by Martha Hodes
In his diary on April 15, 1865, Bostonian Francis Brooks drew an upside-down American flag at half-mast, decorated with a mourning ribbon, flying over a grave with a skull and crossbones signaling the assassination’s danger to the nation.
Francis Brooks Journal, April 15, 1865. Courtesy of the Massachusetts Historical Society.
Every detail recorded and absorbed made it less a hallucinated nightmare or a theatrical drama, less a lie or a hoax. After eleven-year-old Gren-ville Norcross wrote in his diary that President Lincoln was “shot through the head by J. W. Booth,” the boy used up four pages transcribing every word of a newspaper article. Anna Lowell selected particular facts: that Lincoln laughed at the play yet looked sad; that Mrs. Lincoln tried to rouse her husband after Booth pulled the trigger. A woman in New Hampshire described the bullet’s entrance, “three inches back of the left ear.” A man in Washington recorded that Lincoln had entered Ford’s Theatre “from the dress circle through a narrow corridor some three feet wide and eight or ten long” and that the room at Petersen’s was “about 9 feet by 15, with two windows and three doors.” In the two days following, Charles French wrote down all the specifics, from Lincoln’s decision to attend the theater that night to a description of the suit the president would wear inside his casket. Every fact made it more possible that it had truly come to pass.28
Just as the victors had imagined their exultation as universal less than a week earlier, as mourners they now envisioned their grief the same way. If recording the facts helped them cope with their shock, so too did observing and preserving the public scenes of reaction. Many noted not only the desolation etched onto every face, but also the pervasive mood of despondency, thereby fitting their own despair into something larger: a whole village, an entire city. Just as Sarah Browne imagined the feelings of her husband down south, mourners everywhere imagined—and newspapers confirmed—that their own feelings were multiplied across the nation and around the globe. White people who lived or worked near black people tended to record those emotions, like Gideon Welles in Washington who documented the grief of the capital’s large wartime African American population. Some who didn’t know any black people but who associated Lincoln with emancipation conjured those feelings, like the northern New England woman who envisioned “how the poor Freedmen will mourn over the dreadful calamity so suddenly fallen upon us!”29
Newspaper reports, from which mourners gathered so much of their information, also helped the bereaved put unspeakable feelings into words. When a Pennsylvania soldier wrote of the “greatest National calamity that ever befell the American people,” he likely borrowed that description from a journalist. When sixteen-year-old Margaret Howell recorded that she was awakened with the “startling news of the assassination of our noble and beloved President,” she no doubt meant every word, even if the adjectives she chose—startling, noble, beloved—were ubiquitous in the papers. When she wrote, “Tis the saddest day in our History,” she was also likely echoing the papers, invoking a reporter’s words in order to give voice to her own emotions.30
Excitement and gloom. Those were the two words people wrote down again and again, the first emanating from within, the second seeming to descend from the atmosphere. In the nineteenth century, to excite meant to elicit strong emotions of any sort. At Ford’s Theatre, “everybody was excited,” and then the capital had been “thrown into the most intense excitement.” Cities were in “a state of great excitement,” indeed the whole Union was in a state of the “most intense excitement ever known.” People also invoked the word to describe their own sense of being unnerved, like eyewitness Frederick Sawyer who pronounced himself “so excited by what has occurred to night.”31
