Your guess: "angels" or "ages?"

[Linda Anderson]

I found this Letter to the Editor of the New York Press in the June 30, 1889 Macon Telegraph. "An Incident of History. Jame's R. O'Beirne Corrects a Statement Regarding Lincoln's Death."

O'Beirne. who was the Provost Marshall at the time of the assassination, "asks to correction of a statement which appears in your issue of to-day [June 23] to the effect that "Commissioner James Tanner took the dying statement of the martyred President, Abraham Lincoln.'"

O'Beirne goes on to say that Lincoln never made a dying statement unless he made it to Mrs. Lincoln "when she knelt at the bedside and bowed low to her husband's face."

Unfortunately, O'Beirne does not mention any ages or angel comment by Stanton but he does write that "When Mr. Lincoln breathed his last in a guttural, gasping struggle for breath, Mr. Stanton was looking out of the window into the breaking twilight of morning dawn, with one foot on a chair, and holding its back with his right hand, as he leaned with his left elbow on his bended knee."