Mourning Lincoln

by Martha Hodes

  Yet if President Lincoln appeared to have been encouraging clemency, he had closed the second inaugural with a more complicated imperative: “to do all which may achieve and cherish a just, and a lasting peace.” At the inauguration, Lincoln had reflected on divine judgment for the national sin of slavery, making clear that slavery was the cause of the conflict (“All knew,” he said, that slavery was “somehow, the cause of the war”). All hoped and prayed the war would soon end, Lincoln went on, but if God willed the war to continue “until every drop of blood drawn with the lash, shall be paid by another drawn with the sword,” so it must be. Lincoln was less clear about what, precisely, constituted the end of slavery—simply its legal demise or the fuller project of black citizenship and equality—and that was why his words were hard to interpret in light of the assassination. Malice toward none and charity for all: that was either why God had taken Lincoln (because of his lenience toward the enemy) or how Lincoln would have wanted the defeated enemies treated in his own absence (with mercy). A just, and a lasting peace: that implied that peace without enduring justice was not enough. Since these words followed Lincoln’s reflections on slavery as the cause of the war, the idea of a democratic and egalitarian peace seemed to pertain especially to the future of the freedpeople.39

  Many fewer mourners attended to this last point. Anna Lowell may have been thinking of the juxtaposition of the two imperatives when she read the address to her Sunday school students the week after Easter. Lincoln’s words, she wrote in her diary, “almost sublimely mingle the ideas of Justice & Mercy.” More direct were the words of a Chicago woman who signed herself only as “Ruth” in a letter to the black Christian Recorder. “We all remember well the late President’s last Inaugural Address,” she wrote, “and what he said about paying back the blood drawn by the lash.” Yet Anna Lowell and Ruth were both unusual in calling up the second inaugural as a way to point toward Lincoln’s desire, not only for black freedom, but also for justice—for equal political rights—after emancipation.40

  If the ultimate meaning of Lincoln’s second inaugural address was hard to decipher in the aftermath of the assassination, so too did clergymen preach multilayered messages of mercy and vengeance, and so too did Lincoln’s lay mourners struggle with clashing impulses. For all the anger and calls to reprisal, for all the imagined and real violence toward the demonized enemy, for all the blame they placed on slaveholders and slavery, Lincoln’s mourners, both black and white, took at least a measure of refuge in their end-of-war optimism, nurtured by victory and emancipation. Now, amid sorrow and anger, they looked toward the president’s funeral, hopeful that it would offer both resolution for their grief and a path forward for the postwar nation.

  INTERLUDE

  Best Friend

  ENVISIONING LINCOLN’S GENEROSITY TOWARD THE defeated Confederates—contrasting him with the ruthlessness of Generals Sherman and Grant, or with President Andrew Johnson’s hatred of the planter classes, and no doubt thinking of the words with malice toward none—the victors cast him as their enemy’s best friend. As the “best friend of the South,” a white mourner wrote in his diary on April 15, Lincoln would have leavened justice with love. A letter writer to the New York Anglo-African declared that the Confederates had “murdered their best friend,” and the black editors of the Christian Recorder and the San Francisco Elevator likewise named Lincoln the best friend of the rebels. Ministers chimed in too, and mourners echoed the imagery from pulpit and press, ranging from cabinet members (“In the Murder of Lincoln the rebels have killed their best friend,” Secretary of the Interior John P. Usher told his wife), to Union generals (Carl Schurz thought the assassin had “killed the best friend of the South”), to army officers (“They have lost their best friend,” Francis Barnes wrote home from Alabama), to Union soldiers (“They murdered their best friend,” wrote Franklin Boyts), to women on the home front (“The South have lost their best friend” and “murdered their own cause,” Caroline Laing told her daughter). President Lincoln was the “best friend the South ever had,” Albert Browne fairly gloated, “and how have the dastardly cowardly wretches repaid him.”1

