Today, my latest for USA Today posted:
The worst Good Friday in U.S. history began with good spirits, as Americans rejoiced that the Civil War had essentially ended with Confederate Gen. Robert E. Lee's surrender five days earlier.
Two days after Lee met Union Gen. Ulysses S. Grant at Appomattox Court House, jubilant crowds had gathered outside the White House, clamoring for a speech from President Abraham Lincoln, who delivered subdued words of reconciliation, not unaware of the long task of reconciliation and rebuilding that lay ahead.
Earlier that year, Lincoln had delivered one of the greatest speeches in the American canon, his second inaugural address: "With malice toward none with charity for all with firmness in the right as God gives us to see the right let us strive on to finish the work we are in to bind up the nation’s wounds, to care for him who shall have borne the battle and for his widow and his orphan – to do all which may achieve and cherish a just and lasting peace among ourselves and with all nations. "
In the crowd at both speeches was a stage actor whom Lincoln had seen perform. John Wilkes Booth, a Confederate sympathizer, was not stirred toward reconciliation by Lincoln’s rhetoric but was provoked. His original plan to kidnap the president and hold out for ransom was thwarted by Appomattox, so he turned toward darker fantasies.
On Good Friday at a Cabinet meeting, the story goes, the president admitted to strange dreams. In this nightmare, he approached the White House only to see his aides mourning the loss of the president. It was an eerie premonition of his own death.
When the meetings were over, Grant pulled Lincoln aside and politely turned down a request to attend a play, "Our American Cousin," that night. The general and his wife were weary of the nation's capital, eager to see family in New Jersey and, according to many historians, not keen on a night out that included Lincoln’s mercurial wife, Mary.
Lincoln took Mary to the theater with guests Maj. Henry Rathbone and his fiancée, Clara Harris. The news of the president's planned attendance had been published in the newspapers, giving Booth the perfect opportunity to carry out his attack.
Shortly after 10 p.m. April 14, 1865, Booth slipped into the presidential box and assassinated the man widely considered America's greatest president.
When news of the president’s death made its way across the country that weekend, pastors hurriedly changed their normally joyous Easter messages. Charles Hall, pastor of the Church of Epiphany in Washington, D.C., declared: “We gather now around an open grave, permitted to be opened on this Easter Day by the awful and wicked tragedy of this last Good Friday, to temper our pious gratulations as believers with the sorrow which has befallen us as citizens. The grave and gate of death open before us as a people, and we mourn the sanguinary crimes which have made our Good Friday so marked an event in the history of the world. … We are an afflicted nation, horrified by the darkest crimes which can befall a people.”
Read more here at USA Today.