant, who agreed to take him on personally. In April 1865, Richmond, capital of the Confederate States of America, fell. On April 9, 1865, in front of the Appomattox courthouse, generals Grant and Lee agreed upon the terms of Lee’s surrender. Ely Parker wrote those terms.
At the close of the Civil War, the estimation of the death toll exceeded six hundred thousand souls. About twenty thousand each Hispanic and Indigenous peoples fought in Union and Confederate armies. In places like North Carolina and Virginia, members of the Pamunkey and Lumbee tribes served as naval pilots and guerrillas. Pequot fought in the 31st U.S. Colored Infantry, while Company K of the 1st Michigan Sharpshooters comprised Delaware, Huron, Oneida, Potawatomi, Ojibwa, and Ottawa. An estimated 198,000 Black men served in the U.S. Army and Navy, with roughly 40,000 of them losing their lives. And some who fought defied many challenges and prejudices, namely Harriet Tubman, who nursed, scouted, and spied in the South.
The country, including its beleaguered president, was anxious to move in a more peaceful direction, though the path and the scope of the reconstruction seemed unclear. Everyone wanted a chance to exhale, be with those who were home safe, mourn those who never would return.
Shortly after Lee’s surrender, on April 11, Lincoln gave an address from the balcony of the executive mansion. Lately the president had been uneasy, troubled by disturbing dreams. He was subdued. The gathered crowd was not. Cheers erupted at the sight of him.
“We meet this evening, not in sorrow, but in gladness of heart,” he began. He acknowledged the road ahead was “fraught with great difficulty.” The president also promised to proclaim a day of national thanksgiving for the end of the war. Lincoln spoke a great deal to the issue of reconstruction; in particular, he addressed the state of affairs in Louisiana, which had formed a new state government that pledged loyalty to the Union. Not everyone in the throng found the president’s words encouraging. Among those present was the actor John Wilkes Booth, who bristled with rage when Lincoln, still discussing Louisiana’s constituency, said he favored extending the right to vote to Black men, specifically the “very intelligent” and “those who serve our cause as soldiers.” Booth feared this would bring men of color one step closer to fully realized citizenship. “Now, by God I’ll put him through,” Booth said to his companions, Lewis Powell and David Herold. “That is the last speech he’ll ever make.”
Dr. Leale, too, had seen Lincoln’s address days earlier. He had heard the president would be at Ford’s the coming Friday, and decided to attend the theater the very same night. London’s literary periodical Athenaeum and other publications had praised the three-act English farce about an American traveling to England on family business, during its London run. Act 3, scene 2, in particular, almost always offered a guaranteed laugh. One actor in the theater that night decided to make the most of that scene. That actor, though he had tread those boards in times past, was not on the stage that evening. He did, however, know the building’s layout intimately.
Leale watched. The scene unfolded. The crowd laughed, as did the president. Then the sound of a gunshot caught Leale’s ear. He turned toward the sound and saw a man leaping to the stage, his foot catching in the American flag that hung from the front of Lincoln’s box. Dr. Leale rose from his seat and dashed in the direction of the president.
“O Doctor,” Mary Todd Lincoln cried, “do what you can for him, do what you can!”
Leale stooped near the president’s wife. She was to his right, holding Lincoln’s head and sobbing. Major Rathbone, too, was injured. When Rathbone had attempted to apprehend the assassin, John Wilkes Booth, Booth had slashed Rathbone’s left arm with a dagger. Dr. Leale demanded brandy and water.
Leale described finding the president in a “profoundly comatose condition,” adding “his breathing was intermittent and exceedingly stertorous.” Leale put his finger to Lincoln’s right wrist. No sign of a pulse. He held Lincoln’s head and shoulders, and two men helped him lay the president down on the floor of the theater box. They cut the coat and shirt off the president’s body, seeking the source of the blood they felt, yet no shoulder wound was found. While examining the back of Lincoln’s head, Leale found a clot of blood near the base of the skull. He inserted the little finger of his left hand through the smooth opening, where the bullet had entered Lincoln’s brain. “As soon as I removed my finger a slight oozing of blood followed and his breathing became more regular,” Leale later wrote.
