Mourning Lincoln

by Martha Hodes

  And yet how different everything felt from the days before. Out on the streets on the day Lincoln died, and in church on Easter Sunday, people had gathered spontaneously with family and friends to find and offer comfort. Now you either had to be invited or you had to plan carefully, and either way, you likely stood among strangers. A soldier in the Fourteenth Indiana thought it all the most imposing thing he’d ever seen, but “the biggest thing to me,” he told his wife, “was that I had my pocket picked.” One man recorded only that he “roasted in the sun” for hours, another that he found it “an Excellent opportunity to see distinguished officials.” Those who stood too far back could follow along only by the gun salutes and clip-clop of horses’ hooves. The well-orchestrated pomp and circumstance made it seem as if all the questions had been settled, when none had. As Sarah Browne put it after the services in Salem, everything remained “dark—mysterious—terrible.”14

  For mourners at home in their own cities, towns, and villages on April 19, the day felt less grand and more subdued, with a pall and a stillness replacing the customary weekday bustle. In Brattleboro, Vermont, everyone appeared “serious and thoughtful.” In San Francisco, the morning seemed almost holy in its silence. Across the country, the drapery had been augmented for Wednesday’s events, and again women provided much of the labor. Shock lingered; as one woman wrote, it was still “too dreadful to believe.” For Anna Lowell, the day brought on one of her awful headaches, and for Caroline Dall, it all made her “faint & sick.” Where the weather was fine, the contrast was painful. A “lovely day—& yet so sad,” one mourner wrote.15

  Beginning at eleven or noon, bells, guns, and cannon broke the stillness. In church, mourners saw the now-familiar dark drapery, white flowers, and portraits of Lincoln—that is, if they could see anything at all. Just as on Easter Sunday three days before, people crammed inside. Anna Lowell’s church was so crowded that a minister friend “took hold of our hands & shoved us in,” she wrote. Inside, the messages were the same. At Cincinnati’s black Baptist church, the preacher reminded his congregants that ultimate judgment lay with the Lord. Choirs sang “Thy will be done” and “God Works in a Mysterious Way.” Em Cornwall thought she had “got over it a little,” but the gloom of the service prompted grief to “burst forth afresh.” For Caroline Laing, it was the booming cannon announcing the start of services down in Washington. “I felt sad enough before, but at that sound I could control myself no longer & wept during the whole service,” she confided to her daughter. Others stepped back from the intensity. In Newport, Rhode Island, an ingenuous fifteen-year-old who attended two services in a row told her journal that she had “got a little too much” of it. After Quaker services, Annie Hillborn spent a “delightful afternoon” with friends in Philadelphia’s Fairmount Park.16

  Following the religious services came the ceremonies. In Altoona, Pennsylvania, four mourning-bedecked horses carried an empty, flag-draped coffin. In San Francisco, five hundred dapper black men joined the procession, followed by the city’s Chinese merchants. In camp, Union soldiers polished their guns and boots for dress parade and did the women’s work of trimming flags with black crape. In occupied southern cities, Yankees and black residents marched together. In Fernandina, Florida, the bells and cannon “told rebeldom their doom,” a black soldier reported, and Sergeant Thomas Darling, once a slave, offered an oration that included “the claims of our race to all legal rights.”17

  Once again, both in Washington and beyond, it felt as if the whole world was mourning for Lincoln. In New York City, home to a sizable Copperhead population, Caroline Laing convinced herself that even Lincoln’s “worst enemies” were “enemies no longer.” In the border state of Delaware, Anna Ferris thought she had never seen “so universal & heartfelt a tribute of grief.” Some were more judicious, speaking cautiously of free states or crafting phrases like “where the Union Element prevails.” Partly the mourning felt omnipresent on Wednesday, April 19, because at least some dissenters stayed out of the way. In New York, a young secessionist studiously spent the day writing and rewriting her school composition; the like-minded “did not dare show their faces,” she wrote to her brother, lest they be mobbed. In Baltimore, Confederate Louisa Mason purposely stayed inside unpacking a trunk, and down south, it was a good time for Lincoln’s antagonists to keep their thoughts private, like the man who wrote in his diary of “Poor ‘Old abe’ the ‘Ape.’” Some joined in the ceremonies despite their views—Democratic congressman John Pruyn bristled silently at the extolling of the Emancipation Proclamation at New York’s Trinity Church. Still others feigned grief in efforts at self-protection—in Maryland, John Glenn draped a single windowsill for all of five hours (“during the time prescribed by Military orders for mourning,” he explained). In Boston, a “bitter Copperhead” showed up at church to assure the minister that he was “entirely converted.” Many just remained indifferent, like the Confederate prisoner who noted that no business would be transacted because of the funeral, adding that the day brought no news “of any importens.” All such behavior eased the way for mourners to comfort themselves with the ideal of universally shared grief, however vaguely or inaccurately they may have defined that universality.18

