WEB EXCLUSIVESApril 14, 2022<April 11, 2022

Remembering Lincoln and the Titanic

by Georgette Gouveia

Francis Godolphin Osborne Stuart’s photograph of RMS Titanic departing Southampton, England, on her fatal maiden voyage, April 10, 1912. She would sink overnight April 14-15.

Abraham Lincoln in the Mathew Brady photograph taken Feb. 27, 1860 in Manhattan, hours before the Cooper Union speech that would make him a national figure. Five years later, he would be assassinated on April 14, dying in the early morning hours of the 15th.

April 14, a fateful day in history.

Two life-changing events took place overnight April 14 and 15 – 47 years apart.

On the evening of April 14, 1865, President Abraham Lincoln was assassinated by actor and Confederate agent John Wilkes Booth at Ford’s Theatre in Washington, D.C. He died at 7:22 a.m. the next morning, April 15, which was Good Friday, just as it is this year.

Similarly, RMS Titanic hit an iceberg late on the evening of April 14, 1912, sinking in the early hours of the following morning.

Both events have been immortalized on page, canvas and screen. And both have left the world wondering how different it would’ve been had they never taken place.