Mourning Lincoln

by Martha Hodes

  The line between acceptance of God’s will and the effort to understand God’s will was a fine one, and nearly every utterance on the subject could be read both ways: assertions of faith shot through with ambivalence, or assertions of uncertainty shot through with trust in God. Where mourners recorded a struggle, they also asserted faith. Where they asserted faith, they hinted at inner conflict. Like Albert Browne, many entertained doubt. “I Cannot believe it was for the best,” a Union soldier admitted, stumped as to why God would take away the nation’s leader at just this moment. A white captain in the Twenty-Second U.S. Colored Infantry (his regiment had welcomed Lincoln to Richmond) wondered if God had forsaken them all and the nation was “drifting into Anarchy.” For Quaker Anna Ferris, Lincoln’s death was such an “incredible atrocity” that she couldn’t tell “whether love & mercy still reign in Heaven.” Even those who proclaimed spiritual certainty betrayed themselves. Abolitionist and reformer Lydia Maria Child wrote of a trust in God so strong that the assassination “did not shake that faith for an instant,” yet a sentence later she described herself as one who “trusted in Providence till the breeching broke” and the horse ran away.20

  No matter how confusing and distressing were the questions, Lincoln’s mourners did find solace at church, as they listened for affirmations of what they struggled to believe. Outside the White House on the morning of April 15, Gideon Welles had passed African Americans in mourning, then recorded in his diary their “hopeless grief.” But hopelessness was not quite the right description for many black mourners. The idea, as a letter-writer to the San Francisco Elevator put it, was to “draw some consolation out of this great calamity.” The loss of Lincoln, Jacob Thomas told his congregation in upstate New York, was “more than we can bear”—strong words indeed, but Thomas reminded his flock that “in God is our consolation” and asked them to “hope for the best.” The task was to mourn without losing trust, to mourn without losing hope, as Philip Alexander Bell, editor of the Elevator, implored his readers. Chauncey Leonard, one of the few black chaplains in the Union army, knew that Lincoln had piloted the soldiers through the war in order to achieve “Liberty, and Equal Political right,” and yet he knew too that God, “in his wise Providence,” had taken Lincoln away.21

  Hopelessness was not the state of mind of most white mourners either. A woman who at first felt that “all was over” and “anarchy would follow” soon soothed herself with her minister’s “trust & confidence in God.” Like Albert Browne, many repeated the formulaic phrases. Mourners wrote about leaving all affairs to God, “who doeth all things well,” that it was by God that “all things are permitted.” They wrote about God’s “wise purpose,” exhorting themselves to “acquiesce in His will,” and they asked themselves to accept the “unfathomable designs of Providence.” Formulaic or not, such words could hold off despair. As one woman wrote on Easter Sunday, “Everybody here seems trying to remember that God will bear us safely through this new & terrible trial, if we are faithful.”22

  That was the key: remaining steadfast in one’s faith. Steadfastness of faith required resignation to God’s incomprehensible ways, which if sincerely achieved turned out to be the most spiritually satisfying stance, precisely because it consigned evil to the hands of a deity in control of all, for the purpose of eventual good. That did not exactly contradict liberal Christian ideas about human moral agency and control, because God’s will still stemmed from the choices made by human beings on earth. Rather, resignation served as a consoling alternative to thoughts of untethered evil beyond divine rule.

  For the faithful, then, a divine explanation of Lincoln’s tragic death would become clear at some point in the nation’s future. Frederick Douglass conveyed this conviction, with only a touch of uncertainty: “It may be,” he told the crowd in Rochester the day before Easter, “that the blood of our beloved martyred President will be the salvation of our country.” Wavering sentiments like that could be heard everywhere among lay mourners. A northern missionary among the freedpeople thought that “in some way God will bring good out of it.” A New England woman offered just a tad more certitude. “There is doubtless good to come from this great calamity and wickedness,” she wrote, “but as yet it is impossible to see.” Nor did spiritual confidence preclude acknowledging the terrible deed. The way a Vermont man tried to see it, God had lowered “a cloud of more than midnight darkness,” yet that cloud would eventually rise, revealing “His will concerning this great Republic.”23

