Mourning Lincoln

by Martha Hodes

  Comparisons with Jesus stemmed from more than parallels of circumstance, for Christian mourners also invoked their savior as another means to envision a luminous future for the nation—again, not despite the assassination but precisely because of it. Lincoln’s demise, like that of Christ, was the result of controversial ideas and actions, wrote the editors of the New York Anglo-African, and thus would the assassination “benefit that cause”—of black freedom. The white Unitarian minister James Freeman Clarke (who called the death of Christ an assassination) spoke of a “dark future,” yet made clear that just as the crucifixion had appeared to be the “direst calamity” at the time, so much good had followed. As a layman put it, Lincoln’s death would no more harm the Union than “the Crucifixion destroyed Christianity.” The idea that the enemy had killed Lincoln but could not destroy God was oft-repeated. “They killed our best friend,” said a black woman at Fortress Monroe. “But God be living yet. They can’t kill Him.” Or as a white New Englander put it, “Abraham Lincoln is dead, but God lives.” Just as they did all through the war, Lincoln’s mourners now found consolation in faith, and with Lincoln gone, they both deified him and reckoned with the fact that the godlike Lincoln was only a mortal.37

  There was something else too. Just as the president had spoken of “malice toward none” and “charity for all” in his second inaugural address in March 1865, so had Christ spoken the words, “Father forgive them for they know not what they do,” in his crucifixion prayer. But if the message of Easter was one of forgiveness, the message for Lincoln’s mourners, in church on Easter Sunday, was decidedly more confusing. Ironically, it was Lincoln’s propensity for forgiveness—the very quality that made him most Christlike—that served as one of the most satisfying explanations as to why God had taken him away immediately after victory. If God had removed the president because he was too generous to deal properly with the vanquished enemy, then God also presumably wanted the victors to hold their enemies accountable for slavery, secession, and war.

  THE GLOOM THAT DESCENDED ON Lincoln’s supporters was overwhelming, and yet they ultimately looked forward, in faith, to the post–Civil War world. A providential view of history contained within it an inherent optimism, even if believers had to suffer all along the way, and in this spirit mourners embraced the idea that Lincoln’s assassination would make Union victory even better. Indeed, for African Americans it was impossible not to continue celebrating the destruction of slavery despite such profound loss. The president had been dead for less than a week when 250 black men, who had taken flight in order to evade Confederate impressment, celebrated Union victory and their own liberty by marching and singing in front of Yankee soldiers. No more than a week after the assassination, a group of former slaves, overjoyed to come into contact with Union men sailing north from Mobile, were seen “jumping about & swinging their hands” in joy. Slavery had torn the Union apart, and now with victory—even without President Lincoln—the Union was safe, and slavery appeared to be no more. When Lincoln died, all hope at first seemed lost, wrote Garland White, runaway slave and chaplain of the Twenty-Eighth U.S. Colored Infantry, to his friend William Seward, the wounded secretary of state. Soon, though, White felt sure that the nation was “again Safe from the powers that sought to devide distroy & sink it in Eternal Shame.” For George Gaskell, a white officer, and his men of the Eleventh U.S. Colored Heavy Artillery, the war’s outcome would not be diminished. “Aside from this great calamity,” Gaskell wrote to his sister, “the prospects are bright.” Frederick Douglass had already made the same point on the very day the president died, at least when it came to the integrity of the nation: “Though Abraham Lincoln dies, the Republic lives.”38

  Victory could not long be overshadowed for white soldiers either, no matter their views on slavery. The British-born John Burrud, fighting with the 160th New York, felt sure that “the Calamity will not Change the result of the War,” for with Confederate defeat, he wrote to his wife, “the Country is Safe.” Mourners on the home front agreed. “How full of promise is the future!” enthused Samuel Haven after the assassination. When Haven, who had lost a son in the war, explained that the world seemed “brighter on account of the blackness of darkness” which had recently descended, he may have meant Lincoln’s death, all four years of war, or both. As another white man wrote in his diary, “The nation still lives & cannot be assassinated.”39

