A Good Friday Story Like No Other: President Lincoln’s Last Day

Good Friday was like no other in the history of our nation’s capital in 1865. Washington was not merely celebrating the long Easter weekend but the end of the longest and deadliest conflict in American history. The Civil War had raged for four years, and over 600,000 Union and Confederate soldiers lost their lives—and at a time when the population of America was a mere 30 million.

America’s worst man-made disaster had finally come to an end. The Virginia city of Richmond had fallen just a week or so before Good Friday, and General Robert E. Lee surrendered days after that. On the night before Good Friday, the city threw a party to end all parties.

Local newspapers reported it was the most beautiful night in the city’s history, as fireworks flared and sources of every imaginable variety illuminated the evening sky. “One of the papers said that the Capitol dome was so beautiful that night it looked like a second moon had descended upon the earth as a sign of God’s favor for the union,” according to James Swanson, author of the New York Times bestseller Manhunt: The 12-Day Chase for Lincoln’s Killer.

“Last night Washington was ablaze with glory,” Washington’s Evening Star reported. “The very heavens seemed to have come down, and the stars twinkled in a sort of faded way, as if the solar system was out of order. Every flag was flung out, windows were gay with many devices, and gorgeous lanterns danced on their ropes along the walls in a fantastic way.”

Good Friday in 1865 would turn out to be one of President Abraham Lincoln’s very best days too. Only days before, he’d given what would be his last address to the nation as its leader. “We meet this evening not in sorrow but in gladness of heart,” Lincoln began his speech. “The evacuation of Petersburg and Richmond, and the surrender of the principal insurgent army, give hope of a righteous and speedy peace, whose joyous expression cannot be restrained.”

Lincoln met early on Good Friday with his son Robert, who’d been working for General George Meade, and then with his Cabinet. A rare visitor joined the last meeting Lincoln would ever hold with his staff: General Ulysses S. Grant. They discussed affairs of state, and things ended with Lincoln sharing a dream he’d had the night before. In it, he was on a mysterious vessel moving toward a distant shore, and he was alone. Lincoln said that whenever he had that dream—he’d had it many times during the war—something of critical importance transpired.

“I’m convinced something of major significance is about to happen,” he told the men.

When the meeting ended, Lincoln and his wife, Mary, took a carriage ride to enjoy the brilliant spring weather and talk about matters of the heart. “During that ride, Lincoln told her he knew they’d been very unhappy since the death of their 11-year-old son, Willie, in 1862,” Swanson wrote.

The war—and the tragic death count—had also taken its toll on Lincoln. “It had been a crushing burden on him, and the two of them had grown apart during the war for many reasons,” Swanson said. “He told Mary, ‘We must be happy again.'”

Mary wrote a note later that day about her husband’s resurrected spirit. “You alarm me because I have never seen you this happy since just before the death of our son,” she told Lincoln.

That night, he and Mary attended a play at Ford’s Theatre—a popular comedy of the day called Our American Cousin. “The President entered the Theatre at 8 1/2 o’ck, amid deafening cheers and the rising of all,” an eyewitness to the assassination told authorities. “Everything was cheerful, and never was our magistrate more enthusiastically welcomed, or more happy. Many pleasant allusions were made to him in the play to which the audience gave deafening responses, while Mr. Lincoln laughed heartily and bowed frequently to the gratified people.”

The eyewitness continued: “Just after the 3d Act, a muffled pistol shot was heard, and a man sprang wildly from the national box, partially tearing down the flag, then shouting ‘sic semper tyrannis,’ the south is avenged, and with brandished dagger rushed across the stage and disappeared. The whole theatre was paralyzed.”

And in an instant, the greatest Good Friday that Washington had ever experienced—and perhaps the best and happiest day of Lincoln’s life—had suddenly and tragically turned into one of America’s worst.

As Lincoln lay dying in his box, Mary, on her knees in anguish, uttered shriek after shriek at the feet of the dying president.

“He was attended by three doctors, who concluded that the wound was mortal and that the theater was not an appropriate place for such a man to die,” Mike Robinson, a reenactor at Ford’s Theatre, told Newsweek. “They carried him from his box, down the stairs and into the street, looking for a place to make the president as comfortable as possible in the few hours of life he had left to live.”

A person staying at the Petersen House, just across the street from the theater, was quick to help. The doctors rushed Lincoln in and took him directly to the back bedroom, where he died the next morning. “As he died, a light cold rain began to fall over Washington,” Robinson said. “It was as if the very heavens wept at the loss of our beloved president.”

Thus ended the life of one of America’s greatest leaders and heroes at the hands of one of the most popular actors of his day, John Wilkes Booth.

What motivated the 26-year-old actor to do such a thing? “Lincoln was an American Caesar to him,” Swanson explained. “Booth wanted to punish Lincoln the tyrant, he hoped to change history, and, of course, he wanted eternal fame. He had it in his lifetime, but Booth wanted to be immortalized as a Southerner and, ultimately, an American patriot.”

A week after Good Friday, a funeral train carried Lincoln’s body along a circuitous 1,645-mile journey—through 400 cities and towns—to his final resting place in Springfield, Illinois, retracing the very route he had taken in 1861 to Washington to take the oath of office as president.

Over 1 million Americans viewed Lincoln’s body, and millions more stood alongside railroad tracks to view the train and grieve the loss of their beloved leader.

“Inside the funeral car, the presidential coffin joined a smaller one that contained the body of his son, Willie, who had died from typhoid fever three years earlier at the age of 11,” wrote historian Christopher Klein. “Willie’s casket had been held in a vault in a Georgetown cemetery awaiting interment in Springfield at the end of Lincoln’s presidency, which no one envisioned would end so prematurely.”

The opening stanzas of Walt Whitman’s epic poem “When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom’d” captured the nation’s grief in ways mere prose could not:

When lilacs last in the dooryard bloom’d,

And the great star early droop’d in the western sky in the night,

I mourn’d, and yet shall mourn with ever-returning spring.

Ever-returning spring, trinity sure to me you bring,

Lilac blooming perennial and drooping star in the west,

And thought of him I love.

It was a day like no other, Good Friday of 1865. Lincoln’s life—and the nation’s—had never reached such heights and lows in the span of a mere 24 hours. Lincoln had been murdered on the very day Christ was crucified—and murdered for doing God’s work prosecuting the war that ended, once and for all, the institution of slavery in America.