Both men were transported back home—another idea fraught with emotional symbolism in a geographically dislocating war—by trains that wound through the countryside while grieving Americans clustered around and threw flowers. The scale, of course, was vastly different. The South did not have the concentrated populations the North did. New York was not the same as Lynchburg. In New York alone seventy-five thousand people followed Lincoln’s cortege. But the ideas and feelings were the same. Both men were Christian heroes who believed that God was with them and against their enemies, and to their
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