  But manifestations of shock and grief persisted alongside this optimism. “Splitting headache and no wonder,” wrote the minister Edward Everett Hale in the days after Easter Sunday. On the Tuesday after Easter, Anna Lowell still felt “very tired & exhausted in mind & body.” At her Sunday school class the following week, her heart still felt so full that she wasn’t ready to divert attention from the assassination. When the men in Rudolph Rey’s company received news that Confederate general Joseph Johnston had surrendered to Sherman in late April, not a cheer went up, for the soldiers had “not got over morning for there late President.” Even with peace formally declared, “not a solitary cheer was hird from the wole army,” Rey noted. Elizabeth Blackwell, a doctor in New York City, thought that mourning for Lincoln would “hang always on a never fading memory.”40

  All through the spring, mourners would ponder God and the assassination. “We bow with meek and humble resignation to his Divine will, because He does all things well,” wrote the black Union officer and radical abolitionist Martin Delany in late May. Weeks after Lincoln’s death, Lydia Maria Child reasoned that “even the removal of kind and honest ‘old Abe’” had been “necessary for the completion of the great work.” Whereas for Rodney Dorman and other Confederates, God’s purpose was plain—the Good Friday crime was retribution for Union victory (even if that left plenty of unanswered questions about why God had not orchestrated Confederate victory in the first place)—for Sarah Browne and other Union supporters, the theological questions yielded all kinds of contradictions. Amid their spiritual puzzlement, Lincoln’s mourners looked also toward more earthly realms for answers to why the president had been slain. Who, exactly, they wanted to know, was responsible for the murder?41

  INTERLUDE

  Love

  PEOPLE LOVED ABRAHAM LINCOLN. That was the word they used. “I never felt before how deep a hold he had on the hearts of the people,” wrote a Union soldier, and women tended to describe such feelings with greater effusion. “O that good, great man, whom we so loved & revered!” Anna Lowell fretted. “It seemed strange to love so much one whom we have never seen—but we did.” President Lincoln had blurred the boundaries between leader and loved one, and at his death the categories blurred yet more.1

  Whereas a beloved intimate could never be replaced, in a democracy one esteemed leader would always be succeeded by another. Though astounded by Lincoln’s death, Theodore Lyman nevertheless reasoned that “we have fought with success for four years, and I do not believe the shooting of one man is going to trouble us much now.” True, reflected Frederick Sawyer (he had been at Ford’s Theatre that night), “no man on the continent can do just what Mr. Lincoln could have done,” but God would never leave a nation’s work in the hands of a single person. Or as freedpeople in Virginia put it, “God raised us up one friend and He will raise us up another.”2

  The trouble with these rationalizations was that people thought of Lincoln as far more than a statesman, and many mourners felt—as one put it—”personally afflicted” by his death. Some invoked similes, mourning “as if for a dear friend.” For others, no simile or metaphor was necessary. To the readers of San Francisco’s black newspaper, the president had been a “beloved friend.” For “us of the U.S. colored army,” wrote a white officer, “the death of Lincoln is indeed the loss of a friend.” Even more, Lincoln felt to many like family. A white captain in a black regiment felt as if he had lost “some near kindred.” Union soldiers, a white man wrote, “could not of felt any worse if evry one of them had lost their nearest reletave.” Mourners saw this sentiment all aroun
d: “Everywhere it seemed as if the death were of one near and dear in the family” or “as though a private grief had come to each family.” In Chicago, mused one mourner, “almost every family circle seems to be broken.”3

  In particular, people thought of Lincoln as a father, a symbol that held religious as well as familial meaning. An elderly freedwoman called the slain president “a mighty good father to us,” and a white soldier told his brother that the men “all claimed him as a father” (Union soldiers had long spoken of Lincoln as “Father Abraham”). Lincoln’s mourners, one woman mused, were like orphans, a term defined in the nineteenth century as fatherless children. Symbolic as this imagery may have been, Lincoln’s mourners felt moved to compare their feelings to more literal personal losses. “I could not have been more shocked had it been my Father,” wrote a Pennsylvania businessman. An American in Paris mourned for Lincoln “as sorrowfully and far more bitterly than I mourned for my dear father.” Even more, when a freedwoman in North Carolina got word, she felt as if both her father and mother had died at the same time.4