  ON THURSDAY, IT RAINED IN Washington, and forty thousand more people filed past the coffin in the Capitol Rotunda. The next morning, an escort carried Lincoln’s body to the funeral train waiting at the New Jersey Avenue Station of the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad, where Phineas Gurley offered a last prayer to an enormous crowd. It was Friday, April 21, 1865, and the president’s homeward journey was about to begin.

  Cities and towns had petitioned for inclusion as stops along the route, countering the wishes of Mary Lincoln, who wanted a nonstop run to Springfield. Now the train’s itinerary largely retraced, in reverse, the route that Lincoln had traveled to the White House four years earlier. On that journey, credible rumors of a secessionist assassination plot had marred Lincoln’s passage through Baltimore, prompting a secretive switch of plans and a disguise that included discarding the signature stovepipe hat. In 1865, carrying the corpse of the slain chief, the funeral train would stop first in Baltimore, then continue to Harrisburg, Philadelphia, New York, Albany, Buffalo, Cleveland, Columbus, Indianapolis, and Chicago, before reaching Lincoln’s hometown. But it was not just these cities that mattered, it was also the routes in between: the villages and hillsides at which mourners could gather to watch the locomotive pass. Just as they traveled to the nation’s capital, just as they read about every detail of the ceremonies in the newspapers, just as they planned and participated in local observances, now again mourners were eager to make themselves part of the rituals that might answer the restless quest for the meaning of Lincoln’s assassination. At the very least, they wanted to bid a formal good-bye and turn toward the future.

  Planning and executing the funeral train proved a herculean effort. Roughly three hundred passengers would ride in the nine-car train during any given segment, including all manner of national and state officials, who traded places from city to city. Woodstoves would give warmth, and oil would shed light, but the train had to stop for most meals. All along the way, the cars had to be inspected and serviced, halting for water (for the boilers) and wood (for the stoves in cool spring weather). In the eighth car lay two coffins: that of the president and that of Willie Lincoln, who had been disinterred in Washington to be reburied with his father at home. At each major stop, guards would keep watch over the boy while Lincoln’s body was removed for the ceremonies. Robert Lincoln rode to Baltimore, then returned to Washington to stay with his mother. He would join the mourning rituals again only in Springfield. Mary Lincoln stayed in the White House for the duration of the journey.

  Transcontinental railroads were a product of the Civil War, and to many of the victors-turned-mourners, Lincoln’s funeral train pointed the way to the triumph of industry and free labor (and, less happily, corruption and greed). The lack of a federal railroad system in 1865, tho
ugh, meant that no single funeral train traveled the route from start to finish. Rather, over nearly seventeen hundred miles, planners had to coordinate as many as eighty different passenger cars from the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad, the Pennsylvania Railroad, the Hudson River Railroad, the Buffalo and Erie Railroad, the Columbus and Indianapolis Central Railroad, and the Chicago and Alton Railroad, among others. It was not just that different companies owned the cars, it was also that they had built tracks with different gauges, making it impossible for the same cars to travel continuously across the continent. Nor were time zones standardized in 1865, meaning that planners had to calculate arrivals and departures according to an array of schedules, in order to permit newspapers to print the local hour and minute of passage through each town and village—calculations that were hard enough within the same time zone. Residents of Swanville, Pennsylvania, for example, anticipated the train’s appearance on Friday, April 28, at 2:42 in the morning, with its next appearance, at the Fairview station, at 2:49 a.m.

