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Grant in the Bloodgood Hotel, where he was taking supper. He “dropped his head,” Horace Porter recalled, “and sat in perfect silence.” Noticing that he had turned “very pale,” Julia Grant guessed that bad news had arrived and asked him to read the telegram aloud. “First prepare yourself for the most painful and startling news that could be received,” he warned. As he made plans to return to Washington, he told Julia that the tidings filled him “with the gloomiest apprehension. The President was inclined to be kind and magnanimous, and his death at this time is an irreparable loss to the South, which now needs so much both his tenderness and magnanimity.”

At 1 a.m., Stanton telegraphed the chief of police in New York, telling him to “send here immediately three or four of your best detectives.” Half an hour later, he notified General Dix, “The wound is mortal. The President has been insensible ever since it was inflicted, and is now dying.” Three hours later, he updated Dix: “The President continues insensible and is sinking.” Early eyewitness accounts, Stanton revealed, suggested “that two assassins were engaged in the horrible crime, Wilkes Booth being the one that shot the President.”

Shortly after dawn, Mary entered the room for the last time. “The death-struggle had begun,” Welles recorded. “As she entered the chamber and saw how the beloved features were distorted, she fell fainting to the floor.” Restoratives were given, and Mary was assisted back to the sofa in the parlor, never again to see her husband alive.

No sooner had “the town clocks struck seven,” one observer recalled, than “the character of the President’s breathing changed. It became faint and low. At intervals it altogether ceased, until we thought him dead. And then it would be again resumed.” Lincoln’s nine-hour struggle had reached its final moments. “Let us pray,” Reverend Phineas D. Gurley said, and everyone present knelt.

At 7:22 a.m., April 15, 1865, Abraham Lincoln was pronounced dead. Stanton’s concise tribute from his deathbed still echoes. “Now he belongs to the ages.”

When Mary was told that he was gone, she piteously demanded, “Oh, why did you not tell me that he was dying.” Her moans could be heard throughout the house. Finally, with Robert’s help, she was taken to her carriage, which had waited in front of the house through the long night.

Until the moment of Lincoln’s death, Stanton’s “coolness and self-possession” had seemed “remarkable” to those around him. Now he could not stop the tears that streamed down his cheeks. In the days that followed, even as he worked tirelessly to secure the city and catch the conspirators, “Stanton’s grief was uncontrollable,” recalled Horace Porter, “and at the mention of Mr. Lincoln’s name he would break down and weep bitterly.”

While Stanton’s raw grief surprised those who had seen only his gruff exterior, John Hay understood. “Not everyone knows, as I do,” he wrote Stanton, “how close you stood to our lost leader, how he loved you and trusted you, and how vain were all the efforts to shake that trust and confidence, not lightly given & never withdrawn. All this will be known some time of course, to his honor and yours.”

Salmon Chase was up at dawn. Soldiers had guarded him through the “night of horrors,” and he was ready to join his colleagues at Lincoln’s side. As he reached 10th Street, however, he encountered Assistant Treasury Secretary Maunsell Field. “Is he dead?” Chase asked. “Yes,” Field replied, noting that Chase’s “eyes were bloodshot, and his entire face was distorted.” The Chief Justice had arrived too late, the president was already dead, and his colleagues had dispersed. Uncertain what to do next, Chase walked to Seward’s house. Guards had been stationed to prevent entry, but Chase was recognized and allowed into the lower hall. There, doctors told him that Seward “had partially recovered” and, though still in critical condition, “might live—but that Mr. Frederick Seward’s case was hopeless.”

Chase headed toward the Kirkwood Hotel to call on the man who represented the future: