Mourning Lincoln

by Martha Hodes

  The next day, Tuesday, April 4, President Lincoln arrived in Richmond, holding the hand of his twelve-year-old son, Tad, as he walked among the people. All along the route to the former executive mansion—where Lincoln would sit at the desk of the fleeing Jefferson Davis—thousands of overjoyed African Americans encircled and followed, spreading word of Lincoln’s presence. Some of the city’s middling and poorer whites joined in, but it was the black residents who shouted praises to God, calling the president “father” or “master Abraham.” The black Philadelphia journalist Thomas Morris Chester was already referring to his people as citizens in his dispatches. At a jubilee celebration, black families filled every church pew and aisle. Outside, people climbed up to the windows, the crowd so immense that many stood too far away to hear a single word.10

  “We thought Lincoln was risking too much to go into Richmond,” wrote Annie Dudley, a white woman who worked at the Bureau of Indian Affairs in Washington, “very much afraid he would get killed by some of those defeated arch rebels.”11

  The news of Richmond’s fall came to Union troops by telegram, with mounted officers galloping along the lines, or by northern newspapers delivered by passing locomotives or docking steamers. The men threw their hats in the air and cheered. “By jove I never thought men had such lungs,” exclaimed a Michigan soldier. They threw their shoes in the air too, fired muskets and cannons, lit firecrackers, jumped up and down, and danced to the music of regimental bands. Soldiers who got word at nine in the morning reveled till past midnight, gulping whiskey and malt liquor. “Glory to God!” an Ohio man wrote in the pages of the address book he used as a wartime diary. In Tennessee, a bunch of soldiers repeatedly fired a cannon in front of a Confederate residence until every pane of glass was smashed, then joked that the burning building could now pass for an illuminated Unionist home. When word arrived at the Union hospitals, the sick and wounded could all of a sudden “bear their pain better.”12

  President Lincoln walks through the streets of Richmond, Virginia, just after the Confederate capital fell to the Union. In this 1866 drawing, Lincoln holds the hand of his twelve-year-old son, Tad, while African Americans celebrate their freedom and pay tribute to their “best friend.”

  Picture Collection, The Branch Libraries, The New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundations.

  Wild. Crazy. Agog. That’s how people described the mood when the news reached the northern home front. In Wilmington, New York, Cincinnati, Chicago, Sacramento, and everywhere in between, it was huzzas, songs, speeches, pealing church chimes and clanging fire bells, tooting steam whistles and roaring guns and cannons. Crowds collected around the newspaper and telegraph offices. Classroom doors burst open as teachers dismissed school. Washington was in an intoxicated uproar all day April 3 and for three days afterward, the White House “resplendent with candles,” the Capitol dome decorated with “tiers of lights.” The War Department and Post Office were lit up too, and in front of the Patent Office, gas jets spelled the word Union in enormous letters.13

  “Richmond has fallen,” Emilie Davis wrote in her Philadelphia diary. The young woman’s words were spare but the occasion grand, for her brothers had fought with black units in the war, she had attended an emancipation celebration in 1863, and she had listened to Frederick Douglass deliver a lecture only a few months earlier. Young folks in the city, both black and white, took in the illuminations on Chestnut, Walnut, and Arch Streets, and to sixteen-year-old Margaret Howell, the night felt like “New Year’s Eve, Christmas Eve, and Fourth of July all combined.” In Boston, boys piled into a wagon, waving flags and handkerchiefs, shaking rattles and banging drums, stopping in front of each house to shout the news and catch an answering cheer in return. At the state legislature, the men adjourned and broke into “Old John Brown.” When the news reached the California mining town of Weaverville, the workers quit and took their families dancing at the local theater late into the night. Across the Atlantic, the U.S. consul and future novelist William Dean Howells had been entertaining American guests at his home in Venice when word came (it was late April by then), prompting exultation and “great handshaking.”14

  Like Emilie Davis, and like Sarah and Albert Browne, those who counted themselves foes of slavery were immeasurably overjoyed. At eighty-seven years old, John Prentiss of New Hampshire had prayed he would live to see the day. The rebels had fought for slavery as their “Corner Stone,” the elderly white man wrote in his diary, referring to the 1861 “cornerstone speech” of Alexander Stephens, in which the Confederate vice president had proclaimed the “great truth that the negro is not equal to the white man,” that enslavement was his natural condition. Now, Prentiss rejoiced, the slaveholders were “doomed forever.” Abolitionists knew this was the work of God.15