  Sad as people were, it helped to keep in mind that grief by its very nature was a form of resistance to God’s will, thereby reinforcing the conviction that only resignation would bring consolation in the form of God’s mercy. Jews made this point too: “stricken with sorrow,” the members of a California synagogue nonetheless “most resignedly and most humiliatingly” bowed to “divine decree.” Yet uncertainty crept in everywhere, forcing mourners to struggle with a sense that their heartfelt grief cast them as disobedient to God. “It must be all right as God permitted it,” reflected North Carolina freedwoman Mary Ann Starkey, before allowing that “it does seem very hard to us.” That Lincoln’s death was a matter of divine intention was “the view taken by almost every public speaker,” wrote a New England woman, “and every time it is expressed it meets the approval of the audience.” That approval, however, was given in front of religious authorities; in private, doubt lingered. After church on Easter Sunday, Charlotte Blech prayed to “understand & have reason to rejoice even in view of this dark dispensation.” The president’s death, Georgia Treadway mused, after coming home from two Easter services, “seems to be looked upon as Providential,” her uncertain language revealing her spiritual ambivalence.24

  It was a tall order for clergymen, forced to dispense with their prepared sermons. On a day’s notice, they had to find a way to address the palpable sorrow without entirely jettisoning Easter season rejoicing. They had to think about the problem of calamitous evil in the world God had created, and they had to make sense of Union victory and the end of slavery, followed by the president’s murder. As Unitarian minister Edward Everett Hale wrote to his brother on Saturday, Lincoln’s assassination represented the “triumph of Palm Sunday” on the one hand and the “wretchedness and agony of the crucifixion” on the other. James Ward, the Methodist minister in Washington, mulled over in his diary whether the assassination foreshadowed the “dawn of the glorious day” or “a renewed darkness” that would continue on for a long time to come.25

  From the pulpit, the men spoke candidly of the people’s sorrow and intently of God’s unerring will. With the victorious Union’s claim of divine favor now complicated by Lincoln’s death, preachers strived to convey that this very complication added even greater meaning to the war’s outcome. Implicit, if unspoken directly, was the idea that a puzzling and mysterious message from God (taking Lincoln away at such a crucial moment) was more powerful and significant than the mere fulfillment of what the faithful had always expected to happen (Union victory by God’s decree). On Easter Sunday, ministers strove to make their congregants understand that the assassination should intensify faith in God’s ultimate plan precisely because it was so mysterious. For the most part, this message met a cooperative—if still mystified—audience. When mourners went to church, they heard sermons that put into words what they had been trying to tell themselves and one another from the first moment the news arrived (the Easter service, wrote a woman in Chicago, “expressed my feelings this morning”).26

  The best way to make sense of the catastrophe was to incorporate it into Union victory. But Lincoln’s assassination as the will of God did not necessarily constitute a complete answer—after all, vindictive Confederates explained the assassination the same way. Putting your faith in divine intention prompted one further question, a question even some of the most devoted could not stop themselves from asking: Why?

  “Where was God when he let the people kill Abraham Lincoln?” asked a freedman in Washington.r />
  “O why did God permit this awful thing to occur?” Lizzie Moore wrote to her husband.

  “Why did God let them kill him?” asked twelve-year-old Lettie Lindsley.

  “O God! Our God! What does it mean?” cried Lettie’s older sister, Maggie.27

  The very drive to ask the question implied the certainty of an eventual resolution. Some were satisfied with a plain assertion of God’s mysterious ways, while others craved deeper explanations. Either way, attempting to answer the question helped the grief-stricken not only to persist in the duties and trials of life on earth but also to undertake future civic actions directed by God for the sake of the nation.

