Sarah Hamhn's Letter about the
Assassination of Lincoln

H. DRAPER HUNT

N THE evening of April 14, 1865, a young girl sat in
the third row of Ford's Theater in Washington, D.C.,
and was a horrified eyewitness to Abraham Lincoln's
assassination. Her vivid account of what she saw that night is
published here for the first time.

Sarah Jane Hamlin was no ordinary young woman. A hand¬
some and vivacious girl of twenty-three, she was the only daugh¬
ter of the man who, until the month before, had been Lincoln's
Vice-President. Her father, Hannibal HamHn of Maine, one of
the more distinguished statesmen of the Civil War era, has of
necessity been largely neglected by historians, mainly owing
to scarcity of materials. Recently, however, a large corpus of
Hamhn papers has been lent to the Columbia Libraries' Depart¬
ment of Special Collections, where they have with permission
been microfilmed.

The tall, stout figure of this gentleman from Maine, unham¬
pered by an overcoat even in the coldest weather, was a familiar
sight on the streets of Washington during the period 1843-1881.
Hamlin served his State and nation as Congressman, United States
Senator, Vice-President of the United States and Minister to
Spain. A Jacksonian Democrat during his earlier political career
and a prominent anti-slavery man, he broke with his party over
the issue of slavery in the territories in a dramatic speech on
the floor of the U. S. Senate in June, 1856. He immediately
became a convert to the infant RepubUcan party and was its
successful Vice-Presidential standard-bearer in i860. Re-elected

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