by Martha Hodes
Mourning Lincoln
Mourning Lincoln
Martha Hodes
Published with assistance from the Mary Cady Tew Memorial Fund.
Copyright © 2015 by Martha Hodes.
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10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
For Linda
and
As ever, for Bruce
Contents
Good Friday, 1865
1. Victory and Defeat
Interlude: Rumors
2. Shock
Interlude: Men Weeping
3. Glee
Interlude: Public Condolences
4. God
Interlude: Love
5. Blame
Interlude: Best Friend
6. Funeral
Interlude: Springtime
7. Everyday Life
Interlude: Young Folk
8. Everyday Loss
Interlude: Mary Lincoln
9. Nation
Interlude: Relics
10. Justice
Interlude: Peace
Summer 1865 and Beyond
Note on Method
Notes
Essay on Sources
Acknowledgments
Index
Mourning Lincoln
Good Friday, 1865
THE PLAY HAD ALREADY STARTED when the Lincolns arrived. As the honored guests made their way up the stairway to the dress circle, the actors stopped and the audience cheered. As the band struck up “Hail to the Chief,” the president took an impromptu bow. It was Good Friday, April 14, 1865.
The Washington Evening Star had carried a front-page advertisement for Laura Keene’s appearance at Ford’s Theatre in the lighthearted comedy Our American Cousin, and an announcement inside indicated that the president and Mrs. Lincoln would be attending that night. The Lincolns had extended an invitation to General Ulysses S. Grant and his wife, Julia, and when they declined, to Assistant Secretary of War Thomas Eckert, who declined as well. Next down the list were Clara Harris and Major Henry Rathbone, who happily accepted. She was the daughter of a New York senator, and he, Clara’s stepbrother and fiancé. It was an evening that would ruin their lives.
The presidential box, personally decorated by one of the Ford brothers for the occasion, hovered above stage left. Lincoln lowered himself into the walnut rocking chair, with Mary seated to his right. At perhaps a quarter past ten, the audience roared with laughter as the actor Harry Hawk, in the role of the backwoods American cousin of British relatives, uttered the line, “Well, I guess I know enough to turn you inside out, old gal—you sockdologizing old mantrap!” Then came a pistol crack. Was it part of the play? An accidental firing by a soldier in the audience? Now a man leapt to the stage—was that part of the script? But he’d jumped from the president’s box and caught one foot in the decorative swags, waving a knife. Some heard him shout, “Sic semper tyrannis!”—Thus always to tyrants. Some heard, “The South is avenged,” and others heard nothing at all. It didn’t seem like a play anymore, and for a split second everything froze. By the time the audience jolted from their seats, the gunman had vanished.
John Wilkes Booth fires into the back of Lincoln’s head. This 1865 lithograph shows Clara Harris seated next to Mary Lincoln while Henry Rathbone attempts to stop the assassin. Lincoln’s hand is grasping the drapery fashioned from an American flag.
LC-USZ62-2073, Prints and Photographs Division, Library of Congress.
Up in the presidential box, Clara Harris’s hands and face were covered with blood, her clothes saturated. Henry Rathbone hadn’t seen or heard a thing until the shot rang out. He had tried to prevent the assailant from vaulting to the stage, provoking the man to slash his arm from elbow nearly to shoulder. After that, Rathbone could only shout, “Stop that man!” Then Mary Lincoln thought that the blood all over Harris was her husband’s and kept screaming, “My husband’s blood, my dear husband’s blood!” Now came shouts from the audience about murder and calls for doctors. People rushed the stage. Women fainted. Soldiers hurried in with bayonets.
John Wilkes Booth lands on the stage at Ford’s Theatre after jumping from the presidential box. In this engraving, Mary Lincoln and Clara Harris assist the wounded president while men in the audience jump to their feet, pointing at the assassin.
McLellan Lincoln Collection, John Hay Library, Brown University.
At 10:30 p.m., from Tenth Street outside Ford’s Theatre, the news traveled through the darkness, people shouting, rapping on windows, pounding on doors. Mounted patrols galloped through throngs of frightened people, with soldiers, sailors, and policemen everywhere. Members of the audience had recognized the intruder as the well-known Shakespearean actor John Wilkes Booth, and his name spread rapidly. Word came as well about Secretary of State William Seward: another man had knocked on the door of his Washington home at about 10:00 p.m., forced his way upstairs, and assaulted Seward right in his bed, where he was recuperating from a recent carriage accident. As the city embarked on a manhunt for the killer and his accomplices, trains and ferries were ordered halted, and guards stood posted at all roads leading out of the capital.