Gloom, in counterpoint, implied melancholy, shadows, and darkness, all of which endured after the state of excitement died down. Among the freedpeople of Wilmington, North Carolina, wrote a white teacher, the news caused “a dreadful gloom to settle in our midst.” In Brookline, Massachusetts, white men stood together, talking in low voices, while “gloom & dismay were pictured upon every countenance”—again, the reading of faces worked to convince observers that they were not mistaken. John Nicolay, Lincoln’s private secretary, described the gloom in Washington as “heavy and ominous,” as if “some greater calamity still hung in the air, and was about to crush and overwhelm every one.” Soldiers in camp felt it keenly, many remaining quiet in keeping with masculine protocol. For the members of a black regiment that had entered Richmond, the news arrived on a lovely spring day, casting “a gloom over every thing.” When an officer gave word to an Illinois regiment in Virginia, “a silent gloom fell upon us like a pall,” wrote Daniel Chisolm. “No one,” he explained, “spoke or moved.” There was no drill or dress parade, “No Nothing, all quiet, Flags at half mast.” The next day, after the troops packed up to move across the railroad tracks, the men “lay around,” Chisolm wrote in his notebook, “mostly in our tents all quiet and lonesome,” a “Silent Gloom” hovering over the camp.32
Mourners found confirmation of the catastrophic event and of the universal grief they imagined as they soaked up and participated in public rituals. Cities, towns, and villages seemed instantaneously drenched in black drapery, complemented by white, the two traditional colors of nineteenth-century mourning. Businesses that had opened early on Saturday soon began to close—stores, theaters, bars—with the exception of shops that carried anything that could be fashioned into a mourning decoration. By the end of the day on Saturday, A. T. Stewart’s department store in New York had sold a hundred thousand dollars’ worth of black goods. Sundown brought the rituals of illumination—now in sorrow instead of joy—combining burning candles in residential windows, kerosene and gas lamps all aglow, and bonfires lighting up the streets (always accompanied by the worry of spreading flames). The death of a statesman also warranted the donning of mourning emblems, some with likenesses or mottoes, others fashioned more plainly from the ubiquitous crinkly fabric called crape, pinned to bonnets, collars, or sleeves. Shopkeepers began selling the badges on the morning of April 15 and kept up a steady business all through the spring.33
The near-immediate shrouding of public buildings, which to privileged observers seemed to have been accomplished by magic, in fact fell to workingmen, just as the draping of private homes fell to wives and servants (“If you have not already draped our flags with mourning, have it done,” a man told his wife, his words indicating that she should direct a domestic laborer). Washington was the first to be transformed, as workers followed orders to cloak the White House, the Capitol, the War Department, Treasury Department, Post Office, and Patent Office. Servants meanwhile created elaborate displays on the exteriors of the city’s poshest residences (“I had our house fixed early in the day,” Elizabeth Blair Lee wrote to her husband). African Americans, many of them poor, along with the city’s poorer whites, displayed their sentiments with as much black cloth as they could scare up, and soon the city was shrouded in “miles upon miles of material,” as a federal clerk put it, or as Julia Shepard described the scene, the drapery went “on and on,” the streets presenting “only the blackness of darkness.”34
Beyond the capital, mourners worked just as hard. Women transformed the victory flags, sewing black trim along the edges or tying black ribbon to the poles. A man traveled nearly five miles to procure a half-yard of black crape. A woman who didn’t get to the shops quickly enough had to festoon a window with her own black shawl, and widows lent their personal mourning attire to drape local church altars. A shopkeeper used lace collars to display the words “The dead still live.” Poor people everywhere tacked up black rags, while Anna Lowell instructed her servants to decorate the portico of her home with black alpaca and white cotton, accented with black and white rosettes. At the Winter Garden Theatre in New York, someone covered over the name of Edwin Booth, the assassin’s brother, who had just ended a run as Hamlet. Across the continent the labor continued for more than a week, “hammers & stepladders everywhere,�
�� black and white bunting concealing the facades, columns, window frames, and door frames of city halls, churches, banks, department stores, shops, hotels, libraries, schools, and houses from tenement to mansion. Up went the bordered flags, the swags and streamers, the bows and ribbons, banners pronouncing the nation in mourning, and photographs of the slain president, their frames fringed in black.35
