American Experience

NARRATOR

In the early morning of April 21, 1865, a train draped with black bunting slowly departed Washington. In the second-to-last car rode the body

of America's first assassinated president

Abraham Lincoln. Over the next 12 days, the funeral train would wend its way across the country. Millions paused to stand by railroad sidings or file past his open casket to glimpse the martyred president's face.

MAN

It's a nation mourning, it's a people mourning, it's a whole society mourning. But, in the end, they're mourning the death of a simple man like themselves, who came from a place like they came from. You could not write this from scratch. You could not invent this and make it believable, the life and the death. He's an authentic hero who's bigger than life, bigger than war, and almost bigger than America by the time he died.

NARRATOR

At the very moment Lincoln's funeral train departed Washington, his murderer lay shivering in the reeds beside the Potomac River. The largest manhunt in American history was closing in and John Wilkes Booth managed to scribble a few words in his diary.

JOHN WILKES BOOTH (dramatized)

Our cause being almost lost, something decisive and great must be done. A country groaned beneath this tyranny, and prayed for this end, and yet now behold the cold hands they extend to me. God cannot pardon me if I have done wrong. Yet I cannot see any wrong.

MAN

It's often said that Booth killed Lincoln because he was a failed actor, because he went mad. John Wilkes Booth shared political views that were identical to the views held by millions of Southerners, hundreds of thousands and likely millions of Northerners. John Wilkes Booth was not insane, he was not mad, unless you think the country was mad. For 150 years, people have asked, "Why did this handsome, rich, happy young man... Why did he do it?" While millions of people dislike Lincoln and hundreds of thousands fought against him in armies and thousands wanted to see him dead and maybe dozens even daydreamed about it, only one person in millions stepped up to him with a pistol, and that was John Wilkes Booth. (fireworks exploding)

NARRATOR

The night of April 13, 1865, was one of the most radiant anyone in Washington could remember. With the agony of the Civil War drawing to a close, the city celebrated peace by draping itself in lights.

DORIS KEARNS GOODWIN

This incredible sense of jubilation that the war was finally coming to an end, and it was witnessed in the light, the spectacular scenery, with the crowds on the street and the lights in all the windows. It must have been a beautiful thing to behold.

NARRATOR

"The great struggle is over," editorialized the New York Times. "The history of blood is brought to a close. "The last shot has been fired. The last man, we trust, has been slain." That night John Wilkes Booth walked among the revelers in a haze of resentment and alcohol.

JAMES SWANSON

He heard the taunts against General Lee and the Confederate Army. He saw the Union soldiers in their uniforms marching up and down the streets, celebrating. It was the most beautiful, joyful night in American history since we had won the Revolutionary War. And John Wilkes Booth had to witness it all. When he went to bed that night, he was a man with little hope. He was a man without prospects. He was a man who felt his world and everything he held dear had been crushed and humiliated.

NARRATOR

To the Booths of Maryland, greatness was assumed as a birthright. Led by their patriarch, the flamboyant and eccentric Junius Brutus Booth, the family was known as the foremost theatrical dynasty of their time. He was the son of the greatest actor in America. His brother Edwin was on his way to inheriting the mantle and Johnny Booth saw himself... I suppose the modern word would be "entitled." By 17, John had decided to follow his famous father and brother onto the stage.

SMITH

This dramatic, handsome young man, filled with excitement, with vibrancy, took the stage by storm.

NARRATOR

Just as Booth reached stardom, however, the country itself was losing interest in idle pursuits like the theater. A much more vivid drama was turning North against South and brother against brother. The Booths were no exception.

SWANSON

Edwin really became a man of the North. He became a star in the North. And his political consciousness developed along those lines. John Wilkes spent most of his time in the South. That's where he received his great acclaim, that's where he felt best loved. And over time he naturally adopted the Southern point of view.

NARRATOR

"We are of the North," Booth's sister, Asia, once insisted. "Not I," he replied. "So help me God, my soul, life and possessions are for the South." There was a really big burden to being a Booth, whether you went on the stage or not. You have these giants in your family that you're inevitably compared to, and to some extent, as a young man, he needed to, just psychologically, to individualize himself from them and to show that he was his own person. While his family dispersed across the North, Booth spent most of his time in Richmond, Virginia, the citadel of the South. He viewed the South as the ideal type of society. Unlike the North, which he considered rough, mongrel, the South was pure. He did not view slavery as an evil. Slavery was God's blessing to the African-American-- it brought him to Christianity, it brought him to higher civilization. It was the abolitionists in the North that were splitting this country apart and he hated abolitionists; he hated the anti-slavery movement. When radical abolitionist John Brown was captured while trying to incite a slave rebellion in Harpers Ferry, Virginia, Booth heeded a call for volunteers to guard against Brown's escape. He couldn't help but be impressed as Brown held the nation spellbound from his prison cell, issuing bloody prophecies about the fate of the Union.

