Sgt. Silas Cobb was on duty at Washington’s Navy Yard Bridge on April 14, 1865 when John Wilkes Booth came riding up, fresh from assassinating President Lincoln.

Cobb asked his name, and Booth gave his real name. He said he was headed for Beantown, his real destination, the area where Dr. Samuel Mudd lived.

Cobb told Booth there were orders that no person be allowed to cross the bridge after 9 p.m. without proper paper, but Cobb relented and let Booth cross.

The war was finished, and Booth was heading out of Washington, not in, so Cobb saw no threat. He let Booth escape, necessitating a national manhunt that would continue for 12 days.

As Abraham Lincoln’s thinking on slavery evolved, he mulled over several schemas to curtail slavery.

He once met with Delaware Congressman George P. Fisher to sound Fisher out on the prospects for a compensation emancipation plan for Delaware — sort of a test run for the rest of the country.

Slavery was mostly confined to the agricultural southwest corner of Delaware. The state’s climate didn’t support year-round agriculture or the need for a year-round slave workforce.

The president calculated the cost of purchasing the freedom of one slave at $300. He planned to pay the slave owners in U.S. bonds. His timetables varied, from freeing all remaining slaves by 1867 to stretching slavery into the 1890s.

Fisher, newly a Republican, came to Washington with Benjamin Burton, a Republican who owned more slaves than any other Delaware farmer.

Burton wanted to know how Lincoln could be sure Congress would pay the slave owners. Lincoln told him, “Mr. Burton, you tend to your end of the swingle tree, and I’ll tend to mine.”

The congressman was hopeful when he returned to Delaware, but, when word of the plan spread, the state’s Democratic-controlled press denounced it as a conspiracy to deprive Delaware of its sovereign right to determine its own affairs.

Fisher realized his bill would fail by one vote. He didn’t want to embarrass the president, so he never formally presented it to the legislature.

Emancipation didn’t come to Delaware early, but the president did appoint Fisher to a new seat on the U.S. District Court in 1863.

Source: Delaware History, Fall-Winter 2008, Delaware Historical Society

Andrew Johnson

Sen. William M. Stewart of Nevada wrote of entering Vice President Andrew Johnson’s room with Chief Justice Salmon P. Chase on the morning after the assassination.

He said Johnson was in bare feet and only partially dressed, as though he had hurriedly thrown on a pair of trousers and shirt. As the vice-president walked out of one room into the outer room his suite, he put on a very rumpled coat, Stewart wrote in his memoir.

Stewart said Johnson had the appearance of a drunken man. He said the vice-president was dirty and his hair was matted, as though with mud from the gutter. He said he blinked at his visitors through squinting eyes and lurched around unsteadily.

When Chase told him the president had been assassinated, Johnson seemed dazed at first, Stewart wrote.

“Then he jumped up, thrust his right arm up as far as he could reach, and said, in a thick, gruff, hoarse voice, “I’m ready.”

Source: Reminiscences of Sen. William M. Stewart of Nevada, Neale Publishing Co., 1908

Frank Sands, the government undertaker who oversaw President Lincoln’s remains,  died just over three years after the president.

He is buried in historic Congressional Cemetery at 1801 E Street, S.E., in Washington, D.C.

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

The attractive brick townhouse at 712 Jackson Place in Washington, D.C., just across the street from the White House, is now home to the White House Fellowships intern program, but, in 1865, it was home to Maj. Henry Rathbone.

Maj. Rathbone and his fiance Clara Harris accompanied the Lincolns to Ford’s Theatre on April 14, 1865.

Thomas Lincoln, the president’s father, ordered his son to work hard around his farm and sent him to neighboring farms to earn money for the family. He berated his son for reading.

The son did not invite his father to his wedding to Mary Todd Lincoln, and he he did not attend his father’s funeral or pay for a headstone for his father’s grave.

Unlike his father, the president was a loving, involved father who reveled in playing with his sons and sought the best educations for them.

Julia Taft Bayne, who babysat for the Lincolns, later told stories of Tad perched on the back of his father’s chair while Willie sat on one of the president’s knees for a story — usually a melodramatic tale of hunters and settlers attacked by Indians.

Bayne once opened a door to find the president flat on the floor laughing, with his sons and their playmates trying to hold him down.

Source: Lincoln: America’s Greatest President at 200

Although security was lacking at Ford’s Theatre on the evening of April 14, 1865, Secretary of War William Stanton posted sharpshooters on roofs and plainclothes detectives in the crow for President Lincoln’s second inauguration on March 4, 1865.

Good thing.

John Wilkes Booth had a ticket, courtesy of his girlfriend, senator’s daughter Lucy Lambert Hale.

Gen. John H. Morgan

Confederate General John Hunt Morgan was expelled from Transylvania University for boisterous behavior. He fought in the Mexican War with Zachary Taylor, became a successful hemp manufacturer, then joined the Confederate army.

In 1862, he led a band of Confederates to capture a small federal garrison in Gallatin, Tenn., north of Nashville. The goal was to cut off Union supply lines. Gallatin was a vital hub for supplies between Louisville and Nashville.

Morgan’s men captured the Union soldiers, burned the depot and destroyed an 800-foot railroad tunnel by setting fire to a train loaded with hay and pushing it into the tunnel, which eventually collapsed.

Source: The History Channel

William H. Seward, Lincoln’s secretary of state, lived with his father-in-law near Weedsport, N.Y., about 50 miles each of Rochester.

Auburn, the home the Sewards eventually inherited, is now a house museum displaying original items from the Seward family.

Despite his political career taking him far beyond Weedsport, Auburn is the only house Seward ever owned.

To learn more about the Seward House Museum, visit http://sewardhouse.org/general-information/