Lucy's Bones, Sacred Stones, & Einstein's Brain

by Harvey Rachlin

  About ninety people came in and out of the room throughout the night, and four doctors sat by Lincoln’s bed throughout the ordeal. Among those standing or sitting around the bed during the dark hours—really just waiting for the president to die—were Secretary of War Edwin M. Stanton; Robert Todd Lincoln; the president’s private secretary, John Hay; Secretary of the Navy Gideon Welles; Secretary of the Interior John Usher; Senator Charles Sumner; Surgeon General Joseph K. Barnes; Secretary of the Treasury Hugh McCulloch; the Lincoln family physician, Dr. Robert King Stone; and Assistant Surgeon General Colonel Charles H. Crane.

  In the early morning hours another probe was made. As Dr. Taft wrote:

  About 2 A.M., an ordinary silver probe was introduced into the wound by the Surgeon-General. It met an obstruction about three inches from the external orifice, which was decided to be the plug of bone driven in from the skull and lodged in the track of the ball. The probe passed by this obstruction, but was too short to follow the track the whole length. A long Nélaton probe was then procured and passed into the track of the wound for a distance of two inches beyond the plug of bone, when the ball was distinctly felt; passing beyond this, the fragments of the orbital plate of the left orbit were felt. The ball made no mark upon the porcelain tip, and was afterwards found to be of exceedingly hard lead.

  Some difference of opinion existed as to the exact position of the ball, but . . . no further attempt was made to explore the wound.

  At 7:22 A.M. on Saturday, April 15, 1865, almost nine hours after he was shot, President Lincoln passed away.

  This engraving by Alexander Hay Ritchie (1822-1895) shows the grim deathbed scene when Abraham Lincoln died at 7:22 A.M. on April 15, 1865. Gathered around the president are cabinet members, governors, generals, physicians, his son Robert, and others.

  An autopsy was performed on Lincoln in a room on the second floor at the Executive Mansion at noon that same day. Two locks of his hair and six bone fragments from the fatal wound in his skull were taken. These specimens, along with the probes used in attempts to locate the bullet and the bloodstained cuffs of Major Edward Curtis—who, with another pathologist, Lieutenant Colonel Joseph Janvier Woodward, performed the autopsy—still exist today (National Museum of Health and Medicine). The medical kit used in the autopsy also still exists (National Museum of American History).

  No death masks were made of Lincoln, but two life masks had been made: one in 1860, when he became a candidate for president of the United States, by Leonard Volk; the other in Washington, D.C., sixty days before his death, by Clark Mills. (The original castings of both are at the National Museum of American History.)

  After the autopsy, Lincoln’s body was embalmed. The procedure was performed by two Washington, D.C., practitioners who “sacredly preserved” his blood. According to an article in the April 20, 1865, edition of the New York World:

  Three years ago, when little Willie Lincoln died, Doctors [Charles DeCosta] Brown and [Joseph B.] Alexander, the embalmers or injectors, prepared his body so handsomely that the President had it twice disinterred to look upon it. The same men, in the same way, have made perpetual these beloved lineaments. There is now no blood in the body; it was drained by the jugular vein and sacredly preserved, and through a cutting on the inside of the thigh the empty blood-vessels were charged with a chemical preparation which soon hardened to the consistence of stone. The long and bony body is now hard and stiff, so that beyond its present position it cannot be moved any more than the arms or legs of a statue. It has undergone many changes. The scalp has been removed, the brain scooped out, the chest opened and the blood emptied. All this we see of Abraham Lincoln, so cunningly contemplated in this splendid coffin, is a mere shell, an effigy, a sculpture. He lies in sleep, but it is the sleep of marble. All that made this flesh vital, sentient, and affectionate is gone forever.

  As for the presidential blood preserved by Brown and Alexander, one imagines they put it in some sort of chalice and sequestered it so that it might remain safe and unsullied, a consecrated liquid in a treasured container. But where did Brown and Alexander keep it, and what did they do with it? There seems to be no record of whatever happened to Lincoln’s blood.

