Eighty generals from each side died in  America’s Civil War.

A quarter of all Southern white men of military age were killed.

One out of four Union soldiers were killed or wounded.

Source: U.S. News and World Report’s Secrets of the Civil War

Those who entered Petersen’s Boardinghouse on the evening of April 14 to visit the back bedroom where President Lincoln was lying heard shrieks and cries from the front parlor where Bob Lincoln was comforting his mother Mary Todd Lincoln.

Source: Chicago Tribune, April 15, 1865

Dion Haco’s “J. Wilkes Booth, the Assassinator of President Lincoln” is probably the first post-assassination full-length book with John Wilkes Booth as its central character.

After Haco’s novel, war correspondent George Alfred Townsend wrote probably the first book-length biography of Booth, “The Life, Crime and Capture of John Wilkes Booth.”

Both books were advertised by May 24, less than a month after Booth was shot to death at the Garrett Farm in Virginia.

Follow this link to the University of Iowa’s Bolinger Lincoln Collection of early books on the assassination and on Booth, including nine published in the last eight months of 1865: 

http://www.lib.uiowa.edu/spec-coll/bai/fingerson.htm

Source: Books at Iowa 2 by Ronald L. Fingerson

Mary Todd Lincoln said her son Robert’s actions made her hair turn white.

Robert Todd Lincoln had his mother legally committed to a private insane asylum in 1875, but a Chicago newspaper forced her release.

After her release, she wrote to her friend Myra Bradwell: ‘I asked him to look upon my bleached hair, which he had entirely caused with the past sorrowful year.”

Always politically savvy, Mary marshalled the power of her spouse against her eldest son when she wrote: “This one, as my beloved husband always said, was so different than the rest of us.”

The mother and son reconciled about a year before Mary Lincoln died at her sister’s Springfield home in 1882.

The hands of Abraham Lincoln portrayed in the 19-foot-tall statue that is the focal point of the Lincoln Memorial were based on hand casts taken in 1860.

Sculptor Daniel Chester French studied the work of Leonard Wells Volk, who convinced Lincoln to sit for him after he won the Republican nomination for president.

When Volk casted Lincoln’s hands, the right one was swollen, a result of constant handshaking on the campaign trail.

Volks sold 33 casts of Lincoln’s hands for $1,500 each.

His subscribers included sculptor Augustus Saint-Gaudens, Dracula novelist Bram Stoker and assistant secretary of state J.L. Cadwalader.

Photo courtesy of Chicago History Museum

The rocking chair President Lincoln used at Ford’s Theatre has a a large, dark stain in the head area, but it is not the president’s blood.

President Lincoln bled very little at the theater. The stain, which has turned to a resin in the nearly 150 years since the assassination, was probably hair oil.

The Fords moved the elaborate chair out of the theater because ushers and actors were sleeping in it, and their hair oils and pomades were staining the red silk damask upholstery.

After that, the rocker was used only for special events, such as Mr. Lincoln’s visit.

The black walnut chair was held by the government for many years, until Harry Ford’s widow petitioned the government for its return.

She sold it at auction in New York in 1929.

Henry Ford, the automobile magnate, bought it for $2,400. Today it is on display in a climate-controlled case at the Henry Ford Museum in Dearborn, Mich.

The springs supporting the chair are magnetic. Knotted lashing ties control the tension in the seat. There is some very lightweight blue paper on the bottom of the seat frame.

Source: Henry Ford Museum, Dearborn, MI.

Gen. Ulysses Grant and his wife Julia kept a home in Burlington, N.J. to escape the politics and war in Washington. The house, still standing at 309 Wood Street, is a two-story stucco home with French windows on both floors and an expansive front porch topped with delicate wrought-iron railing.

The couple was headed to Burlington on the night of April 14 when they were met at a ferry stop in Philadelphia and informed of the assassination.

The general escorted his wife to Burlington, then returned to Washington, D.C. by train.

Abraham Lincoln and Jefferson Davis left their homes on the same day to move to their capitals – February 11, 1861.  They each had 60 days between their departures for Washington or Richmond and the first volley of war at Fort Sumter.

In President Lincoln’s inaugural address, he firmly stated that the states that seceeded must rejoin the Union.

President Davis, in his installation address, said the time for compromise had passed. “The South is determined to maintain her position, and make all who oppose her smell Southern powder and feel Southern steel.”

Source:” How the North Won” by Herman Hattaway and Archer Jones

There were no Secret Service guards or metal detectors at the Lincoln White House.

The lower story, where the kitchen was, smelled of mildew. Rats were a nuisance there.

Until President Lincoln’s secretary convinced him to limit visiting hours, people began visiting before breakfast and kept arriving until late at night.

After Mary Lincoln redecorated the public rooms, souvenir hunters snipped pieces of curtain tassels and took the curtain cords as souvenirs. One person cut nearly two feet out of a new silk curtain.

Source: Ronald D. Reitveld, The Lincoln White House Community, Journal of the Abraham Lincoln Association

John Wilkes Booth’s body was returned to his family for burial in 1869, but skeptics continued to believe Booth was alive for another half century.

Despite the identifying marks – his three-letter tattoo on his left hand and a distinct scar on his neck – some people still didn’t believe Booth was shot to death by Boston Corbett at the Garrett Farm on April 26, 1865.

Even sworn statements from witnesses couldn’t quell the rumors, which had Booth living in Texas and Oklahoma under an assumed name well into the next century.

This photo from the Hagley Museum and Library shows a supposedly mummified Booth on display in a sideshow, probably in the 1920s: http://cdm16038.contentdm.oclc.org/cdm/ref/collection/p268001coll8/id/180