Mourning Lincoln

by Martha Hodes

  While Albert decried bones on the battlefield, he and his family had another, more personal, experience with death on their minds: less than a year before Lincoln’s assassination, the Brownes’ daughter Nellie had died at the age of twenty-two. In the spring of 1864, Sarah and the children had traveled from Massachusetts for an extended visit with Albert in Beaufort, South Carolina. With her sister, Alice, also in her early twenties, Nellie visited wounded soldiers at the Union hospital, went sailing and horseback riding, and socialized with other northern military families in the occupied Sea Islands. When the Brownes took an excursion to Jacksonville, Nellie Browne met and instantly fell in love with Captain Lewis Weld, provost marshal of the District of Florida and recruiter of black troops. Lewis was more than ten years Nellie’s senior, and within two weeks the couple was privately engaged and planning to wed in June. “Burn this letter,” Nellie wrote to her older brother, Albert Jr., back in Boston, underlining every word. “Keep everything secret” (the last word got an extra underscore). When the Browne family returned to Beaufort, Nellie and Lewis wrote back and forth, expressing their longing for each other. Though her brother, and eventually her father, tried to dissuade Nellie from such recklessness, there was nothing the family could do to slow the impulsive romance.4

  Then, in late May, Nellie suddenly fell ill. Doctors diagnosed poisoned blood and provided quinine, arsenic, and brandy. They ordered Nellie’s hair shorn to relieve her brain. She recognized no one at her bedside but called for Lewis. Typhoid fever was the likely culprit, and on the sixth day of delirium, Albert tried to resign himself to his daughter’s fate by appealing to God’s will—”trying to deceive myself” is how he put it. The family had written to alert Lewis in Jacksonville, and now he wrote back with alarm. “Why did you get sick my darling,” he asked his beloved. “I am terribly anxious about you.” By the time Lewis wrote those words, Nellie was gone. She died on June 2, 1864.5

  From that day forward, the Browne family began a mourning that would last their whole lives. They now looked toward Lewis with gratitude, reversing their earlier objections with the belief that God had sent him to make Nellie’s last weeks on earth the happiest of her short life. Sarah, the inveterate diarist, left every page of her 1864 pocket journal blank between May 28 and June 5. “The sad task is over, amid tears and agony,” she wrote on June 6, as the family prepared to sail north, taking Nellie’s body home. After that, Sarah didn’t write another word for nearly three weeks, living in an “aching void” of loneliness, as Alice disclosed to Lewis (taking that phrase from a hymn about death and mourning). Toward the end of June, Sarah recorded that Albert had placed flowers on Nellie’s grave in Salem’s Harmony Grove Cemetery and that she could feel her daughter’s spiritual presence. Sarah neglected her diary again until the end of August, when she went to church for the first time since returning from the South. Albert, in a stupor of despair, had more trouble accepting God’s will. His daughter’s sudden death a stunning blow, his heart bitter and rebellious, he invoked an image that would later be repeated by so many of Lincoln’s mourners: it felt like a “thunder bolt from so clear and unclouded a sky.” Truth was, Albert’s spiritual doubts left him with too little comfort in God’s supposedly right and merciful ways. “I am past all that,” he told the minister who attempted religious consolation. Unable to conjure a future “blessed reunion” in heaven, the thought that so sustained his wife, Albert was “wretchedly miserable.”6

  Through the jubilation of Union victory the next spring, Nellie Browne was never far from her parents’ minds. “It is a comfort to talk with one who loved our dear Nellie,” Sarah wrote a few days after the fall of Richmond, following a visit with friends. A week later, the Brownes found the death of President Lincoln unfathomable, while the loss of Nellie remained unbearable. With the first anniversary approaching, and as Lincoln’s funeral train neared its destination, Sarah tried hard to conjure her daughter’s “sweet presence” in God’s bright sunshine and greenery. “I cannot feel that Nellie is dead—her presence is ever with me,” she wrote some weeks after Lincoln’s burial. Nighttime always proved more trying, as desolation crept in, and particular days proved especially difficult. On May 14, 1865, in a letter to her husband, Sarah wrote down three words, twice: “A year ago a year ago—.” Unable to complete the sentence, she drew a dash. One year before, Nellie had been well and happy, for May 14 was the day she had revealed her newfound romance, and now Sarah likely held that rapturous letter in her hands. Two weeks later, just before the anniversary of Nellie’s death, Sarah confided to her diary, “I open my arms and drive back the phantom of mental agony but Oh! God I cannot drive away the feeling of loneliness.”7

