150 Years Ago: April 23

The body of Abraham Lincoln spent this day, April 23, 1865, lying in state at Independence Hall in Philadelphia. People began lining up to view the President's body at 5 a.m., and many waited in line for as many as five hours for the chance to pass by the open coffin. "At its greatest, the double line was three miles long and wound from the Delaware River to the Schuylkill River." It was estimated at 300,000 people viewed Lincoln's body in Philadelphia.

According to accounts, the crowd in Philadelphia was so immense that the police had trouble maintaining order. "Some people had their clothing ripped, others fainted, one broke her arm."

Embalming was a fairly new art in 1865. Lincoln was the first president to be embalmed, and the Civil War was the first war in which slain soldiers were embalmed to be returned home for burial. The funeral train traveled with an embalmer and a mortician, and after its stay in Philadelphia, Lincoln's corpse needed a little touch. In his book The Lincoln Train in Pennsylvania, Bradley R. Hoch recounts, "As soon as the entrances closed and the public was out of the Assembly Room . . . embalmer Brown cleaned Lincoln's face of the dust that had accumulated during 33 hours in Philadelphia."
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