Tag Archives: Lincoln’s Second Inaugural Address

Abraham Lincoln is generally regarded as this country’s greatest president. It follows, then, that his last words, if we but knew what they were, would be of compelling interest—not merely to historians, but to all Americans.

As it happens, we do know what Lincoln’s last words were. In an interview in 1882, Mary Lincoln, the president’s widow, confided that in the box at Ford’s Theatre, scant seconds before John Wilkes Booth fired the fatal Derringer ball into her husband’s brain, Lincoln had turned to her and whispered: “We will visit the Holy Land and see those places hallowed by the footsteps of the Savior.” And then: “There is no place I so much desire to see as Jerusalem.”