For the past four years, this nation, undivided, has been noting the sesquicentennial of the greatest conflict this nation has ever faced. This week marks 150 years since the conclusion of the Civil War.
On April 9, 1865, after four long years of bloodshed that nearly tore the nation apart, Gen. Robert E. Lee surrendered his Confederate troops to Union Gen. Ulysses S. Grant, a Clermont County native, in the town of Appomattox Court House, Virginia, effectively ending the war.
A few days after the surrender, Cincinnati Enquirer editors, who had been openly critical of the war, nonetheless granted the newspaper staff a holiday to celebrate the end of the fighting.
That was the day President Abraham Lincoln was assassinated. And The Enquirer missed it.
On April 14, Lincoln was shot in the head while watching a production of the comedy "Our American Cousin" at Ford's Theatre in Washington, D.C.
The assassin, actor John Wilkes Booth, then jumped from the presidential box to the stage below, breaking his leg in the process, and posed for the audience, shouting, "Sic semper tyrannis!" meaning "thus always with tyrants," which is also the Virginia state motto.
Booth, a Confederate sympathizer, was part of a conspiracy plot to kill Lincoln, Grant, Vice President Andrew Johnson, and Secretary of State William H. Seward. Other than the president, only Seward was attacked but he survived stab wounds to his throat and face.
Lincoln died at 7:22 a.m. the next morning.
News in those days had to be sent via telegraph wire. Amazingly, the New York Herald, the biggest-circulation newspaper in the nation, published seven separate editions throughout the night and early morning updating the story as it developed. Their 8:45 a.m. edition on April 15 was the first to declare Lincoln dead.
The Enquirer, having sent the staff home, had no paper on April 16 and had to play catch up.
Booth's acting family on stage in Cincinnati
At the time of Lincoln's murder, Junius Brutus Booth Jr., the elder brother of the assassin, was finishing a two-week engagement in the play "The Three Guardsmen" at Pike's Opera House, Cincinnati's famous theater on Fourth Street between Vine and Walnut streets.
Junius Booth was unaware of what had happened and reported to the theater that morning while crowds clamoring for his head ripped down his playbills. When the acting manager told Booth that his brother had killed the president, Booth reportedly swooned and cried, "My God, can it be possible!"
Junius Booth quickly left town. A few days later in Philadelphia he was arrested and sent to Washington where he was interrogated and released.
John Wilkes Booth, part of the celebrated Booth acting family, had also appeared on stage in Cincinnati in the early 1860s at the National Theater and Wood's Theatre.
On Nov. 14, 1862, The Enquirer reported on Booth's appearance at the National Theater on Sycamore Street, north of Third: "Mr. J. Wilkes Booth will appear to-night for the second and last time in his great impersonation of 'Richard III.' This is Mr. Booth's masterpiece. No actor now upon the stage can render the character of the hump-backed tyrant with equal effect. In short Booth out-Richards Richard."
After a 12-day manhunt, U.S. troops tracked down the fugitive assassin to a farm in Virginia on the morning of April 26, 1865, and John Wilkes Booth was killed. (There are conflicting reports of whether he was shot by a soldier or himself.)
The news of Booth's demise overshadowed a tremendous tragedy that occurred the next day.
On April 27, the steamship S.S. Sultana, which had been built at the John Lithoberry Shipyard in Cincinnati in 1863, exploded and sank on the Mississippi River near Memphis. The ship traveling from Vicksburg, Mississippi, to Cairo, Illinois, had been carrying Union soldiers, many of them recently freed from Confederate prison camps, when the overworked boilers blew up.
Of the 2,300 on board, six times the ship's legal capacity, 1,547 perished, according to the official number from the U.S. Custom Service, making it the worst maritime disaster in U.S. history, with a larger death toll than the R.M.S. Titanic. Of those who perished, 791 were from Ohio, about 50 from Cincinnati.
The Sultana tragedy was overshadowed by news of the war and Booth's death, and is still largely overlooked, although there is a historical marker at Sawyer Point.
Ulysses S. Grant hailed as American hero
In the 20th century, scholars criticized Grant for his drinking and high casualties on the battlefield, but until his death on 1885, Grant, perhaps more so even than Lincoln, was regarded as an American hero who saved the Union.
Grant rode his popularity to two terms in the White House. Although his administration was marred by scandals and corruption, Grant himself was never implicated.
He was a frequent visitor to the Queen City since his parents had relocated to Covington and are buried in Spring Grove Cemetery. Whenever Grant was in town, he enjoyed playing billiards at the Grand Hotel on the southwest corner of Fourth Street and Central Avenue.
Gus Hobelman, manager of the hotel's billiard room, recalled, "I don't believe I saw President Grant during his entire stay here without a long black cigar clamped between his teeth. He did not remove it even when bending over the table to make a shot. Every shot seemed as important to him as Lee's surrender and he executed a difficult one successfully."
After his presidency, Grant embarked on a world tour and wrote a best-selling memoir published by Mark Twain.
Grant's birthplace house in Point Pleasant, 25 miles east of Cincinnati, was carefully uprooted and carried by raft to be displayed Downtown for the Centennial Exposition of the Ohio Valley and Central States, commemorating Cincinnati's centennial, in 1888.
The small frame house then went on a tour of the country by train before it was relocated to the state fairgrounds in Columbus until 1936. The house was then restored and returned to Point Pleasant, where it remains a local historic landmark.
