With the exception of The New York Times, which has been running a Civil War Notebook almost daily for the past five years, the media and the nation took little notice of the 150th anniversary of the death of president Abraham Lincoln at the hand of an assassin, John Wilkes Booth, at Ford’s Theater on the evening of April 14, 1865. The mortally wounded president was carried across the street to the William Petersen’s boarding house, where Lincoln died at 7:22:10 a.m. on April 15, 1865.
The New York Times writes today, In Washington, a Solemn Anniversary of Lincoln’s Death:
At just before 8 p.m. on Tuesday night, looking straight out from the Petersen House on 10th Street in Washington, it was briefly possible to filter out the peripheral sounds and sights of the city and imagine the scene 150 years ago almost to the minute, when President Abraham Lincoln’s carriage pulled up in front of Ford’s Theater and delivered him to his fate.
A few hundred people – tourists, some schoolchildren, history buffs – had been drawn to site of America’s first presidential assassination. They milled in front of the arches of the theater, mingling among the smattering of volunteers in Union uniforms. There were a few early theatergoers who had snagged tickets to a memorial performance – not of “Our American Cousin,’’ which Lincoln was watching, but “Now He Belongs to the Ages,’’ which included excerpts from his speeches.
Official Washington paid little heed; President Obama issued a Presidential Proclamation, but when he attended a gospel singing performance in the East Room of the White House on Tuesday night, he never mentioned the anniversary. Outside Ford’s Theater, there were no speeches, or even politicians, except for a Lincoln impersonator with a top hat.
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An American B-29 superfortress named the Enola Gay dropped the first atomic bomb named “Little Boy” at 8:15 a.m. on August 6, 1945 on Hiroshima, Japan. (Image: Atomic Bomb Dome, Hiroshima, Japan).
