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By Root 818 0

15, 1865, had a greater impact than any other in American history. Shot in his seat at Washington, D.C.’s Ford Theatre while watching the hit play Our American Cousin, Lincoln died the day after actor John Wilkes Booth fired a lead ball into his head. The book of Genesis says it took the Israelites forty days to embalm the body of Jacob; Americans needed just one day to do the same for Lincoln’s from which the brain and scalp were removed beforehand. The president’s corpse was then dressed in a black suit and placed in a lead-lined mahogany casket covered in black broadcloth and studded with silver handles. Lilies, roses, and magnolia blossoms adorned the catafalque around Lincoln’s body as it lay in state in the East Room of the White House. Those who viewed the dead president reported that his expression was one of blissful repose.

What has always fascinated me most about the death of Abraham Lincoln is the 1,700-mile journey his coffin made from Washington, D.C. to Springfield, Illinois, a grim train procession detailed in Ralph Newman’s 1965 article “In This Sad World of Ours, Sorrow Comes to Us All: A Timetable for the Lincoln Funeral Train,” published in the Journal of the Illinois State Historical Society. Today it’s hard to imagine a slain president’s body being taken on a multi-city tour, paraded up Baltimore’s Eutaw Street for a public viewing at the Exchange Building, then to another appearance before another mob at Independence Hall in Philadelphia, and onto the waiting crowds in Harrisburg, Lancaster, Buffalo, Cleveland, Columbus, Indianapolis, and Chicago until the casket finally arrived at the State Capitol in Springfield, where 75,000 people would pass by the bier. Lincoln’s body was the hottest ticket in America. Hairs from his head became prized collectibles; his assistant John Hay, for example, had a special ring made with a few dark strands. The level of this obsession with Lincoln’s death lives on to this day in Springfield.

In 1842, it was in Springfield that Lincoln and his new bride, Mary Todd, bought the only house they would ever own and the place where three of their four sons were born. What’s more, during his 1860 presidential campaign, Lincoln turned his Springfield home into his operating center for hosting strategy sessions, visiting delegations, and parades. Over the years since, Illinois politicians have told voters that legislators meeting at the capitol in Springfield get a strange feeling, a sense of Lincoln’s spirit brooding above, to lead them to create ever better services for the people of his home state. I used to gather my Majic Bus students on the steps of the city capitol and give my lecture on Lincoln’s Springfield years next to a bronze statue of the president who saved the Union. After all, the city does have a legitimate claim to Lincoln. But no matter how many colorful anecdotes I told, no matter how many of the town’s historic markers we visited to study those sites’ various events, it was always the trek to Lincoln’s tomb that was the historical payoff and afterwards felt like an essential rite of passage for any American.

To prepare for the visit to Lincoln’s tomb, I took my students first to 603 South Fifth Street, the house once owned by Lincoln’s sister-in-law, which later became the lifelong home of Vachel Lindsay, whom critic Louis Untermeyer dubbed the greatest lyric poet since Edgar Allen Poe. Lindsay was born in the house in 1879 and committed suicide there in 1931, in between writing hundreds of memorable poems, mostly about the Midwest of the 1910s and ’20s. Author Sinclair Lewis called him, “One of our few great poets, a power and a glory in the land.”

It was while sitting on the porch of Lindsay’s house that I read my students his haunting 1914 poem “Abraham Lincoln Walks at Midnight,” verses that evoke the heavy heart of a man mourning in the rain over his son’s grave and of a president alone at midnight in the White House after the Battle of Bull Run, begging God to help him end the Civil War. In Lindsay’s poem Lincoln’s ghost yet wanders the streets