  Lincoln’s body was to be returned to his hometown, Springfield, Illinois, for burial (Lincoln lived there from April 1837 to February 1861). His body was placed in a car of the funeral train along with the remains of his son, Willie, who had died in the Executive Mansion and had been placed in a vault in a cemetery in Georgetown, a section of Washington, D.C. During the journey to Illinois, more than a million people looked at Abraham Lincoln in his open casket. Lincoln’s face turned dark during the trip, and the embalmer, Brown—he called himself “Dr. Brown”—rode on the funeral train and touched up the president’s face in the major cities where the train stopped: Baltimore, Harrisburg, Philadelphia, New York City, Albany, Buffalo, Cleveland, Columbus, Indianapolis, Chicago. On May 3, 1865, when the train pulled into Springfield, Illinois, where Lincoln’s body was received, there was still chalk on his face.

  From May through December 1865, Lincoln’s body was placed in a public receiving vault, which still exists, at Oak Ridge Cemetery. In December the body was transferred to a temporary tomb of stone and brick, where it remained until September 19, 1871. On that date Lincoln’s body was moved into the main tomb and placed in a crypt in a wall next to his sons Willie and Tad (who had died earlier that year). Abraham Lincoln stayed in that crypt until October 1874, when he was moved into an aboveground marble sarcophagus in the burial chamber.

  In 1876 an attempt was made to steal the body. A group of counterfeiters wanted to hold it for ransom to obtain the release of one of their friends and two hundred thousand dollars. They were captured during their attempt, however, and served time in prison. Lincoln’s body was again moved, this time to the northeast wall of the burial chamber. In 1901, at Robert Lincoln’s request, the slain president was buried beneath the floor of the tomb.

  The nation mourned the president as no American leader had previously ever been mourned, and the co-conspirators were punished. On the twenty-sixth of April, twelve days after he shot Lincoln, Booth was killed in a shoot-out on the Richard Garrett farm near Port Royal, Virginia, where soldiers from the Sixteenth New York Cavalry Unit hunted him down.* Just before sunrise, sometime between 3:00 A.M. and 4:00 A.M., the soldiers torched a tobacco shed, where Booth was hiding with co-conspirator David Herold. While the shed was burning, gunfire was exchanged, and a bullet ripped into Booth’s upper spine, paralyzing him immediately. The soldiers dragged him out feet first and then, because he was bleeding and unconscious, splashed water on his face. Booth softly told them to tell his mother, “I did it for my country,” before passing out. By this time Herold had already surrendered to the soldiers, who tied him to a tree. A few minutes later Booth came to again and said, “I want to see my hands.” The soldiers held both arms in front of his face so he could see them. “Useless, useless,” he said, then died.

  Objects associated with Lincoln’s assassination soon became famous. Mrs. Lincoln’s hat was cut up, and the pieces were sold as souvenirs. That is also what happened to strips of sheets stained with the blood of the president and the rug in William Clark’s room, as well as other items there. “Everybody has a great desire to obtain some memento from my room,” the private wrote to his sister, “so that whoever comes in has to be closely watched for fear that they will steal something. I have a lock of Mr. Lincoln’s hair, which I have had neatly framed; also a piece of linen with a portion of his brain. The same mattress is on my bed, and the same coverlet covers me nightly, that covered him while dying.”

  Clark’s bed was seized a few days later by his landlord, William Petersen, whose home was drawing mourners and sightseers from all over. After Petersen and his wife both died in 1871, their children held an auction for the house and its furniture, and the infamous bed was purchased for eighty dollars by a local resident, William Boyd, who in turn gave the bed to his
brother, Andrew, in Syracuse, New York. Money difficulties later forced Andrew Boyd to sell the bed, and he found a buyer in 1889 in Charles Frederick Gunther, a thirty-four-year-old German-born Chicago candy maker who would become a great collector of Americana;* the purchase price was approximately fifteen hundred dollars. Gunther moved the Civil War’s Libby Prison of Richmond, Virginia, near his establishment and placed his collection inside but returned his treasures to his offices when another building was to be constructed on the site of the museum. Near the turn of the century, a fire wiped out much of his collection, and after Charles Gunther died in February 1920, the Gunther family sold his relics, including the bed, to a private nonprofit Chicago organization.

