On the same night of the assassination of the President, an accomplice
of Booth attempted to murder Mr. Seward, the Secretary of State, in his
own house, while confined to his bed from severe injuries received by
being thrown from his carriage. He was terribly mangled; and his life
was saved by the heroic efforts of his sons and daughter and a nurse,
whose name was Robinson. Some of the accomplices of Booth were arrested,
tried, convicted, and hung; but all were the mere tools and instruments
of the Conspirators. Mystery and darkness yet hang over the chief
instigators of this most cowardly murder: none can say whether the chief
conspirators will ever, in this world, be dragged to light and
punishment.
The terrible news of the death of Lincoln was, on the morning of the
15th, borne by telegraph to every portion of the Republic. Coming, as it
did, in the midst of universal joy, no language can picture the horror
and grief of the people on its reception. A whole nation wept. Persons
who had not heard the news, coming into crowded cities, were struck with
the strange aspect of the people. All business was suspended; gloom,
sadness, grief, sat upon every face. The flag, which had everywhere,
from every spire and masthead, roof, and tree, and public building, been
floating in glorious triumph, was now lowered; and, as the hours of that
dreary 15th of April passed on, the people, by common impulse, each
family by itself, commenced draping their houses and public buildings in
mourning, and before night the whole nation was shrouded in black.
There were no classes of people in the Republic whose grief was more
demonstrative than that of the soldiers and the freedmen. The vast
armies, not yet disbanded, looked upon Lincoln as their father. They
knew his heart had followed them in all their campaigns and marches and
battles. Grief and vengeance filled their hearts. But the poor negroes
everywhere wept and sobbed over a loss which they instinctively felt was
to them irreparable. On the Sunday following his death, the whole people
gathered to their places of public worship, and mingled their tears
together over a bereavement which every one felt like the loss of a
father or a brother. The remains of the President were taken to the
White House. On the 17th, on Monday, a meeting of the members of
Congress then in Washington, was held at the Capitol, to make
arrangements for the funeral. This meeting named a committee of one
member from each State and Territory, and the whole Congressional
delegation from Illinois, as a Congressional Committee to attend the
remains of Mr. Lincoln to their final resting-place in Illinois. Senator
Sumner and others desired that his body should be placed under the dome
of the Capitol at Washington. It was stated that a vault had been
prepared there for the remains of Washington, but had never been used,
because the Washington family and Virginia desired them to remain in the
family vault at Mount Vernon. It was said it would be peculiarly
appropriate for the remains of Lincoln to be deposited under the dome of
the Capitol of the Republic he had saved and redeemed.
The funeral took place on Wednesday, the 19th. The services were held in
the East Room of the Executive Mansion. It was a bright, genial
day--typical of the kind and genial nature of him whom a nation was so
deeply mourning.
After the sad ceremonies at the National Capital, the remains of the
President and of his beloved son Willie, who died at the White House
during his presidency, were placed on a funeral car, and started on its
long pilgrimage to his old home in Illinois, and it was arranged that
the train should take nearly the same route as that by which he had come
from Springfield to Washington in assuming the Executive Chair.
And now the people of every State, city, town, and hamlet, came with
uncovered heads, with streaming eyes, with their offerings of wreaths
and flowers, to witness the passing train. It is impossible to describe
the scenes. Minute-guns, the tolling of bells, music, requiems, dirges,
military and civic displays, draped flags, black covering every public
building and private house, everywhere indicated the pious desire of the
people to do honor to the dead: two thousand miles, along which every
house was draped in black, and from which, everywhere, hung the national
colors in mourning. The funeral ceremonies at Baltimore were peculiarly
impressive: nowhere were the manifestations of grief more universal; but
the sorrow of the negroes, who thronged the streets in thousands, and
hung like a dark fringe upon the long procession, was especially
impressive. Their coarse, homely features were convulsed with a grief
which they could not control; their emotional natures, excited by the
scene, and by each other, until sobs and cries and tears, rolling down
their black faces, told how deeply they felt their loss. When the
remains reached Philadelphia, a half million of people were in the
streets, to do honor to all that was left of him, who, in old
Independence Hall, four years before, had declared that he would sooner
die, sooner be assassinated, than give up the principles of the
Declaration of Independence. He _had_ been assassinated because he would
_not_ give them up. All felt, when the remains were placed in that
historic room, surrounded by the memories of the great men of the Past,
whose portraits from the walls looked down upon the scene, that a peer
of the best and greatest of the revolutionary worthies was now added to
the list of those who had served the Republic.
Through New Jersey, New York, Ohio, Indiana, to Illinois, all the people
followed the funeral train as mourners, but when the remains reached his
own State, where he had been personally known to every one, where the
people had all heard him on the stump and in court, every family
mourned him as a father and a brother. The train reached Springfield on
the 3d of May; and the corpse was taken to Oak Ridge Cemetery, and
there, among his old friends and neighbors, his clients, and
constituents, surrounded by representatives from the Army and Navy, with
delegations from every State, with all the people, the world for his
mourners--was he buried.