  As for the vanquished (who held ambivalent feelings for President Jefferson Davis by war’s end), they gave their love to General Robert E. Lee. On the morning of April 9, 1865, Lee had said he would “rather die a thousand deaths” than surrender to Grant. Lee had done the deed and had not died, but to his admirers surrender felt akin to death, which only elevated the general more. After Appomattox, one Confederate soldier called Lee an “illustrious chieftain” superior to Washington and Napoleon, vowing that southern babies would be taught to lisp his name. “Dear noble old man,” mused a Virginia woman, invoking words that Lincoln’s mourners used to describe their late leader. “I love & revere him now more than ever.”5

  5

  Blame

  FOR SARAH BROWNE, THE “UNPARALLELED outrage” of Lincoln’s assassination was “enough to rouse up the spirit of the meekest angel.” Grieving and in shock, Sarah was also angry. She wanted the assassin and his conspirators to suffer, but it wasn’t they alone who were guilty. She also wanted the “Fathers” of the rebellion to suffer, for she believed that Confederate political and military leaders had made the actions of Booth and the conspirators possible. The many middling and poor white people of the South, for their part, had been drawn into the war “against the dictates of their hearts and Consciences,” Sarah believed, and thus deserved gentler treatment.1

  Sarah expressed grief more vividly than anger, while Albert vented a fury more easily permitted to men, enraged at the Confederates around him in the South, those “dastardly cowardly wretches” with their “devilish purposes.” Slavery, Albert proclaimed, had caused the murder of President Lincoln (the “tree of Slavery,” he wrote, had “borne fruit” in the assassination), and the terrible crime was the “culmination of the teachings from the Southern pulpit and press,” not to mention the leadership of Jefferson Davis and all of “Southern Society.” When it came to the “poor deluded ones”—the white southerners whom Sarah excused—Albert agreed that they should be pardoned freely, as long as their leaders were hanged or forever banished from the nation. The anger Albert Browne felt at Lincoln’s assassination turned him into a savage, he confessed. Subjugate them, humiliate them, exterminate them, he cried, underlining the word exterminate. “We have played with this serpent long enough now,” he wrote; “let us kill the monster and all its infernal brood.” If Sarah thought he had spewed enough bile, Albert assured her there was “a heap left.”2

  FOR RODNEY DORMAN, GLEE WAS fleeting and anger enduring. As far as Dorman was concerned, John Wilkes Booth alone was responsible for the murder of Abraham Lincoln, but of course the Yankees would “molest a great many people” who had nothing to do with the deed, acting with revenge, “against all law” and with “total disregard of all rights.” Unlawful power exercised by the conquerors infuriated Dorman no end—how the Yankees did “beshit & befoul” all they touched in their “fraudulent, forceable, unwarranted, contemptible manner,” he wrote in his diary. As for Booth, he should be honored for his manly bravery, just as in ancient Greece, Harmodius and Aristogeiton were honored for saving Athens by murdering a tyrant.3

  The Yankees said that slavery had killed Lincoln, but in Rodney Dorman’s view, slavery was a force of good: a benevolent institution in which masters loved and provided for their “servants,” who in turn loved and needed their subjugators. “In some instances,” Dorman conceded, slaves had “not been treated as they ought,” but those instances were exceptional. In his version of American history, wicked white northerners had stolen Africans from their native lands (here he called the victims “slaves,” rather than “servants”), sold them to white southerners, then stole them back by “force & fraud” during the Civil War, making for a “double crime, aggravated!” Indeed, at times Dorman reserved greater hostility for white northerners than he did for the freedpeople, for without white instigators, he felt sure, black people would have remained content with enslavement. It was those blasted abolitionists who had awakened the desire for liberty, and the black soldiers he saw in Jacksonville—the literal embodiment of that liberation—were thus intolerable or, in Dorman’s words, “beyond the powers of endurance of man.” All during the spring and summer of 1865, Rodney Dorman seethed at the Yankees. “The only remedy,” he confided to his journal, would be “a general extermination of the whole of them.”4

  LINCOLN’S MOURNERS WERE ANGRY, very angry. Reconciliation to the will of God and acceptance of the assassination as part of a divine plan for the nation’s glorious future did not exempt the guilty parties from facing justice.

