Mourning Lincoln

by Martha Hodes

  Should another battle in fact come to pass, the men vowed to wage brutal warfare. A black soldier in Florida would fight until the enemy was “driven into humble submission.” The men of a black regiment that had marched triumphantly into Richmond wanted fervently to “burn, kill, & distroy.” They would make “a monument of dead rebells,” one of their white officers wrote to his sister, for Lincoln’s life was worth more to them than all the rebels in the whole state. If another battle ensued, it would be “a Sory day” for Confederates, a white soldier told his parents. As for Newton Perkins of the Thirteenth Connecticut, he would inscribe the word Lincoln on a banner, and shout, “Boys, Slay and spare not!” What was more, he promised his mother, those enemy soldiers would wish “they had never been born.” General Carl Schurz thought the Confederates should thank God the war had ended; had his army marched again, he told his wife, the campaigns would have rivaled those of Attila the Hun.10

  Laws of war and honorable wartime conduct held no place in mourners’ fantasies. Union soldiers wanted to meet Confederates on the battlefield because they wanted to exterminate them—Albert Browne was far from alone in that wish. “Extirminate—yes that is the word,” wrote a man in the Forty-Fourth Indiana to his wife—”let extirmination be our watchword,” for “the sooner the world is rid of those vile creatures, the better it will be for mankind.” At this point, he explained, any mercy would be akin to warming up a cold viper, “only to be stung to death with its venomous fangs.” Stationed in South Carolina, the men of the Fifty-Fourth Massachusetts told one another, “Now there is no more peace, let us turn back, again load our muskets and if necessary exterminate the race that can do such things.” For these black men, the Confederates seemed a wholly separate race, and whites used the same language—one called the enemy a “badly whipped race.” Union officer Alonzo Pickard also advocated “extermination” (like Albert Browne, he underlined the word); if that directive seemed “barbarous,” Pickard assured his brother-in-law that it barely matched the murder of Lincoln. Forget taking them as prisoners—Union soldiers at Fort Spanish, Alabama, were for “exterminating the Rebels altogether,” eager just to “shoot them down.” Francis Barnes, a white lieutenant with a black regiment, also wanted the paroled Confederates in Mobile exterminated and was “willing to fight all the rest of my life” to make it happen.11

  Angry campfire talk and imagined retribution could be converted into action. Near Ford’s Theatre on the night of April 14, “mutterings & threats of vengeance” could be heard everywhere, and with soldiers “threatening death to all rebels or their sympathizers,” several paroled Confederates ended up “severly handled.” When news of the assassination arrived at the Union prison at Fort Delaware, a Yankee lieutenant got drunk, found himself a five-foot club, and went into the barracks, striking right and left, inflicting blows on the few who didn’t get out of his way fast enough. In fact any handy Confederate man, including a civilian, would do. “Very hard feeling toward the Rebs,” a Union soldier jotted in his Richmond diary; “afraid there will be blood shed.” In Vicksburg, Union soldiers and African Americans planned to take revenge on white residents (“get up a row and murder the citizens” is how one man put it) before officers put a stop to it. When the news came to Raleigh, Union soldiers expressed such fury that Yankee authorities ordered encircling guards to keep the city from destruction. Patrols were doubled and a curfew imposed, because, wrote General Schurz to his wife, it seemed the soldiers would “vent their rage by setting fire to the city.”12

