Artist Carl Bersch was out on his Tenth Street balcony sketching the end-of-the-war celebrations when, shortly after 10 p.m., a loud cry came from Ford’s Theatre: “President Lincoln has been shot. Clear the street.”

From the balcony about 12-14 feet above the street, Bersch sketched as a group of men carried the president across the street on an improvised stretcher.

His “Borne by Loving Hands” depicts the men stopping at the curb to debate the best place to take the president.

Bersch later wrote that he saw a young man standing on the topmost step of Petersen’s Boardinghouse beckoning the president’s bearers. That man was Henry Safford, a mustachioed 17-year-old War Department clerk. Tuckered out after five nights of revelry, Safford had decided to stay in and read on the clammy, cloudy Friday night.  Hearing the commotion across the street from his second-story room in the front of the house, he went downstairs to help.

Source: “A. Lincoln, His Last 24 Hours” by W. Emerson Reck

John Wilkes Booth was born on this day in 1838, but it was a special date in the Booth household for another reason, too. It was the day Junius Booth and Mary Ann Holmes Booth were married — on John Wilkes’ 13th birthday.

Junius would have married Mary Ann sooner, but he couldn’t.

He had a wife and toddler back in London.

Junius was a top Shakespearean actor in London when he fell for Mary Ann, a flower girl who sold her wares outside Coventry Garden. They eloped to America.

The first Mrs. Booth first learned that her husband had 10 American children when her son grew old enough to sail to America and connect with his dad.

Junius and Mary Ann had shown their American-born children a fake marriage certificate, and they were hoping the issue would never come up.

When Adelaide Delannoy Booth discovered the truth, she came to American and tracked Mary Ann Booth around Baltimore, screaming invectives about her and her illegitimate children.

During those years, John Wilkes reportedly changed from a lovable, friendly boy to a mean bully, who even beat up his younger brother.

Adelaide eventually divorced Junius, leaving him free to marry Mary Ann in 1851. Within a year, Junius contracted a disease on a riverboat, died, and left his new bride a widow.

Mary Ann Holmes Booth

Junius Brutus Booth

When the government released the bodies of the Lincoln conspirators to their families in 1869, there was one condition. None of the four persons hanged on July 7, 1865, could have a marked grave.

Davy Herold’s body was laid to rest hear his father’s body in Congressional Cemetery in Southeast Washington, D.C. The Herold family figured out a way to circumvent the ban on marked graves for conspirators.

When Davy’s sister died, they buried her on top of Davy’s coffin, so they would always know where he was.

Source: The Lincoln Assassination: Where Are They Now? A Guide to the Burial Places of Individuals Connected to the Lincoln Assassination in Washington, D.C. by Jim Garrett and Richard Smyth

John Wilkes Booth was more discreet than many other actors who received wild proposals from female fans.

One actress remembered that male actors often passed around female fans’ letters for amusement, but Booth, realizing the letters could ruin the reputations of the writers, cut off the signatures before he shared his.

“The sting lies in the tails,” he’d say.

When President Lincoln didn’t sleep well he sometimes wandered to his office and worked, with the whole East Wing unoccupied except for himself and the messenger sleeping in the anteroom.

When the Lincolns first occupied the Executive Mansion, ingress and egress was entirely unobstructed. All the doors on the Pennsylvania Avenue side of the mansion were open all through the day and very late into the night.

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

While painters depicted President Abraham Lincoln surrounded by angels, they paired John Wilkes Booth with a fallen angel. Many drawings of Booth and the devil were sold. Here’s one from the Library of Congress collection. Click on it for a larger version:

Confederate Veteran magazine, over the centuries, carried first-person narratives from hundreds of important rebel eyewitnesses.

The editors at Confederate Veteran were so kind as to share an accessible collection of fascinating back issues from 1893-1932.

They are posted on this University of Pennsylvania site: http://onlinebooks.library.upenn.edu/webbin/serial?id=confedvet

There are 2,972 biographies of George Washington, but 5,796 of Abraham Lincoln.

If you’re counting books that are simply about Lincoln, it’s much higher — about 16,000. That’s enough books to stack three stories high. The Center for Education and Leadership at the National Park Service’s Ford’s Theatre complex has done just that. The staircase at the new center winds around a wide stack of Lincoln’s books that reach 34 feet high.

Two hundred biographies were published in 2009 alone — the 200th anniversary of President Lincoln’s birth.

Sources: WSJ.com, World Cat

Confederate General Stonewall Jackson died on May 10, 1843, but his arm had already received a Christian burial.

When Jackson was accidentally shot by his own troops on this day in 1863, his arm was amputated to save his life. His chaplain couldn’t bear to see the general’s arm thrown on a pile of amputed limbs from the Battle of Chancellorsville, so he gave the arm a Christian burial in a private cemetery nearby.

Gen. Jackson died of pneumonia the next week. His body was sent to his family in Lexington, Va. — minus one arm.

Mrs. Jackson decided not to exhume the arm because it received a Christian burial.

Unfortunately, Union soliders reportedly dug it up in 1864, possibly moving it to another location. In 1903, one of Jackson’s staff officers erected this granite marker in the cemetery to commemorate the arm. Ellwood Manor Cemetery is near the National Military Park at Fredericksburg and Spotsylvania in Virginia.

Sources: The Surratt Courier, NPR.org

Courtesy of Columbia Historical Society

In President Lincoln’s time, people kept mourning cards to remember those who died. The card above was distributed in Washington, D.C.