Memories of draft riots still lingered. The suspension of habeas corpus and the censorship of some newspapers continued to raise questions regarding Lincoln’s respect for the constitution. And yet, as the eulogies poured forth from pulpits far and wide on the day of his funeral, Abraham Lincoln began to move beyond the simple man with flaws toward becoming the larger-than-life figure we know today.
Most certainly, the shock of the assassination combined with the emotional roller coaster of war’s end to unleash an outpouring of feelings that demanded public expression. Many of us remember the role television played in connecting our shared grief following the assassination of John Kennedy. In April 1865 Northerners could only turn to each other through rituals offered by their churches or the emotional appeals delivered at civic gatherings.
As the nation mourned, the convergence of Good Friday, Easter Sunday and the assassination laid the groundwork for unavoidable reflections on death and resurrection. The parallels were easily drawn. Where Jesus had died for our sins, so too Lincoln had died that the nation might live. One minister, Gilbert Haven, would even compare Lincoln’s visit to the Confederate capitol of Richmond only ten days before his death with that of Jesus entering Jerusalem the week before his crucifixion. According to Haven, “Good Friday was now not just a sacred day for churches, but the nation as well.” The anniversary of Lincoln’s death, he proclaimed, should be “kept beside the cross and the grave.”
On a more secular level, comparisons with yet another god-like figure in the American mind, George Washington, began to take hold. Where the first president had seen the nation through its difficult birth, the sixteenth had saved the union while also delivering, at least through proclamation, the promise of the Declaration of Independence. Speaking from the pulpit of his Rhinebeck church on the day of national mourning, the reverend Heman R. Timlow gave voice to that comparison, “Oft will we commune, one with the other, and talk of [his] virtues and deeds. We will tell them to our children and children’s children. Side by side with the illustrious Washington, we lay thee in our hearts. Thus enshrined by the American people, no higher earthly honor can be thine. And we desire that thy tomb shall be somewhere under the shades of Mount Vernon so that when patriot pilgrims visit the sanctuary of the dead where reposes the Father of his Country, they shall also stand by the grave of him, who shall be held in grateful veneration as the Martyr of Liberty in 1865.”
Lincoln’s funeral, for many, also became a symbolic representation of the funerals that were never held for the hundreds of thousands who had died on the battlefield but whose bodies never returned home. Overwhelmed by the sheer number of deaths and the inability of the government to account for each slain soldier, family members were often left without the closure provided by the funeral ritual. Many embraced instead the observances held locally for the slain president whose body, like their fallen family member, lay not in their local church but miles away in places like Gettysburg, Chancellorsville and, on that Wednesday in April, Washington D.C. As historian and Harvard president Drew Gilpin Faust recently wrote in The Republic of Suffering, “Lost yet not lost, absent yet ever present, these dead, these immortal phantoms became … the meaning and legacy of the war. Lincoln was but their finest exemplar.”
When reverend Phineas Gurley, pastor of the New York Avenue Presbyterian Church in Washington, concluded funeral services in the East Room of the White House on that Wednesday, twelve army sergeants carried the president’s coffin to a funeral hearse waiting outside. As the procession, drawn by six white horses, turned on to Pennsylvania Avenue and headed towards the Capitol, just how deep the grief over the slain president had extended became evident. It was estimated that more than 100,000 citizens watched in silence as the coffin passed. As reported by Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper, “Every window, housetop, balcony and every inch of the sidewalk on either side was densely crowded …” Thousands of Union soldiers, some of whom had managed to leave their hospital beds behind, fell in behind the procession. Just as remarkable, some 40,000 freed blacks followed. All holding hands.
While the size of the crowds, including the 25,000 who would pass by Lincoln’s coffin as it lay in state in the Capitol on Thursday, surprised many, it was but the first public indication of what was to follow in the coming days as Lincoln’s funeral train departed Washington and headed home to Illinois.
The funeral train, bearing not only the president’s body but also the coffin of his son Willie who had died three years earlier, left Washington on Friday at 8 a.m. Two hours later it arrived in Baltimore, the same city where, four years earlier, the newly elected president passed through in secret following threats on his life. There, after being transferred to a catafalque and proceeding through the streets of the city, 10,000 mourners passed by the coffin in the three hours allotted for viewing.
In Philadelphia, 140,000 mourners waited in a line three miles long to view the president’s body as it lay in state in Independence Hall. The body of the man who had preserved the union rested in the very room that had seen its creation.
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