At 7:22 and ten seconds a.m., after an all-night vigil, Abraham Lincoln died in a backroom at the Peterson House on a bed that was too small for him. Doctors had to lay him diagonally atop the mattress. Soldiers wrapped his naked body in an American flag and put him in a plain pine box to remove him.
After they took him to the White House, sheets, pillows, towels and a coverlet lay on the bed, still wet with the president's blood.
Two Peterson House boarders, brothers Henry and Julius Ulke, one a photographer and the other an artist, set up a tripod camera and, with the morning sun flooding the hallway from the front door all the way to the back of the room, photographed the scene.
I understand the bed was at the Chicago Historical Society at one time. Maybe still is.
What About the Bed? --Old Secesh
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