If truth be told, Edwin Stanton, Lincoln's irascible Secretary of War, was exactly the wrong person to take charge at the Lincoln death bed.
Among other things, he had an unreasoning, morbid fear of death. More than 20 years earlier Stanton was living in a boarding house, and when a servant girl died of cholera and was buried immediately, he dug up the girl's grave - he couldn't believe she was actually dead since she had served him lunch that very same day.
A few years years later, when his daughter Lucy died, he had her body exhumed and kept the coffin in his room for two years.
And when his first wife Mary died he dressed and redressed her in her wedding clothes.
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