ALFORD

One of the interesting features of John Wilkes Booth is his fascination with romantic characters, with heroic characters in particular-- people who define the age, people whose acts made everyone stand up and pay attention to what he was doing. He loved characters in the heroic mold.

NARRATOR

In November 1860, a little-known Illinois politician named Abraham Lincoln was elected President. The victory of an anti-slavery Republican provoked seven states to secede from the Union and enraged millions of Southern sympathizers, including John Wilkes Booth. "We used to laugh at his patriotic froth whenever secession was discussed," Edwin Booth remembered. "That he was insane on that one point, no one who knew him can well doubt."

ALFORD

Shortly after Lincoln's election, Booth wrote a speech. He apparently wrote this to deliver to an audience. It doesn't appear that he ever had an opportunity. But it is a great window into Booth's mind. And it shows us that Booth is terrifically disturbed by the division of the country, that he blames the abolitionists entirely and essentially he sees what's happening as a giant John Brown raid on the South.

BOOTH (dramatized)

You all feel the fire now raging in the nation's heart. It is a fire lighted and fanned by Northern fanaticism, a fire which naught but blood can extinguish. The South wants justice, has waited for it long; she will wait no longer.

NARRATOR

"This war is eating my life out," President Lincoln once said. "I have a strong impression that I shall not live to see its end." The small skirmish that Lincoln thought would be quickly over had, by 1862, turned into a bloody stalemate with no end in sight. Lincoln haunted the War Department, where reports of casualties preyed on his mind.

JOSHUA WOLF SHENK

This is not an abstract conflict. The important battlefields could be heard, or could be gone to very quickly. The casualties stumbled into the capitol. Lincoln was someone who felt death and disappointment and difficulty extremely clearly. It was always with him, the sheer, physical, grueling horror of it.

HAROLD HOLZER

Lincoln assumes the role of a sort of a bereaved and grieving father. He does absorb all of the loss and it ages him and it weighs him down and it makes him so melancholy and somber.

NARRATOR

In February 1862, death reached out and touched Lincoln's own family. His beloved 12-year-old son Willie fell sick with typhoid, contracted from drinking tainted water. After a weeklong illness, Willie died.

HOLZER

The light went out of his life and he mourned very, very deeply, and then he was forced to go back into the work of seeing other boys die.

SHENK

He was constantly wondering, why is this happening? What was God's purpose in this death? Why would he be so afflicting-- not only the nation but Lincoln personally. It calls to mind the biblical story that Lincoln was seen reading in the White House, which is the Book of Job. This man who just has everything taken from him. Job collapses as Lincoln collapses. But that's not the end of the story. The collapse is on its way towards some new understanding of the nature of reality and the moral universe.

NARRATOR

Out of suffering, Lincoln resolved, must come "a new birth of freedom." If so many had to lose their lives, it must be so that many more could gain their freedom. In January 1863, Lincoln issued an order freeing the slaves in the rebellious Confederate states. His Emancipation Proclamation transformed the meaning of the war.

DAVID BLIGHT

He's now linked the cause of black freedom to the cause of the preservation of an American republic, which means, in effect, the war is being fought to reinvent the United States, not to preserve it. The government, the republic, that would come out of this war would not at all be the same anymore.

ALLEN GUELZO

What else could be God leading us to, what else could all this death and suffering and blood mean except a greater understanding of what it is to be a free people?

SHENK

He believed that the government was built on an idea and that this was a war over an idea. And to surrender, to withdraw, to compromise on that idea would be to surrender something precious for all humanity for all time.

NARRATOR

"I expect to maintain this contest until successful," Lincoln wrote, "or till I die or am conquered, or the country forsakes me."