  Mourners on the northern home front called for retaliation too, beginning on the streets of Washington on the night of the assassination, where the tears of all those weeping men fell as much in anger as in sorrow. The people could “hardly contain their wrath,” and the next day residents of the capital shouted to burn down the military prisons as armed guards watched over the enemy inmates. A federal official had never witnessed “so earnest and determined a cry for vengeance,” including one group who wanted to lynch all incarcerated Confederate officers. Calls for reprisal were directed at southern civilians too. The San Francisco poet James Madison Bell rhymed the line “Exterminate! shall be our cry” with “Rebellion’s hated brood shall die!” and included “Fathers and sons, and wives and daughters” as the targets of his decree. George Comfort, though a Quaker, found himself filled with “a feeling of bitter and unrelenting hatred” that would be satisfied only by the “speedy and utter extermination” of the enemy population. As an Illinois man admitted to his own Confederate relative, “I actually thirst for blood and vengeance.” Women joined the chorus, if again more obliquely and in more spiritual guises. Trusting in God’s providence, Anne Neafie told her husband at the front that she wouldn’t object if the soldiers exchanged “ill judged clemency” for greater punishment. Just as Sarah Browne wished for the guilty parties to be crushed, some women expressed their anger more directly, even if they could not enact the vengeance themselves. When Mary Butler cried “death to all traitors,” she included her Confederate beau, Frank, whom she decided then and there never to see again. “I hope he will meet the fate he deserves,” she told her mother, careful to repeat exactly what she meant: “death to the traitors.”13

  Anger rang out from the pens and pulpits of mourning ministers as well. Sharing and reflecting the ire of their congregants, these men intertwined pleas to accept God’s will with calls for reprisal. Churchgoing mourners thus heard confusing messages, an inconsistent brew of mercy and vengeance. Invoking the wrathful God of the Old Testament, clergymen made clear that only retribution, albeit always guided by reason, would pave the way toward justice. “Traitors beware! Vengeance fills the air,” wrote the black minister Thomas Ward in California. A white Congregationalist minister in the Union army made the same point in different words: “Mercy is dead now: justice rules alone.” The fact was, messages of submission to God’s will could be understood in contradictory ways. On the one hand, Union supporters could find comfort in God’s ultimate plans for the nation, even if those plans were impossible to discern. On the other hand, God had intended the assassination precisely to forestall lenience by rousing Union wrath against the enemy. One seemed to cancel out the other, making for a thorny tangle of imperatives.14

  FOR ALL THE RAGE, AND for all the contradictory directives from clergymen, whom exactly did the grieving blame for Lincoln’s murder? When a mourner wrote to her daughter that “the feeling against all those implicated in the assassination of the President was deep & vengeful,” what did she mean by all those implicated? When a missionary among the freedpeople hoped that “those who merit punishment receive their deserts,” who exactly were those who merit punishment? When a barely literate New Hampshire laborer wrote of “the Presdants death” and his wish to “dam” those who carried it out, whom exactly did he include? Who or what had killed Abraham Lincoln?15

  Within hours of the crime at Ford’s Theatre, and continuing for two weeks afterward, federal authorities made hundreds of arrests, eventually charging seven men and one woman with taking part in the conspiracy. The eight suspects were held in a Washington penitentiary, awaiting a trial that would begin in early May. There was George Atzerodt, who failed in his assignment to murder Vice President Andrew Johnson, and there was Lewis Powell, who succeeded in wounding Secretary of State William Seward and one of his sons. There was David Herold, Powell’s accomplice waiting outside the Seward home, and there was Dr. Samuel Mudd, who set the bone that John Wilkes Booth had broken when he jumped to the stage. There were also Samuel Arnold and Michael O’Laughlen, who had helped plan the scheme, and Edman Spangler, the carpenter who worked at Ford’s Theatre. The lone woman was the widowed Mary Surratt, whose Washington boardinghouse and Maryland tavern were linked to the conspirators. Also wanted was Surratt’s son John, who worked for the Confederate secret service; he had not been in Washington on the appointed evening and soon escaped to Canada, then to England, then Rome, then Egypt. But it was the man who pulled the tr
igger on Lincoln—still at large—who dominated the minds of mourners.

