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Show Seventy-Five Years Ago This Month ?' The Whole World Was in Mourning for America's First Martyred President r ; - &Ar 4r '! lit ' - ' K'tr "STOP THAT MAN!" John Wilkes Booth flees across the stage of Ford's theater in Washington after firing the shot which ended the life of Abraham Lincoln. (From a drawing which appeared in Harper's Weekly, April 29, 1865). By ELMO SCOTT WATSON (Released by Western Newspaper Union.) I T IS the evening of April 14, 1865 Good Friday. On the stage of Ford's theater in Washington the famous fa-mous actress, Laura Keene, is playing in a delightful comedy, com-edy, "Our American Cousin." Joining in the laughter that sweeps through the audience from time to time is a gaunt, sad-faced man sitting at ease in a high-backed, satin-upholstered rocking chair in an upper stage box. Abraham Lincoln is forgetting for a few minutes the crushing responsibilities re-sponsibilities which he, as Chief Executive of a nation torn asunder in civil war, has been bearing for four long years. The third act of the play begins. The President leans over to whisper something to Mrs. Lincoln who sits beside him. Neither the Lincolns nor Maj. Harry R. Rathbone and a Miss Harris, who accompanied accom-panied them to the theater, notice that a dark-moustached young man has slipped through the door at the rear of the box and is now standing behind the President. The next moment there is the muffled sound of a shot. It is unnoticed by the players on the stage or the audience, still chuckling chuck-ling over the last funny line they Slave heard. But the President's head drops forward on his breast. Startled, Major Rathbone looks around. Through the smoke he sees the dark young man with a pistol in his hand and hears him .mutter something which sounds -like "Freedom!" The major leaps -o his feet and grapples with the ntruder, who slashes at him with n knife, tears loose from the officer's offi-cer's grasp and springs to the front of the box. As he vaults over the railing, his spur catches in an American Hag which drapes the front of the box. He drops heavily to the stage with one legMoubled under him, then scrambles to his feet. With blood streaming from his wounded arms, Rathbone rushes to the front of the box. "Stop that man! Stop him!" he shouts. "The President has been shot!" But everyone is too stunned to move for a moment. The young man, waving aloft the bloody knife, drags himself across the stage and disappears in the wings. But before he does so, the startled actors recognize in the white face and the black eyes blazing with fanatical hatred the familiar features of one of their own profession John Wilkes Booth. All this has taken place in less time than it takes to tell it. The next moment Ford's theater is a pandemonium of screaming women and shouting men, shoving, shov-ing, pushing, breaking chairs, crashing through railings and '.rampling upon each other as they surge toward the stage or try to climb up to the box where the moaning Mrs. Lincoln is supporting support-ing her stricken husband and Major Ma-jor Rathbone is trying vainly to open the door which the assassin had barred from the inside. Now the soldiers of the President's Presi-dent's guard come bursting into the theater and with fixed bayonets and drawn pistols they charge mfmf -it! ' IN SPRINGFIELD Outside the old Globe tavern, where Abraham Abra-ham Lincoln and Mary Todd spent their honeymoon, members of the martyred President's cabinet and other dignitaries awaited the arrival of the funeral train in Lincoln's home town. the milling crowd. Their hoarse shouts of "Clear out! Clear out, you sons of hell!" rise above the tumult as they drive the half-crazed half-crazed audience out of the theater. the-ater. Meanwhile Rathbone has succeeded suc-ceeded in unbarring the door to the box and several people, among them a surgeon, rush in. They see the tall form of the President slumped forward in his chair, his sad eyes closed, never to open again. Someone brings a Shutter, torn from a building near by, and they lay his gaunt form upon it. They carry him out of the theater to the house of Charles Peterson across the street. Ford's theater is empty, deserted de-serted now. Its curtain has been rung down upon the comedy, "Our American Cousin" and upon one of the greatest tragedies trage-dies in American history. Death at 7:22 A. M. The next morning Washington newspapers carried this story: "The body of President Lincoln, Lin-coln, who died from an assassin's bullet at 7:22 o'clock this morning, morn-ing, was removed from the Peterson Peter-son residence opposite Ford's theater the-ater to the executive mansion in a hearse and wrapped in the American flag. It was escorted by a small squad of cavalry and by Gen. Augur and other military officials on foot. A dense crowd accompanied the remains to the White House, where a military guard excluded the people, allowing allow-ing none but persons of the household house-hold and personal friends of the deceased to enter. Gen. Grant arrived here at 2 o'clock in a special spe-cial train from Philadelphia. His presence tends somewhat to allay the excitement." Leaf through the pages of James G. Blaine's "Twenty Years in Congress," published in 1886, and read there this description of the events which followed: "The remains of the late President Presi-dent lay in state at the executive execu-tive mansion for four days. The entire city seemed as a house of mourning. The martial music which had been resounding in glad celebration of the national triumph had ceased; public edifice edi-fice and private mansion were alike draped with the insignia of grief. "Funeral services, conducted by the leading clergymen of the city, were held in the east room on Wednesday, the 19th of April. Amid the solemn tolling of church bells, and the still more solemn thundering of minute guns from the vast line of fortifications which had protected Washington, the body, escorted by an impos ing military and civic procession, was transferred to the rotunda of the Capitol. "The day was observed throughout the Union as one of fasting and prayer. Services in the churches throughout the land were held in unison with the services serv-ices at the executive mansion, and were everywhere attended with exhibition of profound personal per-sonal grief. , The South in Sorrow. "In all the cities of Canada business was suspended, public meetings of condolence with a kindred people were held, and prayers were read in the churches. "Throughout the Confederate states, where war had ceased but peace had not yet come, the people peo-ple joined in significant expressions expres-sions of sorrow over the death of him whose very name they had been taught to execrate. "Early in the morning of the 21st the body was removed from the capitol and placed on the funeral car which was to transport trans-port it to its final resting place in Illinois . . . The train which moved from the national capital was attended on its course by extraordinary manifestations ot grief on the part of the people." As for the story of that sorrowful sorrow-ful journey westward, no one has ever told it better than Carl Sandburg, Sand-burg, poet and Lincoln biographer. biogra-pher. The closing words of his masterpiece "Abraham Lincoln: The War Years," (published this year by Harcourt, Brace and company) words whose stark simplicity remind one of such writings as the Gettysburg Address Ad-dress are these: "There was a funeral. "It took long to pass its many given points. "Many millions of people saw it . . . "The line of march ran seventeen seven-teen hundred miles. "Yes, there was a funeral. "From his White House in Washington where it began they carried his coffin, and followed fol-lowed it nights and days for twelve days . . . "Bells tolling, bells sobbing the requiem, the salute guns, cannon rumbling their inarticulate thunder. thun-der. "To Springfield, Illinois, the old home town, the Sangamon nearby, near-by, the New Salem hilltop nearby, near-by, for the final rest of the cherished cher-ished dust. "And the night came with great quiet. "And there was rest. "The prairie years, the wa: years, were over." |