  TO THE VICTORS, THE ENTIRE nation appeared to be celebrating, but that impression was accurate only if they ignored the evidence of Confederate distress. For Secretary of the Navy Gideon Welles it seemed the “entire population” was celebrating in the streets of Washington, even as he noted in his diary that all secessionists living in the capital “must have retired.” Notably, the Confederates themselves refrained from describing scenes of universal celebration; Henry Berkeley, an imprisoned private from Lee’s army, named the revelers only as “all yankeedom.” True, some of Richmond’s white residents joined in the festivities, but most stayed inside. Union soldiers could read their “sour faces,” reflecting both anguish and apprehension. Thomas Morris Chester could see them standing silently at their front steps or peering from their windows. He knew it was an occasion they had scarcely ever imagined, and for the vanquished it was frightening indeed. Henri Garidel, in town from Louisiana, watched as black people greeted his conquerors amid billowing Union flags. Listening to their hurrahs, his heart felt “heavy as a mountain.” Lincoln’s carriage, it seemed to Garidel, was “followed by the entire Negro population of Richmond,” and now his own heart was breaking. Nor was every white person up north thrilled—one New Yorker surmised that the “contemptable Copperheads” were keeping quiet out of fear, some even deceitfully waving flags, despite their hatred of Lincoln, black people, and the whole Civil War.16

  For Lee’s men, the last months in the Army of Northern Virginia had been an ordeal of despair and exhaustion accompanied by steady desertion. A member of the Richmond Howitzers, watching the bursting mortar shells through the night, thought “the world would fall to pieces.” Civilians invoked the language of doom too. “Every body is dying with the blues,” Amanda Edmunds wrote from her family’s thousand-acre Virginia plantation. Diehard rebels tried mightily to keep up their spirits, but Yankee glee made it worse, or maybe it was their pious gratitude. Seventeen-year-old Emma LeConte had been living in Columbia, South Carolina, in February, when the combined actions of Union soldiers, slaves, evacuating Confederates, and escaped prisoners set the city afire, sparing the college campus where her father taught. The family also owned a large plantation, and now LeConte had to suffer heretofore unknown hardships, reading by candlelight instead of gas and wearing undergarments cut from rough cloth. Still, anything was worth avoiding surrender. “The South will not give up,” she wrote in her diary. “I can not think that.” As for President Lincoln, the Richmond papers echoed the people’s sentiments. He was a fool and a tyrant.17

  Unthinkable or not, rumors of surrender—originating from speculation, a wish, a worry, or a lie—began the day after Richmond fell. A Union soldier had to discard a jubilant letter announcing the capitulation of Lee’s whole army; “as it isn’t so,” he wrote, “I begin again, crestfallen.” Michigan soldiers in camp near Detroit heard that Robert E. Lee had surrendered, then that it was only Fitzhugh Lee, cavalry commander in his uncle’s army. On the home front, Wilmington Unionists celebrated surrender until the evening papers set the record straight. In Boston, a postman stopped Anna Lowell on the street to impart the thrilling news of final victory, which all too soon, she lamented, “proved bogus.” Rumors also
overtook the Confederates. Prisoners at Fort Delaware heard talk of the “heartsickening” possibility, while rebel soldiers in Texas heard that Robert E. Lee had been killed.18

  When the real news came, the most critical part was that Lee had surrendered his entire army, with not a remnant left to fight. Just days after the fall of Richmond, the general and his escaping troops had found themselves surrounded and trapped by the forces of Generals Ulysses S. Grant and Philip Sheridan. Lee had been hoping to meet up with General Joseph E. Johnston in North Carolina, but by the evening of April 6, as Confederate desertion continued apace, the Army of the Potomac overpowered the men at a place called Sayler’s Creek, ending in more than seven thousand Confederate casualties and prisoners. On April 7, Grant proposed the enemy’s surrender, and over the next two days, messengers conveyed a series of exchanges through the lines, until the two generals agreed to convene in the Virginia village of Appomattox Court House, about a hundred miles west of Richmond. The morning of April 9 saw a brief and ultimately futile Confederate assault, and soon Lee arrived to concede defeat. The surrender of the Army of Northern Virginia was not technically synonymous with Confederate surrender, since fragments of other armies remained in the field, and through late May there would be skirmishes from North Carolina to Texas. But it didn’t matter anymore. The entire army: that was the phrase Grant used in his communication to Sherman, and that was the point Sherman passed on to the officers and soldiers. It was the part that echoed over and over, from the lips of Tennessee farmers to the pens of abolitionist Boston ladies. Lee’s surrender made inevitable the end of the Confederacy.19

