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

President Lincoln’s body was embalmed by Harry Cattell, who worked for Brown & Alexander, a Pennsylvania Avenue embalmer.

Cattell had embalmed 11-year-old Willie Lincoln three years earlier.

He embalmed Mr. Lincoln in the president’s bedroom at the Executive Mansion. Andrew Johnson, the new president, was present for the procedure.

Source: American’s Historical Newspapers: The Washington Post 

Along with John Wilkes Booth’s last hopes, the fire in Richard Henry Garrett’s tobacco barn destroyed the family’s farm equipment and their neighbors’ furniture.

The Garrett family played host to fugitive Booth and his companion Davy Herold at their Locust Hill farm on April 25-26, but they did not know their guests were the subject of a manhunt for the assassinators of President Abraham Lincoln.

Booth and Herold were sleeping in the Garrett’s tobacco barn when Union soldiers surrounded it on the morning of April 26 and set a fire to flush them out.

Sgt. Boston Corbett  fired a paralyzing shot into Booth’s neck as the barn was burning, and Booth died on the front porch of the family farmhouse.

Unfortunately, the Garretts’ neighbors had stored their tables and beds in the tobacco barn to evade looting by Union soldiers. The barn burned to the ground and all was lost.

When Mary Lincoln was a little girl, she idolized her father’s close friend Henry Clay, a three-time candidate for president.

Clay promised her that she could come to the Executive Mansion if he were elected.

He never was, and he died before Mary could invite him to be her guest.

She never forgot the goal, though. When the Lincoln’s moved into the Executive Mansion, Mary stood in the doorway of the opulent Blue Room and exclaimed, “It’s mine, my very own! At last, it’s mine!”

Sources: Journal of the Abraham Lincoln Association, History Cooperative.org