Mourning Lincoln
Page 22
Participation in everyday life served to distract and to comfort, and to comfort by distraction. But that participation also signified something more. Not only did the hum of daily life give the lie to declarations that the world had come to a halt, but at the core of mourners’ immersion in everyday life stood their tenacious optimism. Driven by Union victory and the conviction that the assassination would become part of a magnificent divine plan for the nation’s future, Lincoln’s mourners embraced the persistence of daily life—whether mundane, joyous, or distressing—because victory had brought them into a world they welcomed. From Virginia, Nathan Appleton, a Union officer and scion of a New England family of industrial wealth, found Lincoln’s death a terrible blow, then a week later reflected with gusto on the juxtaposition of tragedy and the progress of the nation. “In the midst of our great excitement the game of life runs gaily on,” he wrote home, as Lincoln’s funeral train headed north. “What a marvelous country!” Henry Adams was touring in Italy when a midnight telegram brought him the news of Lincoln’s murder. Writing to a chum, he rambled on for pages about the ordeal of traveling with his mother and siblings, cracking jokes about the weather in Florence and Dante’s Inferno, before asserting that he was “much too strong an American” to think “we are going to be shaken by a murder.” For African Americans in particular, chronicling everyday events like working for wages and spending those wages (for William Gould onboard a Union ship) and visits with friends (for Emilie Davis in Philadelphia) took on an added dimension: to be immersed in those activities meant to be free. Pursuing the commonplace activities of freedom served as a tribute to President Lincoln and to the future he had helped them bring about.30
Walt Whitman’s 1865 poem about Lincoln’s assassination, “When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom’d,” is best known for its imagery of lilac, star, and songbird, but Whitman also noticed the persistence of everyday life for the president’s mourners, offering an arresting image of “infinite separate houses, how they all went on, each with its meals and minutia of daily usages.” In their grief over the slain president, Lincoln’s mourners wished for resolution, and certainly the massive public funerals across the country made for a ritual that signaled a turn away from the past. But genuine closure is uneven at best, and any forward movement can come only amid the swirl of daily life.31
DEFEAT HAD WROUGHT CHANGES IN the lives of Confederates that no mourner of Lincoln could fathom. Where Union soldiers looked eagerly toward mustering out, thoughts of home were more confusing for boys and men in gray. “Blues awfully,” wrote a Tennessee private in the final entry of his wartime diary. “Anxious thoughts of home.” While Lincoln’s mourners grieved for their leader, Confederates grieved for an entire world and way of life. It was a grief that disrupted the quotidian in ways that the assassination of President Lincoln could not.32
For white southerners whose lives had been upended by the war, romance supplied one of the few refrains of everyday life’s persistence. In the same letter in which he celebrated Lincoln’s murder, a Confederate soldier in Louisiana facetiously wished to be wounded, “so as to produce a reaction in the female hearts.” Ellen House, despite her despair at surrender, described a May wedding in Knoxville that included a “delightful little dance” and flirtations all around. The same was true for an ardent rebel who detailed her gloom before adding, “Mr. Meade & Miss Leaton are—engaged!! & will be married in three weeks & go to Canada!” For Elizabeth Alsop, a friend’s marriage proved a distraction, albeit a short-lived one. One night, Alsop stayed up with two friends until two o’clock in the morning, talking about the approaching wedding, but once the occasion had passed, she found herself again bereft. “My heart is so rebellious,” she told her diary, “that instead of forgiving our enemies, I hate them more every hour of my life.” Alsop spoke for many as she found the routines of daily life taking place against a steady state of misery and anger.33
The end of slavery constituted the most consequential disruption of all for the planter classes. Enslaved people had left their masters throughout the war, and Union victory both precipitated more departures and finalized the meaning of earlier ones. When white Mississippian Nancy Robinson recorded that “all are mourning & their hearts are crushed,” President Lincoln was nowhere in her thoughts, for Robinson estimated that she had been deprived of sixty-five thousand dollars’ worth of human chattel. When yet another former slave informed Robinson that she and her family would be leaving (emphasizing that “they were Free”), Robinson felt, she wrote, “restless with a dread I cannot describe.” In Georgia, Eva Jones wrote to her mother about the “dark, crowding events of this most disastrous year,” of “a life robbed of every blessing.” She specifically meant emancipation and runaway slaves, which she called an “unprecedented robbery,” expressing shock that those who left (“in search of freedom,” she fully admitted) had neglected to say proper good-byes. Jones signed off in “an abyss of despair.”34
Cornelia Spencer felt so distraught about all the changes in her day-to-day life in North Carolina that it seemed plausible she would lose her mind. She worried that marriages performed in the Confederate states would no longer be legally recognized, and she envisioned “a life of continued toil.” Notably, the future she pictured for herself bore obvious parallels with the daily lives of slaves: marriage unrecognized and labor unending. Whether she was oblivious to those parallels or intended deliberately to portray masters as the slaves of Yankees, when Spencer described her home, she might as well have been describing a slave cabin: “not a chair … not a fork … nor a single set of table ware of any sort,” she wrote, “not a carpet or a curtain or a napkin” and “flies every where in doors.” How different from the imagery conjured by Henry Morgan’s friend Frank, up north, picturing Morgan’s cheerful life as a newly married man, including “how your rooms look” and “what you can see from their windows.”35
Cornelia Spencer was not alone. Everyday life in a postwar, post-emancipation future became unbearable for some Confederates. Many of the vanquished, and veterans in particular, suffered anguish and torment manifested as apathy, humiliation, bitterness, and defiance. Combined with the physical wounds of the returning troops, the financial ruin of families and communities, and a racial world turned upside-down, unknown numbers faced lives of depression and mental instability, including alcoholism and family violence. For many there were no words to describe their feelings, much less adequate medical categories to define their conditions. And yet perhaps none at all could admit that their newfound hardships paled in comparison to legal enslavement, living day in and day out as a piece of property to be bought and sold, with the never-ending threat or reality of separation from loved ones, of sexual exploitation and horrific violence.