JAMES McPHERSON

There was no more talk of conciliation, no talk of compromise through some kind of political process. This is an outcome that can only be "tried by war and decided by victory." Tried by war, decided by victory-- those six words put it... said it all. (gunfire)

NARRATOR

The trial of war would last far longer than Abraham Lincoln ever imagined. With Southern victories at Manassas, Fredericksburg, and Chancellorsville, public opinion in the North began to falter. In the summer of 1863, draft riots broke out in several Northern cities. Newspapers denounced Lincoln with what one friend called a "frantic malignancy." Soon sentiment was so strongly against him that Lincoln was certain he would lose his bid for reelection. "The people are impatient," he said. "The bottom is out of the tub." The costs are mounting, the politicians are complaining and the voters are turning against him. And by the end of August 1864, Lincoln has concluded, "If we come to the polls like this in November, we're going to lose." (gunfire) Salvation for Lincoln came in the form of a battlefield victory. On August 31, General William Tecumseh Sherman broke through the Confederate defenses around Atlanta.

He sent a short telegram to President Lincoln

"Atlanta is ours and fairly won."

McPHERSON

And when that was published in the Northern newspapers, it changed Northern opinion around almost overnight. Lincoln, who looked like the defeated and discredited commander in chief of a losing army, now emerges as the leader of a triumphant army and he was triumphantly reelected.

SWANSON

Something turned in Booth when Abraham Lincoln was reelected. He realized Lincoln was in there for good, to prosecute the war to the end. He knew Lincoln was not going to settle with the South and that many more would die, that Lincoln was going to serve another four years in the White House.

BLIGHT

These Yankees-- led by this "black Republican," as they called him, Abraham Lincoln-- were going to use this war now to tear up the South, to destroy its institutions, to overthrow its way of life, and to end their civilization as they had known it.

NARRATOR

By 1864, John Wilkes Booth was only 25 years old, yet he had already begun losing interest in his acting career. "I hardly know what to make of you," his agent wrote him. "Have you lost all your ambition?" Booth's anger and disappointment began to focus on the one man he held responsible for the South's suffering.

ALFORD

There's no doubt that the war was pushing Lincoln forward as a symbol, an icon, something bigger than life. Booth began to focus on Lincoln in this way, that Lincoln, in fact, was the source of all the nation's troubles.

STEERS

Because of the war, Lincoln had to institute a whole series of acts that were viewed as very anti-democratic-- suspension of the writ of habeas corpus, for instance; shutting down newspapers; censoring people's speeches. All of these things were an anathema to John Wilkes Booth and he viewed himself, in the end, I think, as someone that literally God had put here to correct the tyranny of Abraham Lincoln.

ALFORD

Early on, Booth seems to have developed this passionate hatred for tyranny. It's curious where that came from. If we remember that his father's middle name was Brutus, that may tell us a good bit. Brutus, of course, was the character who assassinated Caesar, and if you look both in the play of Shakespeare and in the writings of the historians of ancient Rome, Brutus was a character as noble as Caesar, as distinguished as Caesar, as well-regarded as Caesar and whose patriotism and decency were unquestioned.

NARRATOR

Like Brutus, Booth dreamed of a single, grand gesture that would turn the tide of history and catapult himself into immortality.

SWANSON

John Wilkes Booth felt he had to justify why he wasn't a soldier on the front lines. Why didn't he volunteer? Why wasn't he fighting? Booth thought his resources, his talent and skill could be put to better use.

NARRATOR

Booth began taking on small assignments for the Confederate Underground, a loose network of Southern spies living north of the Mason-Dixon Line. It was here, in the ferment of the Underground, that Booth settled on a bold plan. He would kidnap the president of the United States, convey him south to the Confederate capitol in Richmond, and ransom him for thousands of Confederate prisoners.

STEERS

The idea of capturing or kidnapping a United States president may seem preposterous on the surface, but at the time it was quite feasible. Lincoln was unprotected. He moved about frequently on his own. And he traveled as much as three miles to his summer residence at Soldiers Home often unattended, by himself.

NARRATOR

In November and December, Booth made several trips to southern Maryland, a hotbed of sedition, where he began to recruit coconspirators and scout escape routes.

SWANSON

His most valuable conspirator was John Surratt-- college educated, Confederate courier, known in Richmond. He helped Booth interact with other Confederate agents. Without John Surratt, Booth couldn't have organized the conspiracy.

