by Larry Tagg
Stanton sharpened the image by forbidding anyone to obscure the damage caused by the assassin’s bullet. The New York Herald’s Washington correspondent reported:
The eyes and upper part of the cheeks are still discolored by the effects of the cruel shot which caused his death. It was proposed to remove the discoloration from the face by chemical processes, but the Secretary of War insisted that it was a part of the history of the event, and it should be allowed to remain as an evidence to the thousands who would view the body, when it shall be laid in state, of the death which this martyr to his ideas of justice and right suffered.
Stanton set Lincoln’s funeral train in motion across the North on April 21, at the same time telling the press that Lincoln’s murder was the work of a vast conspiracy, “planned and set on foot by rebels under pretense of avenging the rebel cause.” A proclamation was released that offered a one hundred thousand dollar reward for Jefferson Davis, whose “unscrupulous hand has guided the assassin’s trigger and dagger.” Even so even-tempered a Radical as William Pitt Fessenden swore, “We will hang Jeff Davis!”
Just as the cry for an old-fashioned smiting of the Southern leaders rose in pitch across the North, the funeral train left Washington. It labored through the countryside at a stately twenty miles per hour, slowing down where men took off their hats and families waved miniature flags along the track, sometimes in the thousands. Women covered the rails with flowers. Memorial arches were built over the tracks for the train to pass under, and the nearby hills were dotted with tableaus, signs, and mock graves. As evening came on, bonfires lit the dark and torches flared along the roadbed. Cannon boomed constantly as the train passed along the route.
The funeral train made its way through Baltimore, through Harrisburg, through Philadelphia, with adorations and tributes heaped up in eulogies given by the most prominent men in each city. On Monday, April 24, it reached New York City, the headquarters of the Democratic Party, where in November Lincoln had been crushed more than two to one at the polls. These same New Yorkers now gave the greatest show in the city’s long history—a carnival of sorrow, a two-day Mardi Gras of grief. Estimates of the crowd that poured into the streets ranged up to one million. The fronts of all the great buildings had been draped in black, solemn quotations swayed over arches and doorways, all flags hung at half-mast. A parade of 160,000 mourners accompanied the hearse, drawn by six gray horses draped in black, to City Hall. Most of the slow marchers were in organized groups carrying banners bearing mottoes, each group vying with the next to be the best in its woe. As the New York Herald reported, “New York never before saw such a day. Rome in the palmiest days of its power never witnessed such a triumphal march as New York yesterday formed and looked upon.”
From noon on Monday until noon the next day, Lincoln’s body lay in City Hall, and hundreds of thousands of New Yorkers, many of whom had looted and burned the city in a riot of rebellion less than two years before, waited long hours for the few seconds when they could file past the coffin and gaze at the famous face. The next day, the hearse was drawn from the City Hall to the train station by sixteen black horses, accompanied by twenty thousand soldiers and hundreds of thousands of bedazzled onlookers.
In Brooklyn, the greatest preacher of the age, Henry Ward Beecher, preached his Sunday sermon to intent listeners who crammed into Plymouth church and spilled out onto the lawn. The famous abolitionist had attacked the President through the previous four years—it was he who had said, “Not a spark of genius has he; not an element of leadership; not one particle of heroic enthusiasm.” Only days earlier, in fact, when the assassination was reported, Beecher had told a man that Andrew Johnson’s “little finger was stronger than Lincoln’s loins.” From the pulpit, however, Beecher heaped only praise on Lincoln. He was a “simple, truthful, noble soul, our faithful and sainted Lincoln.” “Not thine the sorrow, but ours, sainted soul!” he wailed. Halfway through his tribute, Beecher switched to the pointed end of the new Radical creed, and laid the blame for the assassination on the South. Booth’s act was “the venomous hatred of liberty wielded by an avowed advocate of slavery,” he declared. “This blow was but the expiring rebellion… . [E]pitomized in this foul act, we find the whole nature and disposition of slavery. It begins in a wanton destruction of all human rights, … and it is the universal enemy of mankind, and of God, who made man.”
