By Nancy Heywood, Collection Services
On 14 April 1865, while attending a play at Ford’s Theatre in Washington, D.C., President Abraham Lincoln was shot by John Wilkes Booth. The event was tragic and shocking. Lincoln died the next morning, 15 April, and people all over the country struggled to comprehend what had happened.
Ford’s Theatre, a National Historic Site and a working theatre, has recently launched a new digital collection, Remembering Lincoln. Two dozen institutions, including the Massachusetts Historical Society, have contributed digital images, metadata, and transcriptions of materials about the assassination of President Lincoln to this online collection. Researchers can read first-person accounts of the startling event, examine newspaper articles, explore printed documents and broadsides, and look at artifacts.
Several remarkable manuscripts from the collections of the MHS are included in the Remembering Lincoln collection. Two letters were written by Augustus Clark, a War Department employee, who was one of the men who moved Lincoln after he was shot from Ford’s Theatre to Petersen’s boarding house. One of Clark’s letters (addressed to S. M. Allen) fully describes his impressions of the evening and the tragic event. In the other letter, written to Massachusetts Governor John A. Andrew, Clark mentions enclosing a piece of cloth with Lincoln’s blood with the correspondence. Both letters (letter to S. M. Allen and letter to Gov. Andrew) and also the towel fragment are viewable on the website.
Another item featured in the digital collection is an excerpt from the young Boston diarist, Sarah Gooll Putnam. Only 14 years old in April of 1865, her reaction was poignant. She drew a shocked face on her diary page along with the following words:
Now guess my feelings, when coming down to breakfast, at mother’s saying “The president is killed!” I stared so [handwritten mark pointing to illustration] for a few minutes without speaking. I cannot realize it yet. Poor, dear, old, Abe.
Please explore the whole Remembering Lincoln website: http://rememberinglincoln.fords.org/
A browse display of the items that MHS contributed to Remembering Lincoln is also available: http://rememberinglincoln.fords.org/contributor?uid=40