We're approaching a day that still lives in infamy 160 years later. This April 14 will be eight score years since the disgruntled younger brother of famed Shakespearean actor Edwin Booth decided to make an infamous name for himself by murdering Abraham Lincoln.  

Less than a week earlier, Lee had surrendered to Grant, largely ending the Civil War, so Lincoln and his wife Mary decided they might enjoy a play at Ford's Theatre.  The past four years had been stressful to the breaking point for the president, who had struggled to find the right general to save the Union on the battlefield.  Mercifully, Grant finally proved to be the one, and while reconstruction with the Confederate states would likely consume Lincoln's second term, at least most of the killing would stop at almost 700,000 Americans dead. 

That alone was enough to lift a mighty weight off Lincoln's shoulders, and the relief must have been sublime for those past few days. When the Lincolns arrived late, the play stopped and everyone stood to cheer their president. Then, just like that, he was gone.

When the country first learned of Lincoln's nomination, most Americans knew little of him and only 39% of them picked him among the four candidates in the race.  He wasn't even on the ballot in many of the Southern states, where he was mocked as a hayseed and a baboon and a dangerous abolitionist. Even his Northern supporters were put off by his gangly appearance and high-pitched twang, but they were primarily worried about his lack of leadership experience to guide the country during the greatest crisis of its existence.

Something had happened during the next four years, though, and when the news of Lincoln's sudden death raced across the country, it felt to many like a tidal wave or tornado that strikes unexpectedly and devastates everything in its path.  

Within four days after his death, more than 100,000 mourners arrived in Washington, doubling the size of the city. At noon on the day of his funeral, bells began tolling across the country and Unitarian minister Edward Everett Hale called the religious service the most impressive ever held in America.  

On the return trip to Springfield, Ill., Lincoln's funeral train followed nearly the same route he had taken to Washington four years earlier. All along the way, thousands stood in the rain and mud, often weeping openly in the middle of the night as the train rolled through their towns and they caught a glimpse of the casket through the windows of the special car it alone occupied.  

In cosmopolitan New York City, 100,000 people stood in line at 2 a.m. to file past his open casket and more than 500,000 saw him there. When the train reached Chicago, the line of mourners ran for five miles. 

Chicago social reformer Jane Addams was just a little girl, but she would always remember that her father sobbed as he said the greatest man in the world had died.  

Walt Whitman was so affected that he wrote two of his most famous poems about Lincoln's passing - "O, Captain! My Captain" and "When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom'd." Schoolchildren then and now continue to recite them.  

I have a copy of the front page of The New York Herald from the morning Lincoln died, on which someone had written, "I was a tiny girl and remember this day so well."

So, what had caused this remarkable apotheosis?  During a eulogy that Emerson gave, he said that Lincoln "stood before us as a man of the people," that he "had a manner that inspired confidence, which disarmed suspicion, which confirmed goodwill." When people saw him, they sensed they could trust him and that he cared for their interests as an almost sacred undertaking. Rarely has a president shown his people that their grief was his own, as though it was his own son or brother or father who had been killed on those battlefields.

Whitman explained that "people can discover their greatest qualities in moments of greatest need" and they admired that Lincoln "had everything against him, wind, tide, current, terrible odds, untried seas, yet he brought the ship of state into a safe harbor."  

He did that in part by surrounding himself with former rivals who he thought were the most qualified to help him, despite the hurtful things they had said to advance their own success. Then, he did it by showing them that saving the Union wasn't enough if it meant that formerly enslaved Americans would have to go back to where they started.  

All that should tell us something valuable during troubled times.

And so, as this tragic anniversary arrives, I have a suggestion.  Instead of the ubiquitous acronym that so many have been promoting, I think a better one would be, WWLD.  We could certainly do worse than emulating a leader we know is telling us the truth, who we know has only our interests at heart in every decision made and who won't silence or punish us for expressing opposing views.  And in times of our own despair, pursuing those qualities can help us keep going, too.

L. Phillips Runyon III has practiced law in Peterborough for 50 years and was the presiding justice of the 8th Circuit Court for 27 years.