Letters from an American - Now He Belongs to the Ages

Episode Date: April 16, 2026

April 15, 2026Abraham Lincoln and Mary Todd Lincoln spent the evening of April 14 at Ford’s Theater in Washington, That night, John Wilkes Booth entered the presidential box and fatally shot Lincoln, As Americans mourned Lincoln’s death, Andrew Johnson restored the political power of the Confederates, Congress fought back, and after discrimination based on race became punishable, the Confederate rhetoric turned to economics, Right wing movements, claiming they fought for individual liberty expanded, eventually joined the planning and execution of the January 6 attack on the Capitol in 2021, Trump pardoned the participants, On April 15, President Abraham Lincoln died, breaking the hearts of those who supported his actions to preserve American democracy. Watch today's recording here: https://www.youtube.com/live/g9TUa1Rwd6U?si=T8_KKcHQZElhpnZ-Get full, free access to Letters from an American here: https://heathercoxrichardson.substack.com/subscribeYou can also find me:Bluesky: https://bsky.app/profile/hcrichardson.bsky.socialInstagram: https://www.instagram.com/heathercoxrichardson/?hl=enFacebook: https://www.facebook.com/heathercoxrichardson/YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@heathercoxrichardson Get full access to Letters from an American at heathercoxrichardson.substack.com/subscribe

April 15, 26. On the evening of April 14, 1865, President Abraham Lincoln and First Lady Mary Todd Lincoln went to Ford's Theater in Washington, D.C., to see a production of the comedy, Our American C. The Lincoln's had spent the afternoon taking a carriage ride together and discussing the future, including the travel they hoped for, to Europe and to California to see the Pacific Ocean. One of the last men to speak with the president before he left for the theater said it seemed the cares of the previous four years were melting away. The Confederacy was all but defeated, and the nation seemed to be on its way to a prosperous, inclusive new future. The very heavens seemed to reflect the dawn of a new era. Poet Walt Whitman noted that after months of fog and clouds, the weather had cleared. The Western star, Venus, in the earlier hours of evening, has never been so large, so clear, he wrote. It seems as if it told something, as if it held rapport indulgent with humanity, with us Americans.

When the Lincoln's and their guests arrived at the theater at about 8.30, the people in the audience leaped to their feet to applaud, and the actors stopped the production while the orchestra played Hail to the Chief. About a half hour later, the president felt chilly and put on his overcoat, but was clearly relaxed and enjoying the play. Shortly after 10 o'clock, the Lincoln's were holding hands, and Mrs. Lincoln worried their public affection would scandalize the young Clara Harris, daughter of New York Senator Ira Harris, who shared their box with her fiancé, Major Henry Rathbone.

Mrs. Lincoln whispered to her husband that she wondered what Clara would think of them holding hands, and Lincoln answered, she won't think anything about it. They would be the last words he ever spoke. On the stage, the play had just reached its best joke, and as the audience roared with laughter, actor John Wilkes Booth entered the presidential box and shot Lincoln in the head, then slashed Rathbone's arm as the officer tried to stop him from getting away.

He jumped to the stage, breaking his leg, and shouted the state motto of Virginia, sick Semper Tyrannus, thus always to tyrants. As Booth escaped, news spread that Secretary of State William Henry Seward had also been attacked, and in the days to follow, the euphoria of the last days of the war gave way to grief. The windows in Washington, D.C. were hung with black garlands, and then the rain came back. In New York City, Whitman wrote in his diary, Lincoln's death, black, black, black. As you look toward the sky, long, broad, black, like great

serpents slowly undulating in every direction. New York is distinguished for its countless gay flags. Every house seems to have a flagstaff. On all these, the colors were at half-mast. At first, Americans wanted revenge against the men who had slain their president. After a two-week investigation in which they questioned hundreds of people, investigators identified 10 people they believed responsible for Lincoln's death. Booth himself had been killed on April 26th as officers tried to take him into custody. Another conspirator had fled the country. The other eight stood trial for seven weeks before a military commission in May and June, 1865. Four were sentenced.

to death by hanging, four were imprisoned. But while Americans mourned Lincoln, the new president, Andrew Johnson, restored the political power of Confederates. On May 29th, he issued a blanket pardon for most former Confederates, except certain leaders and wealthy Southern planters. Those, he said, could apply to him directly for a presidential pardon, which he promised would be liberally extended. They were. By December 1865, he had pardoned all but about 1,500 former Confederate leaders. At the same time, Johnson either looked the other way or cheered as Southern state legislatures passed black codes, laws that worked to push black Americans back into subservience. Congress had adjourned in March 1865, the day of Lincoln's second inauguration,

and Johnson refused to call it back into emergency session after Lincoln's death. When it convened in December, Johnson told the congressman that Reconstruction was over. Northern congressmen simply had to seat newly elected Southern congressmen, some of whom had led the Confederacy less than a year before, to end the unpleasantness of the war years. Congress fought back trying to protect the principles for which Lincoln had died, but with no accountability for a war that had left 620,000 Americans dead and cost more than $5 billion, the ideas of the Confederacy never became odious.