  Rippling outward, beginning that day and extending for weeks into the remotest corners of the nation, word traveled. At Appomattox, African Americans lined the road to honor Union soldiers. Something so long prayed for, “yet it seems impossible that it has come,” wrote Thomas Morris Chester in Richmond, as he watched elderly men and women weep, pray in gratitude, and call out their jubilations. In that once capital city, former slaves congregated—some well dressed, others in field-hand rags—to promenade and sing about John Brown. Children jumped rope and rolled hoops. To the heartbroken Confederate Henri Garidel, the “shouts of joy of the Negroes” made the city “tremble as much as the cannon.” On Roanoke Island off North Carolina, freedmen and women bowed their heads in prayer, then gave three cheers and sang “The Star-Spangled Banner.” The city of Charleston was “wild with rejoicing” as black celebrants sang “Glory to God.”20

  Black and white Union soldiers mostly expressed their elation with deafening noise. The men of a Connecticut regiment had been advancing on the rebel army when an aide-de-camp rode beside the line to relay the news, prompting instant cheers “from a hundred thousand throats.” A Vermont soldier at Appomattox found himself among acres of troops yelling and discharging weapons amid “Toasts and cheers and music,” followed by “music cheers and Toasts.” At City Point, Virginia, General George Meade rode down the line in a carriage, tossing his hat in the air, turning a weary march of the 139th New York into a euphoric parade. In camp in North Carolina, soldiers formed an obedient row to hear an officer read a telegram, then went wild. When word arrived via northern newspapers delivered to a dock or a depot, the reaction was the same.21

  Everywhere, the men “kicked up” and “hurrahed good.” They did handstands, rolled in the springtime mud, and drank whatever liquor was at hand (“I could dance a double shuffle for 6 hours if I had half a pint,” claimed a limping soldier). Regimental musicians—fife and drum, brass bands—kept up the bedlam. In Raleigh it sounded as though “every tree in the surrounding woods was screaming.” In East Tennessee, the all-night roar of the musketry resonated across the landscape just the same as a battle. From army hospital beds, even the most mangled soldiers reveled in the news. A week later, it still seemed “almost incredible,” as if the men would wake up to find their enemies as determined as ever. Thinking of Robert E. Lee, one man “had a sort of impression that we should fight him all our lives.” Marching in North Carolina, white Union soldiers tore down a slave whipping post and set it on fire.22

  WHITE SOUTHERNERS EVERYWHERE, like Rodney Dorman in Jacksonville, reacted with astonishment of an entirely different order. A retreating officer likened the turn of events to “a thunderbolt from heaven.” For the Confederate army, Lee’s surrender completed the gloom of Richmond’s downfall. The imprisoned private Henry Berkeley described a “most intense mental anxiety.” Already heavy hearts sank faster with each crack of celebratory Yankee gunfire. One Virginia lieutenant called it the “saddest day of my life,” underlining each word. For a Tennessee private, the whole world had stopped. “Minutes seem days, and days are months,” he wrote in his diary. In Texas, an army surgeon found himself haunted by “rivers of blood, Southern blood,” flowing through a ruined landscape of mourning widows and orphaned children. A few of the men refused to believe it was true. “Sick at heart, but not conquered yet,” wrote the Tennessee private. Or as a Virginia rebel retorted to a Yankee, “It ain’t over yet.” For most, though, the war was indeed over, at least for now. Across two pages of his journal, Captain Henry Chambers of the Forty-Ninth North Carolina poured out his “bitter, bitter humiliation.” With Yankees, including Negro soldiers, in the role of taunting conquerors, all hope of southern independence was “blasted!” When rain fell, Chambers picked up on the metaphor. “Nature weeps over Liberty’s death,” he wrote, diligently ignoring emancipation, since liberty was for white people only.23