Booth and his recruited conspirators had at first planned to abduct the president and hold him hostage in exchange for wartime prisoners, but after Confederate general Robert E. Lee surrendered at Appomattox on April 9, they changed the scheme from kidnapping to murder. Simultaneous with Booth’s deed, three other men were set to carry out two related missions. George Atzerodt would kill Vice President Andrew Johnson in his suite at the Kirkwood House Hotel on Pennsylvania Avenue, and Lewis Powell would kill Seward while David Herold, on horseback, held Powell’s waiting horse for the escape. Atzerodt lost his nerve at the last minute, and Powell’s plan went awry when his ruse of delivering medicine to the ailing secretary of state failed. Instead, Powell violently fought his way into the Seward residence, where he shot Seward’s grown son (he would recover), then stabbed the intended victim in his bed (he too would recover) before another son intervened. Powell managed to break free, but Herold, flustered by the screams coming from inside the house, had already galloped off on his own horse. Later that night, Herold would meet up with Booth, the two disappearing together into the surrounding countryside. Among the other conspirators were a carpenter at Ford’s Theatre, who briefly held on to Booth’s horse in the back alley; Dr. Samuel Mudd, who later that night would treat the broken bone Booth had sustained from his leap to the stage; and Mary Surratt, a widow who ran a Washington boardinghouse near the theater and owned a Maryland tavern, both of which were implicated in the conspiracy.
Unlike his collaborators, John Wilkes Booth had executed his portion of the plot nearly flawlessly. Three days earlier, on Tue
sday, April 11, the twenty-six-year-old actor had stood among a crowd gathered outside the White House, listening to Lincoln deliver a victory speech about reconstructing the nation. When the president spoke of voting rights for black men, Booth was roused to fury. “That means nigger citizenship,” he uttered, according to a companion. “Now, by God, I’ll put him through.” When Booth entered the box at Ford’s Theatre, he stood directly behind the president, aimed his derringer, and fired one shot into the back of Lincoln’s head.
When the audience’s moment of motionless shock passed, and after people raced outside to tell the world what had happened, three doctors and four soldiers took charge of the unconscious president. With no stretcher available, and the half-mile to the White House too far to travel, they crossed the street to a boardinghouse run by a German tailor named William Petersen. (In years to come, an impossible number of men would claim to have carried the president’s body out of the theater that night.) At Petersen’s, the men maneuvered Lincoln’s gangly frame into a first-floor chamber, placing him diagonally across the small bed. The president’s eldest son, twenty-one-year-old Captain Robert Lincoln, soon arrived, as did Secretary of War Edwin Stanton, who right there in the back parlor directed the search for Booth and his conspirators. Mary Lincoln had followed, but eventually those in charge could no longer withstand the sounds of her torment and insisted that she move from the back bedroom into the front parlor. All through the night and past dawn, the cramped space hosted a somber parade of statesmen and friends, lingering, departing, and returning, alongside the doctors trying to save the president’s life, even as his head wound bled on. Death came at twenty-two minutes past seven o’clock in the morning. At that moment, Edwin Stanton said something. Some heard the words, “Now he belongs to the ages.” Others heard, “Now he belongs to the angels.” Ages or angels, history or heaven, Lincoln belonged to both.
It was Saturday, April 15, 1865. Word spread across the telegraph wires, north, south, and west. Soon, with dispatches read aloud to gathering bystanders, glances at newspaper headlines, and the sight of stricken faces at front doors, millions across the country knew.1
THE STORY OF THE NATION’S first presidential assassination has been told many times over, in biographies of Lincoln and inquiries into the conspiracy, in chronicles of the Civil War and textbooks of American history. These accounts often portray the nation’s (and the world’s) response by looking to newspapers, sermons, formal expressions of condolence, and the phenomenal crowds that turned out for religious services and civic ceremonies. The outlines of that portrait are consistent, describing shock, grief, and anger. But how well does that familiar picture capture the full range of responses? And how universal were the experiences captured in those public sources?
Two personal experiences of collective catastrophe prompted me to ask: How did people respond—at home, on the street, at work, with their families, by themselves—when they heard the news that Abraham Lincoln had been assassinated?
September 11, 2001, was the first day of the fall semester at New York University. When I set out to teach my 9:30 a.m. class, I’d already heard a phenomenal boom, though I had no idea what it was. In the streets of Greenwich Village, I joined a knot of people gazing skyward toward the fractured North Tower of the World Trade Center a mile and a half downtown, thick smoke streaming from the upper windows. Then, as the second plane crashed from the other side, I saw an orange ball of fire burst from the South Tower. It astonishes me now that I went on to class, that the students—they too had seen the burning towers—arrived on time and sat in their chairs. Not until someone opened our classroom door with news of the buildings’ collapse did I dismiss the students, all of us just beginning to comprehend the magnitude of the event.
Out on the street, people looked into one another’s faces to verify that it wasn’t a terrible nightmare, then rushed home to confirm everything by television. Most important was to communicate with loved ones, at least until the phone lines and Internet went dead. Especially for those who lost family and friends, life would never again be the same, but the world did not stop that morning. Even those separated from the flames, ash, and bodies by as little as a mile walked their dogs or finished up work that seemed important. At the same time, the city’s residents began to create makeshift shrines, amassing thousands of candles, flowers, flags, and signs. The cellophane-wrapped bouquets made clear that people in flower shops and corner delis were still at work.
