雙語·林肯傳 29

29

The funeral train bearing Lincoln's body back to Illinois crawled through vast crowds of mourning people. The train itself was smothered in crepe; and the engine, like a hearse-horse, was covered with a huge black blanket trimmed with silver stars.

As it steamed northward faces began to appear beside the track—faces that rapidly multiplied in numbers and increased in sadness.

For miles before the train reached the Philadelphia station it ran between solid walls of humanity, and when it rolled into the city thousands of people were milling and jamming through the streets. Mourners stood in lines three miles long, stretching away from Independence Hall. They edged forward, inch by inch, for ten hours in order to look down at last upon Lincoln's face for but one second. On Saturday at midnight the doors were closed, but the mourners, refusing to be dispersed, kept their places all night long and by three o'clock Sunday morning the crowds were greater than ever and boys were selling their places in line for ten dollars.

Soldiers and mounted police fought to keep traffic lanes open, while hundreds of women fainted, and veterans who had fought at Gettysburg collapsed as they struggled to keep order.

For twenty-four hours before the funeral services were scheduled to take place in New York excursion trains running day and night poured into that city the greatest crowds it had ever known—crowds that filled the hotels and overflowed into private homes and backwashed across the parks and onto steamboat piers.

The next day sixteen white horses, ridden by Negroes, pulled the hearse up Broadway, while women, frantic with grief, tossed flowers in its path. Behind came the tramp, tramp, tramp of marching feet—a hundred and sixty thousand mourners with swaying banners bearing quotations like these: “Ah, the pity of it, Iago—the pity of it!”... “Be still, and know that I am God.”

Half a million spectators fought and trampled upon one another in an effort to view the long procession. Second-story windows facing Broadway were rented for forty dollars each, and window-panes were removed in order that the openings might accommodate as many heads as possible.

Choirs robed in white sang hymns on street corners, marching bands wailed their dirges, and at intervals of sixty seconds the 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 over and kissed the corpse.

When the casket was closed in New York, at noon on Tuesday, thousands who had been unable to view the remains hurried to the trains and sped westward to other points where the funeral car was scheduled to stop. From now on until it reached Springfield the funeral train was seldom out of the sound of tolling bells and booming guns. By day it ran under arches of evergreens and flowers and past hillsides covered with children waving flags; by night its passing was illumined by countless torches and flaming bonfires stretching half-way across the continent.

The country was in a frenzy of excitement. No such funeral had ever before been witnessed, in all history. Weak minds here and there snapped under the strain. A young man in New York slashed his throat with a razor, crying, “I am going to join Abraham Lincoln.”

Forty-eight hours after the assassination a committee from Springfield had hurried to Washington, pleading with Mrs. Lincoln to have her husband buried in his home town. At first, she was sharply opposed to the suggestion. She had hardly a friend left in Springfield, and she knew it. True, she had three sisters living there, but she thoroughly disliked two of them and despised the third one, and she felt nothing but contempt for the rest of the gossiping little village.

“My God, Elizabeth!” she said to her colored dressmaker, “I can never go back to Springfield.”

So she planned to have Lincoln interred in Chicago or placed under the dome of the National Capitol, in the tomb originally constructed for George Washington.

However, after seven days of pleading, she consented to have the body taken back to Springfield. The town raised a public fund, bought a beautiful tract of land consisting of four city blocks—now occupied by the State Capitol—and set men digging day and night.

Finally, on the morning of May 4, the funeral train was in town, the tomb was ready, and thousands of Lincoln's old friends had forgathered for the services, when Mrs. Lincoln, in a sudden rage of erratic temper, countermanded all plans and haughtily decreed that the body must be interred, not where the tomb had been built, but in the Oak Ridge Cemetery, two miles out in the woods.

There were to be no ifs or ands or buts about it. If she did not have her way, she threatened to use “violent” means to carry the remains back to Washington. Why? For a very unlovely reason: the tomb that had been erected in the middle of Springfield stood on what was known as the “Mather block,” and Mrs. Lincoln despised the Mather family. Years before, one of the Mathers had, in some way, aroused her fiery wrath; and now, even in the hushed presence of death, she still cherished her bitter resentment, and would not consent to let Lincoln's body lie for one single night on ground that had been contaminated by the Mathers.

For a quarter of a century this woman had lived under the same roof with a husband who had had “malice toward none,” and “charity for all.” But like the Bourbon kings of France, she had learned nothing, she had forgotten nothing.

Springfield had to bow to the widow's mandate; and so at eleven o'clock the remains were taken out to a public vault in Oak Ridge Cemetery. Fighting Joe Hooker rode ahead of the hearse; and behind it was led Old Buck, covered with a red, white, and blue blanket on which were embroidered the words, “Old Abe's Horse.”

By the time Old Buck got back to his stable, there was not a shred of the blanket left; souvenir-hunters had stripped him bare. And, like buzzards, they swooped down upon the empty hearse, snatching at the draperies and fighting over it until soldiers charged them with bayonets.

For five weeks after the assassination Mrs. Lincoln lay weeping in the White House, refusing to leave her chamber night or day.

Elizabeth Keckley, who was at her bedside during all this time, wrote:

I shall never forget the scene. The wails of a broken heart, the unearthly shrieks, the terrible convulsions, the wild, tempestuous outbursts of grief from the soul. I bathed Mrs. Lincoln's head with cold water, and soothed the terrible tornado as best I could.

Tad's grief at his father's death was as great as the grief of his mother, but her terrible outbursts awed the boy into silence....

Often at night, when Tad would hear her sobbing, he would get up, and come to her bed in his white sleeping-clothes: “Don't cry, Mamma; I can't sleep if you cry! Papa was good, and he has gone to Heaven. He is happy there. He is with God and brother Willie. Don't cry, Mamma, or I will cry too.”