  Rodney Dorman couldn’t have disagreed more, for Lincon was no best friend of his people. Instead, the assassin and his conspirators were “among the greatest benefactors of mankind,” and Dorman approved and applauded them as “killers of tyrants.” Dorman was thus no doubt displeased with the considerable number of his compatriots who took up the best-friend chorus, whether sincerely or shrewdly. Confederates in New Orleans told a Union officer that “the South had lost their best friend.” Hannah Turner, living in Philadelphia, with her husband in the rebel army, wrote that the president would have proven to be “a warm friend to the South,” and Marylander Kate Johnson confided to her brother that the assassination was “too horrible to think of” because “we have lost our best friend.”2

  Lincoln’s own contradictions—or maybe his magisterial skills as a statesman—emerge in the fact that mourning freedpeople made the same claim for themselves, calling Lincoln the “best friend ever I had” and their “best earthly friend.” Bostonian George Ruffin, addressing his people in Richmond, called the slain leader the “Great Emancipator” and “our best friend.” North and south, journalists chimed in. “Brothers mourn! sisters weep!” exclaimed the New York Anglo-African, “for our best friend has passed away.” The New Orleans Black Republican called Lincoln the “greatest earthly friend of the colored race.”3

  Best friend of the freedpeople or best friend of the Confederates, perhaps Lincoln had been both—or at least he had made it appear that way as the war came to a close.

  6

  Funeral

  WHEN RODNEY DORMAN READ THE coverage of Lincoln’s funeral in the New York papers, he felt sickened all over again. It was utterly ridiculous, “gross & distorted,” all “gas & bombast,” with Lincoln lying in state as if the man were royalty or the pope. “Are they not aware of the satire & caricature?” he asked his diary. In complete “tom-foolery” on the day the funeral train was to arrive in Chicago, Union forces in Jacksonville fired a gun every half-hour from sunrise to sunset. “It is enough to make a dog sick,” Dorman wrote, “even after eating his own vomit.” This was Dorman’s version of Proverbs 26:11, “As a dog returneth to his vomit, so a fool returneth to his folly.”1

  The funeral ceremonies for the Yankee chief disgusted Dorman, but at least he could extract a measure of satisfaction when he read about the lenient terms of surrender that Confederate general Joseph Johnston had negotiated with Sherman soon after the assassination. Dorman found this a “start in the right direction,” so when he learned that President Andrew Johnson had rejected the terms entirely, his fury again surged against all those “dastardly scoundrels” up north. He grew impatient too as he read about the crackdown on freedom that accompanied the search for Lincoln’s assassin. That no one could depart from the city of Washington he found entirely despotic. “But what does it matter about law, or the rights of citizens, when tyrants will otherwise?” he asked. The arrest of Mary Surratt, the sole woman among the conspirators, further inflamed him. “You sycophantic, time-serving knaves!” he thundered. “All of you!”2

  SARAH BROWNE STAYED ANGRY TOO. At 11:30 on the morning of Wednesday, April 19, 1865, the bells began to toll in Salem. Services for the president commenced at noon, and Sarah took her place in a pew of the North Church, alongside her children Alice and Eddie. The pulpit remained draped in black and white, and again the mourners sought consolation and confirmation in one another’s faces (“Eye met eye with the fixed expression of horror & sadness,” Sarah wrote in her diary). After church, she and the children walked along Essex Street, joining the crowds to absorb the city’s mourning decorations, and when she described the public mood that afternoon, she wrote not only of gloom and grief but also of ire. “Blood calls for an avenger,” she asserted. “Let us unite together against all tyranny—all oppression—all outrage.” Later, Sarah gazed at the fr
agrant white roses that she and the children had plucked from the church altar after the service. “We smiled as we looked at these flowers,” she conceded, “but apart from them, all was dark—mysterious—terrible.” She drew a heavy line of black ink across the page, perhaps hoping that the local funeral service would provide a point of closure from which to look ahead.3

  Sarah’s elder son, Albert Jr., who worked for the governor of Massachusetts, had traveled to Washington for Lincoln’s funeral, and over the next two weeks Sarah followed the whereabouts of the president’s body. She had already recorded when it was embalmed and brought to the White House. Now she described the ceremonies in the capital, read accounts of the funeral train’s journey, and noted the whereabouts of Mary Lincoln and her sons. As Lincoln’s body headed north and west, Sarah also kept up with the military news, expressing consternation over General Sherman’s overly magnanimous negotiations with General Johnston. They were the “most astonishing—most outrageous—most humiliating agreements ever talked over!” she exclaimed, wondering if the hero and idol of the Union had lost his mind. Down south, Albert agreed, though he made light of the compromises. “Old Tecumpsy Sherman has made a mistake, a grievous mistake,” he wrote home.