  June 1, 1865, had been proclaimed a day of national mourning for Abraham Lincoln, and Albert Browne was grieving. “I cannot sleep,” he wrote to Sarah from Charleston that evening, “but have arisen and throw open the blinds of my chamber.” By the southern moonlight he continued, “I know full well that at this very moment our hearts and feelings are in accord, that we are each calling to mind the dear departed one.” It wasn’t President Lincoln that Albert was writing about, of course, but Nellie.8

  THE WORLD DID NOT STOP when Lincoln was assassinated, and neither did the war’s death toll. With high child mortality rates, low life expectancy, and the prevalence of epidemics, death was a part of everyday life for antebellum Americans. Yet the war’s toll immeasurably escalated experiences of loss: all told, the Civil War claimed more than three-quarters of a million lives, comprising roughly 2 percent of the population, north and south—a figure that would translate into more than seven million in the present-day United States. Accordingly, in the spring of 1865, those who grieved for Lincoln also mourned for husbands, fathers, sons, brothers, sweethearts, friends, and neighbors. Just about everyone on both sides knew someone who had died. When Lincoln was assassinated, some were coping with fresh news of a passing, while others marked anniversaries of earlier losses or lived with continued anxiety over the missing. Personal sorrows both accompanied and competed with grief for the slain president.

  In a photograph subtitled “A Harvest of Death,” the corpses of Union soldiers lay strewn across a Pennsylvania field after the Battle of Gettysburg, in July 1863. With approximately 750,000 losses, virtually every family on both sides of the Civil War knew someone who had died.

  LC-B8184-7964-A, Prints and Photographs Division, Library of Congress.

  Americans in the nineteenth century constructed elaborate religious and cultural ideals centered around grief, and survivors increasingly expressed themselves in highly sentimentalized ways, creating a “cult of mourning” in which intentionally overwrought outpourings soothed their pain. Faith was meant to serve as the first realm of comfort, and all losses were to be reconciled to the will of God. Survivors should strive to accept, and even to embrace, the passing of a loved one, not only because it was imperative to submit to God’s will, but also because the dead would find a land of glorious redemption in the hereafter. Heaven, understood as an enchanting land lying just above the clouds, would bring the joyous reunion of relatives and close friends, where love, marriage, and family life continued on. Ideally, then, death could be anticipated with complete serenity. Agonizing wounds and protracted illnesses aside, Americans tried hard to find consolation in this imagery as they coped with phenomenal wartime losses, combined with the customary march of death, including elderly parents, infants, and anyone in between.

  Always came the question Why? addressed by the faithful to God. President Lincoln himself had pondered the war’s immense death toll in his second inaugural address. “Fondly do we hope—fervently do we pray—that this mighty scourge of war may speedily pass away,” he had said then. Yet if it was God’s will, Lincoln continued, so be it (“every drop of blood drawn with the lash, shall be paid by another drawn with the sword”), for slavery offended God, and the bloody war was the price the nation must pay, on both sides. Many who listened to the address in Wash
ington or later read the president’s words in the newspapers had already lost loved ones in the war, and here Lincoln spoke of those losses in two different ways: first, as divine retribution for the sin of slavery (a sin, he made clear, for which North and South alike held responsibility), and second, for Union supporters, as deaths ennobled precisely because the war would continue on until human bondage was destroyed. Just so, in spite of the astonishment and devastation at Lincoln’s assassination—in fact, because of that very astonishment and devastation—it was fitting for mourners to cast the president’s death as part of God’s mysterious plans. For some, Lincoln’s assassination became the “ultimate death,” symbolizing all soldier deaths and promising immortality for all. Immediately following Union triumph (and on Good Friday, at that), it signaled a divinely ordained future brighter than they could ever have imagined in all the jubilation of victory.9

