After dying of a gunshot wound on April 15, 1865, Abraham Lincoln was not allowed to rest in peace, not immediately at least. Even in death, the slain president was called upon to make a final sacrifice to the Union as his body marched through a grief-stricken country in a funeral spectacle that spanned nearly 1,700 miles.
“Now he belongs to the ages,” Edwin Stanton reportedly said when Lincoln passed away, but the Secretary of War did not believe the country was ready to say goodbye. Although Mary Lincoln wanted her husband’s body to take the most direct route home to Springfield, Illinois for burial, Stanton convinced her to approve a more circuitous rail journey. which traced the whistle stops Lincoln had made from the Illinois capital to the nation’s capital four years earlier. , just before his inauguration.
As dawn broke over Washington, D.C., on April 21, the clatter of hooves broke the silence as horses pulled the hearse carrying Lincoln’s black mahogany casket from the U.S. Capitol, where he had spent the two previous nights slept in the state, down to nearby Baltimore. & Ohio Station. Grabbing the silver coffin handles, the soldiers carried Lincoln’s body onto the presidential wagon, which featured luxurious crimson silk upholstery and walnut and oak finishes. Consumed by war, Lincoln never got a chance to see the newly built wagon, let alone ride in it.
Inside the funeral car, the presidential coffin joined a smaller one which contained the body of his son, Willie, who died of typhoid fever three years earlier at the age of 11. Willie’s coffin had been kept in a vault in a Georgetown cemetery pending burial in Springfield at the end of Lincoln’s presidency, which no one had imagined would end so prematurely.
Lincoln’s widow, too upset to leave the White House for five weeks, was not among the 150 passengers on the funeral train, which included a funeral director and an embalmer. Wanting to give Americans a chance to see their fallen president face-to-face one last time, Stanton had secured Mary Lincoln’s consent to allow the upper half of the coffin lid to be lifted for public viewings in 10 towns along the route. .
Great advances in the art of embalming during the Civil War had allowed the unchilled bodies of tens of thousands of soldiers to be returned to their families for burial, and the same process was used to preserve the commander chief. Embalmer Charles Brown proclaimed that there would be no noticeable change in Lincoln’s appearance by the end of the long tour. “The president’s body will never experience decomposition,” he said. Chicago Grandstand.
William HH Gould, the driver of the first stage of the funeral train, recalled that the president appeared in repose as he left the nation’s capital. “He looked like he was sleeping in pleasant dreams,” Gould recalled.
READ MORE: 10 things you might not know about Lincoln’s assassination
Huge crowds attended round-the-clock viewings of Lincoln
Cleveland Engine, Columbus & Cincinnati Railroad, with a portrait of Abraham Lincoln mounted on the front, 1865. The engine was one of several used to transport Lincoln’s body from Washington, DC, to Springfield, Illinois.
Buyenlarge/Getty Images
With the last embers of the Civil War yet to be extinguished and Lincoln’s assassin on the loose, nerves soared as the funeral train made its first stop in rainy Baltimore, La hometown of John Wilkes Booth and a town once so hostile to Lincoln as President. -elect, he traveled through it incognito for fear of his life.
No such animosity could be found four years later as a quartet of horses wearing black hoods carried a rosewood hearse through muddy streets for three hours before a public screening. The mourners included approximately 30,000 black marchers and spectators. New York Grandstand journalist Charles Page was struck by the sight of “white and black side by side in the rain and mud” and the lack of “awareness of any color difference”.
Similar scenes repeated themselves as grief-stricken Americans communed in town after town. “The martyr advances in triumphal march, more powerful than in his lifetime,” said preacher Henry Ward Beecher. “The nation is rising at every step of his coming. Cities and states are its carriers.
In Philadelphia, tens of thousands of mourners escorted the presidential coffin to Independence Hall, where in 1861 Lincoln said he would “rather be assassinated there than renounce” the principles of the Declaration of independence. During an 8 p.m. public hearing, about 150,000 people passed Lincoln as he rested near the foot of the Liberty Bell.
Even larger crowds emerged in Manhattan. There, half a million spectators, including six-year-old Theodore Roosevelt, watching from a second-story window of his family’s mansion, watched a huge procession in which 16 horses pulled an elaborate hearse decorated with images patriotic. About 125,000 people marched past Lincoln’s corpse at City Hall.
WATCH: HISTORY Channel’s documentary event Abraham Lincoln will premiere Sunday, Feb. 20 at 8/7c. Watch the trailer now.
Lincoln’s body began to show signs of decomposition
The limits of embalming in a time before refrigeration became clear by the time Lincoln’s body left New York. Newspapers reported that Lincoln’s eyes were sunken, his face yellowish and withered. “It’s not the great, benevolent face of Abraham Lincoln,” reported the New York Evening Post. “It’s just a scary shadow.”
“No perceptible change has taken place in the body of the late president since he left Washington,” Brown assured the press. However, public viewings were clearly taking their toll as the embalmer tried to hide Lincoln’s darkened face with chalk white makeup, and the scent of lilacs and camellias struggled to disguise the smell of the rotting body.
Yet the public screenings continued. In fact, civic pride spurred the construction of more extravagant hearses, catafalques, and memorial arches with each successive stop, as if cities were trying to outdo each other in their expressions of grief.
However, perhaps more moving than the great shows of collective mourning, were the private moments of grief exhibited by those who walked for miles around to camp along the train tracks, seeking a momentary glimpse of the presidential coffin through the car windows. As the miles went by, the men took off their hats and lowered their heads as the train passed. The women whispered prayers. The choirs sang hymns. In the dead of night, bonfires along the tracks lit up the path west. For a country that had bottled up four years of grief during the Civil War, the funeral train served as an emotional catharsis.
The United the North Funeral Train
May 1, 1865: In Chicago, citizens build an elaborate, 40-foot-tall Gothic burial arch—decorated with inscriptions such as “Faithful to the Right, a Martyr of Justice”—to cover the temporary train depot that housed the Lincoln funeral train. A massive procession accompanied the casket to the Cook County Courthouse, where his body lay in state until late the next evening. Citizens passed by to pay their respects at the rate of 7,000 an hour.
Paul Popper/Popperfoto via Getty Images
Crowds along the tracks swelled as the funeral train rolled into the Midwest. “As the President’s remains moved westward, where the people more particularly claimed him as their own, the intensity of the feeling seemed to deepen if possible,” Brigadier General Edward Townsend reported.
Even at 3 a.m., 12,000 people gathered in Richmond, Indiana, as the funeral train passed under a 25-foot-tall arch erected by its citizens. A woman dressed as the Genius of Liberty cried over a fake coffin, while a committee of ladies boarded the train to present a pair of flower crowns.
After a public visitation in Chicago, where the line of mourners stretched for more than a mile, the funeral train finally reached Springfield, Illinois on May 3. After a journey of 1,645 miles, Lincoln was home.
The funeral train had passed through 400 towns and villages. A million Americans saw Lincoln’s corpse, and millions more saw the train as the North united to bid farewell to Lincoln.
“Overall, the funeral train experience — and Lincoln’s posthumous image — united northern Democrats and white Republicans, and even offered northern African Americans protected access to public life at a time of great danger to them,” says Richard Wightman Fox, author of Lincoln’s Body: A Cultural History.
After a 24-hour public viewing in the Illinois state capitol, Lincoln’s casket was finally closed on the morning of May 4. After the burial ceremony at Oak Ridge Cemetery, which included an hour-long eulogy, the caskets of father and son were placed. inside a limestone vault and the closed iron gates and gates. Nearly three weeks after he breathed his last, Lincoln was finally laid to rest.