NARRATOR

Surratt introduced Booth to 29-year-old George Atzerodt, a German-born carriage painter and boatman. During the war, Atzerodt secretly ferried Confederate agents across the waterways of southern Maryland. Surratt also introduced Booth to David Herold, 22, an impressionable and dull-witted pharmacy clerk who knew the back roads that would serve as the conspirators' escape route. Lewis Powell, tall and powerful, was a former Confederate prisoner of war who would provide the muscle for the kidnapping conspiracy. Rounding out the group were two of Booth's childhood friends, Samuel Arnold and Mike O'Laughlen, both ex-soldiers in the Confederate Army. The group had little in common other than a strong attraction to the charismatic actor who would be their leader.

SWANSON

It was as though a great star of the modern age picked you, a completely anonymous, unknown person of no status, no wealth, no importance. A great star picks you to be his confidante, his pal, his companion, to travel with, to dine with, drink with. Many of them didn't join the conspiracy because they hated Abraham Lincoln; they joined the conspiracy because they loved and admired John Wilkes Booth.

NARRATOR

On March 4, 1865, more than 50,000 people gathered under rainy skies to witness Abraham Lincoln's second inauguration. After four harrowing years, the end of the war was at last in sight. Lincoln stood to address the crowd, just as a brilliant ray of light pierced the clouds overhead. "Let us strive on to finish the work we are in," Lincoln implored, "to bind up the nation's wounds; "to care for him who shall have borne the battle, "and for his widow, and his orphan; "to do all which may achieve and cherish a just and lasting peace."

BLIGHT

There's not even a moment of bitterness. There's not even the slightest declaration of what will be done with Confederate leadership. It is remarkable that in a moment like that, in this country that has all but won a victory in an all-out, terrible, total civil war, and he doesn't even spend one sentence to declare the righteousness of victory and the evil of Confederate defeat. What he does is to suggest that the sin of slavery was shared by both sides. His way of reaching out to the South-- both sides read the same Bible, both prayed to the same God, neither's prayers were fully answered. And then, of course,

the words we remember

"With malice toward none, with charity for all, let us bind up the nation's wounds."

NARRATOR

Standing on the steps of the Capitol that day, only yards from the president, John Wilkes Booth seethed with hatred. For Booth, the prospect of another Lincoln term held not consolation, but the sting of bitterness and defeat. "What a splendid chance I had," he later confided, "to kill the president where he stood." Two weeks later, Booth and his coconspirators met in the private dining room of a Washington restaurant. Over oysters and champagne, Booth laid out his kidnapping plan.

SWANSON

When Booth started to reveal the details, they thought he was a madman. "We're going to kidnap Abraham Lincoln; we're going to get him at Ford's Theatre." He said, "One of you "will turn down the gaslights at the signal and the theater will be plunged into darkness." Lewis Powell will get into the president's box. He'll be the one who's going to subdue Lincoln, tie him up and then lower him to the stage with a long rope while the theater is plunged into darkness.

NARRATOR

Samuel Arnold scoffed at the audacity of Booth's plan. "You can be the leader of the party," he said, "but not our executioner." He says, "Johnny, all this is going to be done "in front of an audience that will include several hundred soldiers of the Union Army?" And having gotten him out the back if the soldiers don't intercede, nobody is going to give the alarm throughout Washington, which is crawling with Yankee soldiers, cavalry patrols, and police? He says, "It is madness beyond measure." On April 3, the Confederate capital of Richmond finally fell to Union forces. The president himself toured the smoldering ruins, as newly freed slaves rushed to embrace him. Six days later, Confederate General Robert E. Lee surrendered at the small town of Appomattox' courthouse. After four bloody years, the war was over. The Confederacy in ruins, his kidnapping plot in tatters, Booth sank into disappointment and bitterness. By April 1865, Booth was certainly disillusioned.

Think of what he had to endure from his point of view

a few months before, the reelection of the great tyrant; his failure to kidnap the president shamed him. What was his future in the defeated, crushed South?

NARRATOR

Out of his disappointment, Booth began to hatch a new, even more desperate plan. He will punish the North through Lincoln; he will punish the North for what it's done to the South. Now, revenge is not a very noble motive, but we all understand it is a very compelling human motive and sometimes it overwhelms. The morning of April 14, 1865, Abraham Lincoln awoke unusually cheerful. Less than a week after the surrender of the Confederate Army, he allowed himself a moment of satisfaction.

SHENK

He seemed relieved. His face looked different. He had color; he had life in a way that he hadn't all through the war.

