Capt. Oliver Gatch, one of the men who carried President Lincoln across Tenth Street on assassination night, already had a lifetime of war stories to tell before April 14.

He was captured by rebels at Chicamauga in September 1863 and held as a prisoner of war untill March 1, 1865.

After his release, Gatch reunited with his brother Charles at their family home in Ohio. Then they rode to Washington, D.C., so the captain could collect his back pay.

When they reached the capital on the morning of the assassination, Capt. Gatch reported to Secretary William Stanton. Then he set out to collect nearly two years back pay.

His plans were thrown off track when the paymaster said he had an important social engagement. He asked Gatch to come back the next morning. The brothers planned to leave Washington that night, but the polite captain agreed.

Killing time in the capital, they decided to go to Ford’s Theatre because the president was attending the performance of “Our American Cousin.”

At one point in the play, the brothers noticed the handsomest man they’d ever seen lurking near the president’s box. They wondered what he was doing there.

After John Wilkes Booth entered the box and shot the president, Capt. Gatch was one of the men who carried the wounded president across Tenth Street to his deathbed.

Source: The Assassination of Lincoln by E.R. Shawm  McCLure’s magazine, December 1908 

The front cover of Harper’s Weekly for May 20, 1865 carried two sketches. One was of a burnt tobacco barn, the site where John Wilkes Booth was shot by Boston Corbett in the predawn darkness of April 26.The other was the small Garrett farmhouse, where Booth died on the front porch just after sunrise.

Even 26 days after the president was shot, two out of the three front-page headlines referred to the April 14 assassination or the president’s May 9 funeral.

Armory Square Hospital was built in the second year of the Civil War, approximately where the National Air and Space Museum stands today. In its three years of existence, the hospital staff treated more than 13,000 wounded and ill patients, the worst cases that could make the train or boat ride from the battlefield.

Dr. Charles Leale, who stopped President Lincoln from succumbing in the box at Ford’s Theatre, worked at Armory Square.

When the hospital closed in 1865, the last issue of the Armory Square Hospital Gazette, said, “One cannot conceive of a gun-shot wound that has not been treated here.”

Source: si.edu, website of the Smithsonian 

George Armstrong Custer, an 1861 West Point grad, was the youngest officer to attain high rank in the Civil War. He served as an aide to Gen. George McClellan until Gen. Ambrose Burnside took command of the Army of the Potomac.

Although Custer met a bad end when he led 264 men to massacre by the Sioux in 1876, his legend lived on, largely thanks to his wife Elizabeth. Mrs. Custer lectured about her fallen husband, and even wrote a children’s book that promoted him as a role model for manliness.

The ornate funeral car that carried President Lincoln’s body from Washington, D.C. to its burial in Springfield, Ill., was destroyed by first in the early 1900s. No color photos are known to exist.

The train car was described, in various publications, as claret red and chocolate brown. No one knew for sure until this March 27. That’s when chemistry professor Wayne Wesolowski solved the mystery.

Weslowski, who teaches chemistry at the University of Arizona, was dogged in his pursuit of history. After years of trying, he finally convinced the owner of a window frame from the train car to allow him to analyze a tiny chip of its paint.

Along with a conservator experienced in color-matching, Weslowski hunched over a microscope and sprinkled specks of paint against the rare paint sample.

The answer: The car was a deep maroon — 16 parts black and four parts red.

Source: Funeral Train Mystery Solved by Anne Ryman, The Arizona Republic

“The Last Hours of Lincoln” by Alonzo Chappel hangs in the Chicago Historical Society.

Even if the walls were rubber, it would be impossible to shoehorn all the people Chappel painted into the 18×10-foot back bedroom.

The picture is accurate in one aspect though. All of the people pictured did visit the room during President Lincoln’s last hours.

Paintings of the dying and dead were popular in the Victorian age. Chappel’s painting sold well.

Source: Proquest Historic Newspapers, Chicago Tribune, “Artist Drew Two Score and Seven to Lincoln’s Deathbed” by Michael Kilian

John Downing Jr. wrote a letter as he sat beneath the unfinished stump of the Washington Monument on April 26, 1865. In it, he described the soldiers there who were playing a dirge in honor of President Lincoln.

As he wrote, Downing noted that African-Americans who had been slaves months before were passing by with their happy children.

Source: “We Saw Lincoln Shot” by Timothy S. Good

Lt. A.S. Crawford told investigators he was sitting about five feet from the door of the president’s box, watching the play, when John Wilkes Booth interrupted during the third act. Crawford thought Booth was intoxicated. He also noticed a glare in Booth’s eye.

Crawford was about to make a remark about that to his companion when he heard a shot fired. He jumped to the door of the box but Maj. Henry Rathbone, the president’s theater companion, asked him not to let anyone in the box. Crawford sent for a surgeon.

Crawford’s description of the killer: “He very strongly resembled the Booths. What attracted my attention particularly was the glare in his eye… He was a rather good-looking, short-necked fellow about five feet eight inches high with grayish pants, I think.”

Mother’s Day was not celebrated until May 9, 1914, but President Lincoln acknowledged his own mother in a letter to a young woman whose father died in battle in 1862. He wrote:

“All that I am or hope ever to be, I get from my mother — God bless her.”

When she died, he was nine, and he thought of it as his introduction to “the back side of this world.”

“In this sad world of ours, sorrow comes to all; and, to the young it comes with bitterest agony, because it takes them unawares. The older have learned to ever expect it,” he wrote.

He told the woman that she would feel better again, and said he knew that because he had enough experience with death to know:

“The memory of your dear Father, instead of an agony, will yet be a sad sweet feeling in your heart, of a purer, and holier sort than you have known before…”

Source: Shapell.org, the website of the  Shapell Manuscript Foundation