A Post for Lincoln's Birthday

Today is the 217th anniversary of Abraham Lincoln's birth. On this day, Gossips recalls Lincoln's connections with our little city on the Hudson.

From February 11 to February 23. 1861, Lincoln made his inaugural journey by train from Springfield, Illinois, to Washington, D.C., stopping in eighty-three cities along the way. On his 52nd birthday, Lincoln was in Cincinnati. On February 19, Lincoln's train left Albany and made the journey, quoting Carl Sandburg, "Down the Hudson River, with greetings at Troy, Hudson, Peekskill. Then New York, the Front Door to America." 

In the spring of 1865, one week after his assassination, the train bearing Lincoln's corpse from Washington, D.C., back to Springfield also stopped in Hudson. The train arrived in Hudson at 9:45 p.m. Assistant Adjutant General Edward D. Townsend, commander of the funeral train, described what transpired in Hudson in his journal:

At Hudson . . . elaborate preparations had been made. Beneath an arch hung with black and white drapery and evergreen wreaths, was a tableau representing a coffin resting upon a dais; a female figure in white, mourning over the coffin; a soldier standing at one end and a sailor at the other. While a band of young women dressed in white sang a dirge, two others in black entered the funeral-car, placed a floral device on the President's coffin, then knelt for a moment in silence, and quietly withdrew. This whole scene was one of the most weird ever witnessed, its solemnity being intensified by the somber light of the torches at that dead hour of night.

In 2013, Jamison Teale read this account from Townsend's journal in James L. Swanson's book Bloody Crimes: The Funeral of Abraham Lincoln and the Chase for Jefferson Davis. Teale shared that discovery with Gossips, and two years later, on April 25, 2015, the sesquicentennial of the funeral train, what was described by Townsend in his journal was re-created on the lawn beside the Hudson train station. 

Photo: Robert Burns

An account of that event can be found here. 

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