Letter Written by Albert Daggett

“April 15th, 1865, 10 A.M. My Dearest Mother, Within the last 12 hours this city has been the scene of the most terrible tragedies that can be found upon the records of historians. Abraham Lincoln, our noble, self sacrificing President has fallen by the hand of an accursed, traitorous assassin!” Albert Daggett, a nineteen-year-old clerk in the Department of State, was in Ford’s Theatre on the evening of April 14th, seated approximately twenty feet from the presidential box. He wrote this eleven-page letter to his mother on April 15th and 16th describing what he witnessed at the theater, the attack on Secretary of State William Seward, and the pending funeral arrangements. “The Crimson blood of a Lincoln, of a Seward and of a hundred thousand fallen patriots and martyrs calls loudly for revenge,” Daggett wrote. “Never has a nation passed through such an awful ordeal as this!” Read the entire letter by copying and pasting this URL into your browser: http://cdm16089.contentdm.oclc.org/cdm/compoundobject/collection/p16089coll38/id/4320