  Sarah followed the whereabouts of John Wilkes Booth too, noting the assassin’s escape from Ford’s Theatre and the federal government’s ongoing hunt. “Booth is supposed to be in Maryland,” she wrote on April 25, the day before he was captured. “We wait with great interest for all news from the Capitol.” In early May, Sarah documented Lincoln’s burial at Oak Ridge Cemetery in his hometown of Springfield, Illinois. The grand formalities were over, but Sarah Browne’s thoughts remained peppered with words and phrases like fiends and horrible sin.4

  MOURNERS CAME TO WASHINGTON BY the thousands. They arrived on foot, on horseback, in carriages, and on special trains that the railroad companies added to their timetables. They filled every hotel and boardinghouse, slept in spare rooms, on floors, in their own conveyances, and out of doors. If anything was intended to affirm worldwide grief, it was the capital’s funeral, and mourners wanted to count themselves part of that powerful, imagined universality. They came looking to participate in rituals that would help them understand God’s purposes and the meaning of Lincoln’s death. They came to take part in the making of history. They expected to be overawed, and they wanted the victorious nation to move forward into a glorious future.5

  Early on Tuesday, April 18, people began lining up outside the heavily draped White House for the privilege of viewing the president’s body, lying in state in the East Room, and many of those filling Pennsylvania Avenue (some observers thought most) were African Americans. When the doors opened at 9:30 a.m., viewers saw their own efforts at tacking up mourning drapery magnified a thousandfold. Dark fabric covered nearly every surface, with mantels, mirrors, columns, and light fixtures concealed. Hundreds of yards of black and white silk and ninety boxes’ worth of the finest crape had been beautifully arranged. The catafalque, a confection of black alpaca, velvet, crape, and muslin, and black and white satin, stood so high—eleven feet including the canopy—that workmen had removed an entire chandelier to accommodate it. On the platform, amid wreaths of laurel, cedar, and camellia, rested the silver-handled walnut coffin. It was open to reveal the top third of the president’s body, clad in the same black suit he had donned for his second inauguration, complemented by black bowtie and white gloves. His head rested on a white silk pillow. Inside, the coffin was strewn with roses, magnolias, and lilies.6

  The undertakers had worked hard to preserve the president for public display, injecting an artery with chemicals to retard decay and paying special attention to the face. Booth’s lead bullet had penetrated Lincoln’s skull and brain, and after manipulating the protruding eyes back into their sockets, the embalmer arranged the features into a tableau of “quiet sleep”: eyelids closed, beard shaved, visage dusted, and lips shaped into a glimmer of a smile. Benjamin Brown French, Washington’s commissioner of public buildings, and the man in charge of the body, thought the face looked “perfectly natural,” except for the bloodshot spot under the right eye. Although the science of embalming had improved during the war years, it was still a rudimentary art in 1865, and Lincoln’s body would begin to decompose almost right away. A doctor would travel with the funeral train, continually repowdering the face to mask the inevitable darkening of the skin.7

  Over the next eight hours, mourners waiting outside the White House divided into two lines to enter the East Room, climbing the steps on each side of the catafalque to file past. The scene was intended to be both serene and imposing, and many found it exactly so. “My last view of ABRAHAM LINCOLN,” one man recorded grandly in his diary that day. But just as mourners would discover all through the Washington funeral, and all through the journey of the funeral train that took the president back to Illinois, dissatisfaction punctuated the majesty. Here in the East Room, it was a “rush & jam.” Rose Pickard, a Union hospital volunteer, was “jammed almost to death” before she even got in. Spectators were hurried along, each one given little more than a second to glance at the president, instructed not to linger, and prodded along by guards whose job it was to see that only as many people entered as exited. Helen McCalla could barely “wait a moment near the corpse,” making it “impossible to obtain a satisfactory view.” Others stood in line for hours, only to be turned away when the doors closed.8

