We’re celebrating President’s Day with a selection of Abraham Lincoln postcards from the Lincoln Collection: Art, Artifacts, and Ephemera
April 15th 1865: Abraham Lincoln dies
On this day in 1865, after being shot the previous day, U.S.
President Abraham Lincoln died aged 56. Lincoln’s election in 1860 on an antislavery platform prompted the Southern slaveholding states to secede from the Union. The new President led the Union during the subsequent American Civil
War, and furthered the abolition of slavery by issuing his
Emancipation Proclamation and encouraging the passage of the Thirteenth
Amendment. Almost a week after the Confederacy’s surrender to Union
forces at Appomattox, Confederate sympathiser John Wilkes Booth shot the
President while he was attending a performance of ‘Our American Cousin’ at Ford’s Theatre
in Washington D.C. Booth shot Lincoln in the head at point blank range,
and the injured President was immediately taken across the street to Petersen House. However, the
wound was clearly fatal and after a nine hour coma, Lincoln died at 7.22am on April 15th. When he was shot, the President was carrying in his pockets a pocket knife, a watch fob, a handkerchief, a wallet, spectacles, newspaper clippings, and, interestingly a new Confederate five-dollar bill; Lincoln’s face now appears on the five-dollar bill. Upon Lincoln’s death, Vice President Andrew Johnson was swiftly sworn in as seventeenth
President of the United States.
Booth was soon tracked down and killed, while Lincoln was widely mourned
in the North as the steadfast leader who had seen the nation through its bloodiest war. The nation’s sadness was coupled with shock in the wake of the first presidential assassination; three of Lincoln’s successors would meet the same fate.
“Now he belongs to the ages.”
- Secretary of War Edwin Stanton after Lincoln’s death
