Apr 14, 2025 - News
How Utah reacted to Lincoln's assassination
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A wave of mourning swept over Utah 160 years ago this week as news of President Lincoln's assassination reached the territory.
- This is Old News, our weekly procession through the past.
The timeline: John Wilkes Booth shot Abraham Lincoln in Ford's Theatre on April 14; he died the next morning.
- Western newspapers learned of the shooting via telegraph soon thereafter, and at least one paper mentioned printing an "extra" that is now lost to the archives. But the news didn't hit the regular presses here until April 16.
- The Salt Lake Daily Telegraph had the story first — and they described the shock as word spread through the city.
What they said: "From the moment of the reception of this news on East Temple St. the throbbing of busy life on that lovely spring morn began to subside," the Telegraph wrote.
- "Business was at once and simultaneously suspended, and such charnel stillness cast its shadows down this broad avenue of merchandise and trade as Utah, in her darkest hour, never felt before. No untutored voice, nor even sound of rushing car disturbed the seemingly sacred stillness of the hour."
- "Every person we saw appeared wrapped in the solitude of his own reflections. Grouped here and there upon the pavement or store step, sat breathless listeners, impulsive to catch ... the dispatched accounts of the most fearfully daring tragedy that ever wrested from a nation its rulers."
Between the lines: Just days earlier, Utahns were celebrating Gen. Robert E. Lee's surrender in Virginia, which signaled the denouement of the Civil War.
- "The stars and stripes so recently flung to the breezes on occasions of successive and glorious triumphs over armed resistance to the constitutional authority now hang gloomily at half mast, draped and folded by the insignia of a nation's grief," the Telegraph wrote.