A Night Not To Be Forgotten
our way. We heard that the shooter was an actor named John Wilkes Boothe. We also got word that another assassination attempt, this time on Secretary of State Seward, had failed. I could not believe what was happening. On the eve of our nation being reunited, and after four years of terrible bloodshed, our great capital was falling apart. It was a reign of terror. And word got out that Secretary Stanton had instituted martial law in the city and sent out hunters for Boothe. But still no word on the President's condition.
As the cold night began to transform itself into no different a day, a hard rain began to fall. I was among a crowd of hundreds of people not willing to go home until we knew the fate of the President was certain. At around seven-thirty in the morning, exactly twelve hours after we arrived for a night of laughter and presidential celebration, Mrs. Lincoln came out of the house led by one of her sons and got into a carriage to be taken away, I assumed to the White House. As we watched the carriage disappear, this crowd that was once an embroiled mob with no sense of order or presence of mind, began to weep together almost in unison. Nearly all of us, men and women, black and white, stood there in the rain and cried like never before. In the distance a church bell tolled. The President was dead.
I know more about that fateful night now than I did then. I heard that Senator Charles Sumner entered the room that night, took Mr. Lincoln's hand, and tried to speak to him. He rebuked the doctors who told him the President could not hear him and that he was all but dead. And Sumner held his hand tightly and sobbed near Lincoln's pillow. His hand was still grasping the President's when morning light came. Mr. Sumner's anguish represented all of ours, I think. And many others in the room that morning - Gideon Welles, Edwin Stanton, Henry Halleck, Lincoln's doctor - followed the Senator in weeping.
It was at 7:22 A.M that the President was pronounced dead. With him died the prospect of a kinder reconstruction and the profound sense of joy that came from winning the War. This must have been so sobering an event to the people who treasured Mr. Lincoln more than any of us, the
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