  In the course of some four and a half hours on the morning of Friday, April 28, 1865, Lincoln’s funeral train traveled about a hundred miles, beginning in Erie, Pennsylvania, crossing into Ohio at the town of Conneaut, and proceeding to Cleveland. Mourners gathered at every stop, even in the middle of the night. This commemorative ribbon displays the train schedule, capped by an image of a woman weeping over Lincoln’s casket, flanked by mourning soldiers. Strict orders for punctuality appear below the schedule. Lincoln Financial Foundation Collection, courtesy of the Indiana State Museum.

  With schedules distributed, communities drew up plans. Unlike the highly orchestrated ceremonies that would take place at the eleven major stops, the scale of in-between activities was more intimate. At various junctures, workers constructed temporary decorative arches over the tracks, intertwined with evergreens and adorned with flowers and flags. Citizens arranged for tolling bells, cannon blasts, gunshots, prayers, and dirges. Delegations of women in white dresses would greet the train, and school-children would scatter flowers along the tracks. A few used the occasion to satisfy personal curiosity, like Charles Larrabee, who came by for the train’s brief evening stop in Poughkeepsie. “I stood where I could see the notables as they were eating and finally got in amongst them,” he wrote to his mother, amused to see that military and government men “acted like other folks.” Most, though, created a more significant experience for themselves. Wherever the train puffed into view, people gathered to watch it traverse the landscape. Once again, mourners walked, rode their horses, drove their buggies—and boarded other, specially scheduled trains—to arrive at the closest venue at just the right moment. In deference, the funeral cars typically traveled at twenty miles an hour, slowing down considerably when passing overflowing station platforms. When the moment came, the mourners knelt, wept, prayed, doffed hats, removed bonnets, and held children aloft for a sight they would remember their whole lives. Where springtime rains fell, spectators got wet and stayed damp, shoes and hemlines caked with mud, flags and white handkerchiefs soggy. Where the train traveled in darkness, mourners built bonfires or lit lanterns and torches. Even when the train chugged through a village at three o’clock in the morning in a heavy downpour, throngs paid tribute, often by the thousands.19

  Mourners also crowded into the eleven chosen cities, again arriving by any and every means possible, filling every room for rent, and sleeping in parks and streets. “This is a very lonesome day,” wrote an Indiana woman who lived sixty miles north of the train route. “Every body almost has gone to Indianapolis to see the remains of A. Lincoln.” Just as in Washington on April 19, spectators jammed avenues, windows, balconies, and rooftops and climbed trees for a better view. In Philadelphia, Anna Ferris observed a “living tide” gush through the streets. In New York, one man estimated a crowd of a hundred thousand lined up at two o’clock in the morning to view the body and a million and a half watching the procession, which took “7 hours in passing a given point.” In Albany, pushing and shoving was the only way to ensure a place on the stifling outbound cars when the ceremonies ended, prompting people to faint in the middle of crowds. Mourners who made their way to Springfield toured Lincoln’s home, law offices, church pew, even his barbershop, then slept outside or just walked the streets all night, waiting for the train’s arrival. As in Washington, people performed the rituals of grief in the company of strangers.20

  Drapery everywhere was thicker than it had been on Saturday, April 15, or on Easter Sunday, or Wednesday, April 19. Shopkeepers sold miles more fabric, as Philadelphians covered the Liberty Bell and New Yorkers decorated the twenty-foot windows of the Lord and Taylor department store in red, white, and blue silk, complemented by black and white bombazine. The weather was at its springtime best in New York, Albany, and Chicago, while heavy rains fell in Baltimore, Harrisburg, and Cleveland, drenching the train’s black drapery and causing the dye of mourning fabric to bleed onto building facades. The rains were so torrential in Indianapolis that the procession accompanying the hearse to and from the State House had to be canceled. Everywhere, hawkers peddled likenesses of the president. Everywhere, banners—both official and homemade—told you how to feel, proclaiming sentiments in words both plain and poetic: “The Nation Mourns” or “The great heart of the Nation throbs heavily at the Portals of his Grave.” Where a week or two earlier mourners had searched one another’s faces for the meaning of the tragedy, now they read the placards. Nearly everywhere they could see the words from Lincoln’s second inaugural: With malice toward none.21

