On display in Chicago this day, Lincoln‘s body is viewed by some 125,000 mourners. In this the third week following Lincoln’s assassination and the fourth following the Confederate General Robert E. Lee‘s surrender of his Army of Northern Virginia, late in the afternoon in Abbeville, South Carolina former Confederate president Jefferson Davis presides over his…
Although Union General William T. Sherman and Confederate General Joseph Johnston a week earlier agreed on terms for a surrender of Jonston’s remaining army, the last large body of Confederate forces, officials in Washington D.C. rejected those terms as too lenient on the Confederacy. Subsequently, Jefferson Davis rejected Union demands for harsher conditions, and from…
As Abraham Lincoln‘s funeral train — the Lincoln Special — travels from Harrisburg to Philadelphia, tens of thousands of people line the route to catch a glimpse of the car bearing Lincoln’s remains. Not since the deaths of America’s Founding Fathers has there seemingly been national mourning on the massive scale as that over the…