Noah Brooks

A California reporter who had followed Lincoln's rise to the Presidency, Brooks was to be appointed Lincoln's personal secretary in the spring of 1865, but the assassination intervened. Throughout Lincoln's administration Brooks was given unusual access to both the White House and the thoughts of the man who lived there. He would later write Washington in Lincoln's Time and Mr. Lincoln's Washington about his experience as a friend and confidant of the president.

 

First impression: COOPER UNION, New York, February 1860

"When Lincoln rose to speak, I was greatly disappointed. He was tall, and so angular and awkward that I had a feeling of pity for so ungainly a man. His bushy head, with the stiff black hair thrown back, was balanced on a long and lean head-stalk, and when he raised his hands in an opening gesture, I noticed that they were very large. He said 'Mr. Cheerman,' instead of 'Mr. Chairman,' and employed many other words with an old-fashioned pronunciation. I said to myself, 'You won’t do; it’s all very well for the wild West, but this will never go down in New York.'"

Final Impression: Washington, DC, April 1865

"Just before the procession began to move, the Twenty-Second United States Colored Infantry landed from Petersburg and marched up to a position on the avenue, and when the head of the column came up, played a dirge, and headed the procession to the Capitol. While this solemn pageant was passing, I was allowed to go alone up the winding stairs that lead to the top of the great dome of the Capitol. Directly beneath me lay the casket in which the dead President lay at full length, far, far below; and like black atoms moving over a sheet of gray paper, the slow-moving mourners crept silently across the pavement of the rotunda."

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