  One answer could be found in the idea that the Almighty had imparted a painful lesson to humankind for some wrongdoing. “God knows our affliction, and when we are sufficiently punished, and the Nation sufficiently humbled, He will send deliverance,” reasoned Henry Thacher. As for identifying that wrongdoing, Lizzie Moore speculated that perhaps the nation had sinfully worshipped the president more than God. Her husband, at the front, concurred. “Had Lincoln lived no doubt we should all have thought too much of him,” he wrote back. As another mourner explained, precisely because the Union had put its full trust in the president, God had taken him away so that the people would be forced to confirm their “trust in a higher power.” A white teacher in Norfolk told the black children in her classroom that God could “save the nation without Mr. Lincoln, as well as with him.” In this light, God had permitted Lincoln’s assassination as punishment for the fickle victors.28

  Slavery was also the people’s sin, and another compelling answer could be found there. Though this explanation echoed the idea of the judgmental Calvinist God, it also came wrapped in the optimism of liberal Protestantism, for if God had taken Lincoln as punishment for the national sin of slavery, then Lincoln was also a martyr to slavery. A letter writer to the San Francisco Elevator told his fellow black readers that Lincoln’s life had been sanctified by the “Freedom of the Bondmen,” that every drop of Lincoln’s blood “redeemed a bondman” and foretold a time when “the whole earth shall be free.” The tide of freedom was thus unstoppable, and if that wasn’t “cheering and consoling,” then nothing was. In the Christian tradition of millennialism—the belief that there would be a thousand-year reign of peace and prosperity on earth upon the second coming of Christ—Frederick Douglass, like other black leaders, believed that slavery simply could not be sustained, given God’s ultimate direction of human affairs. To loud applause, Douglass told his listeners that although the president had been murdered, “the nation is saved and liberty established forever.” White abolitionists offered similar messages. The assassination, one man wrote in his diary, would “inspire the world with a deeper abhorrence of Slavery,” and the abolitionist Wendell Phillips asserted that because God took Lincoln for the cause of antislavery, his death would “seal the sure triumph of the cause.”29

  Spiritual consolation could be found as well in the related idea that the president had finished his work on earth, the hope Albert Browne invoked in his despairing letter home. In the Protestant idea of a “calling,” the work of every individual, lowly or great, contained a purpose designated by God. Why, then, had the president been “killed when most needed”? one mourner asked. “Who can take his place?” another wondered. “Why could he not have been spared until it was all settled up?” yet another implored. Answers came in the assurance that Lincoln’s labor had been completed when he died. “I can only reconcile it by thinking that the Lord saw that Abraham Lincoln’s work was done,” Lizzie Moore told her husband. Here was God’s providence for the victors-turned-mourners. Lincoln’s actions had been intended to carry out a particular divine plan for human history, and once it was accomplished there was no more need for the president to remain on earth. Edgar Dinsmore, with the Fifty-Fourth Massachusetts, took comfort (“some slight consolation” is how he phrased it) in a different facet of this conviction: that Lincoln had been “rewarded for his labours here” and now rested in a land without sin or sorrow.30

  Assumptions about Lincoln’s political lenience figured strongly in these formulations. Just as some Confederates lamented the assassination because they believed Lincoln would have treated them with mercy, so too did Union supporters invoke this vision when they spoke of God’s providence. Perhaps the most convincing of all spiritual explanations, this one reached directly into the realm of civil religion and pointed concretely toward a bright future for the nation. Many mourners in fact agreed with the radical Republicans that if Lincoln had a single fault, it was his generous spirit. Right before the assassination, at the Fort Sumter celebrations, William Lloyd Garrison had observed “much anxiety” occasioned by the president’s “disposition to be lenient with the conquered rebels.” Now the conviction that Lincoln had finished his work on earth implied that had he lived, his policies would have compromised the glory of Union victory. An Indiana soldier told his mother that it was “providential that he died when and as he did,” for God had called Lincoln away “before he could tarnish his illustrious name.” As Lizzie Moore phrased it more simply, God took Lincoln because he “might have grown weak.”31