  In the immediate aftermath, gleeful Confederates had exalted John Wilkes Booth, with Rodney Dorman calling him a “great public benefactor” and others cheering him on and welcoming him to the South. At the same time, however, Confederates were careful to lay the blame squarely on Booth, keen to confine the guilt to a single perpetrator and his lone circle of collaborators. Even as rebels gloried in the killer’s actions, it was important to separate him from all who had fought for the just and noble cause of the Confederacy, and it was equally important to exempt themselves from Union wrath. One way to accomplish this was by casting Booth—despite his heroic status—as mentally unstable. A Georgia woman worried that the Yankees would blame the whole Confederacy when the assassination was nothing more than the “crazy deed of a madman.” A New Orleans planter believed it had been an act of “some private revenge, and not at all political,” undertaken by a “crazy play Actor.” It was the “work of a lunatic,” others said, the efforts of a man “imbued with tyrannicidal monomania.” As for the larger conspiracy, it was the work of “a few poor fanatics” or “desperadoes.”16

  A smaller number of Confederates removed Booth from their orbit entirely, instead implicating the Copperheads up north. “I do not believe this to be the work of Southerners,” asserted Cloe Whittle. “I believe it is Northern men who have done it.” A minority of Lincoln’s mourners likewise turned their anger on Copperheads, not only for their public expressions of glee but also as directly responsible for the crime. Caroline Dunstan placed at least some of the blame on the “Northern traitors” she saw around her in New York City. A white lieutenant with the U.S. Colored Troops noticed “how the soldiers curse the Copperheads at home,” and a white soldier named the “traitors up North” as “aiding the South every day,” sure they had “killed President Lincoln to aid this Rebelion.” John Burrud, the Englishman fighting with a New York regiment, peppered letters to his wife with especially intense anti-Copperhead rants. Familiar with Lincoln’s antagonists in his upstate hometown, Burrud claimed to hate Copperheads more even than he hated Confederates. The “meanest and most degraded Southern Rebel,” according to Burrud, was “a Saint compared with one of those Copperhead Pipers.” They were fools, idiots, reptiles, and “Black hearted Slavery loveing Demons,” every one of whom should be hanged and sent to hell for the atrocity of Lincoln’s assassination. If they had joined the Confederate army in the first place, Burrud seethed, Union forces could have “rid the Earth of Their poluted carcasses,” but the miscreants were too cowardly, and now Burrud wanted them exterminated (that word again). For their part, Copperheads unsurprisingly agreed with Confederates that the actions of John Wilkes Booth had nothing to do with anyone but himself. As one anti-Lincoln northerner told his friends, gathered at a New York City hotel on the day of Lincoln’s death, the assassin’s act was likely the consequence of a “drunken after dinner boast.”17

  Confederates and Copperheads alike must have found some relief in the fact that most of Lincoln’s mourners trained a good portion of their wrath on Booth. Editors at the San Francisco Elevator called him vile and a wretch, but mourners didn’t need journalists to tell them that—they readily cast the assassin as a scoundrel, a fiend, a dog, and a demon. To capture John Wilkes Booth alive was the hope of many mourners, since death was a “gift to martyrs,” and it was the president who should be martyred, not his murderer. The bereaved wanted to see Booth suffer, and with blood boiling (mourners invoked that phrase to describe their anger), they devised the means. Like many, seventeen-year-old Clara Allen believed that hanging would be too mild and that Booth should be “tortured in some way.” Outside Ford’s Theatre on the night of April 14, people were already exchanging suggestions for the particulars: Hang him from the first lamppost available or cut him to pieces before a lamppost could even be found. Flog him. Shoot him like a dog. Burn him alive slowly. Hang him until almost dead, then “resuscitate him and repeat the procedure for several days.” In Cincinnati, where another Booth brother was appearing at the opera house, the theater had to be closed on the morning of Lincoln’s death, in the face of a furious mob, as Junius Brutus Booth Jr. hurried out of town on an early train.18

  The War Department printed up “wanted” posters for John Wilkes Booth, promising a reward of a hundred thousand dollars, but imagining one’s own participation in Booth’s torment offered special satisfaction beyond a monetary reward. Troops gathered around campfires, conjuring their actions should they personally catch the guilty party. Some wanted to operate the hangman’s noose themselves. A white soldier wanted to chain up Booth and place four black men ready to brand him with hot irons if he tried to sleep, “till he died dead,” while Billy Patterson of the Seventeenth Maine wanted to “fry his liver before his very eyes.” Such scenes were influenced by popular travel accounts that purported to disclose the brutal violence of honor and vengeance in the southern backwoods, entertaining readers with depictions of gouged eyes and severed limbs. John Worthington, an upstate New York banker, bested all the soldiers’ plans for Booth when he told his sister that he wanted to “tear him slowly in pieces, kill him by inches, pull out his toe-nails & pick out his rascally eyes with a fork. Cut out his tongue, break his arms & leg’s & at last hang him on a nail by one eyelid.”19