Doctors Charles Taft and Albert King arrived and advised moving the president to a nearby house. Rathbone and Miss Harris joined them, the bloodied and injured Rathbone escorting Mary Todd Lincoln to the Petersen boardinghouse across the now-crowded street. The president’s personal physician, Dr. Robert Stone, arrived, as did Surgeon General Joseph Barnes and Assistant Surgeon General Charles Crane. Becoming increasingly apoplectic, Mary was forcibly removed to another room. They were eventually joined by Lincoln’s son Captain Robert Todd Lincoln, who stayed by his father’s side for most of the night, when not consoling his mother. At 7:20 a.m., Lincoln “breathed his last and ‘the spirit fled to God who gave it,’” Leale wrote in a report, paraphrasing Ecclesiastes. All those there bowed and “supplicated to God in behalf of the bereaved family and our afflicted country.”
Throughout his presidency, Lincoln had received death threats, both vague and specific, ominous and strange. The sniper attack on horseback. Rumors of a kidnapping. Two such letters from his first year in office capture some of the animosity and hatred that marred Lincoln’s presidency and ultimately claimed his life:
[1861]
Abraham Lincoln Esq
Sir
You will be shot on the 4th of March 1861 by a Louisiana Creole we are decided and our aim is sure.
A young creole.
BEWARE
February 20, 1861
Mr. Lincoln—
May the hand of the devil strike you down before long—You are destroying the country
Damn you—every breath you take—
Hand of God against you
These threats and many others may have proved futile, but John Wilkes Booth and his .44-caliber derringer pistol had succeeded where others had not. Abraham Lincoln was dead, the sixteenth president of the United States and the first to be assassinated.
Vice President Andrew Johnson had left the Petersen House and returned to his residence at the Kirkwood House at Twelfth Street and Pennsylvania Avenue NW, where he would prepare for the next, unexpected stage of his career. He was not aware that an attempt on his life had also been planned, but his would-be assassin had gotten cold feet and abandoned his mission. Seward was not so lucky. Lewis Powell, Booth’s associate, broke into Seward’s home and fought with members of his family and staff, stabbing six individuals before attacking Seward himself, who was in bed recovering from a carriage accident. Striking Seward about the face and neck did not prove fatal, however, as Seward’s neck splint was ultimately an adequate deterrent to Powell’s knife.
It had been not quite a month and a half since Johnson had been sworn in as vice president—an event at which he was notoriously and quite noticeably drunk. This occasion was far more sobering. At 10 a.m., the hour had arrived. Chief Justice Salmon P. Chase arrived to perform the duties. Ironically, the Bible upon which Johnson swore his oath of office was open to Proverbs 20 and 21, the first of which states, “Wine is a mocker, strong drink is raging: and whosoever is deceived thereby is not wise.” Nevertheless, Andrew Johnson took his oath to become the seventeenth president of the United States of America.
Johnson’s first presidential proclamation arrived on April 25, 1865, setting aside May 25 as a “Day of Fasting, Humiliation and Mourning” for Lincoln’s death.
“In memory,” he wrote, “of the good man who has been removed.”
And mourn the nation did. Homage was paid in a variety of manners, some in the form of poetry, some by the pen of poet Walt Whitman, who had written many poems about the emerging identity of America, and Lincoln in particular. During his tenure as a nurse in the Washington, DC, area, Whitman had witnessed much in the way of the human experience that had both distressed and inspired him. The last moments of a young soldier’s life. An unexpected mercy. Fleeting glimpses of the president on his way to and from his duties at the White House.