  But when God took away an intimate, as opposed to a statesman, the question Why? carried a different valence, even if that statesman could be cast as a symbolic father. The loss of a loved one mattered less for the future of the nation and the world, and much more for the rest of a family’s life on earth. As the war came to an end, coping with private loss—whether at the battlefront or at home—was the one obstacle that made the resumption of everyday life impossible for victor and vanquished alike. Albert Browne Jr. captured this fact eloquently when he wrote to his sister’s bereaved fiancé that the “hardest hours” were not those in the immediate aftermath of death but rather the time ahead, “when in the daily course of our life we shall miss Nellie, be lonely without her, and long for her.” Heartache nearly always conflicted with the spiritual resignation of even the most faithful. These were the losses that stubbornly resisted closure and healing. When a neighbor brought word of Lincoln’s death to Calvin Fletcher in Indianapolis on the morning of April 15, Fletcher thought it the “most apaling announcement” he had ever heard, “except,” he wrote in his diary, for “the sudden death of my poor son Miles in 1862.” The president’s death was “horrid news” to Edward Lear, the English illustrator and poet, yet unmatched by the horror of a friend’s suicide a few days later. That was the news that stopped Lear from working, that prompted “Distress & depression—all day.” When the American consul in Marseille got word of Lincoln’s assassination from Paris, he neglected his duty to send out official condolences. “I should have taken an earlier notice of your despatch,” he explained to a fellow diplomat, “but for the loss of my little boy whose recent death temporarily unfitted me for the office.”10

  True, mourners sometimes tilted the comparison the other way. A freed-woman among the crowd in front of the White House on the morning of April 15 was heard to say that she would “rather have given the babe from my bosom!” and a Union soldier in Virginia ruminated that “never had the death of a relative so depressed me as that of our President.” But these striking statements, rather than diminishing the import of private losses, worked by metaphor to conjure vividly the shock of the nation’s first presidential assassination and the depth of mourners’ esteem for President Lincoln.11

  African Americans claimed Lincoln’s assassination to be more crushing for themselves, and grieving whites did not contradict them. As a minister in Cincinnati intoned, “Take father, mother, sister, brother; but do not take the life of the father of this people.” Away from the oratory of the pulpit, though, when the president’s mourners, black as well as white, faced the death of relatives and intimates, whether on or off the battlefield, all found a desolation far beyond that provoked by the assassination. Emilie Davis’s brother Alfred had served in the Union navy, and in late 1865 he died, perhaps from an illness contracted during the war. Yet the fact that her brother had fought for freedom could alleviate Davis’s grief but little. Disclosing her intense sorrow in characteristically few words, Davis recorded that the news was “very sad,” that the journey to her brother’s funeral was “very sad” (the same phrase she had used in recording Lincoln’s assassination), and that she was “so Sorry i Did not get to see him before he Died.” Davis appealed to God for comfort, then wrote a sentence of understated devastation: “i hope i never will have another day like yesterday.” For Emilie Davis, as for African Americans in North and South alike, Lincoln’s assassination was shattering. Yet Davis’s spare diary entries make clear that whereas the president’s funeral in Philadelphia had been for her a grand and solemn occasion, the day of Alfred’s funeral was (despite pride in her brother’s contribution to the fight for black freedom) the worst day of her life.12

  Union victory, wrote the journalist Thomas Morris Chester, constituted the “highest degree of happiness attainable upon earth” for his people, since victory included emancipation—and this made for a further dilemma. Throughout slavery, the afterlife had been the only possibility for genuine freedom, prompting African American communities in some measure to celebrate death. Now, with the victorious war for freedom on earth, the afterlife no longer offered the only realm of happiness. How much more unbearable, then, that the absent ones could not experience freedom during their lives, whether death came on home front or battlefront. How much more agonizing for Emilie Davis to endure her brother’s death after the war was over and her people everywhere were free.13

