Chapter II [excerpt]

     I shall never forget the excitement caused by the killing of Lincoln, nor the great wave of popular indignation that swept over the country and for a time seemed to obliterate all party feeling. New York and Brooklyn were hung with black and for days nothing else was talked of. Years afterward I met Robert T. Lincoln, who said that he had been almost on the spot at every Presidential assassination. “I had just returned from [20][21] the army the night that my father was killed and, feeling too tired to go with him to the theatre, as he wished, I went to bed and was sleeping soundly when I was awakened and told of the crime. I went at once to the house where he lay and was present when he died. One morning, when I was a member of Garfield’s cabinet, I was summoned to meet him at the Pennsylvania Railroad Station as he intended to take a trip to New York. It was while waiting in a side room that I heard a pistol shot and, filled with a terrible foreboding, I exclaimed, ‘The President is shot!’ and rushed out to find my words true. Many years later I was on my way east from my home in Chicago, and as the train stopped before entering Buffalo, the local superintendent of the Pullman Company, of which I was an official, came into my car to speak to me. His first words were, ‘I have sad news for you’ and without waiting to hear more I cried out, ‘Have they killed the President?’”