When Mary Todd and Abraham Lincoln married in Ninian Edwards’ Springfield parlor in 1842, he put a ring on her finger that was engraved, “A.L. to Mary, Nov. 4, 1842. Love is eternal.”

When President Lincoln and his wife Mary visited Washington’s army hospitals,  he would joked with the wounded soldiers while she distributed homemade jams and flowers from the Executive Mansion gardens.

One of President Lincoln’s favorite moves to cheer the troops was to challenge them to a height contest. He’d stand back-to-back with any soldier who thought he might be taller than the 6 foot, 4 inch president.

He never found a soldier that tall, but there was one man in Washington, D.C., who was definitely taller than Mr. Lincoln. Maj. Joseph Stewart was 6- foot, 6-inches tall.

Stewart, who was sitting in the audience at Ford’s Theatre when John Wilkes Booth jumped to the stage after shooting the president, was one of the first theatergoers to realize what had happened. With his long legs, he was able to jump onto the stage and chase the assassin, but he was unable to catch him. He watched from the stage door as Booth rode down Baptist Alley to freedom.

When The Rev. Jacob Walter told the newspapers there wasn’t enough evidence against Mary Surratt to hang a cat, Archbishop Martin Spalding already had his hands full.

The Rev. Jacob Walter

The archbishop, spiritual leader of Washington and Baltimore Catholics in 1865, was already under pressure from the Know-Nothings. The sometimes violent anti-Catholic, anti-immigrant Protestant group was stirring up anti-Catholic sentiment by pointing out that several of the assassination conspirators were Catholics.

Although the Catholic churches had observed a day of mourning, held a High Mass for the repose of the president and tolled their church bells of a half hour as the Protestant churches did, the bishop feared a backlash over the conspirators’ connection to the church.

He was also in negotiations with Attorney General Joshua Speed over the case of The Most Rev. Patrick Lynch, a Charleston bishop accused of disloyalty.

On top of that, he was concerned for Catholics living in the South.

Spalding ordered Fr. Walter to keep mum about Mrs. Surratt.

Fr. Walter, who said who took his superior’s warning as a suggestion rather than an order, blithely ignored it.

He went to the Executive Mansion with Surratt’s 22-year-old daughter in tow, hoping for a last-minute reprieve for Mrs. Surratt. When the president refused to see them, Anna Surratt threw herself on the mansion steps. Word got back to the archbishop.

Walter said he was confident no Catholic woman would take Holy Communion on Holy Thursday and commit murder on Good Friday.

James A. Hardie, the army’s inspector general and a devout Catholic, warned Spalding to keep a lid on Walter.

The archbishop was anxious to end the confrontation with the government. He called Hardie a staunch friend of the church, but he told Hardie that Walter was also doing what he believed best.

Hardie demanded Walter be silent as a condition for his visiting Mrs. Surratt in prison.

Walter agreed to keep mum: “Of course, I cannot let Mrs. Surratt die without the sacraments, so, if I must say yes, I say yes.”

Walter, known for standing up for the disenfranchised and collecting items for the poor, did give Hardie a tongue-lashing though: “You wish me to promise that I shall say nothing in regard to the innocence of Mrs Surratt? Do you know the relation exisitng between a pastor and his flock? I will defend the character of the poorest woman in my parish at the risk of my life…You wish to seal my lips; I wish you to understand that I was born a  freeman and will die one…”

Walter kept quiet for about a quarter century. Then he wrote his side of the story.

Source: A Parish for the Federal City: St. Patrick’s in Washington, 1794-1994 by Morris J. MacGregor

 

The flag that draped Abraham Lincoln’s coffin had 34 stars — one for each Northern and Southern state.

President Lincoln rebuffed efforts to remove the stars representing the states that seceeded from the Union, so the stars were still there when Gen. Robert E. Lee surrendered, six days before the president was assassinated.

Spontaneous parades broke out all over Washington the week after Gen. Robert E. Lee surrendered. Partygoers sang a two-year-old song, “When Johnny Comes Marching Home; Soldier’s Return March.” The instant hit was penned by Louis Lambert, a pseudonym of Patrick Sarsfield Gilmore.

“When Johnny comes Marching Home Again, Hurrah, hurrah!
We’ll give him a hearty welcome then, Hurrah, hurrah!
The men will cheer, the boys will shout, The ladies, they will all turn out,
And we’ll all feel gay, When Johnny comes marching home”

Source: Library of Congress

 

 

Elizabeth Dixon, Mary Lincoln’s friend who helped her through assassination night, offered to pay reporters to keep her name out of the papers.

Ironically, Dixon’s daughter Clementine married James Wellig, editor of Washington’s National Intelligencer.

Some Pennsyvlania Avenue stores still bore black crepe from the president’s funeral when the Army of the Potomac celebrated the end of the war with a parade down the avenue on this day in 1865.

It was just 35 days since mourners lined the avenue as the president’s funeral cortege passed by.

 

Edwin Bates, who was in the audience at Ford’s when the President Lincoln was shot, was convinced the killer was mad.

Writing to his parents in Derby, Vt., the day after the assassination, Bates said he first thought the fine-looking man dressed in a black suit had jumped to the stage for his own safety after some other person had shot him, or, possibily, knocked hm out of the presidential box.

When Bates and his theater companion realized the dagger-wielding man on stage was the assassin, they agreed on one thing: “We agreed that  the probability was that the man, when found, would be discovered to be some insane person.”

They figured even “a rebel of the worst type” would not commit such a horrible deed in such a bold manner before thousands of people with so little chance of escape.

 

 

Capt. Oliver Gatch, one of the men who carried President Lincoln across Tenth Street on assassination night, already had a lifetime of war stories to tell before April 14.

He was captured by rebels at Chicamauga in September 1863 and held as a prisoner of war untill March 1, 1865.

After his release, Gatch reunited with his brother Charles at their family home in Ohio. Then they rode to Washington, D.C., so the captain could collect his back pay.

When they reached the capital on the morning of the assassination, Capt. Gatch reported to Secretary William Stanton. Then he set out to collect nearly two years back pay.

His plans were thrown off track when the paymaster said he had an important social engagement. He asked Gatch to come back the next morning. The brothers planned to leave Washington that night, but the polite captain agreed.

Killing time in the capital, they decided to go to Ford’s Theatre because the president was attending the performance of “Our American Cousin.”

At one point in the play, the brothers noticed the handsomest man they’d ever seen lurking near the president’s box. They wondered what he was doing there.

After John Wilkes Booth entered the box and shot the president, Capt. Gatch was one of the men who carried the wounded president across Tenth Street to his deathbed.

Source: The Assassination of Lincoln by E.R. Shawm  McCLure’s magazine, December 1908 

The front cover of Harper’s Weekly for May 20, 1865 carried two sketches. One was of a burnt tobacco barn, the site where John Wilkes Booth was shot by Boston Corbett in the predawn darkness of April 26.The other was the small Garrett farmhouse, where Booth died on the front porch just after sunrise.

Even 26 days after the president was shot, two out of the three front-page headlines referred to the April 14 assassination or the president’s May 9 funeral.