On Tuesday, April 11, 1865, Lincoln related a recent dream to Mary and a few friends. In his dream, he heard a number of people weeping, and he wandered through the White House to find out what was going on. He got to the East Room and there met with a sobering surprise. Before him was a catafalque, on which rested a corpse wrapped in funeral vestments. He asked nearby soldiers who had died in the White House. “The president” was the answer. The soldier said “He was killed by an assassin!” At that point Lincoln awoke, and could not get back to sleep.
Taken by Alexander Gardner in February 1865, two months before Lincoln’s assassination.
Three days later, Mary Lincoln arranged a theater outing. Fourteen persons turned down the Lincolns’ invitation to join them on the fateful night of April 14, 1865. Excuses ranged from prior engagements to sudden illness. General Grant and his wife Julia had been invited, but Julia reportedly said she refused to sit in a theater box with “that crazy woman,” meaning Mary Lincoln. Even the president’s son Robert declined; he had just returned from Appomattox Court House, where he was present when Lee surrendered to Grant, and he wanted to sleep. The only two persons who accepted the Lincolns’ offer were Maj. Henry R. Rathbone and his fiancee, Clara Harris, the daughter of New York Sen. Ira Harris.
Ford's Theater
Shortly after 10:00 p.m. on April 14, 1865, actor John Wilkes Booth entered the presidential box at Ford’s Theatre in Washington, D.C., and fatally shot President Abraham Lincoln. After Booth shot Lincoln, Rathbone struggled with Booth and sustained serious wounds in his neck and head. (He recovered, but eventually went insane.) As Lincoln slumped forward in his seat, Booth leapt onto the stage and escaped out the back door. The paralyzed president was immediately examined by a doctor in the audience and then carried across the street to Petersen’s Boarding House where he died early the next morning.
The Petersen House
Lincoln’s assassination was the first presidential assassination in U.S. history.
The responsibility to plan Lincoln’s funeral fell to George R. Harrington, Assistant Secretary of the Treasury. As the Ford’s Theater website reports:
It was up to Harrington to decide who would be included in the ceremonies—and who could be excluded without being offended. The number and order of the marchers in the funeral procession had to be determined. Foreign dignitaries had to be remembered. Passes had to be given out to those who wished to view the president’s body in the East Room of the White House.
Harrington had other details to arrange as well. For example, he had to notify Washington City officials of the funeral plans, in part to arrange details like stopping streetcars during the procession.”
The ceremonies continued after the procession in Washington with a funeral train that crossed the northern part of the country. The Library of Congress records:
After thirteen days the train reached Springfield, where the late president lay in state in the Illinois Hall of Representatives in the State Capitol. There, in 1858, as the Republican Party’s nominee for the United States Senate, Lincoln had given his famous “House Divided” speech. More than 75,000 viewed the remains of the slain president.”
Lincoln’s Funeral Procession, 4/29/1865 in Columbus, Ohio
Ninety-eight years after Lincoln’s funeral, Mrs. John F. Kennedy had to plan the funeral of her assassinated husband, and requested that arrangements be modeled on Lincoln’s funeral. As Business Insider reports:
The catafalque that had borne the Great Emancipator’s coffin was brought out of storage and used again. No one was allowed to miss the historical significance of this restaging, which accorded to JFK in death a Lincolnesque moral stature in relation to African American advancement that he had not attained during his lifetime.”
The Library of Congress has replicated the “Programme of Reception” for Lincoln’s lying in state on May 3, here.
Lincoln’s Hearse in Springfield, S.M. Fassett. Photograph, 1865. Prints and Photographs Division, Library of Congress
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