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All-night Vigil Commemorates Assassination of Abraham Lincoln
Please don't miss the video at the end of the article. Tenth Street, which runs between Ford's Theatre and the house where Lincoln died, was closed off the night of April 14th and the morning of April 15th. I went by on the afternoon of the 15th, and it was still crowded.
Lincoln’s corpse and its grand yet ghoulish odyssey
Morning Mix
By Fred Barbash April 17 at 12:31 AM
@fbarbash
On April 21, 1865, a train carrying the body of Abraham Lincoln and bearing the dead president’s picture affixed above the cattle guard on the front left Washington for a 180-city, seven-state journey of more than 1,600 miles. The route, through Baltimore, Philadelphia, New York and then west through Ohio, Indiana and Illinois, was a close approximation, in reverse, of the journey that brought Lincoln to Washington from Springfield when he first assumed the presidency.
Accompanying his body were some 300 people, including an embalmer, and strangely, the disinterred body of Lincoln’s son Willie, who had succumbed at age 11 to typhoid fever and would be reburied next to his father in the family plot in Springfield.
....
There’s been nothing comparable to Lincoln’s final odyssey. It made the unreal real for millions, some 90 years before the advent of television.
But it was also before the advent of refrigeration and Lincoln’s body did not fare well. It “held up well through the first stops of the funeral train: Baltimore, Harrisburg and Philadelphia,” writes Richard Wightman Fox in his acclaimed new book, “Lincoln’s Body.” But “the tide began turning for Lincoln’s corpse after the marathon viewing in Manhattan” where the “body was exposed to the air for twenty-three straight hours.” After that, he writes, quoting the New York Evening Post editor William Cullen Bryant, it was no longer “the genial, kindly face of Abraham Lincoln” but “a ghastly shadow.”
By Fred Barbash April 17 at 12:31 AM
@fbarbash
On April 21, 1865, a train carrying the body of Abraham Lincoln and bearing the dead president’s picture affixed above the cattle guard on the front left Washington for a 180-city, seven-state journey of more than 1,600 miles. The route, through Baltimore, Philadelphia, New York and then west through Ohio, Indiana and Illinois, was a close approximation, in reverse, of the journey that brought Lincoln to Washington from Springfield when he first assumed the presidency.
Accompanying his body were some 300 people, including an embalmer, and strangely, the disinterred body of Lincoln’s son Willie, who had succumbed at age 11 to typhoid fever and would be reburied next to his father in the family plot in Springfield.
....
There’s been nothing comparable to Lincoln’s final odyssey. It made the unreal real for millions, some 90 years before the advent of television.
But it was also before the advent of refrigeration and Lincoln’s body did not fare well. It “held up well through the first stops of the funeral train: Baltimore, Harrisburg and Philadelphia,” writes Richard Wightman Fox in his acclaimed new book, “Lincoln’s Body.” But “the tide began turning for Lincoln’s corpse after the marathon viewing in Manhattan” where the “body was exposed to the air for twenty-three straight hours.” After that, he writes, quoting the New York Evening Post editor William Cullen Bryant, it was no longer “the genial, kindly face of Abraham Lincoln” but “a ghastly shadow.”