by Martha Hodes
Cloe Whittle prayed that God would prevent her from “feeling glad at this awful & most horrible transaction,” but most Confederates prayed in the other direction. Clara Dargan wrote in her diary about the assassination and the attack on Seward, calling the two victims a “Royal Suite of the Imperial Apes” and thanking God fervently for a “first gleam of light in this midnight darkness.” Twenty-one-year-old Sarah Wadley was likewise “electrified” by the tidings, which readily shook her out of her surrender-induced melancholy. Wadley took comfort in the assassin’s motto, hoping his words would “find an echo in every southron’s heart.” More laconic expressions were no less sincere. “I glory in the assassinator,” wrote a Texas woman, while another in South Carolina called the news “very cheering.”18
This kind of spiteful gratification rose from the ongoing war in hearts and minds, in which Lincoln’s violent death avenged the destruction of the Confederate nation and its precious institution of slavery. It was not simply that Lincoln had been killed, it was also that Confederates could now return the humiliating glee that Yankees had expressed in the process of conquering their land. For Amanda Edmunds, the despised Lincoln and Seward had now “felt the suffering which they have inflicted on our Southern people.” Kate Stone, who had lost two brothers in the war, honored Booth in her journal, naming him the “brave destroyer” of the tyrant Lincoln, who could no longer “rejoice in our humiliation.” Should Booth escape to the South, Stone felt sure he would “meet with a warm welcome.”19
Public delight in the assassination could be safely manifested where there was no Union presence to interfere. When the news arrived at a Georgia train station just north of where Sherman’s army had marched to the sea, Confederates laughed and clapped. But white southerners did not have to be isolated to react honestly. From the moment of victory, the joy coursing through black communities in the South had been tempered by unease, with wartime hostilities further stirred up. “We are surrounded by a people who hate us with a deadly hatred,” wrote a northern teacher working among former slaves in Natchez, Mississippi. The night schools for freedpeople in Hampton, Virginia, had to be suspended, another teacher explained, because of all the paroled rebel soldiers “let loose here to prowl around the country, threatening the lives of Union men and colored people.” In Richmond, the “wrath and hatred” of former masters, who watched their own former slaves (for some, their biological children) walk freely to church and school, was “terrible, terrible.”20
Lincoln’s assassination only exacerbated this antagonism, even more vividly giving the lie to mourners’ deluded, if soothing, assertions of a nation united by the terrible crime. While Confederates feared retaliation from angry mourners, worries went both ways. In Portsmouth, Virginia, it was dangerous to venture out at night “since the assassination of the Pres. and since the return of so many Rebel prisoners,” wrote a northern missionary. As soldiers from Lee’s defunct army filled the streets of Richmond, no more would Thomas Seymour, a young white man working with freedpeople, amble over to the telegraph office at night, since “by the citizens we are known to be Yankees.” In Saint Augustine, Florida, downhearted rebels brightened at news of the assassination, “taunting the colored people” about reenslavement, and in Lexington, Kentucky, a white man named Thomas Outten assaulted a black man, calling out, “Old Lincoln is dead, and I will kill the goddamned Negroes now.” When news of the assassination arrived in New Orleans, Patrick Shields, whose slaves had left during the war, pointed to the newspaper being passed among his black neighbors and laughed in approval. Shields attracted a crowd of black and white onlookers as he proclaimed that “all the niggers” would now “go home to their masters.” Jefferson Davis, he went on, was coming to “hang all the niggers to the trees.”21
Merrymakers weren’t necessarily deterred by the presence of black Union soldiers either, and some were downright emboldened, aiming their actions directly at them. Confederates in Key West demonstrated “expressions of Joy” in front of the black troops, and a white woman in Jacksonville asked black men if they were “going to celebrate.” Extra soldiers were called out to patrol the streets of New Orleans after dark, “fearing some trouble with the Negroe Regiment stationed here,” and black occupiers in Petersburg witnessed paroled officers “strutting about” with their swords and pistols, making known “the most jubilant manifestations of satisfaction.” In Tennessee, a white woman jeered at African American soldiers, telling them, “Your father is dead.” Gleeful rebels ignored white enemies too. Unionists in Baltimore saw returning Confederate soldiers “partying it about,” while a Richmond Unionist reported local women exulting over the assassination.22
