A Nation Mourns

By Roger L. Rosentreter

With the possible exception of the November 1963 funeral of President John F. Kennedy, the pageantry surrounding the funeral of President Abraham Lincoln remains unmatched in American history.

On Tuesday, April 18, the resident’s body lay in state on a magnificent eleven-foot-high catafalque in the East Room of the White House. The next day—as the nation formally paid its last respects—six hundred invited guests packed the East Room where a series of risers had been constructed so that everyone could see the proceedings. General Ulysses Grant sat along at the head of the coffin. Robert Lincoln, the president’s eldest son, sat at the foot, President Andrew Johnson and cabinet members stood at the east side of the coffin. There were only seven women in the gathering: the wives of several present and past cabinet members, the daughters of U.S. Supreme Court Chief Justice Salmon P. Chase and the Lincoln family nurse. The president’s widow, Mary Todd Lincoln, remained in her bedroom and did not witness any of the funeral activities.

After the White House service, a fourteen-foot-long hearse carried Lincoln’s remains to the Capitol’s east portico. Throughout the following day the public streamed past the open casket.

Early on Friday, April 21, three hundred dignitaries accompanied Lincoln’s body aboard a nine-car funeral train. The car carrying the president’s coffin (and the exhumed coffin of his son, Willie, who had died in 1862) had been built for Lincoln, but he had never used it. One of the most opulent cars of its time, the United States, as it was later called, offered fine woodwork, upholstered walls and etched glass windows.

Baltimore was the first stop on the twelve-city, 1,700-mile journey that—except for the omission of Cincinnati—duplicated in reverse Lincoln’s trip to Washington in February 1861. As a result of the near riots of 300,000 mourners who stood in three-mile-long lines in Philadelphia, women were asked not to wear their bustles and hoop skirts for fear of injury. In New York City nearly 500,000 people witnessed the almost four-hour-long funeral procession. Windows along the route rented for up to one hundred dollars a person. At Cleveland, the only stop where the President’s body lay outdoors, thousands of citizens passed the open coffin hourly. In Indianapolis, it rained so hard tht the grand procession was canceled. The next day, although Lincoln’s train had departed, a procession was held using an empty casket.

At the train moved slowly westward (at between five to twenty miles per hour), people beholding it removed their hats and placed their hands over their hearts. Trees along the tracks were filled with spectators and farmers stopped working in their fields. Flags—draped with black crepe—were everywhere. Some communities erected memorial arches across the tracks under which the train passed. A sign in Michigan City, Indiana, read: “With Tears We Resign Thee to God and History, The Purposes of the Almighty are Perfect and Must Prevail.”

Chicago’s funeral procession, which rivaled New York City’s, saw thirty-six women, all dressed in white, accompany the coffin through a forty-foot-high arch that had been hastily constructed at the cost of fifteen thousand dollars. A bald eagle, recently shot in Michigan, then stuffed and shipped to Chicago, was perched atop Lincoln’s hearse. The coffin, covered with evergreens also from Michigan, lay in state at the courthouse as thousands passed the still-open coffin. When the funeral procession reached Springfield, Lincoln’s remains were placed in the Illinois State Capitol for one final public viewing.

Throughout the trip, undertaker Charles Brown tried to keep the president’s body looking fresh by constant powderings and by changing Lincoln’s collar, shirt and underclothes each day. It must have worked. Quartermaster Sergeant Sullivan D. Green, a thirty-two-year-old Detroiter who visited the Illinois capitol, recorded, “It is now the twentieth day since he was assassinated, yet, having been embalmed, the remains preserve their natural appearance very well.”

Green’s regiment, the Twenty-Fourth Michigan, served as head of the official military escort for the departed president. Formed in Wayne County during the late summer of 1862, the Twenty-fourth had earned respect as part of the Army of the Potomac’s famed Iron Brigade. In February 1865 the veteran unit, its ranks badly depleted, was removed from the siege around Petersburg, Virginia, and sent to supervise a camp for recent draftees at Springfield, Illinois. There, it provided the guard of honor while the president’s body lay in the capitol.

At 8:00 A.M. on May 4, the Twenty-fourth broke camp. The veterans sported new uniforms, white gloves and new black dress hats. Chaplain William Way noted that he “never saw the regiment when it made a better appearance.” According to Way, the Twenty-fourth’s “general appearance and admirable marching elicited many remarks of commendation, both among military men and citizens.”

At 10:00 A.M. the last viewer was ushered out of the capitol. Lincoln’s coffin was carried in an impressive gold-silver-and-crystal hearse loaned to Springfield by the city of St. Louis to Oak Ridge Cemetery, just outside of town. Under an unusually hot spring sun, the coffins of the president and his son were buried. Three weeks after the Lincolns had attended Ford’s Theatre, the nation’s longest and most elaborate funeral came to an end.
 

This article first appeared in the March/April 2000 issue of Michigan History.