Abraham Lincoln’s Catafalque Dream

A few days prior to his assassination, Lincoln recounted the following dream:

About ten days ago I retired very late. I had been up waiting for important dispatches from the front. I could not have been long in bed when I fell into a slumber, for I was weary. I soon began to dream. 

There seemed to be a deathlike stillness about me. Then I heard subdued sobs, as if a number of people were weeping. I left my bed and wandered downstairs. There the same pitiful sobbing broke the silence, but the mourners were invisible. 

I went from room to room; no living person was in sight, but the sounds of distress met me as I passed along. It was light in all the rooms; every object was familiar to me; but where were all the people who were grieving as if their hearts would break? I was puzzled and alarmed. What could be the meaning of all this? 

Determined to find the cause of a state of things so mysterious and so shocking, I kept on until I arrived at the East Room, which I entered. There I met with a sickening surprise. 

Before me was a catafalque, on which rested a corpse wrapped in funeral vestments. Around it were stationed soldiers who were acting as guards; and there was a throng of others weeping pitifully. "Who is dead in the White House?" I demanded of one of the soldiers. 

"The President," was his answer; "he was killed by an assassin!"

Then came a loud burst of grief from the crowd.

From With Malice Toward None: The Life of Abraham Lincoln, by S. B. Oates, 1977, Harper and Row, New York, pp. 425-426 Reprinted with permission.