Mourning Lincoln

by Martha Hodes

  In church on Easter Sunday, ministers affirmed these convictions. “It was slavery that killed our President,” pronounced Joseph Prime, a black minister in upstate New York. For a white minister in Cincinnati, “Booth was the Agent but Slavery was the murderer.” Abolitionist clergymen explained that God had taken Lincoln in order to punish the nation for its sins, and that included the North, which was complicit in slavery. At a black church in San Francisco, mourners agreed that Lincoln’s death would “expiate a nation’s guilt” and listened to a disquisition on the national, rather than sectional, “sin of slavery.” Indeed, Lincoln himself had articulated that idea in his second inaugural address, first singling out the South (slavery was “localized in the Southern part” of the nation and “constituted a peculiar and powerful interest”) but also implicating the North (God brought war to both sections, as punishment to “those by whom the offence came”).23

  No matter if both sections of the country were implicated, all through the weeks afterward, as mourners thought and talked about the relation between slavery and the assassination, they focused their anger on the Confederacy. The crime, asserted African Americans north and south, was the “natural fruit” of the “barbarous institution of slavery” and the “natural outcrop” of slavery’s cruelty. Whites agreed that whether or not Booth was a slaveholder (he was not) mattered little, since he had acted on behalf of slaveholders’ interests. As one man put it, “Slavery, Rebellion and Assassination form but one word.” A woman “deepley afflicted” by Lincoln’s death sent ten dollars to a charity for work among the freedpeople so that the “last vestage of slavery” would be “swept from the earth.” A freed-woman in Maryland put it most directly of all, telling her former mistress, “You are the slayer of my deliverer!”24

  On the most straightforward level, mourners insisted that Lincoln had died because he was a foe of slavery. On deeper levels, slave-ownership and the workings of the institution led whites to depravity, which led to the assassination. Slavery, wrote Francis Lieber, ruminating on the murder, had “perverted the minds of the Southerners,” turning them into “fiends and fools.” Mourners crafted their official proclamations to make the same point in more lyrical language. The citizens of Pennsylvania detected in the assassination “but another illustration of the diabolical spirit of American slavery.” The citizens of Ohio perceived in the crime an “appalling exhibition of the brutalizing and relentless spirit engendered by slavery.” Men of the Union League Club of Philadelphia loathed equally the “pistol and dagger of the assassin” and the “lash of the slave-driver.” The malevolence, violence, brutality, heartlessness, and treachery of slavery, they wrote, were all “embodied in that miserable assassin.”25

  THE COMPLICITY OF ALL WHITE southerners might have been implied in such assertions but, like Sarah and Albert Browne, Lincoln’s mourners often pointed in particular to the Confederate leadership. Lincoln’s supporters had all along blamed rebel leaders and powerful slaveholders for secession and war, believing that their poorer compatriots had been coerced into supporting the conflict. Just before the outbreak of fighting, Lincoln himself had put forward the idea that the majority of white southerners would demonstrate loyalty to the Union—after all, the majority of white southerners did not own slaves—thereby foiling secession. Wrong as Lincoln had been, the vision of Confederate leaders as responsible for the assassination was a logical extension of the idea that the rebel government and elite slaveholders were ultimately responsible for the war.26

  Right there at Petersen House, as President Lincoln breathed his last, Secretary of War Stanton began to collect accounts from eyewitnesses for the criminal investigation, working from the premise that Confederate authorities, with Jefferson Davis at the top, had hatched the plot and sent Booth as their emissary. Judge Advocate General Joseph Holt, who would soon take over from Stanton and serve as chief prosecutor at the trial of the conspirators, agreed with the secretary of war (though Holt would ultimately be unable to prove the involvement of the Davis administration). On the day Lincoln died, mourners likewise pointed to Confederate officials, naming “the Jeff Davis crew,” as one put it, or in the words of another, “some Black hearted Rebel Hireling of the Tyrant Jeff Davis.”27

