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It is portentous, and a thing of state

That here at midnight, in our little town

A mourning figure walks, and will not rest,

Near the old court-house pacing up and down,

Or by his homestead, or in shadowed yards

He lingers where his children used to play,

Or through the market, on the well-worn stones

He stalks until the dawn-stars burn away….

It breaks his heart that kings must murder still,

That all his hours of travail here for men

Seem yet in vain. And who will bring white peace

That he may sleep upon this hill again?

From Lindsay’s house, I traditionally instructed the Majic Bus driver to follow the same route as the procession of Lincoln’s body in 1865, from the State Capitol to Oak Ridge Cemetery on the outskirts of town, where Lindsay is also buried. It was at Lincoln’s gravesite that I told the students about his interment at which thousands of mourners heard prayers, sang hymns, and listened in tears as his inspirational second inaugural speech was read to them. The nation’s grief was overwhelming, but only in Illinois was it said that the brown thrasher was not heard singing for an entire year after Lincoln was laid in his tomb.

But as Tennessee Williams put it in A Streetcar Named Desire: “Funerals are pretty compared with death.” Over the years this has proved true via the various attempts that have been made to steal Lincoln’s remains. In 1876 thieves with the idea of demanding $200,000 in ransom broke into Lincoln’s tomb, forced open the sarcophagus, and pulled Lincoln’s coffin partway out, but the would-be graverobbers were apprehended and each sentenced to a year in prison. Eventually, to prevent such desecration, Lincoln’s body was reburied thirteen feet deep and surrounded by more than six feet of solid concrete.

A 117-foot obelisk towers over the granite tomb that houses the remains of Abraham Lincoln, his wife Mary Todd, and their sons—Edward, William, and Thomas; Robert, the eldest, is buried in Arlington National Cemetery. The family tomb’s entrance is dominated by a bust of Lincoln as a beardless prairie lawyer designed by sculptor Larkin Mead and executed in bronze by Gutzon Borglum of Mount Rushmore fame. It is said that rubbing the bust’s nose brings good luck, but after millions of visitors there’s not much nose left. Inside the tomb, the walls are lined with passages from Lincoln speeches engraved in bronze, complementing a life-size statue of the president labeled Great Emancipator. A circular hallway leads to the marble burial chamber, where Secretary of War Edwin Stanton’s famous reaction to Lincoln’s death is literally etched in stone: “Now he belongs to the ages.”

And so he does. The quiet of the horrific human toll of the Civil War —more than a half million Americans dead in their uniforms and many millions more suffering over their loss—has a heartbreaking immediacy. Pausing in the gloom where our sixteenth president lies almost mutes his ringing Gettysburg Address and the moral soaring of the Emancipation Proclamation beneath the echo of a line by poet Carl Sandburg: “When Abraham Lincoln was shoveled into the tombs, he forgot the copperheads and the assassin…in the dust, in the cool tombs.” To most Americans, Lincoln’s tomb is a melancholy shrine indeed—for as Harriet Beecher Stowe wrote in Little Foxes the year Lincoln died, “The bitterest tears shed over graves are for words left unsaid and deeds left undone.”

Back then it was only after seeing the assassinated president’s lanky body lying in a coffin that the American public realized in awe how unflappable he had stayed throughout those four years of civil terror. In his lifetime Lincoln had been belittled by many, even his friends mistaking his serenity for weakness. In death, however, his greatness became undeniable: seeing his remains returned in pomp to the common prairie soil, his citizens sobbed with the understanding that Lincoln had sacrificed himself for them and the nation. Under his stewardship all questions of division were settled: