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On April 21, Lincoln’s funeral train pulled away from Washington station at 7:00 A.M. and began its seventeen-hundred-mile journey to Springfield, Illinois.38.3 That day, in Virginia, the raider John Singleton Mosby disbanded his Partisan Rangers, although Mosby himself refused to give his parole. His two British volunteers confounded the Federals by asking for safe passage to Canada. The following day, General Fitz Lee wrote his final dispatch to Robert E. Lee, commending each of his staff officers “and Captain Llewellyn Saunderson, who, having just arrived from his native country, Ireland, joined me previously to the fall of Petersburg, and remained with me to the last.”38.4 27 Lincoln’s train had reached Albany, the state capital of New York, when Joe Johnston surrendered his army to Sherman on April 26. The one important difference to the terms that Grant had offered Lee was Sherman’s agreement to provide transport for the Southern troops from distant states. Henry Feilden had only a hundred miles to travel in order to reach Julia in Greenville, South Carolina, so he set off on his own horse.

I have not heard anything about you for so long that I have been quite miserable. You are aware I suppose that the war has ended in this part of the country, and that we have given in on this side of the Mississippi. Considering the position we were in, General Johnston made excellent terms with Sherman for the army—that is to say—that we are not to be molested by the Yankee Government, and our personal property is respected. No one else in the country has any guarantee for either life or property, except from the magnanimity of our enemies, which does not amount to much. The feeling of indignation in the North against our late leaders is described by the Yankee officers as intense. General Schofield (a very old friend of General Hardee’s) who now commands North Carolina advised him to leave the country at once. My own opinion is that our prominent men will be treated with great severity, if not executed.… The death of Lincoln was looked upon by our army as a great misfortune for the South. If he were alive we should have had no difficulty in getting terms.28

The flight of John Wilkes Booth, the man behind the South’s “great misfortune,” also came to an end on April 26. (Lewis Powell, the attempted murderer of Seward, had been caught ten days earlier.) Booth and another accomplice were found in a barn a few miles south of Port Royal, Virginia, by a detachment of twenty-six Federal soldiers. When Booth refused to surrender, they set fire to the barn in the hope of flushing him out, but one of the soldiers, Boston Corbett, shot him in the neck while he remained inside. Corbett’s desire for glory deprived the mourning nation of the chance to obtain justice for its slain president.

Lincoln’s funeral train finally reached its destination at Springfield, Illinois, on May 3, 1865. After a twelve-day journey through more than 440 cities and towns, the bodies of Lincoln and his son Willie, who had died in 1862, would now be laid to rest in Oak Ridge Cemetery.

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England was already “staggering,” according to Benjamin Moran, over the news of Lee’s surrender when the telegram announcing the assassination of President Lincoln arrived on April 26. John Bright felt “stunned and ill” when he heard the news. He was in mourning for his best friend, Richard Cobden, who had died on April 2, three weeks too soon to celebrate “this great triumph of the Republic,” and his brother-in-law Samuel Lucas, the owner and editor of the Morning Star, who had died on the sixteenth. “I feel at times as if I could suffer no more and grieve no more,” wrote Bright in his diary. “The slave interest has not been able to destroy the nation, but it succeeded in killing the President.”29 “I was horror struck,” recorded Moran, “and at once went up with Mr. Alward [the new assistant secretary] to announce the intelligence to Mr. Adams. He turned as pale as death.” Within a few hours the legation was overrun