President Lincoln was not sitting atop Old Abe for this trip through town. The last time anyone would have occasion to espy the sixteenth president of the United States making his way through the streets of the nation’s capital, it would not be his person they would hail, but rather the procession, or the train that would carry Abraham Lincoln, one last time, to his home state of Illinois. Lincoln’s remains made this final journey along with those of young William Lincoln, who had died three years earlier. Lincoln’s most trusted valet, a Black man named William Slade, had prepared the president’s body for burial. Whitman’s words never rang truer:
O Captain! my Captain! our fearful trip is done;
The ship has weather’d every rack, the prize we sought is won;
The port is near, the bells I hear, the people all exulting,
While follow eyes the steady keel, the vessel grim and daring:
But O heart! heart! heart!
Leave you not the little spot,
Where on the deck my captain lies,
Fallen cold and dead.
And this time Nast’s Columbia wept. Her eyes showed no glimmer of hope. Her face was not raised in praise or valor, but rather buried in her hand. Her shield was nowhere to be seen. The American flag upon which she rested her outstretched arm lay draped over a casket.
Lincoln did not live to see the ratification of the Thirteenth Amendment in December 1865. Several months earlier, in August, Frederick Douglass wrote Mary Todd Lincoln from his home in Rochester, New York, to thank her for a gift: the president’s favorite walking stick.
“I assure you,” Douglass wrote, “that this inestimable memento of his Excellency will be retained in my possession while I live—an object of sacred interest—a token not merely of the kind consideration in which I have reason to know that the President was pleased to hold me personally, but as an indication of his humane interest [in the] welfare of my whole race.”
In June, the Lady’s Book printed a simple message:
We Mourn! Our Chief has Fallen! ABRAHAM LINCOLN IS DEAD!
In the months after Lincoln’s death, Hale pondered her own mortality. At the end of May, she sat down to write her last will and testament.
Whether Hale’s legacy weighed heavier on her mind considering recent events can’t be confirmed, but that very legacy, with or without her attention, was taking on a life of its own.
As the sadness of spring passed and fall approached once again, Vassar Female College opened its doors to more than 350 young women, which cheered Hale immensely. Even more encouraging—and thanks in no small part to Hale’s persistence—twenty-four of the professors were also women. Within a year, the trustees would agree to remove “female” from the school’s name and would soon remove that word from the marble facade of the campus’s main building.
But her dearest campaign was never far from her thoughts. Hale’s determination to create a national holiday had not been swayed by recent events. She saw no reason not to continue to petition yet another president to continue with what she had already proclaimed was an established annual tradition.
As she had so many times before, Hale appealed to her readers to rescue the popularity of the holiday. In November 1865, the “Editors’ Table” of the Lady’s Book was titled “Our National Thanksgiving Day. The Pledge of American Union Forever.”
“Our Thanksgiving Day becoming the focus, as it were, of the private life and virtues of the people, should be hallowed and exalted, and made the day of generous deeds and innocent enjoyments, of noble aspirations and heavenly hopes,” Hale wrote. She then launched into her own story. “Nineteen years ago the idea of this united American Thanksgiving Day was put forth by the Editress of the Lady’s Book. . . . Our late beloved and lamented President Lincoln recognized the truth of these ideas as soon as they were presented to him. . . . But at that time, and also in November, 1864, he was not able to influence the States in rebellion, so that the festival was, necessarily, incomplete. President Johnson,” she continued, “has a happier lot. His voice can reach all American citizens.” Hale continued her public plea by stating, “The 30th of November, 1865, will bring the consummation.”
Despite Hale’s confidence, the thirtieth did not bring that consummation. On October 28, 1865, Johnson issued the third consecutive presidential proclamation for a national day of thanksgiving in the United States—but not for the last Thursday of November. Instead, he chose December 7, writing:
Whereas it has pleased Almighty God during the year which is now coming to an end to relieve our beloved country from the fearful scourge of civil war and to permit us to secure the blessings of peace, unity, and harmony, with a great enlargement of civil liberty; and
Whereas our Heavenly Father has also during the year graciously averted from us the calamities of foreign war, pestilence, and famine, while our granaries are full of the fruits of an abundant season.
