The Final Days of Abraham Lincoln
On April 9, 1865, Abraham Lincoln was paying a visit to Secretary of State William Henry Seward, injured in a carriage accident, when Secretary of War Edwin Stanton burst in with the news: Confederate General Robert E. Lee had surrendered to Ulysses S. Grant and the Union Army earlier that day, ending the bloodiest conflict in American history.
The following morning, after Stanton jolted the region awake with a 500-gun salute at dawn, the populace of Washington, D.