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Beecher and the Radicals soon saw that all their enemies would fall before the sword that Lincoln’s death had put in their hands, and they widened its swath to wound the Democratic press. Gurowski put it in his diary: “All over the rebel region, the press for years incited to Lincoln’s murder. For years a part of the Northern press, which was and is the gospel of the Northern Copperheads, slavers, and traitors, pointed to Lincoln as a tyrant, and to Seward as his henchman. Murder and slaughter by infuriated wretches are now the fruits of those stimulating teachings.” The New York Herald, which had reviled Lincoln as “the great ghoul at Washington” during the war, did not want to be on the wrong side now, and on Black Easter it, too, found murderers in the Democratic press:
The blow has fallen, and whence did it come? From Richmond, no one doubts; yet wherever the idea was conceived, or the plan framed, it is as clear as day that the real origin of this dreadful act is to be found in the fiendish and malignant spirit developed and fostered by the rebel press North and South. That press has, in the most devilish manner, urged men to the commission of this very deed.
Even the moderate Harper’s Weekly indicted the Democratic press, saying:
He has been denounced as a despot, as a usurper, as a man who arbitrarily annulled the Constitution, as a magistrate under whose administration all the securities of liberty, property, and even life, were deliberately disregarded and imperiled. Political hostility has been inflamed into hate by the assertion that he was responsible for the war, and that he had opened all the yawning graves and tumbled the bloody victims in… . If there were a military despotism in the country, as was declared, he was the despot. If there were a tyranny, he was the tyrant. Is it surprising that somebody should have believed all this, that somebody should have said, if there is a tyranny it can not be very criminal to slay the tyrant, and that working himself up to the due frenzy he should strike the blow?
The Democratic papers quickly realized that if they didn’t repent their opposition to Lincoln, they risked ruin by mobs like the ones that had gutted their offices in the first summer of the war. Herman Melville caught the vengeful mood in his poem “The Martyr”:
He lieth in his blood—
The Father in his face;
They have killed him, the Forgiver—
The Avenger takes his place.
There is sobbing of the strong,
And a pall upon the land;
But the people in their weeping
Bare the iron hand:
Beware the People weeping
When they bare the iron hand.
Lincoln’s body was still warm when “the People weeping” took their first victim. As they carried Lincoln away from the house where he had just died, one onlooker foolishly sent up a cheer for Jefferson Davis. He was set upon by mourners and nearly torn to pieces. As the news of the assassination spread across the country, violence was widespread against anyone who spoke lightly of the tragedy. Melville Stone, the general manager of the Associated Press, was in the lounge of a Chicago hotel when, he reported, “I heard the crack of a revolver, and a man fell in the centre of the room. His assailant stood perfectly composed with a smoking revolver in his hand, and justified his action by saying: ‘He said it served Lincoln right.’ There was no arrest, no one would have dared arrest the man. He walked out a hero. I never knew who he was.” George Templeton Strong said three or four men on Wall Street made light of Lincoln’s murder “and were instantly set upon by the bystanders and pummeled. One of them narrowly escaped death.” The doors of local jails rattled shut behind men in every city who wer
e heard exulting in the news of Lincoln’s death, some of them rescued from murderous mobs and put behind bars for their own safety.
Nervous newspapermen paid particular attention to a California wire that told of a mob that traveled from one “copperhead organ” to another and “emptied their contents into the street amid the applause of an immense crowd,” warning that “other Democratic newspaper offices are threatened.” Soon there came news that the editor of a Democratic newspaper in Maryland, Joseph Shaw, had been killed by a mob after he had published criticism of Lincoln on Black Sunday.
Democratic editors everywhere knew what was good for them and rushed their protestations of patriotic grief into print. They even tried to claim Lincoln as their own. His arch-enemy in his home state, the Chicago Times, now said:
There are not on this day mourners more sincere than the democracy of the Northern States. Widely as they have differed with Mr. Lincoln— greatly as their confidence in him had been shaken—they saw in the indications of the last few days of his life that he might command their support in the close of the war, as he did in the beginning. These indications inspired them with hope, and confidence, and joy, which are now dashed to the ground. The democracy may well mourn the death of Abraham Lincoln.
