The Death of Lincoln: A Premonition

“I think we are near the end at last,” Abe Lincoln told William Seward, his secretary of state, in early April of 1865.

He was referring to the Civil War.  Confederate General Robert E. Lee had just surrendered to Ulysses S. Grant, ensuring that America’s bloodiest and costliest conflict would end in victory for the Union forces under Lincoln’s command.

Alas, little did Lincoln know that his own end also was near. It came this week (April 15) in 1865 at the hand of assassin John Wilkes Booth during a show at Ford’s Theater in Washington, D.C.

But, amazingly, Lincoln did have a foreboding of how his life would end. In what would have made a riveting Shakespearean tragedy, a few weeks prior to his death Lincoln had a dream so haunting that he finally shared it with his wife Mary and members of the White House staff.  In the dream, which was undoubtedly the result of Lincoln’s recurring fitful sleep (itself the result of the terrible burdens of his office), Lincoln found himself wandering the corridors of the White House searching for the origin of a terrible sound, the sound of people wailing. “I went from room to room,” he told Mary and the others, “No living person was in sight, but the same mournful sounds of distress met me as I passed along.”

Finding himself “puzzled and distressed” at this mystery, Lincoln wandered into the East Room, where — as he told his listeners — “I was met with a sickening surprise.” A corpse wrapped in funeral clothing was in the center of the room, with soldiers stationed around it. “Who is dead in the White House?” Lincoln had cried in the dream, only to be told, “The President. He was killed by an assassin!”

When Mary and the others expressed their horror at the dream, Lincoln, realizing how much he had scared his listeners, tried to make light of it, but his attempts at humor fell flat.  Finally, he passed it off by telling the gathering, “Well, let it go. I think the Lord in His own good time and way will work this out all right.”

If so, then Lincoln was right when he had said in his Second Inaugural Address of a month earlier, “The Almighty has His own purposes.” Lincoln’s untimely death made a southern slave owner and sympathizer, Andrew Johnson, president, which changed forever the course of post-war Reconstruction and precipitated a Constitutional crisis so grave that it resulted in Johnson’s impeachment, the first ever impeachment of an American president. In the ensuing Senate trial, Johnson escaped being found guilty by one vote.

Prophecy, perfidy, death and dissension. Shakespeare would have been impressed.