NARRATOR

"He was transfigured," wrote one close friend. "That indescribable sadness had been suddenly changed for an equally indescribable joy."

HOLZER

It is indeed the first day that he really feels that Washington is free and at peace.

NARRATOR

At the morning cabinet meeting, Lincoln again expressed his desire for clemency toward the South. Then, in his usual way, he regaled his cabinet with stories.

GUELZO

Lincoln even talks about a dream that he had, a dream that he was standing on the deck of a ship. The ship was heading towards a dim shore ahead. He said it was a dream he'd always had at important turning points in the war and he was convinced that he'd had the dream again because this was now the last great, final turning point.

KEARNS GOODWIN

He invited Mary to a carriage ride that afternoon, just the two of the together. They talked about what it might be like in Springfield when they went home again to the place where they had begun and he said to her, "Mary, we've got to try to be happy now. Our future is ahead of us." And then that night they go to the theater.

NARRATOR

That same morning, John Wilkes Booth awoke late. He made his way to Ford's Theatre to pick up his mail, held for him by the theater's owners.

SWANSON

And then somebody at Ford's Theatre said, "President Lincoln is coming tonight." That was the moment. He's sitting on the front step of Ford's Theatre and someone tells him, "He's coming here tonight."

NARRATOR

"He left the theater in a kind of hurry," remembered one onlooker, "as if he had made up his mind about something to be done." Once Booth learned that Lincoln would be at the theater that night, he had essentially eight hours or so to get ready, and he went into a frenzy of action.

SWANSON

He checked on his horse. He made sure his derringer pistol was ready. He thought about what he had to take on the road during his escape.

NARRATOR

That afternoon, Booth returned to Ford's Theatre. He went to the president's box and in a small antechamber, he carved a mortise in which to brace a stick of wood. The other end would bar the door from the inside. An hour later, Booth convened what remained of his accomplices at a restaurant nearby. He informed them of a startling change of plans.

SWANSON

"Tonight, in about two hours, "I am going to kill Abraham Lincoln. "You, Lewis Powell, "will murder the secretary of state, William Seward. "George Atzerodt, your job is to murder the vice president, Andrew Johnson." Booth, of course, reserved the greatest act for himself. He would perform the Lincoln assassination solo.

NARRATOR

That night, the Lincolns set out for Ford's Theatre

around 8

00 p.m. Having been turned down by a series of more luminous guests, the Lincolns stopped to pick up a young friend of Mary's named Clara Harris and her fianc, Corporal Henry Rathbone.

The presidential party arrived at the theater around 8

30, half an hour after the play, a popular comedy, had begun.

SWANSON

No guard, no entourage, no fanfare, no announcement of his presence. He simply entered the theater and began walking to his box.

NARRATOR

John Wilkes Booth rode up to the back entrance of Ford's Theatre

around 9

00 on a small bay mare. Leaving his horse with a young stagehand, he entered the theater's back door, passed under the stage and out again into a side alley, where he whiled away the time in a saloon.

Maybe about 10

15, Booth came by the ticket office and started up the steps to the dress circle. He was dressed in an ordinary dark business suit with his trademark slouched hat. He had a small, single-shot pistol, derringer, with him and a large, English-made hunting knife. As he goes across the back, Booth stops, he listens to what's occurring on stage. He's apparently timing the play. Finally makes his way to the door of the box only to find the president's valet and messenger, Charles Forbes, sitting in a seat right near the door. Booth reached into his pocket, handed him a small piece of paper, probably a calling card. And, of course, Booth's calling card would admit him to almost any place in Washington. Booth then opens the outer door leading to the vestibule to the box and closes it, and then picks up the wood stand that he had left behind the door earlier in the day and uses it as a brace, wedging it between the door and the hole that he cut out in the wall. Now he's one door away from Abraham Lincoln. He can hear the sound of the play, the actors speaking. It's dark in there. He walks up to the door and he looks through a peephole.

NARRATOR

Below, the play had reached a climax as actor Harry Hawk prepared to deliver his biggest laugh line of the evening.

SWANSON

He was waiting to hear that line. The other actors leave the stage, Harry Hawk stands there alone and he says the line...

MAN

"...you sockdologizing old man-trap..." (gunshot)

NARRATOR

Suddenly a shot rang out through the auditorium. Rathbone leapt to his feet and Booth swung his dagger, cutting the young officer's shoulder to his elbow.