Nonetheless, when Confederates thought about the contours of daily life after the war, some drifted into suicidal broodings. “I think if I were sure of going to Heaven and it pleased God to take me to himself,” Elizabeth Alsop wrote shortly after Lee’s surrender, “I should be glad to die.” A despondent soldier thought an early May day’s gloomy weather could “drive a morbid melancholy man to commit suicide.” The desolation of defeat did in fact drive a number of Confederates to take their own lives. The best known was Edmund Ruffin, the fire-eating, proslavery secessionist. Ruffin, living on his farm near Richmond at war’s end, expressed venom toward the Yankees in the pages of his diary as freely as did Rodney Dorman, choking on the “repulsive” and “disgusting” northern newspapers that compounded his “hatred & abhorrence” of Yankee rule. From the moment Richmond fell, Ruffin prepared for suicide, even envying his own son who had fallen in the war (“Would that I had died with him,” he wrote). Were he himself younger, Ruffin reasoned, he might look forward to a reversal of fortunes in the future, but now it was his “earnest wish that I may not live another day,” as he plainly put it. Ruffin consoled himself with the heterodox view that the Bible permitted the taking of one’s own life, and shortly before he put t
he musket in his mouth, he once again recorded his “unmitigated hatred” of Yankees. Edmund Ruffin saw no future at all after defeat, and so when Confederate secession failed, he seceded from the world in the most radical way possible.36
In the ideal vision of the president’s mourners, the world came to a halt when Lincoln died. Although it was impossible for events to reverse course, at least the illusion of suspended time permitted proper mourning for the slain chief, as a prelude to looking toward the future of the victorious nation. In the ideal vision of Lincoln’s enemies, on the other hand, the world would stop and reverse course, taking them back, not to the world before the assassination, but much farther than that, to the antebellum South. For white southerners, the revolution wrought by the war altered everyday life too fundamentally to permit much distraction, amusement, or comfort, what with slaves gone, free black men in military uniforms patrolling their land, and white privilege seemingly vanished. Confederates wished now for the world to stop, but Lincoln’s mourners knew that it would not: not for well-to-do New Englanders who put on their wedding finery and shared pancake recipes; not for black and white Union soldiers or the working classes, who kept on marching and laboring; and certainly not for former slaves who looked toward freedom.
There was one thing, though, that made looking toward the glorious future just as unbearable for Lincoln’s mourners as it was for his antagonists: the death of loved ones, those who would never return home to rejoin the stream of daily life. In the Browne household, the loss of their daughter Nellie in 1864 unrelentingly overshadowed the assassination, and with the fearfully high toll of wartime deaths, similar devastation could be found in just about any family at the end of the Civil War.
INTERLUDE
Young Folk
CHILDREN ON THE UNION HOME front felt the devastation of Lincoln’s assassination all around them, and none more so than those among the freedpeople. “Uncle Sam is dead,” proclaimed a Virginia boy of five or six years old. When he asked an adult, “Have I got to go back to massas?” he echoed the question he’d been hearing all around him. In the southern classrooms where former slaves learned to read and write, children responded to the news by “ceasing from play” or expressed their grief with “tearful inquiries.” Up north too, in an Ohio classroom, free black children “felt the weight of the sorrow,” a teacher wrote, whispering to one another, “The president is dead! The president is dead!” As parents, instructors, and ministers spoke of black freedom, these young ones grasped the import of Lincoln’s death, and no doubt white observers accurately captured their reactions. What went unrecorded, given that missionary teachers had a stake in portraying their charges as pious and serious, was the likelihood that the children remained immersed in their daily lives, the younger ones perhaps jumping rope or playing ball on their way home from school that day.1
Young white children who wrote their own narratives expose just such ingenuous absorptions. On the day of the president’s funeral, nine-year-old Edward Martin wrote that his school had let out early, adding, “In the after noon I played ball.” On the day he got the news of Lincoln’s assassination, eleven-year-old Grenville Norcross traded adventure books with friends, lending The Three Daring Trappers and borrowing The Pioneer Boy, and How He Became President; if Grenville chose a book about the late executive on purpose, he wrote only, “All the houses are being hung in black on account of the death of Abraham Lincoln.”2