  Although Lincoln’s mourners envisioned such tortures for Booth in particular, they did not confine their vindictive thoughts to the killer and his immediate circle, not by far. Rather, the Confederacy as a whole had emboldened Booth to commit the deed, and as a rational criminal, he had acted in the spirit of the rebels, including the violation of law and the U.S. Constitution. From Virginia, black Civil War correspondent Thomas Morris Chester explained the assassination as “another one of the infamous crimes which logically followed the efforts of treason to dismember the Union.” According to a Maryland Unionist, Booth had been spurred on by all who had ever prayed for Lincoln’s death, even by anyone who had ever so much as called the president a despot. In the pages of her spare diary, African American servant and night-school student Emilie Davis called Booth the “Confederate villain,” thereby plainly associating him with the rebels, and white schoolgirl Sarah Putnam likewise named all Confederates as guilty when she wrote, “The rebels only hurt their own cause when they assassinated dear old Lincoln.”20

  The War Department’s “wanted” poster promised a reward for the capture of the assassin of the “late beloved President,” displaying an image of John Wilkes Booth, along with conspirators John Surratt and David Herold (with both their names misspelled).

  LC-USZ62-11193, Rare Book and Special Collections Division, Library of Congress.

  The bigger culprit was something mourners called the southern “system.” All secessionists were guilty, explained Francis Lieber, legal adviser to the Lincoln administration (and one-time southern slaveholder), because Booth was the servant of a “devilish system and doctrine.” Others invoked the same word: Lincoln was the victim of a “thug system.” The act of assassination comported exactly with “their whole system.” Racial slavery was at the heart of that system. When Union army authorities appealed to African Americans in the greater Washington area to assist with the capture of the assassin, the official bulletin announced that Lincoln had been murdered “because he was your friend.” Though Booth grasped the pistol, the message read, it was “fired by the hands of treason and slavery,” and Lincoln might have been spared had he been “unfaithful to you and to the great cause of human freedom.” In those words were implicated not only all treasonous rebels but also the cause of that treason: slavery.21

  Blaming slavery for the assassination was not necessarily the same as upholding racial equality, since Union supporters fought a war against slavery for a variety of reasons, ranging from the moral opposition of abolitionists to much more broadly based economic objections that saw slave labor as competing unfairly with the freedom of white wageworkers. Vermont soldier
George Mellish, for one, deeply mourned Lincoln, even as he recorded his hatred of the black people he encountered down south. Mellish supported emancipation, he explained, but he wanted the freedpeople sent off to Africa. Likewise, Pennsylvania soldier John Smith mourned Lincoln and hated Confederates, while he also hated abolitionists and black people (he was going to bring his gun home, he told his mother, “to shoot nigers”). Conversely, to believe in black inferiority and subordination was not necessarily to endorse the institution of slavery, and in fact mourners all along the political spectrum invoked slavery as the cause of the president’s murder. Abolitionists certainly made this cry, but more moderate Union supporters did so too. An eyewitness at Ford’s Theatre, writing out his experiences on the night of April 14, exclaimed, “How many more martyrs to slavery!” At seven o’clock in the morning in New York City, even before Lincoln was pronounced dead, Francis Lieber wrote to Union general Henry Halleck, “It is Slavery, Slavery!” All day Saturday, the accusations continued. Lincoln had been sacrificed to slavery, taken by “an agent of that accursed system of Slavery and State Rights.” It was the fault of “all the hate, wickedness, & guilt of Slavery.” In London, with the official telegram from Secretary of War Edwin Stanton at hand, Charles Francis Adams was stunned, but soon, he confessed to his diary, he understood the crime as the “fruit of the seed that was sown in the slavery of the African race.”22