“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

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