Hale’s incorrect prediction of the date notwithstanding, the holiday enjoyed wider observance in the newly unified country. Southern newspapers carried the news of the holiday, including the editors of the Daily Progress of Raleigh, North Carolina, who wrote, “we do trust that our whole people will show a proper regard for the day with an entire suspension of business and proper religious exercises on the occasion.” Four days later, The Daily Standard of that same city reported: “Thanksgiving day was generally observed throughout the country.” In Charleston, the South Carolina Leader reported on services held at the Zion Presbyterian Church, writing: “All seemed to feel the same gratitude for the blessings bestowed upon us. . . . Our pen will not do justice to the occasion, and we can only say that it was the best meeting we ever attended. It was a real old-fashioned New England Thanksgiving, only more so.”
Thomas Nast’s illustration that first year after the close of the Civil War focused on peace, unity, an abundance of industrious acts and fruitful crops, and soldiers returning home from battle. The central panel featured a well-attended, if somewhat somber, thanksgiving meal. There was much reason, it seemed, despite the nation’s losses, for gratitude, but the scene fell appropriately short of evoking an air of celebration. The day before the observance carried even more import that year, as Georgia became the twenty-seventh state to ratify the Thirteenth Amendment. It was official: Slavery in the United States was no more.
Johnson’s administration would go down in history as one of the least successful ever. He was impeached by the House for violating the Tenure of Office Act when he removed Secretary of War Edwin Stanton from his cabinet. Acquitted by the Senate, Johnson ultimately survived his impeachment process by one vote and slid toward the finish line as a one-term president who had followed in the footsteps of a giant. While in office, he kept the thanksgiving tradition going by issuing three more proclamations, calling for thanks in 1866 for an “indispensable condition of peace, security and progress,” as well as many “peculiar blessings.” Johnson noted that the civil “war that so recently closed among us has not been anywhere reopened,” and spoke of fields that “have yielded quite abundantly,” the success of the mining industry, the resuming of commerce abroad, and the extension of the railroads.
Then, in October 1867, Johnson’s proclamation started out differently than prior ones made by him or, for that matter, Abraham Lincoln or George Washington. Rather than starting with a list of things for which to be thankful, he instead seemed to acknowledge Hale’s desire for the holiday to be a permanent fixture on the American calendar. His proclamation that year spoke directly to the seeds of the tradition:
“In conformity with a recent custom that may now be regarded as established on national consent and approval, I, Andrew Johnson, President of the United States, do hereby recommend to my fellow-citizens that Thursday, the 28th of November next, be set apart and observed throughout the Republic as a day of national thanksgiving and praise.” He then marched through the now-expected litany of “abundant harvests” and prosperous industries “in our workshops, in our mines, and in our forests,” and spoke of the extension of “iron roads.”
As Washington and Lincoln had, Johnson crossed Thomas Jefferson’s no-man’s-land—the separation of church and state—and ascribed the nation’s blessing to the divine: “He has inclined our hearts to turn away from domestic contentions and commotions consequent upon a distracting and desolating civil war, and to walk more and more in the ancient ways of loyalty, conciliation, and brotherly love.”
Now in her seventy-ninth year, it would seem Hale still could not rest. With an annual thanksgiving established amid such divisiveness and discord, the question now remained how, if at all, it might survive without Hale herself.
The Lady’s Book survived the war intact, though subscriptions had taken a hit, falling to roughly 110,000. However, four years later, in January 1869, Louis Godey boasted that the magazine’s readership was up to 500,000 subscribers—perhaps employing his own special “readership math,” which included those who perused, but did not buy, the publication. That same month, the magazine reviewed the work of yet another up-and-coming woman writer. “Miss Alcott’s reputation as a writer of ‘juveniles’ is here well sustained,” Hale wrote of Louisa May Alcott’s book Little Women. “The story is easy, natural, and interesting. We know of no better present for the holidays.” Letting no moss grow under her own literary footing, Hale had published yet another book of her own, this one titled, aptly, Manners; or, Happy Homes and Good Society All the Year Round. Hale dedicated the book: “To young people particularly, and to all who seek happiness in this life, or for the hope of happiness in the life to come, this book is offered as a friend in their pursuits.” Within that book of domestic advice a chapter is titled: “Our National Thanksgiving Day.” In it, Hale detailed the journey to Lincoln’s proclamation and continued to press the need for the official establishment of the holiday, expressing gladness that “this has already been done in a measure.”
