The car was so wide that every depot and tunnel between Chicago and Springfield had to be modified, but the funeral offered an unparalleled opportunity to promote one of Chicago's most important new industrial products. (KARAMANSKI 248)

A company of Union soldiers surrounded him in a tobacco barn. They had been ordered to bring Booth back alive, but a sergeant shot him in the neck, paralyzing him. Booth begged them to tell his mother that he died for his country, then asked the soldiers to lift his paralyzed hands to his face, whispering his last words, "Useless, useless!" Relic hunters eagerly scavenged locks of hair from his lifeless body. The national fascination with Booth transformed the black mustached conspirator into America's quintessential villain.

Among the most notorious Copperheads were a small cadre of Chicagoans arrested for the "Great North-Western Conspiracy," a plot to release Confederate prisoners from Chicago's Camp Douglas and lay waste to the city. The Chicago conspirators were found guilty in the Camp Douglas affair on April 19, the week following Lincoln's death. The popular press fueled the public's fears of a vast national conspiracy with allusions to the Chicago conspirators:

 

The assassination of Lincoln is the work of those secret Western clubs whose mysteries have been developed in late judicial proceedings in Chicago... This order, whose history, when known, will entitle it to outrank all the secret political orders of Italy, in the enormity of its crimes, still exists - not only in the Northwest, but to an alarming extent throughout the North and South; and its leaders are now plotting fresh treason... It works in secret within its "temples" and without; places its assassins in hiding to shoot and stab; applies the torch at midnight, when the innocent are wrapped in peaceful slumbers; waylays railway trains, to tumble them down embankments, by the displacement of the track; conceals torpedoes in coal heaps to explode in steamboat furnaces and hotels... It is shown that the programme of murder was arranged on an immense scale, and at least one hundred prominent personages were marked for sacrifice to the Moloch of Blood. There were one hundred armed assassins at Ford's theatre on the night of the 14th of April, each ready to aim the deadly bullet at the life of a victim. (HAWLEY 30,34-35)

Lincoln's funeral train in Chicago, May 1865 (ICHi-11261).


The president was buried in Springfield, Illinois in May 1865. His remains were subsequently moved seventeen times, including an attempted grave robbery in 1876. Robert Lincoln, the president's eldest son, finally ordered his father reburied under four thousand pounds of cement in 1901.

In Chicago, Lincoln's remains were transferred to a special Chicago, Alton and St. Louis Railway train equipped with George Pullman's first "Pioneer" palace car.
Lock of hair attributed to John Wilkes Booth and carte de visite of John Wilkes Booth with Satan (ICHi-31002).

There was a widespread belief in the North that Booth was part of a larger conspiracy of Confederates and Copperheads, or northern Confederate sympathizers. After arresting and questioning hundreds of suspects, the government charged nine people with conspiring to assassinate the president.

Portraits of the conspirators charged with the assassination of Abraham Lincoln, The Trial of the Assassins and Conspirators at Washington City, DC, May & June, 1865, for the Murder of President Abraham Lincoln,1865, and ticket of admission to the trial of the conspirators dated May 22, 1865.
The president's assassin, John Wilkes Booth, was apprehended in Virginia less than two weeks after his escape from Ford's Theatre.