  Wednesday, April 19, was a beautiful spring day in the capital, the “saddest day of my life,” wrote Anson Henry, Lincoln’s physician and friend. The funeral service held in the East Room was for dignitaries only: President Johnson, cabinet members, generals, governors, senators and representatives, Supreme Court justices, ambassadors, and other eminent men. Elder son Captain Robert Lincoln was there, struggling to retain his composure, but Mary Lincoln stayed away, unable to bear it. Also missing was Secretary of State William Seward, still recovering from the wounds inflicted by one of Booth’s conspirators. Only seven women stood among the crowd of about six hundred: four wives, two daughters, and the nurse who had cared for Willie Lincoln, Robert and Tad’s brother, who had died in 1862 at the age of twelve. Mourners all over the world would later drink up the particulars of the East Room services, avidly reading the newspapers and copying down details.9

  The Reverend Phineas D. Gurley delivered the sermon. He was minister of the Presbyterian church where the Lincoln family worshipped and had conducted the funeral service for Willie Lincoln too. Gurley offered comfort, but he did not brush aside the unfathomable. There was divine will, of course: Gurley invoked a striking image of God’s hand hovering above the one that pointed the gun and pulled the trigger, permitting “whatsoever He pleased.” But even as Gurley surmised that God intended Lincoln’s death to humble the victors, he admitted the crime’s incomprehensible nature (“a mystery that is very deep”). There was the imperative to submit but also the undeniable pain and sorrow (“We bow, we weep, we worship”). There were hints of anger when Gurley claimed that Lincoln had been the nation’s “best hope.” There was profound optimism (soon would come “a bright and glorious day, such as our country has never seen”), but then again dawn coexisted with darkness in the “stricken and weary land.” There was a mixture of retribution and generosity (“We sing of mercy as well as of judgment”), and there was, finally, Abraham Lincoln’s larger purpose in an abolitionist and emancipationist view of the war: the end of slavery and the hope of racial equality. Consolation ultimately lay in the assurance that freedom and union would last forever. Once again, men wept openly.10

  Although most found the ceremony solemn and impressive, not everyone came away pleased. George Templeton Strong, New York lawyer and treasurer of the U.S. Sanitary Commission, thought the whole thing “vile and vulgar,” the prayers uttered by Bishop Matthew Simpson “whining” and “most nauseous.” For Easter Sunday, ministers had composed their remarks hurriedly, amid shock and grief; perhaps Strong, and others too, now
found the language overwrought.11

  The funeral of George Washington, in 1799, served as the model for the day’s formalities. Men from the Veteran Reserve Corps removed Lincoln’s coffin from the East Room and transferred it to the hearse that would carry it the mile and a half from the White House to the Capitol, where it would rest on a second custom-built catafalque in the Rotunda, also heavily draped. A carriage drawn by six horses and followed by one riderless mount, empty boots turned backward in the stirrups, conveyed the body. Many from the indoor service marched in the procession, joined by all manner of contingents: fraternal orders, workingmen, hospital convalescents, college students. First in the procession of infantry and cavalry were black soldiers, though not by design. The Twenty-Second U.S. Colored Troops, which had marched into Richmond, were called to Washington “to represent the Colored Soldiers.” Arriving by boat in the nick of time, they had met the procession head-on. In a metaphorical reenactment of their service to the nation, the men turned about-face to lead the parade, just as they had run to Union lines before they were permitted to enlist, then turned about-face to fight when Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation. Perhaps sixty thousand spectators, with a likely majority of African Americans, watched perhaps forty thousand marchers, from curbs and pavement, windows and balconies, rooftops and treetops. One white viewer was struck especially by the “negro & white troops” and the “white & black” civilians. Another described the “promiscuous motley procession headed & tailed by Ethiopian Americans.”12

  The gravity was palpable to many. George Templeton Strong brightened, grateful to be present for the “most memorable ceremonial this continent has ever seen.” Another observer found it “a splendid sight and a mournful one,” and a soldier listening from his hospital bed described an otherwise “solemn hush” over the whole city. Even a Confederate sympathizer, who regularly filled his diary with references to “nig suffrage” and “nig troops,” noted the “great display.”13