  If rain felt like nature’s tears, Confederate men joined in, unembarrassed. At Appomattox, everyone from privates to officers “broke down and wept like little children,” one man recorded, “and Oh, Lord! I cried too.” When General Lee bade his men good-bye, “not a dry eye could be seen,” another wrote, and many “sobbed aloud in uncontrollable anguish.” The man didn’t know how long this ritual went on, for as soon as he shook hands with Lee, he left the scene, “almost blind of tears.” For Henri Garidel, the grief of defeat took a toll on his body. “My heart was so heavy that I was almost suffocating,” he wrote the day after Lee’s surrender, his symptoms spreading to include a stomach ailment and heartburn. “Unhappiness,” he reported, “is going to kill me.”24

  Gloom and anger engulfed the Confederate home front. In Richmond, Lucy Fletcher had seen the crowds of black people in the streets (deceived by the Yankees into leaving their masters, she felt sure), actually “enjoying themselves,” she spluttered, “negro & Yankee, Yankee & negro, ad nauseum.” After Union victory, she sat alone inside a shattered church, unable to quiet the “anxious forebodings,” as she pled with God to “overrule this terrible calamity.” Time felt distorted, just as it had for men in the field. For nineteen-year-old Mary Cabell in Lynchburg, the shock turned weeks into years, then compressed years into days. When Cabell thought back to the rebel victory at Fort Sumter and the jubilee that had followed Virginia’s secession five days later, surrender felt like “a wild, dreadful, bewildering dream.” The mood around Eliza Andrews in Mayfield, Georgia, was one of “complete revulsion,” with no more talk of “fighting to the last ditch,” since, she conceded, “the last ditch has already been reached.” Emma Le-Conte was simply incredulous: “We give up to the Yankees! How can it be?” Why, if the problem was inferior numbers, then Jefferson Davis should have called out the women, for “we would go and fight, too.” The future was impossible to imagine, unless you thought about leaving the United States altogether, or maybe committing suicide.25

  Unionists in the border states of Delaware, Maryland, Kentucky, and Missouri, where the white population had divided sharply over the war, marked the occasion in ways that reflected local dissension. To Anna Ferris in Wilmington, the pealing bells seemed to be ringing in a thousand years of peace, while in Lexington, a small crowd of soldiers, poor whites, and African Americans remained subdued. In Baltimore, bells rang and cannons fired, but many white residents refused even to place a candle in their windows. One black m
an at first thought all the nighttime noise signaled a rebel attack. “Surrender of Lee and his whole Caboodles,” he wrote when definitive word came. “Bully for Grant.”26

  Up north, it was easier for the victors to imagine their own exhilaration as universal. Sextons rang church bells, women rang dinner bells, men fired the town cannons, boys burst firecrackers, and housewives and servants got to work sewing bunting, cutting streamers from white flannel, and searching for scraps of complementary red and blue. In Washington, from the White House to the humblest homes of freedpeople, “light answered light,” wrote Julia Shepard, taking in the calcium illumination on public buildings, the bonfires and bursting rockets in the streets, and the windows lit up by a million candles that made midnight look like noontime. Downtown Chicago blazed with bonfires at eleven o’clock at night, and in Hartford a street carnival lasted till dawn. In New York the next morning, a newsboy breathlessly hawked the extra, calling out, “Surrender of Lee’s army, ten cents and no mistake.”27

  When Mary Peck heard the church bells ringing off schedule, she at first thought someone had died in her tiny town near Albany. When she wrote the word “victory” in a letter to her husband at the front, she underlined it and added two exclamation points; the words “Lee has surrendered” merited a triple underline. Pausing from her domestic chores, Peck watched as farmers passing along the road threw their caps in the air and cheered. How she longed to join them, but “I am a woman,” she wrote, “so I only said Thank God! & went in the house—& cried.” With her young son shouting, “Mama we’ve whipped the rebels,” the family’s two black servants quit work and took the boy into town to celebrate. In Cincinnati, African Americans hoisted a sign reading, “All men are born equal.” In Sacramento, residents burned Jefferson Davis in effigy. In Iowa, Hattie Schenck thought she could see the horses making merry, and in New Hampshire, Henry Thacher thought even “inanimate matter” was filled with joy. Everywhere, Union supporters prayed, for victory was a sure sign of God’s graces.28