  Clergymen confirmed this idea, focusing largely on leaders and elites, as they cast John Wilkes Booth as product and symbol of the slave South. Take the particularly angry sermon preached by Alonso Quint on Easter Sunday in New Bedford, Massachusetts. Quint, a white man, fired up his congregation with calls for black citizenship and the confiscation of rebel property, characterizing the generic southern white person as lazy, ignorant, deceitful, greedy, licentious, and barbaric (thereby turning the tables on white stereotypes of black people). Yet Quint was speaking of slaveholders only, evident in his imagery of whips and chains. By the same token, some ministers advocated the death penalty, not only for the assassin, but also for Jefferson Davis, Robert E. Lee, and other higher-ups. In New Haven, Georgia Treadway attended two Easter services, both of which placed Davis, along with Lee and other Confederate generals, “on the same level as the murderer.” Journalists also singled out Confederate authorities, with the New York Anglo-African hoping to see such men tried in the courtroom. Once their “connection with the murder of the President” was proven, the black editors wrote, it would be “impossible to save their necks.”28

  Unsurprisingly, Confederates expressed dismay that their conquerors would think to place blame anywhere beyond Booth and his accomplices or the Copperheads. “I dont see why they should take revenge on us,” an imprisoned private wrote in his diary, while Edmund Ruffin—the zealous secessionist known for firing a shot in Charleston harbor at the war’s outset—was infuriated to read a sermon in the New York papers that equated Booth with the “spirit which fired on Fort Sumter.” Eliza Andrews, believing Booth alone to be guilty, called the “wanted” handbills for Jefferson Davis “villainous slander.”29

  Lincoln’s mourners meanwhile kept up a steady chorus, naming as guilty the “leading men,” the “secession party,” the “upper classes of the South,” and the “hot-headed leaders.” As a black man in California claimed, “The leaders of the rebellion have always aimed at one thing, and that is the destruction of the Chief Magistrate,” while a white woman in Vermont wanted Jefferson Davis hanged from the same gallows as John Brown. In the two days after Easter, lawyer George White recorded in his diary a long list of Confederates potentially responsible for the assassination. Along with Davis and Lee, he identified Judah Benjamin (secretary of state), John Breckinridge (secretary of war), John Campbell (assistant secretary of war), Robert Toombs (previous secretary of state), James Mason and John Slidell (diplomats), Robert Hunter (Virginia senator, and peace commissioner in early 1865), Jacob Thompson (agent to Canada), and Generals P. G. T. Beauregard, Richard Ewell, A. P. Hill, and Joseph E. Johnston. Women of the slaveholding classes held an uncertain position in these assertions. Mostly they went unmentioned, though the minister Quint saw fit to pity them as suffering widows. Occasionally a mourner implicated them fully, like the man who fumed over “shedevils” or the one who pronounced Confederate ladies even “worse than the Men in their Sentiments.”30

  Blaming the Confederate leadership for Lincoln’s assassination meant exempting white southerners outside the planter classes, but when mourners invoked phrases like “the masses,” it was never entirely clear who exactly fell into that category. From its founding in the 1850s, the Republican Party had envisioned the white population of the South as slaveholding elites in conflict with a degraded class of impoverished and powerless plebeians whose chances for upward mobility were squelched by slave labor. All through the war, white northerners imagined just such a simplistically divided Confederacy, unwilling to differentiate among the majority of white southerners who fell outside the category of large plantation owners. That left a great deal of ambiguity. Where was the dividing line between large and small planters, between small planters and yeoman farme
rs (who might own a few slaves), and between struggling yeoman farmers and poverty-stricken white families? Just such ambiguity was apparent in the speech Henry Ward Beecher had delivered at Fort Sumter, right before Lincoln’s assassination, in which he blamed the war squarely on southern slaveholders, accusing them of sweeping “common people” into their ranks with lies “against interests as dear to them as their own lives” and implored fellow victors to treat the deceived masses with mercy. Even if they had cast their wartime lot with their powerful neighbors, Beecher believed, the whole of the ignorant rank and file should be welcomed back into the Union.31

