The booming wartime economy in Washington did not last. Recession followed the end of the war.

The government budgeted 22.9 million for war expenditures in 1861, but that had climbed to 1.03 billion by 1865.

The War Department put the expenditure for the Civil War at 2.73 billion.

Source: “Of Duty Well and Faithfully Done: A History of the Regular Army in the Civil War” by Clayton R. Newell, Charles R. Shrader, Edward M. Coffman

The Todd family of Lexington, Ky., is an example of the suffering of ordinary families during the Civil War. Mary Todd Lincoln’s parents lost three sons and two sons-in-law to the war.

Samuel Briggs Todd was killed fighting for the Confederacy at the Battle of Shiloh.

David Todd died of wounds suffered while fighting for the South at Vicksburg.

Alexander Humphreys Todd, a Confederate soldier, died in a friendly fire incident in Baton Rouge.

Their son-in-law Benjamin Hardin Helm, a West Point graduate who fought for the Confederacy, was mortally wounded at Chickamauga.

And, on this day 148 years ago, they lost another son-in-law nine hours after a fatal shooting at Ford’s Theatre.

Dr. Charles Leale, the first doctor in the presidential box on the evening of April 14, 1865, said at the outset that the wound was fatal and there was no hope.

The president’s strong body took almost nine hours to shut down.

His friends and family stood by helplessly in a small back room of a Tenth Street boardinghouse while doctors ministered to him.

Later, Robert Todd Lincoln told his cousin Kate Helms that he thought the interminable agony of the night would never end.

Abraham Lincoln sent this resume when he was looking for a job in 1860:

6 ft., 4 in.  nearly

Lean in flesh

Weighing 180 pounds

Dark complexion

Coarse black hair

Gray eyes

Education: defective

Profession: a lawyer

Have been a captain of volunteers in the Black Hawk War

Postmaster at a very small office

Four times a member of the Illinois Legislature

Was a member of the lower house of Congress.

Yours, etc.

A Lincoln

President Lincoln’s wife and his law partner snipped at each other for decades.

William H. Herndon called Mary Todd Lincoln “cold as a chunk of ice,” a “she-wolf,”  and “the female cat of the age.”

She called him “a dirty dog.”

Their antagonism for each other is significant because Herndon compiled much of the information known about his law partner’s early adult life, and his dislike of Mrs. Lincoln’s may have influenced the information he included.

John Wilkes Booth and his friend Davy Herold stood on the Executive Mansion lawn on the evening of April 11, 1865, listening to President Lincoln speak from a second-story window.

It was the first time President Lincoln publicly called for the vote for African-Americans.

Booth became enraged. “That means nigger citizenship,” he said. “That is the last speech he will ever make.”

Dr. Charles Leale, the young army surgeon who would try to save the president after Booth shot him, was also standing on the lawn. Leale hadn’t intended to come to the speech. Out for a walk after work, he was swept up into the crowd walking down Pennsylvania Avenue.

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.