The Lincoln deathbed is on display at the Chicago History Museum. Visitors to the room where Lincoln died at Petersen House in Washington, D.C. see a similar walnut spool bed from the same period, circa 1850.

The Petersen House bed was donated by the Society of Dames of the Loyal Legion’s D.C. chapter.

The main difference between the two beds is the shape of the finials on the bedposts. The spools on period piece are like extensions of the posts. The original bed has spools that start wide at the base and rise to a point like a Christmas tree.

Source: National Park Service

Louis J. Weichmann, the boarder at Mary Surratt’s house who testified against her, went on to work as a newspaper reporter, worked in a customs house and opened a business college.

After he testified against Mary Surratt in 1865, Secretary of War William Stanton helped him get a job at the Philadelphia customs house.

He was obliged to return to Washington to testify at the trial of John H. Surratt Jr. in 1867.

After he testified against his former friend, Weichmann received threatening letters and was put under the protection of government detectives.

He eventually moved to Anderson, Ind., where his brother was a Catholic priest. He opened a business college.

Before he died at age 60, a nervous and broken man, Weichmann signed a statement that all of the evidence he gave at the trials was absolutely true.

Source: Reveille in Washington by Margaret Leech

Major Henry R. Rathbone, the closest man to John Wilkes Booth when the actor shot the president,  estimated the distances inside the presidential box in his affidavit given April 15, 1865.

Rathbone said the box was 10-to-12 feet long  and about nine feet deep from front to back.

The president took a seat about four or five feet from the door. Rathbone took a seat on the opposite side of the box – about seven or eight feet from the president and also seven or eight feet from the door.

Source: Henry R. Rathbone affidavit, National Archives

J.D. Reamer, a prominent Hagerstown, Md. merchant, was arrested and sent to Old Capitol Prison with the alleged conspirators in the murder of President Lincoln.

Mr. Reamer’s crime: In a private conversation, he predicted the exact day of the president’s death.

Source: “The Terrible Tragedy at Washington: Assassination of President Lincoln, Last Hours and Death-Bed Scenes of the President,” Barclay & Co., 1865

This unflattering description of co-conspirator George Atzerodt appeared in the newspapers following the assassination. His name was also misspelled:

“Atzeroth is a German by birth, but, having come to this country when quite a child, he speaks English with as much fluency as a native. He is about five feet seven or eight inches high, with a well-knit and compact frame, and about 29 years of age. His complexion is dark and swarthy, with black, crisp hair and mustache; eyes dark gray, deep set and piercing. His forehead is low, and the general contour of his features stamp him as a man of low character, who would stoop to any action, no matter how vile, for money.”

Thousands visited Washington’s Navy Yard when John Wilkes Booth’s body was kept on a boat from there.  No one who was not connected to the yard was admitted.

Many gawkers expressed disappointment that Booth was not taken alive.

Source: Newspaper accounts reprinted in “The Terrible Tragedy at Washington: Assassination of President Lincoln, Last Hours and Death-Bed Scenes of the President,” Barclay & Co., 1865

Three years before the night  President Abraham Lincoln was assassinated and Secretary of State William Seward’s throat was slit in an assassination attempt, Seward wrote this:

“Assassination is not an American practice or habit, and one so vicious and desperate cannot be engrafted into our political system.”

After a week of bonfires, fireworks and bright lights, Washington marked Black Easter.

The president’s death on Holy Saturday 1865 meant the red, white and blue bunting celebrating the war’s end was replaced with black crepe. Merchants sold out of every type of black material, from cheap muslim to the expensive black alpaca that draped the pulpit of President Lincoln’s pastor, The Rev. Dr. Phineas Gurley.

Sources: 1865 newspaper accounts. 

The rambling Centre Market on the south side of Pennsylvania Avenue between 7th and 9th Streets was the commercial district in Washington, D.C. in Lincoln’s time.

The tonier north side of Pennsylvania Avenue was home to fancy shops, restaurants, hotels and theaters.

Mary Elizabeth Jenkins was born to a slave-owning family in Maryland’s Prince George’s County in 1823. She was the middle child and the only daughter.

Her mother was widowed when Mary was two, but Mrs. Jenkins reared her children without remarrying. She managed a small plantation and managed to send her three children to private schools.

Although the family was Episcopalian, she sent 12-year-old Mary to the Academy for Young Ladies, a school associated with St. Mary’s Catholic Church in Alexandria, Va. There Mary converted to Catholicism.

When the academy closed four years later in 1839, Mary reluctantly returned home.

A year later, she married John Surratt. She was 16; he was 26 and a disreputable alcoholic who had already fathered an illegitimate child.

The new bride got involved in a growing Catholic parish near the farm where they settled.

They moved again.

Then a fire destroyed their home, forcing John to work in Virginia while Mary and the children lived with relatives in Maryland.

He earned enough to buy land and build a tavern in Maryland. Mary and the children moved there in 1853.

John Surratt’s drinking cost most of the profits from running the tavern and a post office on the site, but Mary raised tobacco, bred hogs and pigeons, managed a storage granary, ran a livery stable and a blacksmith shop, and found the money to send their children to Catholic schools.

John Surratt died of a stroke in 1862. To stay solvent, Mary leased the inn and moved to a house the family owned on H Street in Washington, D.C. She took in boarders to support herself.

Her son John took over the post office for 14 months, a good position for a Confederate spy and courier.

Source: Review of “The Assassin’s Accomplice: Mary Surratt and the Plot To Kill Abraham Lincoln” by Kate Clifford Larson. Review written by The Rev. Paul Liston in Potomac Catholic Heritage, Spring 2009