On February 23, Lincoln started to recover. The following day, the Rev. Dr. Phineas D. Gurley conducted a White House funeral that Lincoln had asked Orville H. Browning to arrange. There, as the president stood with his eyes full of tears and his lips aquiver, gazing at his boy’s corpse, a look of the utmost grief came over his face, and he exclaimed that Willie “was too good for this earth … but then we loved him so. It is hard, hard to have him die!” He said repeatedly, “This is the hardest trial of my life. Why is it? Oh, why is it?” His body shook convulsively as he sobbed and buried his face in his hands. Elizabeth Keckly, Mrs. Lincoln’s modiste and close friend, never observed a man so grief-stricken. A woman who attended the funeral complained that it “was in very bad taste, ostentatious & showy.” She thought that “one needed only to look at the poor President, bowed over & sobbing audibly to see he had nothing to do with the pageant. The services by Dr Gurley were endlessly long and offensively fulsome. I felt glad that the poor Mother was ill in bed & so escaped the painful infliction.”
Source: Abraham Lincoln ∶ A Life ▫𓂃
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