It took nine hours for the powerful frame of the President to give up its battle, the final battle of the long horrific Civil War. Doctors worked to remove blood clots from the wound and the medical debate about whether Lincoln could have been saved rages on uselessly to this day. Booth's derringer is in the basement museum of Ford's Theater across the street. The hunting knife is there too, the one Booth used to slice open the arm of Major Rathbone who just happened to be sitting with the President and his wife in the balcony box on April 14, 1865. The bullet, some hair, and a fragment of the poor president's skull, I understand, along with the doctor's blood-stained shirt cuffs are on display at Walter Reed Army Medical Center just down the road in Washington, DC.

Tourists still file into the Peterson House from the street in an endless parade as they have from the first hours after the body was removed. Back then they were less orderly. Julius Elke, a boarder at Peterson's took a fuzzy photograph of the bloody bed where the president had lain, placed diagonally to accommodate his lengthy frame. Then the souvenir hunters swarmed in, grabbing up everything in sight - clothes, bedding, furniture, even shredding bits of wallpaper and carpeting.

Today visitors still climb a few steps and turn into a dark hallway of the Peterson House where a young US National Park ranger with a walkie-talkie smiles and directs the flow of traffic to the left, through the parlor where Mary Todd Lincoln screamed and cried uncontrollably at the news of her husband's death. Visitors file through another small room which, for a few short moments, served as the seat of the US Government as the mantel of leadership passed on. Booth had intended to cripple the North by assassinating the vice president and secretary of state as well, but his rag-tag troupe of conspirators failed by inches.

Had I been in fourth grade like the 21st century kids who pushed past me in line, shoving their way from the boring old parlor and into the death bed room, things might have been different for me. "Where's the blood?" one wanted to know. "Are those his real boots?" another asked. But maybe nothing changes. They stopped, like I did, mouths hanging just a little open and there was a silence in that room. It hung forever, like the sound of a coward's derringer held inches from a great man's skull. It ended in a second, like it must a thousand times a day there at the Peterson House.

Like everyone, I snapped the obligatory photos of an empty wood-poster bed. It looks for all the world like the one in Julius Elke's picture - same spread, same striped wallpaper. There are at least three famous paintings of the deathbed scene I know, and in each the room grows larger. Like history, the room expanded to accommodate all the lesser known faces that mingled aimlessly at the edge of importance.

I know it isn't the real pillow, but I touched it just the same. Don't ask me why. I wasn't in that room a full minute before the clot of pilgrims washed me out the door, down a stairway, along a long hall and back into the street. To the left a life-sized cardboard figure of George W. Bush smiled from the doorway of the Souvenir Factory. Past T-shirt booths to my right (3 for $10) the red neon sign of the Lincoln House Bar and Grille popped my catatonia. I was back in America.

Unlike most tourists, I did Ford's Theatre second, snapped my obligatory picture of the assassination scene and gaped even further at the relics in the basement. They have the door in a glass case there, the one Booth rigged with a peep hole and a stick, so that he could enter silently unseen. Booth was a great actor remember, and knew Ford's Theatre well, better even than history buffs like me. There was, as I had long hoped, the carte d' vise of Lucy Hale, the pictures of her and four other women Booth had in his pocket when he was shot in the spine at Garrison's barn twelve days later. I saw the authentic white hoods worn by the conspirators when they were hung months later in an explosion of anger following the war and the death of their newly sainted President.

From Ford's I hopped a trolley to the Lincoln Memorial. After seeing Lincoln so mortal, I needed that giant statue there to pump his memory back to its impossible proportions. I watched for half an hour as one tiny person after another stood, staring up at the Colossus of Illinois, the barefoot boy from the log cabin who became a minor god. It was impossible not to be moved. It was impossible not to compare the greatness of one president to the mediocrity of so many others.

Portsmouth has no such holy place, where someone so towering was laid so low. We offer a kinder gentler perspective on American history. We can sense it daily in small doses just walking through the city streets. But sometimes you have to stand where it all happened. We need to measure our lives against such national deities. And I did. I stood at the edge of Lincoln’s bed like a bug-eyed fourth grader. I heard, for myself, the total silence that followed the president’s final breath and passed through the empty air where greatness disappeared.

Copyright © 2006 by J. Dennis Robinson. All rights reserved.