A STRANGE COINCIDENCE IN THE LIVES OF LINCOLN AND HIS SLAYER.
When President Lincoln was assassinated on the night of April 14, 1865, while witnessing a play at Ford’s Theater in Washington, he was removed to the Peterson house, which was directly opposite the theater.
The late John T. Ford related that he had occasion to visit John Wilkes Booth at the Peterson house once. The Davenport-Wallack combination was playing “Julius Cæsar” at Ford’s theater. Booth had been cast to play Marc Antony and was late in coming to rehearsal. Ford went over to the house to ask him to hurry up. He found Booth lying in bed studying his lines. He little dreamed then that Lincoln would so shortly die in the same house, the same room and on that identical bed, or that Booth would turn out to be his assassin.
WHERE IS THE ORIGINAL EMANCIPATION PROCLAMATION?
When Lincoln went to Washington he had a sale of the furniture of the Eighth street home at Springfield. Most of the articles were bought by a well-to-do family named Tilton, who admired the President in such a way as to make what had belonged to him things to be treasured. When the troops passed through Springfield to the front they visited the house “where Uncle Abe had lived,” and the Tiltons used to confer great favor by permitting the boys in blue to sit down in the dining room and have a glass of milk off the table from which Mr. Lincoln had eaten many times. But the Tiltons moved away to Chicago. They carried with them the furniture which had been in the Lincoln house, prizing it more than ever after his death. In 1871 came the Chicago fire, and with it went not only the Lincoln furniture, but the original document, which, if it were in existence now, would be preserved with the zeal that guards the Declaration of Independence—the Proclamation of Emancipation. The draft of the proclamation had been sent to Chicago to be exhibited for some purpose and was burned in that fire.
MR. GRIFFITHS ON LINCOLN.
“No other public man has been subjected to such scrutiny from the time he was born until the end of his tragic career as was Lincoln,” said Mr. Griffiths in a lecture. “He obtained his early education from ‘Æsop’s Fables,’ ‘Robinson Crusoe,’ the ‘Pilgrim’s Progress’ and a copy of the Indiana statutes. This was before some of our later legislatures had made their records or his education might have been marred instead of made.