In New York City, as the body of the president was transported by barge from New Jersey to lower Manhattan, some 20,000 awaited its arrival at City Hall Park. Amid a “requiem of singing societies,” according to The New York Times, the coffin was taken to City Hall to lie in state. During its time there, it was estimated that 120,000 New Yorkers filed past the open coffin. The following day, a procession accompanied the president’s body as it moved up Broadway to the Hudson River railroad station. “It was,” noted the Times, “the greatest thing of its kind that New York had ever seen. The huge procession took four hours to pass a given point and was estimated to contain no less than 50,000 persons.”
As the funeral train left New York behind, the Hudson Valley waited. One Poughkeepsie student, Benjamin Stouffer, in a letter home to his family in Franklin County, described the mood that had descended on that city and, no doubt, on both sides of the river. “I never heard any thing that shocked me so much. Some of the boys awoke me up early on Saturday morning and told me Lincoln had been shot. I scarcely knew what to do. Evy [sic] one looked down and were sad the town was just as [a] Sunday. Our teachers told us to go home that thy could not teach school and about nine oclock all the bells in the city were tolled.”
The funeral train moved through Yonkers, Tarrytown, and Ossining. According to Carl Sandburg, in his trilogy on the life of Lincoln, those looking out from within the funeral cars continued to witness an outpouring of emotion and displays honoring the martyred Lincoln. “At Peekskill, encircled with roses and tasseled red-white-and-blue, a tall portrait of Lincoln. Firemen and a company of Highland Grays with drooped flags marched before a large crowd. At Garrison’s Landing, opposite the West Point military academy, were assembled the academy staff and professors — and a thousand precise and caped cadets. At Cold Spring again was a young woman in the semblance of the Goddess of Liberty, her face black-veiled, at her right a kneeling boy soldier, at her left a sailor boy kneeling. Fishkill evergreened its motto ‘In God We Trust,’ crowded both sides of the track; across the Hudson River General George Washington’s revolutionary headquarters had flags with mourning signs. Here too were delegations from Newburgh, New Paltz, and other parts of the apple country immediately across the river.”
Arriving in Poughkeepsie, the train made its only scheduled stop between New York and Albany. There, as the engine eased to a halt, seven local ladies were permitted to enter the car carrying the body of the president to lay flowers on the coffin. Outside, a thousand students from the National Business College lined up as the school band played solemn music. As minute guns sounded and the crowd waved small American flags, the train began its departure only 15 minutes after it had arrived.
Leaving Poughkeepsie, with its streets “hung with crape flags flying at half-mast and trimmed with black,” the train continued to move north as evening fell. Within site of the Catskills, as it neared the station at Rhinecliff, residents of Kingston and Rondout could be found waiting on both sides of the river. In Ponckhockie, along the bluffs overlooking the river, locals had gathered to peer though the darkness towards the other side of the river. Earlier in the evening, more than 200 from the Kingston-Rondout area had made the trip across the river to await the train’s arrival in Rhinecliff.
According to the Rondout Courier, as local church bells tolled, “Ten minutes ahead of the funeral train a pilot engine passed up, and at a signal from the Lark the minute guns commenced their booming firing from the bluff in Ponckhockie. The speed of the train was ‘slowed’ as the funeral pageant passed Rhinecliff, and through the dense darkness the reverent crowd saw indistinctly for a moment the mournful train sweeping through the lines of light, a solemn dirge from the German Band of Rondout breaking the silence by its sad melody, and in a moment the cars swept by and were lost in the deep gloom, parting forever from our sight and presence here, all that is mortal of Abraham Lincoln.”
On the train traveled, heading north past Tivoli, where the depot was draped and homes were decorated with flags and illuminated in the night. In Catskill, large bonfires also illuminated the evening, offering silhouettes of those gathered in quiet respect as the train passed on the opposite shore. In Hudson, minute guns fired as the American Hotel and the Hudson House stood draped in mourning.
Delayed by the crowds they had passed along the way, as engineers slowed the train through each town they passed, the funeral train eventually arrived in Albany at 11 p.m. Despite the late hour, the body of the president was transferred to the Capitol and placed in the Assembly chamber on almost the same spot where, four years earlier, then president-elect Lincoln had spoken. The doors to the chamber were opened to the public at 1:15 a.m. and the line of mourners continued to pass by the president’s body until 1:30 the following afternoon. Even then, when the doors were finally closed, it is said that the line of citizens that had come not only from Albany but also the Adirondacks, Massachusetts, the Hudson Valley and Vermont to pay their respects continued out of the Capitol and down the street for a mile.
Placed on a hearse and, again, drawn by six white horses, the body of Lincoln then headed a procession that included governor Ruben Fenton, a contingent of New York officials and a variety of selected bands down State Street to the railroad station. There, with the coffin returned to the funeral car, the train departed Albany heading west. Abraham Lincoln had left the Hudson Valley forever.
As a younger man, depression was not unknown to Abraham Lincoln. At one point in his life, deep within its clutches, the future president even expressed willingness for death except for the fact that “he had done nothing to make any human remember that he had lived.” Now, 150 years later, we remember. The Lincoln catechism we hold onto today, whether grounded in myth or reality, is a unique part of the American foundation. In many respects, the transformation of Lincoln into the iconic figure he became has often been less about him and more about the living.
In April 1865, America was awash in a sea of death. Even today, most of us live but a short distance from a cemetery that contains reminders of those who gave their lives during a conflict of unimaginable American horror, a conflict in which even the “Captain,” as Walt Whitman penned Lincoln, had fallen ““cold and dead” upon the deck. Within that context, the need arose to recognize something greater than the living, to believe in the nation’s immortality. Both the life and death of Abraham Lincoln fulfilled that need.
In many respects, it still does. Lincoln was — and remains — accessible to those who seek him out. We know him because, like each of us, he was not perfect. Is it possible that in the transformation of Lincoln beyond what he was in life that we run the risk of idolizing or over-sentimentalizing? Of course. But, in an Internet-driven, 140-character world in which a tsunami of information buffets us each day, simple words — “with malice towards none, with charity for all” — and basic human character may still have a place. This month, a century and a half has passed since Edwin Stanton, a man who once despised Lincoln, sat in tears beside Lincoln’s deathbed and spoke the oft-quoted words, “Now he belongs to the ages.”
Through the sum of his life — and death — he still does.
End Note: Copies of the Kingston Democratic Journal, Rondout Courier and Kingston Argus can be found on microfilm at the Kingston Library. A complete copy of Rev. Timlow’s eulogy can be found at www.lincolncollection.org. The Republic of Suffering by Drew Gilpin Faust is published by Alfred A. Knopf (New York, 2008). Richard Heppner will offer a reading and discussion on his essay at the Ulster County Historical Society on April 12 at 3 p.m.
Richard Heppner is Woodstock Town Historian.
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