Lincoln’s Burial (and Re-burials)
(From Who's Buried in Grant's Tomb?: A Tour of Presidential
Gravesites by Brian Lamb, Richard Norton
Smith and Douglas Brinkley.)
The most
revered of presidents has suffered posthumous indignities that Jeb Stuart
wouldn't wish on his worst Yankee enemy. To begin with, there was Lincoln’s
funeral, which at twenty days was prolonged even by the lugubrious standards
the day. Too prostrate with grief to accompany her husband remains to Illinois,
Mary Lincoln found solace by quarreling with her Springfield neighbors, whose
plan to entomb Lincoln in a downtown city lot she loudly vetoed. She insisted
that Lincoln be interred in rural Oak Ridge Cemetery, a park like setting
modeled after such recently consecrated beauty spots as Boston’s Mount Auburn
and Brooklyn.
Alternatively,
Mrs. Lincoln would consign her husband to the basement crypt in the Capitol
that had originally been reserved for George Washington.
In defense
of the much-maligned widow there is something about a funeral that brings out
the worst in people. Within hours of John F. Kennedy's assassination, an Iowa
Congressman and self-proclaimed watchdog of the treasury named H.B. Gross
questioned the cost of placing an eternal flame over Arlington’s Section 45,
Grave S45.
Anyway, with
Mary holding all the cards, the Lincoln Monument Association quickly folded.
Its members may have entertained second thoughts after a band of would be body
snatchers broke into the Lincoln tomb on election night, 1876. The conspirators
planned to hide the presidential remains in an Indiana sand dune pending the
release of their leader, who was in jail on counterfeiting charges. The
intruders nearly succeeded in extricating the Great Emancipator’s coffin before
being surprised by agents who had infiltrated the gang.
Over the
next quarter century, Springfield's city fathers buried and reburied their most
famous citizen.
At one point
Lincoln's casket was concealed under construction materials, leaving admirers
to pay homage before an empty tomb. In September 1901, a small group assembled
at Oak Ridge. Among those in attendance was a thirteen year-old boy named
Fleetwood Lindley, who had been hastily summoned to the scene by his father. A
pungent odor filled the tomb as a blowtorch-wielding plumber removed the
section of Lincoln's green lead casket above the president's head and
shoulders.
Young
Lindley crowded forward with the others to get a better look.
What they saw,
thirty-six years after the fact, was the handiwork of a Philadelphia
undertaker, who had used white chalk to disguise the decomposing corpse during its
cross-country rail journey.
Notwithstanding
this macabre cosmetic touch, Lincoln's features were plainly recognizable to
the boy.
To be sure,
the presidential eyebrows had vanished and yellow mold and small red spots, the
latter guessed to be remnants of an American flag, disfigured the black
broadcloth suit in which Lincoln had taken his second inauguration oath in
March 1865. But the figure in the coffin was unmistakably Abraham Lincoln. His
identity established and the crowd's curiosity gratified, Lincoln was lowered
for the final time into a cage of steel bars and smothered under ten feet of
Portland cement.
Before his
death in 1963, Fleetwood Lindley claimed distinction as the last living person
to have gazed upon the features of Abraham Lincoln.
Note this tale.
