The Day Lincoln Was Shot Read Online Free PDF

appointed Mr. Seward, she said, “That dirty abolition sneak!”
    In the last campaign, she told Lizzie Keckley that Lincoln had to be reelected because she owed bills totaling at least $27,000 and there was no other way in which they could be paid.
    She was generous too. When gifts of fruits and wines and liquors reached the White House, she loaded them in a carriage and drove out to the Soldiers’ Home on Seventh Street and gave them to the wounded. She was never too weary to make the trip out, and nothing could make her hurry away from the bedsides. On afternoons when she noted that her husband looked tired, she often dropped her own plans and suggested that he come with her for an afternoon drive. At other times, unknown to him, she invited old Illinois friends to breakfast so that his mood might be brightened.
    They were still chatting around the breakfast table when, far to the south, Jefferson Davis penned a note, in Greensboro, North Carolina, to his wife. He had no taste for breakfast this morning. The Confederacy was crushed and dead. He did not know whether the North would demand his life. And so his lean face was hard and expressionless as he penned:
    Dear Winnie,
    I will come to you if I can. Everything is dark. You should prepare for the worst. . . . My love to the children.
    The letter had to be written early. Later in the day, there would be no time, because the President of the Confederate States of America had scheduled a conference with the leader of the last complete army in the field: General Joseph Johnston. And the bitterness that each of these men felt for the other would, on this day at least, be buried and Johnston would say: “My views are, sir, that our people are tired of the war, feel themselves whipped, and will not fight.” At which point Jefferson Davis would write another letter, one to General William Tecumseh Sherman, asking for terms.
    Across town from the White House, Noah Brooks was also writing. He was a newspaperman and, quite regularly, he wrote articles for newspapers in distant cities. The weakness in what Mr. Brooks wrote was the knowledge that he was a particular friend to the President. So particular, in fact, that in this coming June, Noah Brooks was scheduled to replace John G. Nicolay as one of Lincoln’s secretaries.
    Across the top of the first page, he wrote “News letter” in longhand. Underneath, he wrote: “April 14, 1865.” The young man thought for a while, pen off paper, eyes vacantly staring through the window of his room, then the pen began to skate lightly over the paper, describing the elegant maneuvers which made the words which made the sense of his thinking. He had heard the President’s speech of Tuesday, in which Lincoln had noted that elections were held in Louisiana and, as a sop to the radicals of his own party who wanted a harsh peace for the conquered South, he had said that he hoped the vote would be given to the intelligent Negro and the Negro who had fought in uniform.
    â€œThe radicals,” Mr. Brooks wrote, “are as virulent and bitter as ever.” He named some names, but he mitigated the sting of the high-sounding names by adding that the President’s enemies “form but an inconsiderable portion of the great mass of the loyal people.” The people, Brooks found, “have an implicit and truthful faith in Lincoln, which is almost unreasonable and unreasoning.”
    The reporter was exaggerating. The people of the South had no faith in Lincoln. The people of the North felt, in the main, that he was a stumbling, homely man whose “wrong” guesses, comically enough, were always justified in the end. “Old Abe will come out all right,” they said, and, in this, one can read the chuckling affection one would have for a backward neighbor who always bests the pompous banker. Lincoln was lonely in a sense, but his isolation, such as it was, was created more by the