Tonight marks the anniversary of Lincoln’s shooting.

I’ve always found this photo of him, taken in February by Alex Gardner, incredibly moving because his face shows so clearly the war’s impact.

But he was not fragile.

I’m sorry to get clinical, but Booth’s bullet entered the back of Lincoln’s head behind his left ear and came to rest behind his right eye.

He should have died on the floor of the Presidential Booth at Ford’s.

A few months earlier, aboard the presidential yacht on a visit to Grant’s headquarters, the president, smiling, picked up an axe–a tool he was very familiar with–and, grasping it at the end of the handle, held it straight out at arm’s length.

I can do that! some of the young sailors thought. When they tried, they found out that they couldn’t.

When they carried him across the street from Ford’s to a boarding house and laid him across a bed–diagonally, because he was so tall–the attending physicians began to strip the clothes from his body.

Onlookers, including Secretary of War Stanton, who’d once argued a court case with Lincoln and dismissed him then as a nonentity, were stunned. The president had the musculature of a Classic statue.

The Lincoln in popular myth hated physical labor and we might remember, from our childhoods, images of him taking long breaks under a shade tree to read Pilgrim’s Progress or Shakespeare or Blackstone’s Commentaries.

That’s not quite true. Only a man who’d devoted so much time to working so hard could have fought as hard as Lincoln did that night.

He died at 7:22 a.m. on April 15, 1865. It was the day after Good Friday.