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filed by his open casket as it lay in state in the East Room of the White House. The service itself, by invitation only, was attended by six hundred, not including Mary Lincoln, who was too distraught to appear. A funeral procession of soldiers and dignitaries accompanied Lincoln’s hearse, drawn by six gray horses, to the Capitol, where the president lay in state as lines of mourners passed. Across the nation a variety of observances marked the funeral day: a procession of twenty thousand in Memphis, a large gathering in San Francisco, an address by Ralph Waldo Emerson in Massachusetts, and throughout the northern states, as the New York Herald reported, “universal suspension of ordinary avocations and a closing of places of business.”31

From the Capitol, Lincoln’s body was taken to the railroad station to begin the seventeen-hundred-mile journey to Springfield, Illinois, and his grave. At each stop—Baltimore, Harrisburg, Philadelphia, New York, Albany, Buffalo, Cleveland, Columbus, Indianapolis, Chicago—mourners paid homage to the slain president. In Philadelphia his coffin lay in Independence Hall, while a column of people three miles long waited to view his remains. In New York the Herald estimated that 75,000 marched with his cortege while ten times that number watched from sidewalks and rooftops. Everywhere black Americans seemed to manifest particular sorrow—weeping along the routes of his cortege, marching in proud units of U.S. Colored Troops in processions that accompanied his hearse, writing poems and essays in the African American press, and proclaiming from the pulpit. “We, as a people,” declared the pastor of the African Methodist Episcopal Church in Troy, New York, “feel more than all others that we are bereaved. We had learned to love Mr. Lincoln…We looked up to him as our saviour, our deliverer.”32

By the time Lincoln reached Springfield on May 3, the shortcomings of contemporary embalming technology had become apparent, and his face took on a distorted, almost grotesque appearance. But the pageantry did not abate until May 4, when he was laid to rest in Oak Ridge Cemetery on the outskirts of the town he had left for Washington just a little more than four years earlier. A hymn composed for this final ceremony implored:

Grant that the cause, for which he died,

May live forever more.

“President Lincoln’s Funeral—Citizens Viewing the Body at the City Hall, New York.” Harper’s Weekly, May 6, 1865.

Lincoln’s death contained the redemptive promise of national immortality. But like Jackson’s death, Lincoln’s passing was marked by an irony that underscored the limitation and even futility of human powers. Jackson died close to the high-water mark of the Confederacy; Lincoln was assassinated just as victory proved firmly in Union grasp.

In the weeks after Lincoln’s assassination, Walt Whitman composed three poems of mourning, meditations on the nation’s grief. In “Hush’d Be the Camps To-day,” written the very day of Lincoln’s funeral, Whitman speaks as one of the people, leading the soldiers in mourning and urging the common men to whom he is so devoted to join him in tribute to “our dear commander.”

Sing of the love we bore him—because you, dwellers in camps, know it truly.

As they invault the coffin there,

Sing…

For the heavy hearts of soldiers.33

“O Captain! My Captain,” composed several months later during the summer of 1865, again invokes popular grief. It is, as literary scholar Helen Vendler explains, “a designedly democratic and populist poem,” with a meter and refrain designed for public tastes. The regular rhythm and rhyme are uncharacteristic of Whitman’s work, and “O Captain!” is probably the easiest of his poems to memorize and recite. In the voice of a young sailor, Whitman composed an elegy in “democratic style,” speaking this time not for the collectivity of soldiers or for generalized sorrow but for the searing grief of a single man, in a representation of the individual pain of which the cumulative loss is constituted.34

Here Captain! Dear father

The arm beneath