At sunrise the next day, I walked north in search of a newspaper—another way to confirm what still seemed like a dream. I fell in step with a neighbor on the same mission, passing through a police checkpoint and continuing on for dozens of blocks before we found an open newsstand. “U.S. ATTACKED,” read the New York Times headline. Across the country that day, headlines universalized the nation’s reaction: DEVASTATION, read the Baltimore Sun; OUTRAGE, cried the Atlanta Journal-Constitution. UNTHINKABLE, proclaimed the Salt Lake City Tribune.
People put their feelings into words by chalking messages onto sidewalks and taping up handwritten or hastily printed signs. Some imparted information that testified to the disaster: “Vigil in park @ dusk” or “For obvious reasons our screening this evening has been cancelled.” The signboard outside a bar read, “Sports Today: None.” Many posters revealed a spirit of unity, thanking police and firefighters, offering compassion, or asking for prayers—in English, Spanish, German, Chinese, Japanese, Hebrew, and Arabic. Others revealed more confusion than conviction: “I don’t know how to feel,” read one; a slip of paper, posted in multiple locations, read simply, “Why?”
It felt as if the whole world was grieving and in shock, yet evidence of tension and contention could be read everywhere. One sign called for peace, another for “peace after payback.” Messages calling for harmony were defaced with calls to war, in turn answered with cries for justice without revenge. Some signs spewed fury at the peacemakers; others warned mourners to distrust the media.
I began right away to gather tokens and relics: along with the newspapers from that day, I bought special issues of magazines paying tribute to the lost, and searched for postcards of the city skyline with the Twin Towers intact. As if in a trance, I dropped off an armload of warm clothes and helped prepare a meal for rescue workers. Three days later, as I rode a train out of New York, I found myself startled at the conversation in the seats just ahead: someone was talking about something unrelated to September 11.
Hazier in my memory (and undocumented in my personal archives) is the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, about which Americans continue to ask one another, or their elders, “Where were you when you found out?” My sole recollection of that day in November 1963, when I was five years old, consists of walking up Third Avenue in the Murray Hill neighborhood of New York with Mary Gallagher, the devout Catholic woman who took care of us while my father was at work. Schools had been dismissed early, and Mary and I were going to pick up my sister. How Mary loved Kennedy! His murder might as well have been the crucifixion, my father would say later—or if he was not quite Jesus, then JFK felt to Mary like a brother or a son, and she must have asked God why, struggling to find spiritual consolation. Up the avenue we walked, tears streaming down Mary’s face as she pressed a transistor radio to her ear. Other grown-ups on the street must have been weeping too, searching one another’s faces to make sure the awful tidings were true. In my sister’s first-grade classroom, the loudspeaker had crackled with an announcement that the president had been shot. At a Ford dealership on the West Side, my father had been paying for auto parts when the man behind the counter gruffly announced the news to his customers, then turned the volume up high on his back-room radio. Along with everyone else at the counter, my father completed his purchase.
If I’d been watching our small black-and-white television that afternoon, I’d have seen Walter Cronkite break into a soap opera broadcast to announce the shooting. When the camera switched to the CBS affiliate in Dallas, viewers s
aw the hotel ballroom where so many had gathered to hear President Kennedy deliver a speech. For a long moment, the lens trained on an African American man in waiter’s vest and bowtie, wiping his eyes repeatedly with a linen napkin. The Texas reporter soon passed on the emergency room’s unofficial pronouncement of death, informing viewers that the doctor himself was in tears. Minutes later, from the New York studio, Cronkite told his audience that Kennedy had died at 1:00 p.m. central standard time. Looking into the camera, he struggled just a bit to remain composed.
The grown-ups around me knew they were part of history-in-the-making that day, yet the world had not stood still then either. The next day, my father taught his dance class at the Martha Graham School, and Mary, still stricken, came to work. Soon I joined the one hundred million viewers watching the funeral on television. Surely it felt as if the shock and sorrow were universal, yet I now know that despite the overwhelming grief, there were also disagreements and anger, even fistfights between mourners and exulters. Indeed, just before Walter Cronkite officially announced Kennedy’s death on air, he told the nation that Dallas had called out an extra four hundred policemen owing to “fears and concerns” for the president.
THESE EXPERIENCES, ENCOMPASSING ONLY A fraction of the range of reactions to transformative events, led me to wonder what stories we might find if we listened for immediate personal responses to Lincoln’s assassination: of northerners and southerners, Yankees and Confederates, African Americans and whites, soldiers and civilians, men and women, rich and poor, the well known and the unknown. What would we find by reading extensively through the diaries people kept and the letters they wrote during the momentous hours, days, weeks, and months that followed the crime at Ford’s Theatre? Here was a key moment of confusion and conflict that has been left out of the story or glossed over with generalities. The record of personal responses overlaps with public pronouncements, but the two are not the same, as individual writings reveal experiences that cannot be recovered elsewhere. Drawing on evidence from hundreds of letters, diaries, and other sources that disclose personal responses, Mourning Lincoln delves into the moment of Lincoln’s assassination to uncover a profusion of real-time sentiments, creating a multivocal narrative history that takes us far beyond the headlines to tell the story, and illuminate its meanings, on a human scale.