  Beecher spoke for most white northerners, who believed not only that the institution of slavery oppressed white people outside the master class, but also that those oppressed whites had always harbored antislavery sentiment. At war’s end, many white Union supporters believed that the majority of white southerners would act on their long-smoldering resentment of aristocratic slaveholders and reveal themselves as natural allies of the Yankees. After the fall of Richmond, Henry Thacher was waiting for “the people” to turn their wrath from the Union to their own leaders, once they discovered “the game the Chivalry are playing.” For Union army chaplain Hallock Armstrong, confirmation came from common southern whites themselves, who told him that the Civil War was “a war of the Aristocracy of the South,” prompting Armstrong to project that victory would “knock off the shackles from millions of poor whites.” Passing through Virginia on his way home, Edward Benham and his fellow soldiers were cheered by African Americans, but it was the white natives who startled them, convincing Benham that with the war over, they would now “think for themselves.” From the other side, a soldier in Lee’s army was shocked that the “miserably poor” whites he met in North Carolina expressed delight at the coming of the Yankees. Some of the Union troops, though, voiced skepticism, wondering whether those exulters had given up on the Confederate cause only after the war became too oppressive on the home front. After the fall of Richmond, one Union soldier thought white people were happy to encounter the enemy, “not because they were Union from principle, but because they were Union by being whipped & tired out by the war.” After surrender, another noticed that the women of destitute white families welcomed Yankees because they were starving yet still defended the Confederate cause.32

  Despite any evidence to the contrary, most of Lincoln’s white mourners only amplified their portraits of innocent poor whites in the defeated Confederacy. Leave the “ignorantly deluded” alone, Alonso Quint pled in his Easter Sunday sermon, and they would “learn better by and by.” In Springfield, Illinois, when the Reverend Matthew Simpson singled out Confederate leaders, he simultaneously extended forgiveness to the “deluded masses.” A Union soldier in Raleigh warned his compatriots to take care in their treatment of the “unwilling, reluctant, enforced accessories” of the wicked leaders, and a Maryland Unionist brought the slain president into the picture, blaming Lincoln-hating Confederates for “inflaming the minds of humbler individuals.”33

  Where Confederate soldiers fit into this stark division was less clear. Immediately following the assassination, Union troops had fantasized about brutally attacking their already vanquished enemies on the battlefield, and a few explicitly named the rebel rank and file as culpable. Alfred Neafie, for one, pronounced guilty every soldier who remained loyal to the rebellion after Lincoln’s murder. Alonzo Pickard made the same point more violently. “I was always very lenient in my feelings towards all except the leaders,” he wrote from Virginia, but now he wanted everyone exterminated, leader and follower alike. Yet apart from the anger that flared, especially among Union soldiers, in the immediate aftermath of the assassination, the great majority of Lincoln’s white mourners continued to speak in sweeping terms about the blameless poor white people of the South.34

  Trouble was, if the majority of southern whites resented the slaveholding aristocracy, they did not appreciate black freedom either. During the secession crisis and then during the war, the planter classes had indeed taken care to suppress, sometimes with violence, any heterodox antislavery ideas among whites in their midst, and poor and middling folk certainly benefitted from remaining in the good graces of those who held political and social power. But southern whites outside the planter classes allied with the rich not merely out of fear. Comradeship with a wealthy slaveholder could provide a gin to clean their few bales of cotton, a slave or two to borrow for a particularly arduous task, even the opportunity to work as a plantation overseer. Many poor whites also shared an antagonism toward federal power. And though the destruction of slavery might break the cross-class bonds of southern white people, racism easily persisted across class lines.