She continued, “There is something peculiarly beautiful in seeing a great people, of the most varying creeds and opinions, bound by no established faith, thus voluntarily uniting throughout our wide land to mingle their voices in one common hymn of praise and thanksgiving.”
In February 1869, those thousands of subscribers read of the success of the prior year’s festivities, which Hale described in detail, delighting in surveying celebrations not only throughout “the Republic” but also in Alaska—“the first Thanksgiving day ever known in that boreal region”—as well as in Paris, Rome, and Berlin. She lauded the presence of “traditional roast turkey” on tables in Japan, Russia, and Brazil.
She then made a public plea of sorts. Perhaps as a nudge to the incoming president. Perhaps as a reaction to President Johnson’s designating the 1865 holiday in December, rather than on the last Thursday in November. Perhaps, more likely, it was because Hale knew that only one thing would secure the holiday once and for all. She wrote:
“The Day needs only the sanction of Congress to become established as an American Holiday, not only in the Republic, but wherever Americans meet throughout the world.”
In a sense, this was as political as she would get in the magazine. However, Hale would not see any congressional act of the sort that year. Nevertheless, she was likely cheered that the new president, former Union general Ulysses S. Grant, continued the still-new tradition—the third sitting president in a row to do so. In October 1869, President Grant issued his first proclamation for a national day of thanksgiving.
Thomas Nast’s thanksgiving illustration for that year was one of notable inclusion. The Fourteenth Amendment had been ratified in July of the year prior, 1868, which granted citizenship to “[a]ll persons born or naturalized in the United States and subject to the jurisdiction thereof”—which included former enslaved people. It also forbade any state to “make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens” or “deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law,” and guaranteed all citizens “equal protection of the laws.” The Fourteenth Amendment also had the potential to impact Native peoples. Grant himself was a proponent of citizenship for all, believing that whether one was Protestant or Catholic, Puritan or recently immigrated, all should be able to become an American citizen. His view extended to all Native peoples, whom Grant referred to as the “original occupants of the land” in his inaugural address. He chose his friend Ely Parker as Commissioner of Indian Affairs, making Parker the first Native American ever to hold a cabinet-level post. It also put Parker in a difficult position, as his responsibilities included overseeing policies that ultimately encouraged the assimilation of Indigenous peoples. Grant and Parker wanted citizenship for every Native American, a position with supporters and detractors both in government and among various Indigenous peoples. Grant and Parker’s efforts on the citizenship front would be undone by politics, as would their friendship. Parker would eventually resign his post after a political adversary accused him of misappropriating funds (despite Congress clearing him of the fraud charges). Grant’s administration would preside over expansionist policies and violence that pushed Native peoples onto reservations, instigating bloody wars and massacres that took lives and compromised the way of life of the nation’s “original occupants.”
The title for Nast’s 1869 illustration was Uncle Sam’s Thanksgiving Dinner. Uncle Sam presides over a large table populated by different races, genders, and nationalities. “Universal Suffrage” and “Self Governance” form a large centerpiece for the setting and sit squarely in the middle of the table, while “Come One Come All,” and “Free and Equal” are splashed across the two lower corners. As Uncle Sam carves a turkey, Columbia occupies the opposite end of the table, sitting with a Black man to her left and engaging with a Chinese man and his family on her right. Diners of varying backgrounds, among them Irish, Italian, German, African American, Native peoples, and more, were a reflection of the changing cultural makeup of the United States. Behind the dinner scene, portraits of Lincoln, Washington, and Grant hang on the wall.