A scene from Abraham Lincoln’s first inauguration (Library of Congress) It was the custom then, too, for the outgoing president to accompany the incoming president to the Capitol for the ceremony in a procession down Pennsylvania Avenue that started at the Willard Hotel. A 16-year-old named Julia Taft recalled, “As we took our places, a file of green-coated sharpshooters went through up to the roof. The whisper went round that they had received orders to shoot at any one crowding toward the President’s carriage.” When the soon-to-be sixteenth president of the United States passed by in his carriage, riding with the outgoing president, James Buchanan, Julia heard a woman remark: “There goes that Illinois ape, the cursed Abolitionist. But he will never come back alive.”