Lincoln’s relentless abuser, the New York World, likewise beat its breast—“Today every loyal heart must suffer the terrible shock, and swell with overburdening grief at the calamity which has been permitted to befall us in the assassination of the Chief Magistrate”—as did its Lincoln-hating twin, the New York Daily News, which vowed, “We are stunned, shocked, horrified beyond measure at this fearful announcement.” The leader of Copperhead opinion in Boston, the Evening Courier, now wailed, “No language of which we are capable could half express the horror and dismay with which the dreadful event of the day has affected us.” The Dayton Daily Empire, Vallandigham’s Copperhead mouthpiece, solemnly swore, “We had opposed Mr. Lincoln in his lifetime. Yet just at this juncture we had the expectation of lending him our support.” Many Copperhead journals pleaded, like the Milwaukee See-Bote, “We have voted against Lincoln’s election, written against it, spoken against it—that we have done, and as we believe with pure conscience. But we may say with an equally pure conscience that there are no more sincere mourners today—none who deplore the death of the President more than the Democracy of the Northern States.” Lincoln’s nemesis in Ohio, The Crisis, anxious to deflect the charges against the Democratic press, argued, “Since the assassination of President Lincoln, we have examined nearly two hundred Democratic journals, from every State and district in the Northern States, and we have not been able to find in one of them an expression in the remotest degree justifying that horrible crime.”
Republicans were skeptical of the Democrats’ sudden alleluias for Old Abe, and resented them dodging the punishment for their years of wickedness merely by singing in the choir for one Sunday. The Chicago Tribune sneered that “the men who had misrepresented, abused and vilified the President while he lived, should at least stop praising him now that he is dead. It’s all of mercy these men have a right to expect, that they are allowed to live … . They have not the decency to go out and hang themselves, like Judas.”
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With Lincoln’s enemies in the North now prostrate, wrath over his murder was focused mainly on his murderer’s “accomplices” in the South. Here, for four years, Southern papers had regularly carried private advertisements offering rewards for Lincoln’s head. Indeed, pent-up hatred among Southerners briefly gave way to raptures over Lincoln’s death. The thousands of rebel prisoners in Fort Delaware sent up a cheer and threw their hats in the air when they heard the news. One rebel soldier from Lee’s army wrote later that “Lincoln’s death seemed … like a gleam of sunshine on a winter’s day.” Southern women thrilled to the romantic derring-do of John Wilkes Booth, like the Georgia woman for whom the news of the assassination came as “one sweet drop among so much that is painful.” Young Emily LeConte of Columbia, South Carolina, confessed that she quivered with joy at the news of Lincoln’s fate, and asked, “Could there have been a fitter death for such a man?” Kay Stone of Texas wrote in her diary, “All honor to J. Wilkes Booth, who has rid the world of a tyrant and made himself famous for generations.”
Texas, the only rebel state without Union troops on its soil and thus the least inhibited, was the noisiest in its celebrations. The Dallas Herald called Booth “a Divine instrument sent to remove a bloody despot.” The Marshall Texas Republican proclaimed, “the world is happily rid of a monster that disgraced the form of humanity.” Men will thrill to Lincoln’s killing, shouted the Houston Telegraph, “from now until God’s judgment day.” The Galveston News exulted in a similar vein: “It does look to us … as if an avenging Nemesis had brought swift and inevitable retribution upon a man stained with so many bloody crimes.”
Outside of Texas, however, Southern cities were occupied by Union armies, and citizens there had to be much more circumspect about their reaction to Lincoln’s murder. Union soldiers were wild with grief when they heard that their Commander-in-Chief had been slain, and were keen for bloody reprisals. When the news was read to Sherman’s army in North Carolina, for example, many soldiers swore “eternal vengeance against the whole Southern race,” according to one. “Few men will stop from committing any outrage of crime they may wish to,” wrote another in the wake of the news; “I would like to see [General Sherman] turn his army loose over what is left.” A Wisconsin soldier reported that his messmates proposed burning Raleigh down and killing every rebel in it.