For all that, Confederates who expressed glee in public did not always get away with it, and any such demonstration might become a symbolic battlefield on which to put down unfinished rebellion. In a variant of “hard war,” in which the Union understood Confederate soldiers, leaders, and civilians alike as enemy and target, authorities might react with violence to any impudent or imprudent act in the wake of Lincoln’s assassination. As Albert Browne wrote home from Charleston, “Woe be to him who should dare to utter one word of jubilation.” In prison camps in particular, Union officials saw little reason to withhold retaliatory discipline. When one inmate in Chicago responded to the news with the words, “That’s bully,” a Yankee commenced “kicking him about like a brute,” then hung him twenty feet off the ground for hours, with irons tied to both legs. At Fort Delaware, a prisoner who called Lincoln a “goddamned old nigger-loving son of a bitch” was knocked down and slapped by a Union general, hung by his hands for an hour, and ordered whipped by a black man. When prisoners at Fort Jefferson, Florida, cheered Lincoln’s death, they were tied up and suspended, their feet barely touching the ground. The men begged and prayed and cursed to no avail, prompting remorse from some of their captors; other Union men, though, wanted to shoot them right there.23
Civilians who refused to censor their anti-Lincoln sentiments in public could also find themselves in trouble. Suspicious of a man observed doing no more than laughing on his porch, Yankees searched his house and threatened to burn it down. When locals in Alexandria, Virginia, refused to obey orders to drape their homes, some were assaulted with brickbats and stones. “The fate of our President has so enraged the soldiers at St. Louis,” a northerner observed, “that several persons have been shot who have said things in the wrong direction.” Surrender or no surrender, rebels remained defiant, and Yankees responded with violence. Legal action could also be a consequence. Union authorities in Huntsville, Alabama, announced that anyone rejoicing at the assassination would be tried for treason, and elsewhere jubilant Confederates were in fact arrested: in Chattanooga for “expressing pleasure” at the assassination; in Mobile for declaring that Lincoln was “not worth the powder that shot him”; in Nashville for joking that the headlines should have read “Glorious News!” When two stricken Union men brought a newspaper into a cigar store on Magazine Street in New Orleans, only to hear the proprietor say, “I am glad of it, I hope it is true,” they had the offender taken into custody. In Washington, when a black woman reported a secessionist thanking God for Booth, authorities seized the man. At least some of these arrests resulted from more than words, including that of Patrick Shields, who harassed his black neighbors in New Orleans, and Thomas Outten, who assaulted a black man in Lexington. As a northern teacher wrote to her parents from Charleston, “More than one man was arrested for expressing his joy at the news,” and there was “considerable apprehension as to the safety of the Northerners.”24
Whether Confederates remained silent, gloated in private, or expressed themselves in public with or without retaliation, they knew their joy was fleeting. Even the exuberant young Emma LeConte understood that Lincoln’s death could not reverse defeat. “There seems no reason to exult, for this will make no change in our position,” she sighed amid her family’s happy acclamations. When Georgia plantation mistress Caroline Jones consi
dered that Lincoln could no longer “raise his howl of diabolical triumph,” she knew it was only “one sweet drop among so much that is painful.” In South Carolina, Mary Chesnut listened to the men around her talk about “a nation in mourning,” with no reference to Lincoln. The Confederacy was her nation, and its downfall her people’s tragedy; “glorious young blood poured out like rain on the battlefields,” Chesnut wrote. “For what?” When Rodney Dorman poured his elation into his private journal, it was tinged with the same question.25
ALTHOUGH CONFEDERATES CONTRADICTED COMFORTING visions of universal grief, Lincoln’s mourners could at least wave them away as the stubborn enemy and bitter losers. But northerners who declined to mourn—or, worse, openly celebrated—proved more irksome to the loyal bereaved. It was these subversives who most uncomfortably disrupted the idea of a unified victorious and grieving nation at war’s end, for these antagonists dwelled within the Union states, among the mourners, in their own towns and cities, some even right next door.