Former Confederates still talked to newspapermen, gave speeches, ran for office, and garnered support. By the 1870s, after the establishment of the Department of Justice meant that discrimination based on race could result and federal charges, former Confederates switched their rhetoric from race to economics. Because most black men were impoverished, their votes for roads and schools and hospitals translated into tax levies on white men with property. Former Confederates argued that black voting was just a redistribution of wealth from white taxpayers to black Americans, a form of socialism. That rhetoric appealed to Northern Americans who worried about immigrants voting in cities.

Increasingly, they listened as former Confederates began to argue that their fight had not been to spread human enslavement, despite their many declarations saying exactly that, but to preserve individualism from a grasping federal government. By the 1890s, towns not only across the south, but also in the north and west, were putting up statues of Confederate soldiers as symbols of true America. In the 1930s, with the Southern economy dependent on New Deal programs from the federal government, Confederate iconography fell out of sight, but it sprang back to popularity after President Harry S. Truman, a Democrat, ordered the integration of the U.S. military in 1948. That year, the Democratic Party split in two as half of the party followed Truman and half refused. Southern racists under then South Carolina Governor Strom Thurmond, who had fathered the child of his family's teenage black housekeeper in 1925,

formed the segregationist states' rights Democratic Party called Dixie Kratzy Krat. in a play on the South's nickname and took the Confederate battle flag as their party flag. The ruling of a unanimous Supreme Court that racial segregation in the public schools was unconstitutional. In the May 1954, Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas decision, resurrected Confederate ideology more widely. In Georgia, the Ku Klux Klan had reformed near Stone Mountain outside of Atlanta, in the early 20th century, and the United Daughters of the Confederacy set out to create a giant carving

of Confederate leaders on the side of the mountain. The plan had been abandoned in 1928 as interest in the project waned, but it was reborn after Brown v. Board. Vice President Spiro Agnew dedicated the monument, which features Confederate leaders Jefferson Davis, Robert E. Lee, and Stonewall Jackson in May 1970. The idea that those embracing the iconography of the Confederacy were simply defending individual liberty against an overreaching government became an article of faith among the radical right, especially as the Republican Party complained that the taxes necessary to run a modern government that included everyone were promoting socialism.

Former Army gunner Timothy McVeigh wrote to a newspaper in 1992 saying, Taxes are a joke. More taxes are always the answer to government mismanagement. Is a civil war imminent? Do we have to shed blood to reform the current system? I hope it doesn't come to that, but it might. Three years later, McVeigh set off a bomb at the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma, killing 168 people, including 19 children younger than six, and wounding more than 800 others. When captured, he was wearing a t-shirt with a picture of Abraham Lincoln and the words, Sick Semper, Tyrannus. In 2009, Elmer Stewart Rhodes, a lawyer and former paratrooper,

who had been a staffer for Representative Ron Paul, a Republican of Texas. started a right-wing gang called the Oath-keepers. Claiming to take their inspiration from the Patriots who stood against the British regulars on Lexington Green in 1775, they pledged to stand against what they considered a tyrannical government. In 2021, Rhodes and the Oath-keepers, along with the right-wing proud boys, were part of the planning and execution of the January 6th attack on the U.S. Capitol,

when they tried to stop the counting of the electoral votes that would make Democrat Joe Biden, president. Biden had won both the electoral vote and the popular vote by more than 7 million votes, but the insurrectionists wanted their own leader, President Donald Trump, to stay in office. One of the rioters accomplished what the southern troops during the Civil War had never been able to. He carried the Confederate flag into the United States Capitol. In November 2022, a federal jury convicted roads of seditious conspiracy for using force and violence to try to stop the process of the Democratic election of a president. Juries found at least a dozen other oathkeepers guilty of seditious conspiracy or other serious crimes.

As soon as he retook all, he took all of. office in 2025, Trump issued a sweeping pardon to the participants in the January 6th attack who had been convicted of crimes, including the crimes of using a deadly weapon and causing serious bodily injury to an officer, removing accountability for their attempt to overturn the nation's democratic process and releasing them back into the streets. At the time, he commuted the sentence of 14 of the leading oathkeepers and proud boys, ending prison sentences that had been as long as 22 years. Because he did not pardon those leaders, but commuted their sentences, their cases continued to work their way through the appeals court. Yesterday, the Department of Justice moved to wipe out the seditious conspiracy convictions altogether. The United States has determined in its prosecutorial discretion that dismissal of this criminal case is in the interests of justice, Assistant U.S. Attorney Daniel Lenners of the U.S. Attorney's Office in Washington, D.C., wrote, Exactly 161 years before, on the night of April 14, 1865, bystanders at Ford's Theater had carried the grievously

wounded Lincoln to a boarding house across the street, where members of his cabinet crowded around his bed. At 722, on the morning of April 15, 1865, President Abraham Lincoln breathed his last. His Secretary of War, Edwin Stanton, stood heartbroken by the bedside of the man who had tried to preserve American democracy and said, Now he belongs to the ages. When he tried to put his own loss and that of the nation to poetry, Walt Whitman thought back to the heady days of spring 1865, when the heavens themselves seemed to promise a glorious democratic future

and their contrast to what came after. When lilacs last in the dooryard bloomed, he wrote, and the great star early drooped in the western sky and the night, I mourned and yet shall mourn with ever-returning spring. Letters from an American was written and read by Heather Cox Richardson. It was produced at Soundscape Productions, Dead of Massachusetts, recorded with music composed by Michael Moss.