Thus, when a proclamation came to observe a day of mourning, the people in the occupied South quietly did as they were told, adjusting to whatever was required of them. Ministers delivered the mandatory sermons, and Southern newspapers issued the compulsory regrets. Where the Union army was strongest, Southern protestations of sorrow for Lincoln’s death were loudest. In Richmond, for instance, the Richmond Whig dressed its borders in black and cried, “The heaviest blow which has ever fallen upon the people of the South has descended.” Its editor made sure to wave aside the rumors of Southern conspiracy, insisting that Booth’s secrecy “indicates that there were but few accomplices in this inhuman crime,” and added a plea for mercy, saying, “The abhorrence with which it is regarded on all sides will, it is hoped, deter insane and malignant men from the emulation of the infamy which attaches to this infernal deed.” Other journals in the South, many with new editors installed by Union armies, followed suit. Witnessing these faux laments in New Orleans, one observer wrote, “The more violently ‘secesh’ the inmates, [and] the more thankful they are for Lincoln’s death, the more profusely the houses are decked with emblems of woe… . Men who have hated Lincoln with all their souls, under terror of confiscation and imprisonment which they understand is the alternative, tie black crape from every practicable knob and point to save their homes.” In their private scribblings, Southerners regretted Lincoln’s death only because they knew they would suffer harsher punishments under President Andrew Johnson, the turncoat Tennessean.
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If the sudden proclamations of Lincoln’s nobility in the black-bordered columns of the Democratic and Southern press were mere show, drafted with an eye to survival, the sorrowful response to his murder in British journals showed a genuine change of heart. There were still dissenters, like London’s Evening Standard, who maintained, “He was not a hero while he lived, and therefore his cruel murder does not make him a martyr.” But most British editors dreaded the ferocity of the spirit of vengeance in the North, and realized belatedly that a living Lincoln had been the surest guarantee of a peaceful Reconstruction.
The Times of London, the pre-eminent opinion-maker not only of Britain but of all Europe, which had printed hostility to Lincoln’s every act during his term and which had recently viewed Lincoln’s re-election as “an avowed step towards the foundation of a military despotism,” was the most conspicuous penitent, saying n
ow, “Abraham Lincoln was as little of a tyrant as any man who ever lived. He could have been a tyrant had he pleased, but he never uttered so much as an ill-natured speech.”
The conversion of the London Punch was nearly as dramatic. The magazine’s renowned illustrator, John Tenniel, had caricatured Lincoln throughout the war as a bearded ruffian—malicious, vulgar, and arrogant. Now, Punch blazoned its May 6, 1865 issue with Tenniel’s sentimental illustration of a tearful Britannia mourning at the deathbed of the slain American President. Punch’s editor, Tom Taylor, composed an eloquent mea culpa of nineteen stanzas that read in part:
Yes, he had lived to shame me from my sneer,
To lame my pencil, and confute my pen—
To make me own this hind of princes peer,
This rail-splitter a true-born king of men.
The London Morning Star spoke for the vast majority in the British press when it confessed to a long list of injustices in the four years past:
“Britannia Lays a Wreath on Lincoln’s Bier”
English writers degraded themselves to the level of the coarsest caricaturists when they had to tell of Abraham Lincoln. They stooped to criticize a foreign patriot as a menial might comment on the bearing of a hero. They sneered at his manners, … they made coarse pleasantry of his figure, … they were facetious about his dress, … they were indignant about his jokes … . History will proclaim, to the eternal humiliation of our country, how an influential section of the British press outbade the journalists of the South in their slander and invective against the great man who has been so cruelly slain; how his every action was twisted and tortured into a wrong, his every noble aspiration spoken of as a desire for blood, his personal appearance caricatured, his lowly origin made the theme for scorn by men as base-born as he, but without the nobleness of soul which made Lincoln a prince among princes; how even that proclamation which conferred liberty upon four millions of down-trodden slaves was reviled as a base effort to incite the negroes to servile war.