  This was the problem that Lincoln’s white mourners elided. By exempting those beyond the planter classes, they let slide the fact that the vast majority of white southerners in 1865 remained loyal to white supremacy. Though African Americans had joined the chorus that blamed the Confederate leadership for secession, war, and the assassination, they were also among the few who raised the problem of racism among the so-called white masses of the South. In the speech he delivered in Rochester on the day Lincoln died, Frederick Douglass pointedly divided the South into two distinct populations: not rich and poor but, rather, black friends and white foes, mindful of the fact that all white southerners held a sturdy stake in black subjugation. A writer for the New York Anglo-African likewise wrote that “poor and ignorant” white people in the slave states should be emancipated from the “tyranny of the rich and educated” but doubted that they could be “emancipated from negro-hate.” A writer for the Christian Recorder wrote of the “class of ignorant white loyalists” who also believed that his people were “made to be slaves.”35

  When this complication occurred to Lincoln’s white mourners, they tended only to expand their idealism. Hallock Armstrong admitted that “poor white trash” in the South appeared to hate black people (he believed they craved “somebody more degraded than themselves”), yet he confidently imagined that by treating them with benevolence, the occupying Yankees could embark on the mission of “regenerating the misguided millions.” Just as the followers of William Lloyd Garrison had once imagined themselves ending slavery purely through the moral suasion of slaveholders, white mourners now imagined themselves enlightening poorer white southerners out of their racism. On the home front, in the days following the assassination, Anna Lowell attended a meeting of Bostonians who wished to “instruct & civilize,” not only freedpeople, but also poor whites, who “needed it even more.” The “white trash” of the South, John Green-leaf Whittier wrote in the Liberator (he put the phrase in quotation marks), looked toward African Americans “with a bitter hatred,” yet education, he believed, would cure the racism of these pitiable “misguided masses”—note the contrast with the black writer who described the Negro-hating wealthy classes of the South as “educated,” aware that education made no difference.36

  These convictions about moral uplift were sincere, part and parcel of deep-rooted ideas about the social mobility inherent in a system built on capital and labor, standing in turn on a foundation of faith in the inevitable progress of human civilization. Yet by implying that the institution of slavery alone fueled racism, these white mourners exempted themselves from their own paternalism and prejudices.

  GRIEVING CLERGYMEN CALLED FOR VENGEANCE, but they also helped diffuse anger with concurrent calls for mercy. Some mourners may have come home from church on Easter Sunday with their initial fury fanned, yet many found greater comfort in commands to forgive. For Anna Ferris, “the feeling of indignation & rage melted away” after Sunday services, replaced by an understanding of Jesus’s prayer “Father forgive them for they know not what they do.” On each successive Sunday after Easter, the assassination-themed sermons became less harsh, and vengeful human feelings paled before the knowledge that God would serve as the final judge of the criminals. As the Washington minister James Ward wrote in his diary, “I
t is God, to whom alone vengeance belongeth,” and as Caroline Laing wrote to her daughter, paraphrasing Romans 12:19 (and likely a sermon she had heard), “Vengeance is mine saith the Lord.”37

  Wrestling with blame and forgiveness, people turned to President Lincoln’s second inaugural address. Drawn to the words “malice toward none” and “charity for all,” and to Lincoln’s directive to “bind up the nation’s wounds,” mourners came to two different conclusions. Some invoked these words to demonstrate that the president’s lenience would have made him unfit to reconstruct the nation, hence God had taken him away at just the right moment. Others invoked the same words to prove that mercy constituted the proper attitude toward their vanquished enemies, since that was what the slain president would have wanted (and some invoked both interpretations at the same time). Even though the very fact of the assassination only further complicated those words—if Lincoln had advocated for clemency when he was alive, did that still hold true after the Confederate system had murdered him?—many nonetheless focused on the message of forgiveness. Black minister Jacob Thomas told his Easter Sunday listeners that Lincoln had shown Christian grace by exercising mercy “even toward his foes,” and white minister J. G. Holland refrained from speaking aloud the vengeance he felt inside, for Lincoln’s kind spirit spoke of charity and “Christian forbearance.” With malice toward none and with charity for all were the words that mourners frequently chose to inscribe onto their signs and banners in the wake of Lincoln’s death.38