Mourning Lincoln

by Martha Hodes

  In military service, camp life became its own domestic sphere, where Union troops wove a record of the ordinary into their heartfelt expressions of grief. For many, the wartime diary—often a pocket-sized register providing a few lines for each printed date—was a bare-bones listing of activities and memos. Now the men interspersed mentions of the president’s death among entries about picket and guard duty, camp inspections, and weather conditions. As one soldier put it on April 15, “Died at 7 o’clock A.M. Day cloudy and some rain. Detailed for duty on patrol on Martinsburg Road.” A Wisconsin volunteer followed up news of the assassination with what mattered most: stretched rations, a shaded camping spot, letters at mail call. Nor could matters of health be left aside. “President was shot by an assassin and cannot live. I am suffering with a very lame back,” one man wrote in his diary. Another reversed the order: “In Hospital. Comfortable. President Lincoln assassinated last night.”13

  William Gould, the runaway slave in the Union navy, received the appalling news from another ship while en route to Lisbon in early May. Docked at Lisbon, Gould made a record of the facts (the shooting, the gunman, the assault on Seward), adding that the men had commenced supplying the ship with coal. The next day, Gould described the sailors’ flag-lowering ceremony in between his record of the continued coaling of the ship and a trip ashore to market. None of that diminished the significance of the loss; elsewhere in his diary, Gould wished for Jefferson Davis to be hanged and offered a vehement dissent against the deportation of freed slaves, indicating his immersion in wartime politics.14

  When it came to the chronicling of events, mourners interwove ordinary life with the trauma of Lincoln’s assassination even more seamlessly in letters than in diaries, moving with ease between the catastrophic and the everyday. Some of this fulfilled nineteenth-century convention, which called for opening one’s letters with an acknowledgment of missives received, and Lincoln’s assassination little disrupted this pattern—as a Union soldier wrote to his sister, “I recd a letter from Susie two or three days ago. I have not answered it yet. President Lincoln is dead.” For letter writers, it was also a matter of resources. Time was often short, whether for servant, mistress, farmer, merchant, or soldier, and once you sat down to compose a letter, it was imperative to convey everything your correspondent needed to know, including details that seemed insignificant compared with the calamity at hand. The scarcity of paper and other writing supplies, especially for the working classes and troops in the field, likewise obligated correspondents to fill their sheets full, further prompting the inclusion of seemingly petty concerns.15

  Soldiers’ letters were less perfunctory than their diaries, as the men shared their grief and continued, as usual, to ask those at home for assistance with the challenges of camp life. An army officer expressed outrage at Lincoln’s murder, then asked his wife to send undershirts and drawers, while another thanked his mother for sending maple sugar before turning to the assassination. Another held off on the national news until he had instructed his parents to fix a pair of ill-fitting boots, after which he imparted that he was “exceedingly saddened and surprised” at the president’s murder. By the same token, letter writers wanted to know about daily life on the home front. Although Horace Gilmore communicated his shock and sadness to his wife, he also needed to know about their farm’s grain and grass seed. Likewise, after mentioning the assassination, a sergeant inquired of a veteran friend, “Have you got your artificial Arm yet and if so how does it work?” Hardship and bravery were also important to convey to loved ones, and soldiers spun tales that easily trumped, in length and depth, their responses to Lincoln’s assassination. One young man wrote in meticulous detail about his lost overcoat, after which he conceded, “We are all greatly grieved at the death of our President.” Another, perhaps for the sake of his children, regaled his family with the story of an encounter with a “monstrous big black snake” before mentioning the funeral sermon he’d taken in.16

