Lincoln, the unknown

218 •LINCOLN THE UNKNOWNknown—crowds that filled the hotels and overflowed into privatehomes and backwashed across the parks and onto steamboatpiers.The next day sixteen white horses, ridden by Negroes, pulledthe hearse up Broadway, while women, frantic with grief, tossedflowers in its path. Behind came the tramp, tramp, tramp ofmarching feet—a hundred and sixty thousand mourners withswaying banners bearing quotations like these: "Ah, the pityof it, Iago—the pity of it!" . . . "Be still, and know that I amGod."Half a million spectators fought and trampled upon one anotherin an effort to view the long procession. Second-storywindows facing Broadway were rented for forty dollars each,and window-panes were removed in order that the openingsmight accommodate as many heads as possible.Choirs robed in white sang hymns on street corners, marchingbands wailed their dirges, and at intervals of sixty secondsthe roar of a hundred cannon reverberated over the town.As the crowds sobbed by the bier in City Hall, New York,many spoke to the dead man, some tried to touch his face;and, while the guard was not looking, one woman bent overand kissed the corpse.When the casket was closed in New York, at noon onTuesday, thousands who had been unable to view the remainshurried to the trainsand sped westward to other points wherethe funeral car was scheduled to stop. From now on until itreached Springfield the funeral train was seldom out of thesound of tolling bells and booming guns. By day it ran underarches of evergreens and flowers and past hillsides covered withchildren waving flags; by night its passing was illumined bycountless torches and flaming bonfires stretching half-wayacross the continent.The country was in a frenzy of excitement. No such funeralhad ever before been witnessed, in all history. Weak minds hereand there snapped under the strain. A young man in New Yorkslashed his throat with a razor, crying, "I am going to joinAbraham Lincoln."Forty-eight hours after the assassination a committee fromSpringfield had hurried to Washington, pleading with Mrs. Lincolnto have her husband buried in his home town. At first,was sharply opposed to the suggestion. She had hardly a friendleft in Springfield, and she knew it. True, she had three sistersshe