Falmouth Museums on the Green Exhibit Marks 150th Anniversary of Lincoln Assassination

An exhibit to commemorate the 150th anniversary of President Abraham Lincoln’s assassination is currently on display at Falmouth Museums on the Green, home of the Falmouth Historical Society. The exhibit is located in the Cultural Center, 55 Palmer Avenue, and features a Lincoln autograph from the FHS archives. To schedule a viewing, call 508-548-4857.

The Lincoln autograph is from the papers of Rev. Henry Herbert Smythe (1854-1930), the second rector of St. Barnabas Episcopal Church in Falmouth. An avid autograph collector, Rev. Smythe most likely acquired it at auction or was given it as a gift.  

In the election of 1860, Lincoln swept every Cape Cod town, but he carried Falmouth by a smaller margin than most.  The town’s anti-slavery contingent, anchored by its Quaker community, had always been vocal.  Yet many merchants were bound to the South by strong ties of commerce. The shipbuilding Swifts had made their fortune trading in live oak from South Carolina and Florida, and Woods Hole summer resident Joseph Story Fay had brought a railroad to Savannah, GA, where he was revered.  Still, when war did come, Falmouth rallied behind the cause of Union. 

Out of a population of 2650, approximately 150 men served.  (A minority of these – 70 at most — were hired as substitutes and may have come from other towns).  Nineteen Falmouth men died in uniform, sixteen of them succumbing to disease.  Walter Nye (tintype) of the 38th Mass. Regiment, Company H, died of a fever in Baton Rouge, Louisiana on April 19, 1863.  Falmouth native and Yale graduate Captain Andrew Shiverick (pictured) joined the 28th Wisconsin Regiment to serve under his uncle, James Lewis.  Shiverick died of typhoid in Memphis, Tennessee on April 22, 1863. 

Struck down just days after Lee’s surrender, Lincoln was the war’s final casualty.  His loss was felt deeply by every family that had suffered, or dreaded, such a fate for their own loved ones.  The six-year-old future poet, Katharine Lee Bates, never forgot how Falmouth’s women draped the Congregational Church with their black mourning shawls – adopting Lincoln into their personal circle of grief.