  The bed Lincoln died in, like so many other historical artifacts, was an ordinary object that would have surely been lost to oblivion had it not been plucked by the hand of fate. That this small wooden bed in a private’s rented room, in a tailor’s boardinghouse, should have been Abraham Lincoln’s final resting place would have been all but inconceivable only a split second before the fatal shooting.

  As the president breathed his last, those present were overcome with grief, still stunned by the circumstances that led them to gaze down upon their moribund leader. Soon after, the late president’s body was taken away, leaving the bed a witness for the ages to this tragic event.

  LOCATION: Chicago Historical Society, Chicago, Illinois.

  Footnotes

  *The Executive Mansion, once known as the President’s Palace, was officially named the White House on October 17, 1901, by President Theodore Roosevelt.

  *From Our American Cousin: The Play That Changed History, with an introduction by Welford D. Taylor, 1990. Published by Beacham Publishing, Washington, D.C.

  *Based on Rathbone’s testimony and a 1914 newspaper article listing the items of the Lincoln assassination conspirators held by the U.S. government, this knife (Ford’s Theatre) has been identified as a bone-handled knife with a blade about five inches long and an inscription that reads, “Land of the free, home of the brave.”

  *Going from the balcony to the passageway, the door opened by pushing it in. Booth put one end of the bar behind the doorknob and jammed the other end into a hole he chiseled out of the plaster of the wall, probably earlier that day. Pushing on the door from the mezzanine just wedged the bar in farther. The bar was from a wooden music stand that Booth apparently had found in the theater that afternoon and left in the passageway.

  *Another point of interest here is that in 1867 Rathbone married Clara Harris, his stepsister, then on Christmas Day 1883 shot and stabbed her to death in bed in Hanover, Germany. German authorities arrested Rathbone, and he was subsequently committed to an insane asylum, where he lived a rather plush life and died in relative obscurity in 1911. Both he and his wife were buried in Hanover, and, according to some accounts, the cemetery where they were interred was bombed into oblivion during Allied air raids of World War II, although their remains could have been removed prior to the war to make room for new remains, as was the custom in Europe. The murder of Clara Harris Rathbone by Henry Rathbone is yet another tragedy that may be associated with those who occupied the state box that night.

  *Having slept on the ground or on cots over the last few months while serving on Grant’s staff, Robert Todd told his parents he didn’t want to go to Ford’s Theatre that night so he could catch up on his sleep on a bed. He visited his father at the Petersen house, but it was decided that Lincoln’s other surviving son, twelve-year-old Thomas (nicknamed Tad), should stay at home and be spared the grief of watching his father die.

  *The president’s black ebony walking stick that he carried to Ford’s Theatre and stood in a corner of his box is at the Abraham Lincoln Museum, Lincoln Memorial University, Harrogate, Tennessee. The beaver-fur top hat Lincoln wore that night is at the National Museum of American History, which also has the suit he wore the last day of his life before he changed into his evening wear, and the cup, part of the State China, he last sipped from at the Executive Mansion before going to Ford’s Theatre.

  *The fatal bullet that struck Booth was claimed to have been fired by Sergeant Thomas “Boston” Corbett, who became a soldier after an austere religious awakening. Upon hearing a church sermon in Boston in 1859, he realized how sinful he was because of his trysts with some ladies of the night, changed his first name from Thomas to Boston, and castrated himself before enlisting.

  *Gunther also purchased one of the Appomattox Surrender Tables.

  LITTLE SORREL, STONEWALL

  JACKSON’S CHARGER

  DATE: 1886.

  WHAT IT IS: The mounted hide of Stonewall Jackson’s battle horse, Little Sorrel. Thomas Jonathan Jackson, nicknamed “Stonewall” by his troops, was a revered Confederate general in the Civil War.