  Well-to-do white women offered the most dizzying interweaving of the profound and the mundane. Letter-writing manuals consumed by the middling and upper classes in the nineteenth century directed them, after all, to “relate the little incidents of your domestic life,” and this they did in their ample leisure time. Among the most voluble was a correspondent named Rebecca (no last name survives), writing to a cousin traveling in China. In an effort to fit the most news into the least amount of postage, Rebecca never so much as indented a paragraph. Beginning with grief “too deep ever to be forgotten,” she gave an account of Lincoln’s funeral services in Boston, then listed the wedding presents received by a recent bride and hinted at the out-of-wedlock pregnancy of a neighbor (“To judge from some little things that have been said, I should think the engagement would not be a very long one”). Rebecca reported that Lincoln’s mourning drapery had been removed from the church for another wedding, for which she described the bride’s dress and veil, before adding, “That day we heard of Booth’s capture and death.” From an account of the conspirators’ trial, Rebecca leapt to the issue of how hot a griddle should be when cooking buckwheat pancakes. Such interspersing of trivia need not indicate a vacuous mind. Ardent abolitionist and women’s rights reformer Martha Coffin Wright didn’t mention Lincoln’s assassination until after she had written reams of minutiae to her daughter-in-law, elaborating on housepainting, wallpapering, and the merits and demerits of various servants. Yet Wright eventually expressed some of the most radical ideas about the political disempowerment of Confederates.17

  Engaging in the activities of everyday life—and writing about them—also became part of the process of coping with the present and facing the future. Eyewitness Helen Du Barry, who had found herself “so nervous since that awful night” at Ford’s Theatre, apprised her mother of her progress in sewing little more than a week later. “I have finished my green dress and it looks good as new,” she reported. “I am on the pink plaid pineapple—putting a lining in the skirt & flouncing it.” It wasn’t that Du Barry had put the trauma behind her; far from it. It was just that everyday life intruded and distracted, and therefore served as comfort.18

  True, a minority of mourners pled that they could think of nothing but the assassination. One man asked his mother’s forgiveness for writing so much about it, explaining, “My heart is so full that I can scarcely turn my thoughts into a different channel.” A woman likewise explained her inability to mention any other topic by declaring that “the pen refuses to write except of national affairs.” A few mourners were entirely unable to go on with everyday life, like twenty-three-year-old Martha Thomas. When Thomas was admitted to an asylum in Washington, D.C., several years later for “chronic mania,” doctors listed the cause as “Lincoln’s Death” (perhaps she had been in the theater on the fateful night). For others, though, expressions of anguish proved no more than typical of their daily lives. When Emily Watkins heard the news on the morning of April 15, she filled a letter to her husband with a torrent of feverish lamentations. “Our poor Country,” she cried, “Oh! Oh!—what will become of us. … Oh—Dear.—What a calamity—what a loss.—What a dreadful event in our history.” On and on she went, stopping at a last lament about “the death of poor Lincoln.” Rather than reflecting disruption, however, these words are of a piece with a life of near-constant anguish. A month later, overburdened with helping her grown daughter plan a schoolroom pageant, Watkins felt “troubled & tormented & wretched” for lack of a letter from her husband, worrying that she would go crazy or die of the “suspense & torture.” Though Watkins no doubt meant every overwrought word she penned about Lincoln, she had simply gone on with her everyday life, applying her usual litany of agonized expressions to the current national tragedy.19

  Others, ambivalent about mingling the cataclysmic with the routine, found ways to separate one from the other. Some drew thick black lines across the page before turning from the assassination to more personal news. Others marked the transition with words, like the Boston wom
an who wrote solemnly about the president, then told her correspondent, “I will cease this subject and go back a little to tell you what we have been doing”—which gave her license to launch into cheerier events. Abby Briggs was “as funny as ever and kept us laughing,” she wrote next. “You should have heard her talk French with Irène!” Helen Blake, an American traveling in Europe, put the distractions first, spending more than three pages arranging summer plans with a friend, discussing matters like the Swiss weather and foreign tipping customs. Then she paused. “I have written all this without saying one word of the dreadful news that stunned us all last week,” she admitted, for once she made mention of it, she knew she could “write of nothing else.” Blake looked to the future with trepidation, she told her friend, but promised to “spare you all my fears until we meet.” By reserving thoughts of Lincoln’s assassination for another time and place, Blake embraced the persistence of daily private life; indeed, the rest of her letter described her delightful surroundings and how much fun the children were having.20

