April 14, 1865

Lee had surrendered at Appomattox five days before. The war was effectively over and the city had been lit up for two nights running.

He did not want to go out. He went because his wife wanted to, and because the papers had said the general would be there. Grant had cried off. They sat in a box on the left of the stage and watched a farce called Our American Cousin, and at about a quarter past ten a man walked in behind him and shot him once behind the left ear.

They carried him across Tenth Street to a boarding house and laid him diagonally across a bed too short for him. He did not regain consciousness. He died at twenty-two minutes past seven the next morning, the first American president to be killed in office.

The same night a second man forced his way into the Secretary of State's house and stabbed him in his bed; he lived. A third was to have killed the Vice President and lost his nerve in a hotel bar.

His body went home to Illinois by train over thirteen days, stopping in city after city so that people could come and look. Something like a third of the country stood beside the line as it passed.

He was fifty-six. He had been a captain of volunteers at twenty-three, elected by his own company, and had served out that summer as a private under men who had answered to him.