  Anger was a complicated emotion for nineteenth-century Americans. Long associated with a deplorable lack of self-control, anger, particularly men’s anger, had been likened to barbarism, unbecoming to civilized people. These cultural assumptions had recently begun to change, with the idea that well-moderated fury could be put to good use, and even savage rage like Albert Browne’s was understandable in particularly abominable circumstances. That permission extended almost exclusively to white men of the middling and upper classes, while women were meant never to be angry, under any circumstances. But with Lincoln’s murder, these social rules evaporated, just as had the dictates against men weeping, and mourners embraced their fury without compunction. As one man wrote in his diary, describing a pervasive state, “Wrath flashes through the gloom.”5

  A vitriol of stunning intensity runs through the record of personal responses to Lincoln’s assassination. Indignation. That was one way mourners described their feelings, as if they had personally been victims of an unjust act (recall that Sarah Browne had pictured Albert’s initial feelings as “honor and indignation”). At a meeting of black San Franciscans, poet and plasterer James Madison Bell spoke of pain “mixed with indignation.” A white woman in Boston juggled “amazement, horror, indignation, and a feeling of personal bereavement.” Rage. That word was even more commonly invoked. On a New England street on the day Lincoln died, people wept, “fired with rage.” On Easter Sunday in Philadelphia, a woman watched her brother-in-law “crushed with sorrow” yet “savage with rage.” In Washington on Sunday too, people appeared “wild with grief and rage.” Down south, the sorrowing hearts of Union soldiers and officers filled up with hatred and fury.6

  Wartime is a powerful catalyst to acceptable anger, requiring as it does the demonization of the enemy. If surrender had softened those feelings among the victors, Lincoln’s assassination recalled them, then multiplied the demonization a hundredfold. General Joseph Keifer had been counseling moderation and magnanimity, rationalizing that the war was over and bitterness an unchristian sentiment, but now he regretted that he’d ever treated a rebel well. From Virginia, he wrote to his wife that he was ready to take an “oath of eternal enmity.” The day before the assassination, a Union soldier allowed that he could have “forgiven all of those wretches of Rebels”; the day after, he wanted only to “crush them.” Women expressed similar thoughts, if in g
entler and more religious language. “We were preparing in peace and forgiveness to smooth over and forget,” a mourner in Connecticut wrote to her sister, but now “God has given us a sword again.” Men and women alike depicted the violence against Lincoln with adjectives that suggested an otherworldly brutality. It was a “murderous devilish malignity,” wrote one; “infernal, diabolical Devillish, demoniacal,” wrote another. It “caps the climax of inhuman atrocity,” a soldier wrote home. From there, it was easy to dehumanize the wider Confederate population. They were miscreants and fiends, malicious, bloodthirsty, vile, venomous, base, and barbarous. They were savages, and savages must be met with equal—nay, overpowering—ferocity.7

  From the front came cries for vengeance. “Is there a man in the Army, or out of it that will not Seek revenge?” asked an Iowa soldier, answering his own question: “no not One.” Union officer Newton Perkins felt himself enveloped in a gloom pierced by a “spirit of vindictiveness and vengeance.” Even on Easter Sunday, he wrote to his mother, he couldn’t find “one spark of Christianity left in me towards traitors.” Lee’s soldiers should have been butchered, not paroled, another fumed. Had the black soldiers at the siege of Fort Blakeley, Alabama—a battle fought on the day of Lee’s surrender—known the assassination was imminent, a white officer surmised, they would have chanted King Lear’s chorus, “Kill, kill, kill, kill, kill, kill!”8

  Visions of a speedy peace receded as the men imagined the actions they would take should they find themselves in another engagement with the enemy. Many in fact hungered for just such an encounter—recall the words of young black men outside the White House on the night the president died: “Just let them leave the rebels to us!” White soldiers who supported Lincoln felt the same way, no matter what they made of black freedom. All thoughts of returning home were forgotten, an officer observed, as his men begged to fight any remaining remnant of armed rebels. When it appeared that General Joseph E. Johnston, still in the field, might surrender to Sherman, Union soldiers in North Carolina were dismayed. “We wish that the fight were not over yet!” they exclaimed around the campfire. “Don’t let him surrender,” they repeated over and over, hoping to be “let loose” on the enemy in order to “revenge the President’s murder.” Some felt sure the war would now be prolonged—”& it better last until they are all killed,” one man added.9