CHAPTER XXXI

LINCOLN'S FUNERAL

THE first edition of the morning papers in all the cities and towns of the North told their readers on Saturday, April 15, 1865, that Abraham Lincoln, President of the United States, lay mortally wounded in Washington. The extras within the next two hours told them he was dead. The first impulse of men everywhere seems to have been to doubt. It could not be. They realized only too quickly that it was true! There was no discrediting the circumstantial accounts of the later telegrams. There was no escape from the horror and uncertainty which filled the air, driving out the joy and exultation which for days had inundated the country.

In the great cities like New York a death-like silence followed the spreading of the news-a silence made the more terrible by the presence of hundreds of men and women walking in the streets with bent heads, white faces, and knit brows. Automatically, without thought of what their neighbors were doing, these men went to their shops only to send away their clerks and close their doors for the day. Stock exchanges met only to adjourn. By ten o'clock business had ceased. It was not only in the cities, where the tension of feeling is always greatest, that this was true. It was the same in the small towns.

"I was a compositor then, working in a printing office at Danville, Illinois," says Prof. A. G. Draper, of Washington, D. C. "The editor came into the room early in the forenoon with a telegram in his hand; he was regarding it

intently, with a pale face. Without saying a word he passed it to one and another of the compositors. I noticed that as the men read it they laid down their sticks, and without a word went, one after another, took their coats and hats off the nails where they were hanging, put them on, and went into the street. Finally the telegram was passed to me. It was the announcement that Lincoln had been shot the night before and had died that morning. Automatically I laid down my stick, took my hat and coat, and went into the street. It seemed to me as if every man in town had dropped his business just where it was and come out. There was no sound; but the people, with pale faces and tense looks, regarded one another as if questioning what would happen next."

Just as the first universal impulse seems to have been to cease all business, so the next was to drag down the banners of victory which hung everywhere and replace them by crape. New York City before noon of Saturday was hung in black from the Battery to Harlem. It was not only Broadway and Washington Square and Fifth Avenue which mourned. The soiled windows of Five Points tenements and saloons were draped, and from the doors of the poor hovels of upper Manhattan west of Central Park bits of black weed were strung. And so it was in all the cities and towns of the North. "About nine o'clock on Saturday the intelligence reached us of the assassination of Mr. Lincoln and the attempt upon Mr. Seward's life," wrote Senator Grimes from Burlington, Iowa. "Immediately the people began to assemble about the Hawkeye' office, and soon Third Street became packed with people. And such expressions of horror, indignation, sorrow, and wonder were never heard before. Shortly, some one began to decorate his house with the habiliments of mourning; and soon all the business part of the town, even the vilest liquor dens, was shrouded with the outward signs

of sorrow. All business was at once suspended, and not resumed during the day; but every one waited for further intelligence from Washington."

And this was true not only of the towns, it was true of the distant farms. There the news was slower in coming. A traveller journeying from the town stopped to tell it at a farm-house. The farmer, leaving his plow, walked or rode across lots to repeat it to a neighbor. Everywhere they dropped their work, and everywhere they brought out a strip of black and tied it to the door-knob.

The awful quiet of the North through the first few hours after the tragedy covered not grief alone; below it was a righteous anger, which, as the hours passed, began to break out. It showed itself first against those of Southern sympathy who were bold enough to say they were "glad of it." In New York a man was heard to remark that "it served old Abe right." Cries of "Lynch him, lynch him!" were raised. He was set upon by the crowd, and escaped narrowly. All day the police were busy hustling suspected Copperheads away from the mobs which seemed to rise from the ground at the first word of treason.

"I was kept busy last night," further wrote Senator Grimes from Burlington, " trying to prevent the destruction of the store of a foolish woman who, it was said, expressed her joy at Mr. Lincoln's murder. Had she been a man, so much was the old Adam aroused in me, I would not have uttered a word to save her."

In Cincinnati, which had spent the day and night before in the most elaborate jubilation, the rage against treason broke out at the least provocation. "Some individuals of the 'butternut' inclination," says a former citizen, in recalling these days, "were knocked into the gutters and kicked, because they would make no expression of sorrow, or because of their well-known past sympathy with the rebellion. Others as