  WHAT IT LOOKS LIKE: The hide is sorrel, or rust colored, and is mounted over a plaster of Paris frame. Its height is fourteen hands. (The height of a horse is measured from the ground up to the withers, in units called hands, one hand equal to four inches.) The mane is short and scruffy, having fallen prey to souvenir hunters, and many of the hairs on the tail are replacements, because people also plucked its hairs for souvenirs.

  It was the night of May 2, 1863. Chancellorsville, Virginia. The Civil War had been raging for two years now, and fierce combat had taken place here over the past couple of days. More than sixty thousand Confederate soldiers, under Generals Robert E. Lee and Stonewall Jackson, engaged the Federal Army of the Potomac, which was advancing along the Rappahannock. Lee fought the Union army from the front, while Jackson moved to the rear to launch a surprise attack. The Confederates pushed back the 130,000 Union troops, led by General Joseph Hooker, to Chancellorsville, but at a tremendous cost to both sides. The land was now strewn with corpses, the air thick with their stench. There were maimed soldiers crying in agony and raging brush fires and the smell of gunpowder all around. The scene was one of great devastation.

  At about 9:00 P.M. General Jackson and a party of his men were riding down the Orange turnpike on the battlefield at Chancellorsville, returning to camp after having examined the troop positions of the enemy. It was a moment of victory for the Confederates, with Hooker’s army repelled.

  A skillful and successful military leader, Stonewall was revered by the Confederate troops. (Stonewall was a nickname that stuck to him after the Battle of the First Manassas, when Confederate general Barnard Bee, who was being driven by the Union, looked behind him and saw Jackson and his troops on a hill and shouted, “There stands Jackson like a stone wall, rally behind Virginians.”) His parents died when he was a child and he had little formal education; nevertheless, he was accepted into the United States Military Academy at West Point, where he graduated number seventeen in his class. Then the young army officer went off to Mexico, which was at war with the United States, and distinguished himself as a soldier in battle there.

  With few opportunities for advancement after the Mexican War ended in 1848, Jackson became disillusioned with the army. In 1851 he left the army and went to teach at the Virginia Military Institute (VMI), a school established in 1839 to provide military training and secular education to young men who in times of crisis desired to come to the aid of their country.

  The India-rubber raincoat Stonewall Jackson wore the night he was shot at Chancellorsville, May 2, 1863.

  At VMI Jackson taught by rote and wasn’t a particularly inspiring professor, probably because he had not chosen education as his career. In 1861, after ten years at VMI, Thomas J. Jackson was recruited to fight for the Confederate cause in the War Between the States.

  Jackson fought valiantly at Winchester, Cross Keys, Port Republic, and Kernstown, all in the Shenandoah Valley in Virginia, as well as at Antietam in Sharpsburg, Maryland, and Fredericksburg, Virginia. Though he used several different chargers in battle, his favorite was Little Sorrel.

  Two years earlier, in 1861, the horse was on board a Union supply train headed for Washington. But Con
federates captured the train outside of Harpers Ferry, Virginia (later West Virginia), and one of Jackson’s men, surveying the horse stock, selected a pair of sorrel horses and presented them to Jackson as trophies. The smaller of the two horses was intended for Jackson’s wife, but the venerable soldier actually preferred it for himself. The big sorrel he was to ride had more spirit than he desired as well as the curious habit of lying down to rest with its legs folded under him, whereas the smaller horse was gentle. Jackson adopted the little sorrel as his warhorse. To some it may have seemed ironic that Jackson chose to ride a gentle warhorse into battle, but with its calm nature it was easy to control and did not frighten too easily.

  And so it was on Little Sorrel that Jackson was returning to camp on the evening of May 2. Ahead were the Confederate pickets, who were under orders to fire at anything that moved in front of the line.

  The Eighteenth North Carolina Regiment, hearing the clip-clop-ping of horses and seeing figures in the dim moonlight, let out a volley of rounds. They picked off a couple of the returning men, and there was shouting by Jackson’s party to stop firing, that they were Confederates. But the pickets kept shooting, despite the screams. Suddenly, Stonewall Jackson was hit, and Little Sorrel bolted. The firing continued, so if the horse hadn’t retreated, Jackson would probably have been killed on the spot.