Abraham Lincoln

Abraham Lincoln died at Petersen House, the boarding house across from Ford's Theatre in Washington, D.C., on the morning of April 15, 1865. He was fifty-six. The shot had come the night before, in a box he had occupied without ceremony, five days after Richmond fell. Born near Hodgenville, Kentucky, on February 12, 1809, he grew up splitting rails and reading borrowed books on the Indiana and Illinois frontier. Springfield, Illinois, was the town he claimed as home — the law office and the house on Eighth Street — not the city where he died. He was a one-term congressman and a losing Senate candidate before the country, coming apart, made him President. He held the Union by language as much as by armies: a proclamation that named freedom as a war aim, an amendment that wrote it into the Constitution, and a second inaugural that asked malice toward none while the dead were still being counted. Mary Todd Lincoln was beside him in the theater. After a state funeral in Washington, a funeral train carried him west. He is buried at Oak Ridge Cemetery in Springfield, Illinois. The city still keeps the lawyer who walked those streets before the war taught the nation his voice.