  Even mourners who claimed the trivia of daily life to be just that—trivial in the face of disaster—readily contradicted themselves. When Sarah Hale asserted that recent events (the fall of Richmond, Confederate surrender, and the assassination) “prevented people from thinking or talking much of any thing else,” that assertion came on the fourth page of a letter positively crammed with seemingly idle local and family news. In another letter, after six pages of domestic and neighborhood anecdotes, Hale added, “All this is hardly worth writing but it is of such trifles that our life is made up.” By admitting that it was impossible to jettison quotidian matters, Hale overruled the words that came both before (hardly worth writing) and after (such trifles).21

  Even more striking are the claims of William Lloyd Garrison Jr., son of the famed abolitionist, whose diary betrayed his preoccupation with his wife’s poor health. “Ellie sick again,” he wrote on April 15, the day he received the “horrible news” of the assassination; “Ellie sick,” he reiterated the next day. “Last week has been a hard one,” Garrison wrote to his mother-in-law on Easter Sunday, referring not to Lincoln but to his wife, for with housecleaning and houseguests, she had “worked beyond her strength.” When Garrison finally came to the great crime, he wrote—discrediting both his letters and his diary—”There is only one topic to-day & the feeling it excites is too deep to allow much else than a few, sad words of regret.” Clearly there was more than one topic for Garrison, which he justified by claiming that the feelings called up by the assassination were too profound to articulate. With an ill spouse interfering, perhaps Garrison invoked the idea of profundity as a way to excuse himself from falling short of the ideal of complete engrossment in the devastating event. In part, both Hale and Garrison meant that nothing else merited attention in conventional public discourse. Where headlines, sermons, and words exchanged on the street were meant to be unswervingly devoted to the assassination, personal writings became a refuge from that imperative.22

  Unable and unwilling to fulfill the ideal of complete absorption in Lincoln’s death, mourners sometimes wrote about that very conflict, doubling back to dismiss their more mundane concerns. When Harriet Canfield wrote to her husband about the new bedroom carpet on Easter Sunday, she added, “It seems almost wrong to keep to business as though no such awful thing had happened.” After a Brooklyn woman expended several hundred words describing the exhausting search for a new house to rent, she likewise conceded to her daughter, “But how trifling all this seems compared with the dreadful calamity which has fallen upon the Nation.” James Garfield, future president of the United States (himself to be assassinated in 1881), was away from home to conduct property transactions, but, he wrote to his wife, it felt “sacrilege to talk of money or business now.”23

  More often, though, mourners moved effortlessly from the catastrophic to the everyday without worry. In the days following the “very sad” news of Lincoln’s death, Emilie Davis, the African American servant, combined descriptions of the public arena with important fragments of daily life: attending school, visits with female friends, a sore throat, and whether or not her suitor had stopped by. As someone who had stood in line for hours across two days in order to catch a glimpse of Lincoln’s body in Philadelphia, Davis made no pretense that the world had come to a halt, and those who wrote in greater detail display similar patterns.24

  Nor did Lincoln’s death keep his mourners from pursuing everyday amusements, any more than had four years of war. Immediately following the assassination, and all during the two weeks of the funeral train, bereaved men and women both recorded their grief and enjoyed themselves. They played whist, croquet, and jackstraws, went on shopping excursions, attended dances and balls, and went to the circus. The day after a “solemn & impressive” service for the fallen president, Mary Elliot played Chinese billiards with her friends, then played again the next day. Not only did people engage in such diversions, but most found nothing troubling in recording them right alongside news of the president’s murder and their aggrieved responses. Mourners even went to the theater. A small number faulted Lincoln for that unchristian form of entertainment—even before the crime, the minister James Ward was mortified with the president’s Good Friday plans at a “Temple of Evil” when he should have been in church, and afterward Ellis Hughes wished that Lincoln had saved his own life by resisting the wicked crowds known to frequent auditoriums. But most didn’t give it a thought, and some followed in the late president’s footsteps. As one woman scoffed at New York theatergoers who lined up to exchange their tickets for a future performance (all theaters had closed after the crime), “Grief or no grief they will flock to the play.” She was right, but her interpretation was wanting. The ticket holders were mourning for Lincoln, but they were also diverting their sorrow and finding solace by participating in the ongoing flow of everyday life.25