SWANSON

Booth turned from Rathbone and began swinging his leg over the balustrade and he caught one of his spurs on the bunting and on the framed photograph of George Washington that hung at the front of the box.

NARRATOR

Landing awkwardly on the stage below, Booth broke his left ankle. Audience members later would disagree about what he shouted next. Many heard "Sic semper tyrannis"-- "Thus always to tyrants"; others, "The South is avenged."

ALFORD

He remained almost frozen for a minute as he struggled to gain his composure, and what he later told a friend was all the courage he could muster, he got to his feet and started for the wings.

People look at each other for a moment

"Is this part of the play? What is all this about?" This lasts for a second, two seconds, three seconds.

That's when the shouts go up

"The president has been shot!" "Somebody stop that man!" But Booth has already bolted past the scenery, past the curtains, out the back entrance. He gallops away into the dark of Washington.

NARRATOR

As Booth made his escape, his coconspirators were not faring as well.

Around 10

15, Lewis Powell knocked on the door of Secretary of State William Seward's mansion. After forcing his way up the stairs, he entered Seward's bedroom, where the Secretary was recovering from a broken jaw suffered during a carriage accident.

KEARNS GOODWIN

He has a huge Bowie knife, he comes to Seward's bedside, slashes his face with such force that his entire cheek is torn off. He loses so much blood that it was astonishing he didn't die right then. He is scarred for life. However, because of the way the jaw was wired because of the carriage accident, he missed the jugular vein.

NARRATOR

As the alarm was raised, one of Seward's sons, along with a nurse, rushed the would-be assassin. Powell dropped his knife and escaped down the stairs and out the door. At the same time,

George Atzerodt approached his quarry

Vice President of the United States Andrew Johnson. But as he neared Johnson's residence, he lost his nerve.

SWANSON

Atzerodt never went up those stairs, he never knocked on the door, he never tried to assassinate the vice president of the United States. He was the only conspirator of Booth who failed his master that night.

NARRATOR

Inside Ford's Theatre, a young surgeon was the first to gain access to the presidential box.

SWANSON

He cuts open Lincoln's shirt. He can't find the wound. There was no blood on him at all. He just won't wake up. So now the question is, where shall the president of the United States die? It can't be on the floor of a theater box.

GUELZO

Ten feet across F Street from Ford's Theatre is a young man standing out in front of a boarding house who shouts over the din in the streets, "They should bring him over here," and they carry Lincoln's body across the street, up the small, winding steps of the Petersen Boarding House into the back bedroom, and they lay him out crosswise across the bedstead that is in the back bedroom. And that is when the deathwatch begins. By now, the attending doctor had found a small bullet hole below Lincoln's left ear. He declared the wound mortal. One by one, as they received the terrible news, Lincoln's cabinet members rushed to the Petersen House. "The giant sufferer lay extended diagonally across the bed," remembered Navy Secretary Gideon Welles. "His slow, full respiration lifted the bedclothes "with each breath. His features were calm and striking."

STEERS

After he was completely stripped and covered in blankets and hot water bottles, Mary Lincoln was brought into the room to see him. And she basically became hysterical. She kept pleading with Lincoln, pleading with him to open his eyes, just to say one word to her, but, of course, he couldn't.

NARRATOR

Amid the chaos, Secretary of War Edwin Stanton took charge.

GUELZO

It's Stanton who is actually the man who keeps his head. He needs to get evidence, he needs to get witnesses, he needs to get depositions. He wants troops put on alert, he wants certain arrests made, he wants bridges closed, he wants a cordon put around Washington. In a situation like this, there was no precedent. The idea that this was done by individuals just was incomprehensible. It had to be... it had to be something much larger, much wider that wasn't finished yet.

NARRATOR

Inside the Petersen House, as dawn approached, Abraham Lincoln was quickly fading.

HOLZER

In the room, it's eerily quiet. Lincoln's breathing is horrible to hear because he's taking deep breaths and he's rattling and wheezing, and sometimes he doesn't breathe for what seems like forever.

NARRATOR

Finally,

at 7

22 in the morning, the surgeon general pronounced the vigil over. Abraham Lincoln was dead. "We all stood transfixed in our positions," remembered one witness, "speechless around the dead body of that great and good man."

KEARNS GOODWIN

These men, who by that time had come to love Lincoln, showed their feelings crying at that bedside. And then, of course, Stanton utters the words that have come down over time. "Now," Stanton said, "he belongs to the ages."