Like the grown-ups around them, children on the Union home front, both black and white, experienced grief at Lincoln’s loss in the context of everyday life. Accordingly, a child might grasp the gravity by thinking of President Lincoln as a father, free of metaphorical meaning. When a Vermont mother explained to her five-year-old son that the slain president had two boys of his own, her son thought those bereft children might “try to die too.” Or a young person might attempt to imitate the sorrow of her parents, like the little girl who refused to kiss her father because, she explained, “good President Lincoln’s dead, and I feel so bad!” On the other hand, younger children might unwittingly break the spell of solemnity. One little girl, entranced by marching soldiers at the Chicago funeral, exclaimed, “Oh ain’t it nice! I’m so glad I came,” while another, filing past Lincoln’s body at the Chicago courthouse, remarked frankly that she liked looking at “dead folks” so much that she wished she were the president’s embalmer. Older children, or more precocious ones, understood more. In a Virginia classroom of freedpeople, some expressed anxieties about President Andrew Johnson’s policies. In Nashville, the twelve-year-old daughter of an ardent white Unionist family paced up and down, wringing her hands over the assassin and his conspirators. “Catch the murderers!” she cried. “Oh, if I was only a man, I would kill the very last one of them!”3
But like Eddie Browne in Salem, some older white children rebelled against the grown-ups’ grief. In Newport, Rhode Island, on the morning Lincoln died, Carrie Hunter, about fifteen, wrote to her sister in New York, describing everything as “rather dismal,” what with all the prostrated adults, black drapery, and shut-up shops. Seeking the company of schoolmates, Carrie “could not help laughing to see Katey Powell & Fannie Ogden looking so dreadfully grave & solemn.” When the three girls encountered another friend, they playfully instructed her that she “must look sober.” Among the group was Georgiana King, who had learned of Lincoln’s death when someone rushed into her parents’ home, “weeping and screaming,” and she too was glad to get away. To her diary, Georgiana confessed how handsome she found John Wilkes Booth, before writing about the good-looking new boy in town, with whom she and her friends resolved to “have a flirtation.” Lincoln’s assassination had intruded on the carefree lives of Newport’s privileged youth, and they made sure to intrude right back. Indeed, at least some adults must have felt the same kind of impatience expressed by young folk like Carrie and Georgiana.4
Privileged young Confederates also found time for distraction amid the terrible gloom of defeat. Seventeen-year-old Emma LeConte, who had written gleefully about the assassination and poured the bitterness of conquest into the pages of her diary, brightened up a bit in May. With a group of contemporaries, including young men home from the army, Emma took walks in the woods, where, she wrote, “we sit and talk and laugh and tease each other till almost dark.” Sometimes they had little parties—”How long it had been since any of us had danced!” she exclaimed, and how good it was to “throw off the trouble and gloom for a little while.” Emma admitted that in a way it felt wrong to be happy, thereby illuminating an important difference with Lincoln’s mourners—their lightheartedness could be excused by victory. Instead, Emma LeConte consoled herself that she and her friends had fun “only among ourselves” and offered a reasonable excuse: “Young people cannot be depressed and gloomy all the time.”5
8
Everyday Loss
THE FUSS OVER THE SLAIN Yankee president infuriated Rodney Dorman, and not merely because he found it sickening to treat the despotic leader as royalty. Dorman also found the spectacular pageantry offensive because it detracted from the “thousands other slain, since the war began!” Casualties on both sides were enormous, but Dorman’s anger no doubt sprang from the especially colossal death rate among the rebels—somewhere between two and three times higher than that for Union soldiers.1
The Confederate toll also prompted Dorman to pen a furious diatribe about Yankee prisons. “How many prisoners did they starve & freeze, in a land of plenty?” he asked his diary. “How many did they freeze to death?” Conditions in all Civil War prisons were deplorable, often horrific, though captured Union men tended to suffer greater material want because of the collapsing Confederate economy. To defend the sorry treatment of Union soldiers, Dorman explained to himself that the rebels were forced to crowd Yankees into camps as a result of President Lincoln’s tyrannical policies—namely that prisoner exchange had broken down when Confederate authorities refused to include African Americans, on the theory that runaw
ay slaves on the battlefield remained stolen property, which comported with Dorman’s views exactly. The Yankees “put it beyond the power of the Confederacy to treat prisoners very well,” he reasoned, yet “compelled them to hold them indefinitely! & then complained of the treatment!” It was “an outrage upon humanity,” though only in keeping with the barbaric nature of his enemies. “How many did they wontonly murder?” Dorman asked. “Answer this, you murderers & thieves without a parallel in the history of the world.” For Rodney Dorman, that so many Confederate men had died in the war was a result of Yankee savagery, both on and off the battlefield.2
ON A VISIT TO FORT WAGNER, in Charleston harbor, in the spring of 1865, Albert Browne happened upon bones, the “remains of our brave soldiers,” he wrote, from the battle that took place there in 1863, in which so many men of the Fifty-Fourth Massachusetts had perished. This was the battle that had proven to skeptical white northerners that African Americans were capable of fighting. Now Albert’s eyes alighted on part of a skeleton clad in a decayed blue uniform. “All these should be carefully gathered and buried,” he wrote home.3