  MINISTERS SPOKE OF LINCOLN AS the last casualty of the Civil War, but that was true only symbolically. After surrender and the assassination, after the funeral and the funeral train, soldiers kept dying, in hospitals, in camp, and back at home from disease, infection, and mortal wounds. “President Lincoln assassinated last night,” wrote a Massachusetts soldier in a Washington hospital. Over the following days and weeks, he added: “Five died in this ward,” “The man next bed to me died,” and “Another poor fellow relieved from all suffering.” During the days that Lincoln’s funeral train traveled across the country, two Pennsylvania sisters recorded funerals for a neighbor killed in battle and another neighbor’s wounded brother, who “had his arm amputated & bled to death.” During those same days, Walt Whitman, visiting patients at Armory Square Hospital in Washington, wrote to the mother of a young man who had just perished, trying to soothe the family’s pain by describing the suffering boy as “perfectly resign’d.”14

  Soldiers were still dying after Lincoln’s burial in early May. John Payne, who began his military career in the Tenth Louisiana Volunteers of African Descent, was thrilled that the Confederates had been “whipped and cowed” yet at the same time crushed by the death of a white comrade in late May, a man he called “perhaps the warmest personal friend of my youth.” In late May too, when a soldier drowned while bathing near a dangerous current in a Virginia river, a devastated friend lifted the lifeless body, wondering why he himself had been spared. “One shall be taken and another left,” he wrote home to his wife, who in turn asked why they were the ones “left to mourn.” Here was another version of the why question addressed to God, this time dwelling on the puzzle of who survived the war and who did not. Abial Edwards, a Maine volunteer, suffered the death of his younger brother that autumn, while both young men were still in the field. He had never expected the war to “strike me so near,” he confided to his sweetheart at home, and when Edwards asked God why, no answer felt satisfactory. Like Albert Browne wandering around Fort Wagner, soldiers continued to happen upon the bodies and bleached bones of their unburied comrades all through the spring and beyond. As the Washington minister James Ward wrote in his diary two weeks after Lincoln’s assassination, cemeteries everywhere were filling up, creating “a world of death” all around.15

  Men who lost their comrades were also haunted by visions of impending grief on the home front. “How sad it will be for his mother and the girls,” a soldier sighed over a fallen man on Easter Sunday, perhaps finding it easier to imagine the feelings of womenfolk than to face his own emotions. A few days after Lincoln’s burial, a Union soldier in Savannah likewise wrote home to New England, reflecting on the “many dark and dreary nights” during whi
ch wives and children had waited for word from husband and father, “only to hear that he was no more.”16

  Indeed, the distance of faraway wartime deaths made everything worse for families. Lincoln’s funeral train delivered his body home to Springfield, but for the hundreds of thousands of Union troops who had died in battle, on the march, in camp, and in army hospitals, there would be no such return. From the start, the Civil War disrupted ideal visions of death, in which the expiring patient lay abed at home, surrounded by family and friends. Popular wartime songs portrayed the dying man, far from the hearth, with his mother standing as the symbol of home: “Break It Gently to My Mother” (in the dying soldier’s voice) or “Let Me Kiss Him for His Mother” (in the voice of a kind stranger). Next best for families was to retrieve the body, not least for the purpose of verification, in an era when identification of battlefield corpses was woefully inadequate. But retrieval often entailed disinterment from a makeshift grave wherever a man had fallen, not to mention the expense of embalming and shipment. Unlike Lincoln’s corpse, only a small number of the wartime dead would ever return to their families, for there was simply not enough space, time, resources, or labor for all the procedures of proper burial, let alone travel home.17

  A mourner on the home front weeps for a “brave and gallant soldier, and a true patriot.” In this 1863 lithograph, the blank spaces for name, regiment, and place and date of death permitted bereaved families to imagine their own loved one identified on this imposing tombstone. In reality, many of the fallen went unidentified and few families could afford to bring bodies back home. Visible in the background are Union troops and a fluttering American flag.