HOLZER

They send for a coffin, and that's when many people first realize that he's dead, when they see this wooden coffin being taken up the stairs. And then a bit later, the doors swing open and the soldiers bring the coffin out again, and you can tell from their struggles that it's... this time it's occupied.

NARRATOR

By the morning of Lincoln's death, telegraphs reporting the assassination had reached nearly every major city in America. That evening, headlines broke the shocking news. "The sun set last night on a jubilant and rejoicing nation," wrote the New York Herald. "It rose this morning upon a sorrow-stricken people." No one grieved more than the nation's newly freed slaves. "There will be sadness today, such as needs no funeral orations or badges of mourning," wrote the New York Times. "The tears of the forgotten, outcast and oppressed slave "will be the sincerest tears that fall on the grave of the president." The day after Lincoln's death, April 16, was Easter Sunday. In a nation steeped in religion, on the holiest day of the year, churches and cathedrals across the land were swelled to the rafters and draped in black. In parishes from Maine to California, ministers tore up their Easter sermons and replaced them with lamentations.

GUELZO

Preachers in church after church, in pulpit after pulpit, seized upon the extraordinary conjunction of this event and all these events of religious history. And they began drawing the inevitable connection, that as Christ had died to save men's souls, Lincoln had died to save the Union.

McPHERSON

The parallels with Christ on the cross could not escape anybody. Lincoln was assassinated on Good Friday. He had taken on the burdens of the whole nation on his own shoulders, and for that he was crucified. Here is a man like Jesus who was killed to save the rest of us.

SWANSON

It was with the assassination that the myth of Abraham Lincoln was born. Lincoln was not universally liked or beloved during his presidency. Millions of people hated him. Once he was assassinated, everything changed.

NARRATOR

Amid the songs of praise for Lincoln, there were cries for revenge. "Let the South perish," thundered one Northern minister. "In the grave of our murdered president, let the last vestige of them be buried."

SMITH

It wasn't enough that they had revolted for four-and-a-half long years, that they had slain on the field of battle the cream of a generation, that they had destroyed themselves. Now, to top it off, they had killed Abraham Lincoln, shot in the back in the presence of his wife. The South had indicted, tried and convicted itself of irredeemable evil.

NARRATOR

In the occupied sections of the Confederacy, many feared retribution and publicly expressed their deepest condolences. But in private, many praised Booth as "our Brutus." "After all the heaviness and gloom," wrote one Southern woman, "this blow to our enemies comes like a gleam of light. "We have suffered till we feel savage. Our hated enemy has met the just reward of his life." (bell clanging) On April 21, a special train departed Washington, D.C. It carried the remains of Abraham Lincoln and his son Willie, disinterred so he could be reburied next to his father. For the next 12 days, the train would reverse the route Lincoln had taken four years earlier on his way to his first inauguration. In Philadelphia, Lincoln's casket was displayed in Independence Hall, while a line of mourners stretching more than three miles waited to pay their respects. In New York, the next day, Lincoln's hearse was led down Fifth Avenue by 16 magnificent steeds, as bells from Trinity Church rang out. More than half a million people, a quarter of the city's population, lined the route. From New York, Lincoln's train made its way slowly west.

GUELZO

In remote areas people would come miles to line the track simply to stand and watch. A newspaper reporter who was with the funeral train looked out the windows. He could just see crowds upon crowds of people doing nothing but standing silently by the railroad tracks.

HOLZER

They're there simply to lift their caps or bow their heads as this car goes by, and what they see for just the fleeting second is worth the effort and the wait, and that is a soldier standing on guard in front of a big coffin and a little coffin.

SWANSON

The outpouring of grief and emotion during that 1,700-mile journey of the funeral train from Washington to Springfield was not just for Lincoln. The American people mourned their president, but they mourned every son, every brother, every husband, every father lost in that war.

BLIGHT

When people wept for Lincoln, or when they went to their diaries, as many did, and they drew black around the pages, they were really weeping for themselves. They were weeping for their own kids. They were weeping for their own losses. We mourn for ourselves even when we mourn a great public leader.

NARRATOR

"The nation rises up at his coming," wrote one poet. "Cities and states are his pallbearers "and cannon beat the hours with solemn procession. "Give him place, ye prairies! "Ye winds that move over the mighty space of the West, "chant his requiem! Ye people, behold a martyr."