Lincoln

A long lost photo of Abraham Lincoln lying in state in the Capitol Rotunda, April 1865. Photographers were banned, I’m not sure how this could have been taken without getting caught. Perhaps the photographer was caught and expelled, but managed to conceal the photo plate. Tens of thousands of grieving people filed past Lincoln’s body for two days, ordinary people and dignitaries, farmers in home spun and big city dandies and emancipated slaves and, once the public viewing was done, long lines of bandaged, hobbling, often limbless soldiers brought in from the hospitals all over Washington. On the third day the body was put aboard a funeral train for the long ride back to Springfield, Illinois, past silent crowds and clusters of people all along the way, where he was laid to rest in a simple grave per his wishes. Sometime later he was reinterred in the towering almost Roman marble monument that would have appalled him and where, deep inside a cavernous and elaborately appointed tomb more worthy of an emperor than a simple country lawyer, a seven ton cenotaph of red marble marks the way to the burial chamber deep down containing the white marble sarcophagus where his bones lie to this day. People file past and speak in hushed voices, and you can almost see him there, lanky, bearded and lifeless, and wonder.

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