Look at the open second-floor window between shutters in this photograph, and you will see two little boys. President Theodore Roosevelt’s widow, Edith, identified one of them as her husband at the age of 6, looking down from his grandfather’s Union Square mansion onto the coffin of the assassinated Abraham Lincoln on Broadway in New York in April 1865.

The remains of the president were being paraded past silent crowds, to the sound of pipes and muffled drums, through the boulevards of major cities between Washington and his resting place in Springfield, Ill.

“Yes, I think that is my husband, and next to him his brother,” Edith Carow Roosevelt told the photojournalist Stefan Lorant. She recalled that at the age of 3, she had joined her future husband and his brother, Elliott, at the open window, but that when she saw “all the black drapings,” she started to weep: “They didn’t like me crying. They took me and locked me in a back room.”

For Theodore Roosevelt’s family, Lincoln’s cortege was no abstract public ceremony. During the Civil War, Mary and Abraham Lincoln had befriended and gone to church with T.R.'s father. As president, Theodore told friends that Lincoln was “my great hero” and that he meant “more to me than any other of our public men.” Noting a Lincoln portrait he had hung on his office wall in the White House, he said, “I look up to that picture, and I do as I believe Lincoln would have done.”