Named by their opponents after a poisonous snake, these were the Copperheads, members of the northern Democratic Party who disagreed with the whole premise of a civil war over slavery. As the most virulent faction of the so-called Peace Democrats (they were against the war, but not because they were pacifists), Copperheads renounced the conflict as an unconstitutional raising of arms. Many who identified as such—they soon took the name for their own—had come from slave states or emigrated from Ireland or Germany, joining the northern working classes. Their common denominator was hostility to the antislavery cause, often accompanied by intense racism. Lines of dissent and treason blurred during wartime, but most Copperheads were not strictly traitors, since they did not support secession or hope for Confederate victory. Their desire, rather, was to restore the pre–Civil War nation, but since Confederates were fighting to preserve slavery via secession and independence, that position made little sense. If Lincoln gave in to his northern enemies and gave up on the war, there would be two nations, not one, a problem the Copperheads avoided addressing.
Copperheads had made known their anti-Lincoln sentiments at the outbreak of war, and in late 1862 they again spoke up loudly when President Lincoln introduced his plans for the Emancipation Proclamation. The pinnacle of their influence came in the summer of 1864, with mounting Confederate victories, a rising Union death toll, and tensions over the northern draft. Their nadir came that autumn, with the fall of Atlanta to Sherman’s army, followed by Sheridan’s Shenandoah Valley campaign, both of which ensured Lincoln’s handy reelection in November. Then, the assassination unleashed the Copperheads again, as they spewed enough glee to make clear that they had never melted away. Now mourners had to contend not only with defiant Confederates but also with a faction of northern citizens who turned the Union home front into a battleground. At the literal battle-front too, loyal Union soldiers confronted outspoken disloyal brethren in blue.
Not all of Lincoln’s northern adversaries felt free to speak their minds. The same as fearful southern whites, some Copperheads just kept quiet. In upstate New York, locals known for their anti-Lincoln sentiments all played the parts of “good Union men,” and in a northern California town, any rejoicing among them had to take place “in their own Houses & among themselves.” Where Union supporters and Confederate sympathizers had once gotten along out west by steering clear of war talk, such toleration was simply not possible after the assassination; one mourner decided then and there to “quit all social intimacy” with those on the other side. Like nervous Confederates, some Copperheads also hid their hatred of Lincoln in deceptive public displays. In Chicago, an abolitionist schoolteacher noticed that “strong Democrats now mourn with the rest.” In Saco, Maine, everyone paid tribute to Lincoln, “even those who were against him politically.” The city of Trenton, with a reputation for disloyalty, was soon “draped in mourning from one end to the other,” and in Brooklyn there were “plenty of Traitors & copperheads hanging out mourning,” wrote one of the aggrieved, scoffing at those “compelled by public feeling to act the Hypocrite.” A sergeant in the Fifteenth New Jersey likewise painfully admitted that many in his company had “secretly rejoiced” at the news; none had “dared to cheer,” he added, though he felt sure that “if some Rebel had proposed it there were plenty ready to join in.”26
Still, many Copperheads, like many Confederates, refused to disguise their true sentiments. Private or semiprivate conversations proved the least dangerous. In Bloomington, Indiana, a woman declared her intention to “give a grand dinner” to mark the occasion. In Saint Peter, Minnesota, a young woman told a Union soldier that she “expected to have a good time” at a local ball “because Lincoln was killed” (the man promptly withdrew his invitation). In Boston, an Irish cook made her politics known in front of her employer by “laughing all day” when the news arrived. In another northern household, the Irish servants made clear that they were “so glad Lincoln was dead!” As their mistress explained it to herself, “They hate him for emancipating the negroes, fearing we shall employ them, & reduce the wages.” Meanwhile, a New York hotel fired its Irish waiters for their “Celtic talk approving Lincoln’s murder.”27
