Lincoln's Last Day

Oh, no!

A great man is reduced to memory.

Objects that were kept warm in his pockets,

just hours before, are ownerless.

In the day that led to his last moments

Abraham Lincoln suspected nothing.

The Civil War was ending, Robert E. Lee had surrendered,

and Lincoln was looking forward to the rest of his life.

They started planning the future.

They were happy.

But a band of Confederate sympathizers

spent those same hours activating a deadly plot...

Then fate steps in and takes it all from them.

History was changed in an instant.

They arrive late to the theatre,

and the play begins...

and then it was the story that everybody knows.

But this story goes inside the tragedy...

as the clock ticks down

the last 24 hours of Lincoln's life.

What happened on that fateful day?

And what can we learn from the objects that survive?

Morning. April 14, 1865.

In just 24 hours

the country will be plunged into unimaginable grief.

But the day dawned bright and sunny.

The nation was emerging

from the bloody sacrifice of Civil War.

The war hung over Abraham Lincoln's presidency

like a cloud.

The problem of slavery

was threatening to tear the country apart

before the ink was even dry on the constitution.

On Lincoln's watch... it happened.

If he succeeded

in soldering the Union back,

then he would obviously be considered alongside Washington

as among the greatest of American presidents.

On the other hand, if he faile,

he would be the last president of the United States.

And there was really nothing in between.

It had been just five days before April 14th

that the southern surrender at Appomattox

marked the beginning of the end of the war.

There's just this sense of this relief

after four years of this incredible war,

and here's this moment

where it's like the clouds are breaking,

the sun is coming out.

Lincoln starts the day

with a personal account of the end of the war.

Tell Cornelia everything

was excellent this morning.

It's perfect.

He has breakfast with his family,

including his son Robert, who's home from the war.

Tell us about your adventure

with General Grant.

As an aide to General Ulysses S. Grant,

Robert Todd Lincoln was witness to the surrender.

Ordinary transaction.

President Lincoln expressed a lot of interest

in details about the surrender of General Lee,

what he looked like,

and expressed, you know, his hope for a happy future.

We should go for a drive this afternoon.

Mary Lincoln talks about their plans

to attend the theatre that evening.

There were two great theatres

in Washington at that time,

Ford's Theatre and Grover's.

All the Lincolns had to do was express an interest in coming,

and believe me, the theatre people knocked themselves silly

getting the tickets to the White House.

Because if the President is coming, you know,

that brought in extra patrons.

You wanted to see the President,

even if you didn't want to see the play.

When I was a boy, my mother would make...

For a modern president,

going to the theatre constituts a security nightmare,

but Lincoln lived in a different world.

He has this great thirst

for human contact and relationships.

And so he works hard at not isolating himself

within the world of the White House.

Lincoln was seemingly determined

not to be a prisoner of his office,

not to live in the bubble.

Because even in the 19th century there was a bubble.

It was the Lincolns' habit

to see a play nearly every wee.

Their patronage was raising the social profile of the theatre.

There were many people who disliked the theatre.

It had a false reality to it, for example.

There were extravagance, emotionalism,

coarse audiences, late hours,

a historic association with prostitution, for example.

A lot of these things led

kind of the moral element of the country

to exclude or boycott actors socially.

The evening's performance

stars the British actress and director Laura Keene.

Known for her beautiful dancing girls,

reviewers warned polite audiences

of the "the hidden mysteries of alabaster bosoms"

and the "finely shaped legs" parading Ms. Keene's stage.

Keene's comedy "Our American Cousin"

was her signature production.

But history will remember it for one tragic event.

So how can I help you?

After breakfast, in his White House office,

he meets with Nancy Bushrod, a newly freed woman

seeking back pay for her Union soldier husband.

Interestingly enough we do know a little bit

about how Lincoln might have reacted

to the newly freed people.

In the fall of '63,

he had issued a proclamation of amnesty and reconstruction.

And what he seemed to be saying

was that freed people should be educated.

They had to become a part of American society.

They needed to be treated fairly.

Lincoln promises Mrs. Bushrod

she will receive the lost paychecks.

At 11 a.m., he leads a cabinet meeting.

It was a good meeting.

Everyone said Lincoln seemed light-hearted,

that like a burden had been lifted off him

by the surrender of the main Confederate Army.

Lincoln made it clear

that he wasn't interested in any more blood-letting.

He didn't want to be party to hanging Jeff Davis

or any other of the ringleaders of the late rebellion.

Enough lives have been sacrificed.

- Agreed, Mr. President. - Healing must...

Secretary of War Edwin Stanton

has a seat at the cabinet tabl.

Just days before, Lincoln refused to let him resign,

pleading he needed Stanton's help

through the war's final act.

Assistant Secretary of State Frederick Seward

is filling in for his injured father.

William Seward is bedridden after a carriage accident.

Seward is really Lincoln's

closest confidant and advisor,

so in some sense he's deputy president.

General, I'm delighted...

Fresh from the surrender,

General Grant is the celebrity in the room.

Lincoln invites him to the theatre,

but Grant and his wife are leaving town

to visit their children.

At 3 p.m., Lincoln meets with his vice president,

Andrew Johnson.

There probably couldn't be two people more opposite

than Andrew Johnson and Abraham Lincoln.

Johnson hated black people in general.

He did not believe that black people had any righs

that he had to recognize.

Almost all you need to know about Andrew Johnson

is that he didn't call it reconstruction.

He called it restoration.

Well, words matter.

And sometimes words matter a great deal.

At 4 o'clock,

Lincoln set the complicated affairs of the nation aside

for a rare outing with his wif.

It was unusual, maybe exceptional,

that Lincoln would have asked to join his wife

on her carriage ride around the city.

He wanted to go alone, just the two of them,

nobody trailing along.

It was a very sort of intimate moment for them.

And it comes out of this buoyancy

of, you know, the war is over.

We finally can look to our future.

All of the self-doubt, you kno, somehow is relieved.

A lovely day.

Oh, yes. This is gonna be nice.

Lost in a moment of bliss,

Lincoln was unaware of the nefarious conspiracy

organizing to take his life.

We need to talk.

You look like you're feeling quite well.

Giddy, in fact.

She talks about how he's in this giddy mood.

And in a sense she's teasing him, you know...

seeing this individual

that she knew many years ago in Springfield

seems to be emerging.

This burden is just lifting off him.

I'm happy to be with you today.

Lincoln did have a very hard time during the wa.

Not only the responsibilities, the decisions

that led to the deaths of thousands of people,

but he also lost his son Willie in 1862.

That sent Mrs. Lincoln into a spiraling depression.

Willie was just 11 years old when he died.

From what we hear, he was Lincoln's favorite child