  Lincoln’s mourners made efforts to connect themselves to the grand and historic events all around them. At each of the major stops, a Veteran Reserve Guard of Escort, consisting of twenty-nine men who rode the entire route, hoisted the coffin to their shoulders and conveyed it to a locally supplied horse-drawn hearse that in turn transported the body to the venue where it would lie in state. Enormous crowds gathered to watch the transfer, then again to witness the elaborate ceremonies planned by local committees. For a man perched in a second-story window in New York, it was, he felt sure, “the most imposing thing I ever saw or ever expect to see again.” In Indianapolis, a spectator thought the display “the most notable & worthy of the age & century.” Still, the experience was far from perfect. Mourners pushed, shoved, and fainted, while pickpockets collected wallets and watches and thieves worked the empty houses. For some, the extensive preparations took a toll on the occasion’s gravity. English actress Ellen Kean detected entirely too much gaiety (women smiling in their spring dresses!) and not enough dignity (Lincoln’s remains shuttled about “to gratify the morbid curiosity of the idle”). A critic in the Midwest thought the ceremonies amounted to “more of a show than respect for Lincoln.” Sometimes it was just exhausting. In Chicago, a woman held up her baby girl to see the parade until the child seemed to weigh a ton.22

  An anonymous sketcher walked the streets of New York City after the assassination, recording the signs and banners displayed in shop windows and on building facades. This page, with Broadway addresses recorded, documents magnanimous sentiments, taken from Lincoln’s second inaugural address in March 1865 (“With malice toward none, with charity to all”), alongside more vengeful statements (“Death to Traitors”).

  McLellan Lincoln Collection, John Hay Library, Brown University.

  Miscalculations and blunders were inevitable, given the scale of the endeavor. The New York procession straggled, with marchers forming pathetic-looking lines that were “twenty a-breast, and only two deep.” In Philadelphia, everything was running late, and as dusk turned to darkness, no one could see much of anything. Annie Hillborn and her friends stood in a “Sea of people” through bursts of rain that occasioned the raising of “thousands of umbrellas,” and after a four-hour wait, they could “scarcely distinguish the procession from the spectators.” For Anna Ferris, straining her eyes, only the “flash of a street lamp revealed the coffin for an instant.” Soon the frustrated viewers became unr
uly, prompting policemen to “beat the people back with their clubs.” Near Independence Hall, male spectators were “fumbling the women.” Lucy McKim was among the very few to record the occasion without sentimental revision, one of the few to document the impersonal nature of the formal rituals. On Broad Street between Spruce and Arch, McKim pushed against a solid wall of people, “every available perch being black with a seething mass of human beings.” Moving inside at Ninth and Arch, she and her companions waited until after sunset for the procession to appear, at which point a group of boys let out an unseemly cheer. It could hardly be called marching, McKim scoffed, with the lines gaping and no music to be heard. “Play up! Play up!” people shouted at the bands. When the hearse finally appeared, it “bobbed & jolted,” unable to provoke the intended awe. So “entirely ludicrous” was it all, McKim recounted to her fiancé, that she actually burst out laughing. The whole thing was no more than “a miserable, showy, superficial, irreverent farce.”23

  No matter how satisfying or unsatisfying were the rituals, many of Lincoln’s mourners had come for a single objective: to view the president’s body up close. Again, the contrast with the immediacy of learning the news was unmistakable. In those moments and hours, mourners had gazed at the stricken brows and falling tears across so many countenances for confirmation and comfort, whereas now they came to gaze upon a single face only. For many, to be sure, that turned out to be a reverent experience. In Philadelphia, African American student and servant Emilie Davis anticipated Lincoln’s arrival, recording the upcoming event the day before, then again the next morning. “The President comes in town this afternoon,” she wrote in her diary, as if Lincoln were still alive. Davis’s first two attempts to view the body failed because the crowds were so great, and the next day she waited several hours for a turn. Yet even that briefest glimpse was, for her, “a sight worth seeing.” In Indianapolis, Mattie Jackson was among the last few hundred viewers to glimpse the president, since African Americans were relegated to the back of the line. Jackson, who had escaped from slavery in Missouri, went to see the body expressly because she wouldn’t believe Lincoln was dead until she set her own eyes on the lifeless corpse.24