The Nation Mourns: Lincoln’s Final Journey Through New York

It was the bullet felt around the world.

On April 14, 1865, President Abraham Lincoln was shot by stage actor, Confederate sympathizer, and white supremacist John Wilkes Booth at Ford’s Theater in Washington, DC. Lincoln succumbed to his wounds in the early hours of the following day, April 15, at the Peterson Boarding House just across the street. Outside, crowds of grief-stricken Americans gathered in silence, waiting for word, waiting for hope.

The morning after his death, poet Walt Whitman described the grieving scene in New York, writing:

All Broadway is black with mourning — the facades of the houses are festooned with black — great flags with wide & heavy fringes of dead black, give a pensive effect”…“the horror, fever, uncertainty, alarm in the public — Every hour brings a great history event on the wires — at 11 o’clock the new president is sworn

Lincoln’s body was not laid to rest right away. Instead, from April 21 to May 3, 1865, he embarked on one final journey — aboard a funeral train retracing, in reverse, the route he took to his first inauguration four years earlier. The somber procession covered nearly 1,700 miles from Washington, D.C. to Springfield, Illinois, giving a mourning nation the chance to say farewell. In many ways, the journey represented Lincoln’s final sacrifice to the Union..

By the fifth day, the train arrived in Manhattan. An estimated 750,000 New Yorkers filled the streets and flocked to City Hall to pay their respects to the former President on display. Another 160,000 people marched in the city’s grand funeral parade. 

In the days following Lincoln’s assassination, preparations for the procession had been underway, culminating in a stunning display of unity. In large swaths, elected city and state officials, distinguished military officers, and religious leaders of all denominations united and took to the streets, side by side, and honored the late President. Perhaps most poignantly, in the rear of the cavalcade, 200 Black men carried a banner that read: Abraham Lincoln- Our Emancipator.

Before his untimely death, President Lincoln’s connection to New York, and specifically to Greenwich Village, ran deep. In 1860, Lincoln gave his acclaimed Cooper Union Address at the Great Hall of Cooper Union, which helped secure his place as the Republican candidate for president. And come his passing, the city grieved him not just as a president, but as one of their own. Above City Hall hung a drooping yet powerful banner that read “The Nation Mourns.” 

Among the thousands of onlookers was six-year-old Theodore Roosevelt. Joined by his brother Elliott, the future president watched the funeral procession from the windows of his grandfather’s Greek Revival brownstone at 849 Broadway, which sat at the corner of 14th Street and Broadway. It’s a fortuitous photograph, one that links the legacy of the fallen president with the promise of a future one.

Regardless of race, faith, or class, for Lincoln, the city came together. The President’s casket, pulled by sixteen horses, proceeded up Broadway and through our neighborhood to Union Square, where there was another ceremony. Then, the parade went west to Fifth Avenue, traveling north until 34th Street and then west again to the Hudson River Railway Depot. From there, the journey continued to Albany and beyond. 

For a country barely emerging from the trauma of the Civil War — the deadliest and bloodiest conflict it had ever seen — this late-April afternoon was a rare moment of shared sorrow and solemn reflection. On that day, New Yorkers put aside any differences and mourned their fallen President as one.