Brig. Gen. Benjamin Helm

Mary Lincoln was in New York when word reached the Executive Mansion that her beloved brother-in-law Confederate General Benjamin Hardin Helm had been killed at Chickamauga.

The president sent her a telegram: “We now have a tolerably accurate summing up of the late battle between Rosecrans and Bragg. Of the killed, one Major Genl. and five Brigadiers, including your brother-in-law, Helm.”

It seemed cold, but the president could not lament the death of a Confederate general over the Union’s military telegraph system.

A friend from Illinois said he had never seen the president more moved than when he heard of the death of his 32-year-old brother-in-law.

Source: House of Abraham: Lincoln & The Todds, A Family Divided by War by Stephen Berry

Dr. Charles Leale, U.S. Army

Dr. Charles A. Leale, the young army surgeon who was first to reach President Lincoln after the assassination, administered mouth-to-mouth resuscitation. He described the scene immediately afterwards:

“On the carpeted floor lay prostrate the president of the United States. His long, outstretched, athletic body of six feet, four inches appeared unusually heroic. His bleeding head rested on my white linen handkerchief. His clothing was arranged as nicely as possible. He was irregularly breathing, his heart was feeble beating, his face was pale and in solemn repose, his eyelids were closed, his countenance made him appear to be in prayerful communion with the Universal God he always loved.”

Source: Leale address delivered before the Military Order of the Loyal Legion of the United States, February 1909.

The Emancipation Proclamation wasn’t an immediate favorite among Lincoln’s cabinet members. Edwin Stanton, the secretary of war, and Edward Bates, the attorney general, did favor immediate publication. Interior Secretary Caleb Smith considered resigning over it.

Postmaster General Montgomery Blair thought it would alienate the border states.

Three cabinet members supported it with reservations — Gideon Welles, secretary of the Navy, Treasury Secretary Salmon P. Chase and Secretary of State William H. Seward.

Source: Lincoln: America’s Greatest President at 200, Smithsonian Enterprises

This priceless GEICO commercial tests the limits of Honest Abe: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RPX2cQP8uoI

Quotes from President Lincoln:

Be sure you put your feet in the right place, then stand firm.

Those who look for the bad in people will surely find it.

Those not skinning can hold a leg.

How many legs does a dog have if you call the tail a leg? Four. Calling a tail a leg doesn’t make it a leg.

Whenever I hear anyone arguing for slavery, I feel a strong impulse to see it tried on him personally.

Source: Abraham Lincoln: A History, Volume 8, by John Hay and John Nicolay and Goodreads.com

Death room on Saturday, April 15, 1865

In 1908, author Harriet Eunice Hawley described the room where President Lincoln died at 7:22 a.m. on April 15, 1865:

“A feeling of reverence and awe steals over one as he steps across the threshold of this room. The sadness of those last moments seem almost to linger here still.”

The death room is now part of the Ford’s Theatre museum complex, run by the National Park Service. It is on the second floor of Petersen House, located directly across Tenth Street from Ford’s Theatre. Free tickets available at the Ford’s Theatre box office allow visitors admission to Ford’s Theatre, a park ranger presentation inside the theatre, the museum in the basement of Ford’s, Petersen House and the Center for Education and Leadership next to Petersen House.

Among the many artifacts at Ford’s are John Wilkes Booth’s palm-sized Deringer pistol, the clothes the president wore to Ford’s, and John Wilkes Booth’s riding boots.  The artifacts at the Center for Education and Leadership include John Wilkes Booth’s key ring and one of the guns he took on the run.

The Pullman sleeper car or “palace car,” the plush train car that carried the rich and famous after the Civil War, was just an idea in the back of George Pullman’s head until 1864.

The first palace car was completed then, designed after boats that traveled the Erie Canal when Pullman was a boy.

In 1867 Pullman introduced a sleeper car with an attached kitchen and dining car. The food and service rivaled the best restaurants of the day. In 1868, he offered the Delmonico, a railroad car with food prepared by chefs from Delmonico’s Restaurant in New York.

Source: Great Hoteliers: Pioneers of the Hotel Industry by Stanley Turkel

Confederate General J.E.B. Stuart was pitted against a member of his own family this week in 1862.

Gen. Robert E. Lee assigned Stuart to check the Army of the Potomac’s right flank. Instead, the dashing young general circled the entire Yankee force. He did glean information that helped Lee.

Stuart was pursued by Union cavalry commanded by his own father-in-law Philip St. George Cooke.

Maj. Henry R. Rathbone

Henry R. Rathbone, the man who couldn’t hold on to John Wilkes Booth after the assassin shot the president, gradually grew despondent over his failure. Friends said he relived the theater scene in his mind repeatedly.

At Christmastime 1883, while living in Germany, Rathbone fatally shot and stabbed Clara Harris Rathbone, his wife and also his step-sister.

He then attempted suicide but was unsuccessful. He lived out his days in a luxury asylum in Hanover, Germany, where he was attended by servants and was allowed to drive a car through the surrounding countryside.

Six weeks after the murder, the couple’s three young children boarded the White Star steamship Britannic for the voyage to New York, where their mother’s siblings were waiting to take them in.

An uncle, Hamilton Harris of Albany, N.Y.,  met Henry Riggs, Gerald and Pauline at the dock.

Henry Riggs, who was called “Harry,” grew devoted to President Lincoln.

Rep. Henry Riggs Rathbone

Lean and tall, he developed a stoop in his carriage similar to the president’s, and those who knew him said it pleased him to hear people remark on the resemblance.

He was elected to Congress in 1922 and pushed for the preservation of Petersen House and Ford’s Theatre.

Source: Washington Post, Proquest Historical Newspapers

Architect Frank Lloyd Wright’s uncle was a Chicago minister with thick white hair and a long white beard reminiscent of a Biblical figure. The Rev. Jenkin Lloyd Jones’ devotion to President Lincoln may have led to Wright’s first architectural commission.

Jones, a Civil War veteran and a Unitarian-turned-nondenominational minister, decided to build an Abraham Lincoln Center just down East Oakwood Boulevard from his All Souls Church.

His nephew, still in his 30s, was the original architect for the $200,000, seven-story building. After he and his uncle quarreled over the design. Wright eventually resigned. He wrote on the blueprints: “Building completed over protest of the architect.” The building opened in 1905.

Some think the plain brick building, which now houses Northeastern Illinois University’s Center for City Studies, shows Wright’s design imprint.

Wright’s son said the center should be included in lists of his father’s works, and said the design should be dated 1888, making it his father’s first architectural work.

Source: True Lincoln by Geoffrey Johnson, Chicago Magazine, December 2004 and Citywide Services Chicago Real Estate Appraisers