  Ministers put forth two opposing ideas: Lincoln’s generosity of spirit as a positive attribute on the one hand and his presumed lenience toward the enemy as a fatal flaw on the other. Either way, he was simply not the right man to reconstruct the nation, this line of spiritual reasoning went, and mourners elaborated at length on the fact that such an undertaking had never been his calling. Lydia Maria Child could only conclude that the assassination was one of the “wonderful manifestations of Providence,” since the “kind-hearted” Lincoln would have offered the rebels “too easy terms.” Lincoln’s only fault, wrote Washington telegrapher David Homer Bates, was being “too lenient with the vile traitors,” and thus had come the “hand of Providence.” The president, Anna Ferris wrote in her diary, was struck down while embarking on “a policy so benign that his enemies could ask for nothing more.” On the Sunday after Easter, Wendell Phillips proclaimed that God took Lincoln “when his star touched its zenith.”32

  DEATH AT JUST THE RIGHT moment, many mourners believed, served the nation—and Lincoln—best, and indeed the timing and circumstances made for nearly instantaneous deification, swiftly erasing almost all criticisms that had once been advanced by Union supporters. Even some who had recently condemned the president’s moderation were quick to characterize him, in death, as noble and courageous. But not all. Although the editors of the San Francisco Elevator praised the slain president, they did not hesitate to remind their readers that “we have sometimes thought Mr. Lincoln too slow” in “the elevation of our race.” More pointedly, an emigrant in Liberia wrote critically of the late president’s treatment of African Americans as “cast off and forsaken” (the mourner himself was one such exile). In a different vein, a white college professor criticized the late president as a “sorry intellect” (if honest and hardworking); the Emancipation Proclamation was Lincoln’s greatest act, this man believed, but it had been forced on him by others more farsighted than he.33

  Still, these voices—mourners rationalizing the demise of the man they were mourning—made up only a quiet chorus. Confederates noticed with contempt that Union supporters now glossed over Lincoln’s faults. The bereaved, John Glenn wrote in his Maryland diary, were “prepared to make a demigod of Lincoln,” willfully blind to the flaws they had so recently recognized. “The infatuation of the people is certainly extraordinary,” he sniffed. As for the ardent secessionist Edmund Ruffin, glancing through the reprinted sermons in the northern newspapers, he found himself “utterly disgusted” by the “man-worship.” Worship it was, as mourners both anticipated and echoed the clergymen and journalists, dispensing with nuance in a flood of laudatory adjectives. An Ohio soldier summed up the tone echoing across so many letters and diaries when he described the slain chief as noble, patriotic, wise, honest, sincere, generous, kind, u
npretending, decisive, and just.34

  Lofty comparisons soon followed. George Washington was invoked most commonly, as mourners pronounced Lincoln the greatest president since the nation’s first. Like Washington, Lincoln deserved a towering memorial for his immortal statesmanship (the Washington Monument had been under construction since 1848). If Washington was the father of the country, claimed the poet John Greenleaf Whittier, then Lincoln was its savior. A few thought Lincoln superior, since he was much more a “man of the people,” and some specifically distinguished Lincoln from the slaveholding founder, proclaiming him the father of liberty—indeed the Emancipation Proclamation meant that Lincoln would live on in American memory long after Washington had been forgotten. The president’s connection to black freedom also prompted mourners to invoke Moses, with Philip Alexander Bell calling the late president the “Moses of his age,” even as Bell criticized him for straggling in the “elevation of our race.” Ministers both black and white pointed out that God had permitted Moses to lead his people to the Promised Land but not to enter it. Listening to her pastor make this comparison, Lizzie Moore thought it “a beautiful coincidence.”35

  Death on Good Friday made parallels with Jesus inescapable, not to mention a Christian understanding that saw the president’s recent entry into the enemy capital as parallel to Jesus’s entry into Jerusalem before crucifixion. Lincoln, wrote the black editors of the Elevator, was “but one degree inferior” to Christ. A former slave in Virginia claimed that the president had been “more than anybody else to us,” with the exception of God, and a freedman on Saint Helena Island went even further: “Lincoln died for we, Christ died for we,” he said, and the two were the same man. Some white mourners drew the same comparison. “Mankind has lost its best friend since the crusifiction of Christ,” wrote an army officer, and a Wisconsin soldier thought no equal to Christ had lived on earth until President Lincoln.36