  Romance gave men and women alike an antidote to grief, but even more than that, it called them toward the future. The day after Lizzie Niles wrote in her diary of a weeping nation, she didn’t hesitate to note down news of an entirely different order. “The funniest thing of all is that Nathaniel Bull and Abbie Sabin are married,” she marveled. “Well I wonder what will happen next.” Even as Maggie Wylie paid lip service to the idea that life had come to a halt (“We can talk or think of nothing else but the assassination”), she thought a great deal about her fiancé, Arthur Mellette, fighting with the Ninth Indiana. “I had such a plain dream of Arth,” she wrote soon thereafter. “I never had such a one before—I thought we were married.” Young men revealed similar preoccupations. Maryland Unionist Henry Shriver grieved for Lincoln, but evenings spent with his sweetheart overtook those thoughts. After church on Easter Sunday, their evening alone turned out to be, Shriver confided to his diary, the “most intensely delightful one that I ever spent.” When romance turned out badly, the trouble not only intruded on the ideal of wholly focused mourning but also supplanted attention to the president. One Union supporter wrote the words “President Lincoln was assassinated” in her diary, then without so much as skipping a line, launched into a lament about a son who had run off with the wrong girl, concluding (of her son, not Lincoln), “O how sad & heart broken I feel about him.” Happy or sad, the future still mattered precisely because the world had not stood still.26

  Matters of the heart were a recurring topic in soldiers’ letters, countering the dreariness of camp life and the ordeals of the battlefield, and the subject lost none of its power in the aftermath of Lincoln’s assassination. Edgar Dinsmore, in Charleston with the Fifty-Fourth Massachusetts, was both deeply dismayed over the president’s death and at once engaged in serious flirtation with a young woman named Carrie Drayton. How, Dinsmore asked, could he “express the pleasure that I experience this evening at the reception of your inexpressibly welcome and more than sweet letter?” He continued in the same vein at considerable length, at one point mentioning that the Fifty-Fourth had been “marchin
g and fighting, for the good old cause—Liberty,” but mostly Dinsmore detailed his joy at corresponding with Drayton and the prospect of returning home. When, after many pages, he declared, “We mourn for the loss of our great and good President as a loss irreparable,” he immediately resumed his earnest wooing. Maybe Dinsmore didn’t want to mar his courtship efforts with reference to the assassination. Maybe there was nothing left to say that the two African Americans didn’t already know. No doubt both hoped that the president’s death would not change the war’s glorious outcome of union and freedom.27

  White soldiers flirted too. William Mead first wrote of vengeance and justice, then teased Louisa White not to be jealous if he occasionally corresponded with another “fair, young, interesting, lovely, and k-i-s-s-a-b-l-e damsel.” Some put that kind of banter first, like Nelson Palmer, who cheerfully related his diversions with a southern girl “of some 16 summers,” before reporting that his regiment had fired seventy-six guns for the slain president. Away from the war, young men’s thoughts also strayed from the terrible news. As Henry Adams (son of the U.S. minister in London) wrote from overseas to a male friend back home—in the same letter in which he reflected on Lincoln’s assassination—”If you know Miss Montgomery (the blonde) tell her that she looks like the Venus of Medici.”28

  The promise of love proved to be among the best that everyday life could offer heartbroken mourners. On April 19, 1865, the day of Lincoln’s funeral in Washington, a man named Frank sat down to write to his dear friend Henry Morgan, who had long ago chosen that date for his wedding. “I will shut my eyes to all tokens of mourning, and close my ears to all sorrowful tollings to-day,” Frank wrote, “and hear only joy-bells because it is your wedding-day.” Frank tried mightily to stay on the happy topic, though it had been “ghastly,” he admitted, to be “plunged from the heights of joy” following Union victory to the “depths of sorrow by the horrible murder.” Frank confessed that he was grateful for distraction, beseeching Morgan to tell him “all about the wedding, whether you behaved yourself or not,” and “how many mistakes you made in the service.” Indeed, Frank specifically requested information about the most quotidian details, asking about Morgan’s new married life, including “how your rooms look” and “what you can see from their windows.” Mourners like Frank, though bereft, self-consciously immersed themselves in the everyday, both as diversion and as a means to embrace the way forward.29