The centre of it had reached the Capitol and was returning before the rear had left Willard’s. The procession was two hours and ten minutes in passing a given point, and was about three miles long. Reporter Benjamin Perley Poore described the dramatic scene: In the Rotunda, the body of the martyred president lay in state upon a hastily constructed catafalque. Rejoice that through him Emancipation was proclaimed.” Having just days before taken to the streets in joyful celebration, Washingtonians now solemnly lined Pennsylvania Avenue as the massive funeral procession made its way to the Capitol. “Mourn not the dead,” Sumner later wrote in his eulogy to Lincoln, “but rejoice in his life and example. Keeping his deathbed vigil throughout the long night, the Massachusetts senator was one of the few present when Lincoln died on the morning of April 15. As the president lay dying in a house across the street from the theater, Senator Charles Sumner appeared at his bedside. The euphoria of Union victory came to a sudden halt on the night of April 14, 1865, when President Lincoln was shot while attending a play at Ford’s Theatre. ![]() Secretary of War Edwin Stanton ordered that guns be fired in salute to commemorate the day. Lee surrendered at Appomattox, crowds of Washingtonians again took to the streets in jubilation. ![]() ‘This is the Lord’s doing it is marvelous in our eyes.’” A week later, after Confederate General Robert E. ![]() To celebrate the event, French “had the 23rd verse of the 118th Psalm printed on cloth, in enormous letters, as a transparency, and stretched on a frame the entire length of the top of the western portico. It was indeed glorious, all Washington was in the streets,” wrote Benjamin Brown French, commissioner of public buildings in Washington, D.C. “The Capitol made a magnificent display-as did the whole city. On April 4, 1865, as news of the fall of Richmond spread, public buildings throughout Washington were illuminated in celebration.
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