Mixing race and racism into their post-assassination utterances, Copperheads fanned another ongoing conflict on the northern home front: that between abolitionists, black and white, who wanted equal rights for African Americans, and those who wanted no such thing. One soldier said he approved of Lincoln’s death because the president was an abolitionist who had caused “thousands of innocent men being killed.” Private Elijah Chapman was angry that the president had doffed his hat to black people, and Private Henry Peters told another soldier in the washroom of a Saint Louis boardinghouse that he applauded the assassination because Lincoln was “for the Negro.” At Philadelphia’s naval hospital, a sailor hoped aloud that “the next president will put the niggers where they ought to be,” while in camp in Alabama a Union soldier declared the murder justified since Lincoln permitted “white men to be slaughtered for the nigger.” Like Confederates, Copperheads also directed their taunts directly at African Americans. A Union soldier from Indiana, in camp in Nashville, boasted of telling a black man that he rejoiced in Lincoln’s death. “Goddamn him,” the soldier added, “he ought to have been killed long ago.” On Saint Helena Island, a sneering Union army boatswain told the deckhands, “Come up here you damned black sons of bitches, your best friend is dead.” Even more disconcerting, Copperheads extended threats of white-on-black violence into the North, as far up as Canada. A black minister in Ontario, shattered at news of the assassination, heard a group of boys delighting that “the nigger’s friend was dead.” Spying the minister, they turned on him, exclaiming, “There is one of his nigger friends now.”28
This flare-up of Copperhead sentiments provoked violent thoughts among grieving civilians. A Massachusetts farmer described the reaction of the bereaved as “bloodthirsty,” while a Pennsylvania woman declared indignant mourners “ready to go to war now.” Told of a man exulting over the assassination, a Baltimore mourner wanted the offender “dangling from a lamp post.” Passing men on the streets of Boston who didn’t appear to be mourning, Caroline Dall “could have killed them.” Female offenders might be spared, perhaps because their talk (like that of Confederate women) did not seem sufficiently threatening. In Chicago, a woman seen tearing down mourning drapery was quickly surrounded by an “indignant crowd,” then left alone after she slipped into a shop. When gossip circulated in an upstate New York town that Susan Hews had clapped and cheered at the news, citizens ordered her exiled, but Hews denied the reports. One angry mourner called her a “dirty low-minded ignorant disloyal contemptable Thing,” making clear that had she “been a man,” she would never have gotten away with her alleged behavior. Still, femininity was not always a safeguard, at least not in the eyes of female mourners. Em Cornwall, disgusted by insincere drapery in her Connecticut town, wanted to “knock every one of the mean, nasty, slimy, reptiles into
the dust,” whether they wore “petticoats or pantaloons.”29
Nor was it all wishes and warnings. Menacing crowds forced some transgressors into exile and made others take back their insults, as in Brattle-boro, Vermont, where neighbors forced a man to mount a wagon and recant. In New York, mourners tarred an undraped house, and in Germantown, Pennsylvania, three men swore at a neighborhood traitor so menacingly that a black-bordered flag soon floated from his window. Copperhead expressions could also induce a warlike atmosphere. In Boston, reports of anti-Lincoln behavior prompted an increase in the police force. In Indianapolis, Union soldiers who expressed satisfaction with the president’s death were so violently threatened that they were put under the protection of military authorities. In San Francisco, mourners attacked Democratic newspaper offices, and the militia was called out, with the city under siege for days.30
New Englanders react in fury to a man who expressed glee over Lincoln’s death. This woodcut from an April 1865 issue of the National Police Gazette, entitled “Tarring and Feathering at Swampscott, Mass., of a Justifier of the Assassin,” shows the tarred and feathered victim paraded through the streets with an American flag planted next to him. The mob includes a bonneted woman (far right) and a young boy (far left).
National Police Gazette, April 29, 1865, Lincoln Collection Publications and Newspapers, Special Collections Research Center, University of Chicago Library.
Just as Lincoln’s mourners copied out the facts of the night at Ford’s Theatre in their personal writings, so too did they copy down reports of Copperhead expressions and the violence that ensued, whether gleaned from newspaper notices or captured in swirling rumors. From the Boston area came stories of a store mobbed and cleaned out, a man tarred and feathered, people “roughly handled,” factory workers assaulted by fellow laborers. Word came that a man joking that Lincoln “had as much brain now as he ever had” was nearly killed by a mob. New Yorkers offered accounts of gloating Irish immigrants igniting “violent demonstrations,” a young boy beaten, a man carried “almost dead” to the police station. Rumors circulated of a Copperhead in Pennsylvania quickly “crushed into a jelly”; a man in Washington shot by Union cavalry for proclaiming the assassination “good enough for the black rascal”; an offender in Chicago “shot dead” for exulting in the murder; a fellow in Minnesota hanged from a tree as “a warning to all future traitors.”31