In the defeated Confederacy, freedpeople, Yankee occupiers, and Unionists got to work too. In Charleston and New Orleans, black residents decorated houses and clothing. In Savannah and Norfolk, the homes of even the most impoverished African Americans had “a bit of black suspended upon door or window,” and the smallest children wore mourning badges. On the Sea Islands, freedwomen made their children “little crape rosettes,” and the children crafted wreaths of roses tied with dark crape, while white teachers distributed scraps of fabric to those who had none. On Saint Helena, one little girl cut her black bonnet into pieces small enough that she “supplied the whole school.” By order of the War Department, Union soldiers and officers set to the task of draping their military posts. One soldier had to travel into the nearest town, inquiring of every merchant and any person along the way if they had any makeshift mourning goods to sell or donate. Union officers meanwhile saw to it that the only trade conducted, most especially among local Confederates, was in mourning goods.36
All these rituals were carried out amid shock, the same state of mind so recently entered by defeated Confederates. Yet Lincoln’s supporters had not truly exchanged places with their enemies, for the president’s assassination did not reverse Union victory, and Confederates remained the ones for whom the war had been fought in vain. Nonetheless, the crime compounded the uncertainty of what would happen next for the triumphant nation. This was true most especially for African Americans: recall the freedpeople in Washington who wondered right away if Lincoln’s demise would jeopardize freedom. Although black leaders had criticized the president’s hesitancy regarding emancipation early in the war, Lincoln had over time been deeply influenced by the convictions of black and white abolitionists, including the more radical members of his own party. For many African Americans in the spring of 1865, Abraham Lincoln was the Great Emancipator (the “bondman’s saviour,” wrote a member of the U.S. Colored Troops), and his death brought very real forebodings. In Charleston, black men and women expressed apprehension about the murder, fearing “the result of it to themselves.” On the Sea Islands, some wondered if the white northerners who were running the old plantations as free-labor experiments would now depart, prompting their former masters to return. Others wondered if, with Lincoln gone, the whole Union government was dead too. Like those outside the gates of the White House on Saturday morning, adults and children in the South articulated the terrible question: Would they be slaves again?37
Free African Americans up north meanwhile felt the loss of hope they had built so high: hope built on the escape of slaves to Union lines, on the Emancipation Proclamation affirming those actions, and on Confederate surrender affirming it decisively. Writing to the black-owned Christian Recorder, correspondents relayed the mood around them. In Chicago, “We felt as if all our hopes were lost.” In Indiana, “The hope of our people is again stricken down.” White mourners expressed fear as well, though theirs was more amorphous, less concrete: “visions of disaster and desolation, & national ruin,” in the words of a Pennsylvania man. Or as Anna Ferris wrote from Delaware, “We seem groping in thick blackness & look at each other in fear & dread.” Others wrote of a future filled with evil and anarchy. But for Lincoln’s black mourners alone was shock accompanied by the most raw anxiety.38
In the days afterward, it felt to Sarah Browne that everyone shared her sense of horror, grief, and outrage. The crime, she wrote, “froze the blood of the nation, which now flows in one current.” Sarah didn’t count the Confederates—those “aiders and abettors of treason”—as part of that single current. Nor did she count those in her own New England city who defied the solemnity. She’d heard of a dissenter thrown off a Salem streetcar, another “compelled to salute the Flag,” people even tarred and feathered for their refusal to mourn for Lincoln. Without hesitation, Sarah endorsed these violent actions against the enemies in her midst. “All this is right,” she wrote to Albert.39
Sarah Browne wrote in her diary and letters about universal shock, but across the Confederacy and across the Union, the reaction to Lincoln’s assassination was not all horrific disbelief, excitement and gloom, mourning drapery and badges, fear and dread. For some, Lincoln’s murder was an occasion for celebration. The Yankee president murdered! It was almost too good to be true.
