Digital Extra: The Journal's 175th Anniversary

07.21.2004

1865. A newspaper in mourning

Like dark pinstripes, heavy black lines ran down the pages of The Journal on April 15, 1865, between the columns of newsprint. The black stripes gave the paper a dark, mournful look.

President Lincoln was dead.

The news had come by telegraph from Washington, D.C.:

Appalling National Calamity

MURDER IN THE CAPITAL

The dispatch was a straightforward account of the shooting of Lincoln at Ford's Theatre during a production of Our American Cousin:

"During the third act, and while there was a temporary pause for one of the actors to enter, a sharp report of a pistol was heard, which merely attracted attention, but suggested nothing serious, until a man rushed to the front of the President's box, waving a long dagger in his right hand, and exclaiming 'sic semper tyrannis,' immediately leaped from the box, which was in the second tier, to the stage beneath, and ran across the opposite side, making his escape amid the bewilderment of the audience."

"The hour of our triumph is the hour of unspeakable sorrow," The Journal mourned in an editorial. "That noble man, most beloved of all men in the nation, the great, the good, Abraham Lincoln, was murdered in cold blood!

"Our pen almost refuses to write the words. But alas! alas! they must be written. That infernal rebel hate, which has pursued him with diabolical fury these four years and more, has at last robbed the nation of his precious life."