Suburban Valkyrie

They came by the thousands, a steady stream of men, women and children dressed in their best, tears in their eyes, mourning badges pinned to their clothes. By one count, more than 7,000 people shuffled past his casket each hour.

Hours upon hours later, as the body of murdered President Abraham Lincoln was carried away from the Cook County Court House back to the funeral train to make the final leg of its solemn journey toward Springfield, the Chicago Tribune estimated that 36,000 people had taken part in the funeral procession, and 100,000 had crowded the streets to witness the procession.

"No community has done itself such peculiar honor as Chicago did yesterday, by the vast magnitude, the perfect order and solemn beauty of the funeral procession," proclaimed the newspaper on May 2, 1865. "The most careful estimates by time and actual count show that thirty-six thousand people participated in the procession as members of organized military, civic, municipal, educational, religious or other associations, apart from the immense numbers, amounting to at least one hundred thousand citizens, who thronged the line of the procession from curb-stone to house top."

Only five years before, the city of Chicago had hosted the Republican National Convention, where the jubilant party faithful had chosen the man who now lay dead - "a man known to the public only for his inflexible honesty and sterling common sense" - to represent their party on the ballot for president and to "reverse the policy of the country in regard to" slavery.

Like generations of Illinois schoolchildren before me, I learned the details of our former president's life and even felt a sort of pride of relation. Growing up in the "Land of Lincoln" makes one acutely aware of the much-revered traits of honesty and integrity for which Lincoln was justifiably renowned.

That academic connection took on a far more personal tenor, however, one day in 1999, when I discovered a brittle, yellowed print among a collection of family photos that I had inherited.

The depiction on the front showed a train.



The handwriting on the back showed why that photo had been kept amongst our family's heirlooms for decades. "Train that carried Lincoln's body from Wash. to Ill."


Shot in the head while watching a play with his wife, Lincoln died the morning of April 15, 1865 - 150 years ago today. It had been just six days since Robert E. Lee surrendered to Ulysses S. Grant at Appomattox Courthouse to end the Civil War. Already torn apart by war and personal loss, much of the nation was plunged into grief and shock at the loss of the president. Though a funeral was held in Washington, D.C., that was not enough. The people needed to pay their respects.

"In an age before television or radio, the only way for a person to participate was to leave her farm or close his store and physically go to a funeral procession where Lincoln lay in state," writes Ainissa Ramirez, in Time magazine. "Lincoln's funeral train allowed the nation to mourn in unison by bringing him to them in a way that neither telegraph nor newspapers could satisfy."

And so began what many historians have called the longest funeral in history.

The United States, a private train car which had been built so that Lincoln would have a means to travel the country to unite the people after the Civil War, instead was outfitted as a hearse car. It carried Lincoln's body on a 13-day, 1,600-mile route from Washington, D.C. to the murdered president's final resting place in the Illinois state capital of Springfield.

A pilot train ran ahead of the funeral train, sounding a solemn bell to give notice to the people. Then the funeral train itself - a portrait of the president mounted above the cattle catcher and black mourning cloth draping the hearse car - would arrive, passing solemnly at no more than 20 miles per hour through each and every community.

An estimated 1.5 million people turned out along the route to bear witness to the president's passing, some traveling to cities to view or participate in elaborate funeral ceremonies, others lining dusty crossroads in the countryside. They came at all hours of the day and night. The president of the New York Central Railroad, who was aboard the funeral train, said, "As we sped over the rails at night, the scene was the most pathetic ever witnessed. At every crossroads the glare of innumerable torches illuminated the whole population, kneeling on the ground."

As the train neared Lincoln's home state and approached Chicago, emotions were high. Newspapers had printed daily updates, dispatched from reporters accompanying the funeral procession, and the people had followed along.

INDIANAPOLIS, Sunday - Midnight
The remains have been placed on the train, and we resume our journey to Chicago. On the way we pass in succession Augusta and Zionsville. These are small places, but it seems the inhabitants are on the roadside. Some of them hold torches in their hands, and the surroundings are solemnly lighted up. Men stand with uncovered heads as the train hurries on its way. - The New York Times, May 1, 1865

By the time the train finally reached Chicago, the city was virtually shut down.

"There was none of the hum of business; none of the rush and whirl and hot haste that characterize Chicago, - but closed stores, silent streets and sadness resting on all faces," wrote U.S. Sanitary Commission activist Mary A. Livermore. "Flags bound with crape floated mournfully at half-mast. Black draperies shrouded the buildings. All talk was low and brief. Many wept as they walked, and on the breast or arm of all were mourning badges. All nationalities, creeds, and sects were ranged along the route to be taken by the funeral cortege, or stood amid the solemn pageantry and funeral splendor of the great procession."

At the time of Lincoln's death, my paternal ancestors - the Wilsons, Holdens, Garretts and Campbells - lived on farms in Fulton County, Illinois. The first husband of my great great great grandmother Mary (Rounds) Garrett, whose name was John W. Shores, had responded to Lincoln's call for more troops in the early years of the Civil War. Shores enlisted in Company G of the 85th Illinois Infantry in August 1862. He was killed in the Battle of Kennesaw Mountain, Georgia, on June 27, 1864, fighting for the ideals in which Lincoln had believed so fervently.

Meanwhile, my maternal ancestors, the Blackburns, still had lived in Pennsylvania in the 1860s but shortly would move to Nebraska, where my great grandfather Ross Milward Blackburn was born. As a young man, Ross took a job with the Chicago & North Western Railway offices in Iowa. In 1905, he was transferred to the company's Chicago office. He worked for the railroad his entire life. It was among the photos from his side of the family where I found the image of Lincoln's funeral train, with the note on the back written in an (as yet) unknown hand.

Who originally had obtained the photo? Who had tucked it away amidst the baby pictures and wedding portraits of the Blackburn and Piehl families?

Moments after Lincoln died in a bedroom at the Petersen boarding house, across the street from Ford’s Theater, the Secretary of War, Edwin Stanton, reputedly said, “Now he belongs to the ages.”

And so he does. But one of my forebears took time to preserve this photographic copy of a copy of a relic of a quintessentially American saint. Perhaps they hoped that by doing so, they too could lay claim to some infinitesimal part of him. They were confident enough in the success of their efforts to make the photo a family heirloom, preserved across the decades. And now, 150 years later, those 1,600 miles of rail have led to a shelf in a closet in my home, where a photo of Lincoln's funeral train laid where it has for decades, folded in amongst photos of somber newlyweds and round-cheeked babies.

I want to follow those rails back where they came from. I want to meet the people who kneeled with lanterns in the night as the fallen President passed by on his journey into the ages. They are my people, and they, too, belong to the ages. But if we take the time to listen to their whispering — and they never stop whispering, which is perhaps why we listen so rarely — the ages also can belong to us.