INTERLUDE
Men Weeping
PLENTY OF MEN KEPT THEIR feelings in check, conserving their words or remaining silent in grief and anger. Extreme circumstances, however, could snap codes of conduct, and the end of the Civil War was just such an occasion: when Garland White and his fellow black soldiers entered the fallen city Richmond, White found himself “overcome with tears.” The higher a man’s social status, the more constricted he felt in displaying emotion, but now it barely mattered. For Union men, black and white, rich and poor, victory had been worthy of weeping with joy, and news of the assassination likewise brought tears of sorrow. Just as Confederate men had wept openly in the shock and bitterness of defeat, it was now the turn of Union men to break the rules of masculine deportment.1
That grown men cried—a staple of news reports and memoirs—is proven in the leaves of private journals. Some, like George Templeton Strong, swallowed hard, as his eyes kept filling, and the corners of his mouth kept twitching, “in spite of all I could do,” he wrote in his diary. Walking through the Broadway throngs in New York, one woman saw that her husband could “scarcely keep back the tears.” Others didn’t bother to try. As black soldiers in camp in Pennsylvania listened to a sermon on Lincoln’s death, many wept freely, the same as on city and village streets, where white men were “sobbing and crying bitterly.” In Philadelphia, weeping men grasped hands, while in Saco, Maine, men talked in groups, “wiping their eyes.” At a church service for Americans in Paris, the minister got through the service only with a “violent effort of self-control,” his voice breaking at the closing prayer for the slain president.2
Men, one woman wrote, were “not ashamed of their tears.” To be sure, many who recorded the sobs of their male companions made sure to call those men strong, in an effort to distinguish them from excusably weak women. In the post office in New York, one woman found “the Clerks & every one so sad—strong men in tears,” just as a minister in Buffalo spoke of the “unusual spectacle of strong men in tears.” Others portrayed the men as shedding tears of fury. Inside Ford’s Theatre, one witness wrote, “strong men wept, and cursed, and tore the seats in the impotence of their anger.” Some men recorded their own emotions obliquely, bypassing the use of first-person singular. “We think it no shame to weep here to-day,” wrote a federal clerk in Washington. Others put it more directly. A man riding on the streetcars in New York found it “impossible to control my tears,” then found himself face to face with another weeping gentleman, the reality of the terrible crime once again verified in an exchange of glances that revealed befitting emotions. As a white officer in a black regiment told his mother, “I never wept so much over the death of any person.”3
Because the sight of men crying in public was far from common, some observers felt obliged to describe them as children, thereby casting their actions as something more familiar. At a Quaker meeting in Philadelphia, a woman watched as a man cried out, “Oh no! no! it cannot be” and “wept as a child.” Aggrieved Union soldiers in Raleigh were subdued, some “weeping like children.” Of course those men were still strong. On the street outside Ford’s Theatre, wrote one eyewitness to the murder, “strong men throw their arms around each other’s necks and cry like children.” Anson Henry, Lincoln’s physician and friend, had come to Washington immediately on hearing the news. When he l
aid eyes on the president’s lifeless body, “the fountain of tears was broken up,” he wrote, “and I wept like a child refusing to be comforted, remaining riveted to the spot.” To his wife, he confided, “I had never before realized the luxury of tears.”4
3
Glee
THE PRESIDENT HAD BEEN DEAD for a week when a navy ship came into Jacksonville, Florida, carrying the April 15 issue of the New York Herald. “IMPORTANT: ASSASSINATION OF PRESIDENT LINCOLN,” read the headline, and below that, “SECRETARY SEWARD DAGGERED IN HIS BED.” Here was Rodney Dorman’s moment of triumphal vengeance. Good riddance to them, he crowed, presuming that Seward hadn’t survived, for both men were “nuisances to the earth,” and “a thousand deaths each could not atone for their cruelty, crimes & wickedness.” A Union soldier in the city’s occupying forces surmised that local Confederates were “making merry,” even if they remained silent in public, and no doubt Dorman confined his sentiments to the pages of his diary. There he relished the news, grateful to both God and the assassin. Whoever the killer was, he was “a great public benefactor.”1
The next evening came further confirmation via another vessel (with no contradiction of Seward’s demise), fanning Dorman’s glee, alongside his ever-present ire. How glorious that neither man could any longer “exult & gloat over the South, & the ruin & devastation they have caused,” he wrote. Among Dorman’s other targets were Henry Ward Beecher (along with all meddling northern ministers), New York newspaperman Horace Greeley, radical Republican senator Charles Sumner of Massachusetts, and other such “disgraces to humanity & the world.” All these evil people—who Dorman thought of as a “sanctimonious band of self satisfied villians & hypocrites”—should now live in fear that God would strike them down too.2
