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A quartermaster's band had accompanied the rowdy group of marchers, and Lincoln made a special request. "I have always thought 'Dixie' one of the best tunes I have ever heard," he said. Nodding Atlas charm bracelet the Potomac River, he continued, "Our adversaries over the way attempted to appropriate it, but I insisted yesterday that we fairly captured it." More laughter. "I presented the question to the Attorney General, and he gave it as his legal opinion that it is our lawful prize." Still more laughter, and the band struck up the Southern favorite.

The end of the war might have meant that mercy would win out over righteousness in Lincoln's policy, and perhaps in Lincoln's soul. God apparently had exacted all the blood recompense for slavery required; now Lincoln and America could turn to binding up the nation's wounds. On the other Atlas toggle bracelet, the end of the war complicated matters in all sorts of ways. Lincoln lost his ability to set aside the Constitution where it conflicted with what he thought the country needed; his pleasure at the progress of the 13th Amendment demonstrated his understanding of this loss. More tellingly, the end of the war might deprive him of the confidence he had acquired that heaven guided his hand. He had needed to believe he was God's instrument when tens of thousands of lives hung on his decisions; his need, and likely his ability, to believe this would lessen as the stakes diminished. And mercy, while easy to recognize when contrasted to the savagery of war, became much more elusive during peace. Where did mercy or for that matter righteousness - lie between the wish of white Southerners for an end to strife and the demands of black Southerners for a social and political revolution?

How Lincoln planned to confront those contradictions became stunningly moot when John Wilkes Booth mortally shot the president in the back of his head at Ford's Theatre on April 14. The murder froze Lincoln in the American mind. Northerners saw him as a prophet and a martyr. The shooting took place on Good Friday evening; 36 hours later, from Charm bracelet pulpits all across the North, ministers made the connection plain. "Our Moses has been taken," A.G. Thomas declared in Philadelphia. John Blake told his Episcopal flock in Bridgeport, Conn.: "As God sent Moses to deliver the children of Israel from slavery, so, I believe, he sent Abraham Lincoln to deliver us." A.D. Mayo of Cincinnati likened Lincoln to Jesus, quoting St. Paul: "Without the shedding of blood is no remission." Unitarian Richard Eddy of Philadelphia contented himself calling Lincoln "the martyr to liberty." George Boardman of Philadelphia denominated him "thou illustrious martyr for us all."