Mourning Lincoln

by Martha Hodes

“Poor Mrs. Lincoln!” cried a London socialite. “What a grief! what a horror for her!”

  Even the wife of a New York Democratic judge (she had once referred to Lincoln as “Uncle Ape”) couldn’t help exclaiming into her diary, “Poor Mrs. Lincoln!”1

  The president’s mourners knew that if anyone’s world had come to a halt in the aftermath of the assassination, it was that of Mary Lincoln, who shut herself up in a White House bedroom, unwilling to attend her husband’s funeral, unwilling to accompany his body along the route of the funeral train, and unwilling to be present at his burial in Springfield. When Lizzie Moore wrote, “O, how sad it must be to those who knew him personally,” she named the difference between mourning for a statesman and mourning for a loved one. Secretary of the Navy Gideon Welles recorded in his diary that at the White House on Saturday, the president’s twelve-year-old son, Tad, had asked him, “Oh, Mr. Welles, who killed my father?” Strangers to the president thought about the boy too. “Poor little Tad,” wrote Anna Lowell, recording (from the newspapers) how he was “overcome with grief” at his father’s death. Some included the older son, Robert, in their thoughts as well. “The tears of sympathy flow for the widow & orphans of our martyred chief,” Caroline White told her diary.2

  Mourners also dwelled on the effects of the harrowing circumstances: the president’s sudden, violent assassination before his wife’s very eyes. “Poor Mrs. Lincoln,” wrote the English novelist Elizabeth Gaskell, “it adds to the depth of the crime that it should be done in her presence.” Another mourner wondered how she felt “as she sat by him, and saw him shot!” Unlike so many Civil War soldiers, Lincoln had not died in a place far away from his family, but neither had he died peacefully at home. Rather, he had passed his final hours in a too-small bed, in a cramped room at a random boardinghouse, with a steady stream of visitors coming and going, an investigation into his murder taking place in the very next room, even before he had breathed his last. As for the First Lady, the men who took charge soon excluded her from the bedroom where her husband lay dying, finding her state of extreme distress overly irritating. All in all, there was little comfort to be taken in being with her husband on that night, only devastation and lifelong trauma.3

  Newspaper accounts of Mary Lincoln’s screams in Ford’s Theatre, and of her delirium during the long hours at Petersen House, troubled mourners too. One woman recorded Mrs. Lincoln’s “agonizing inquiries” about her husband’s life and the “heart rending response” she ultimately received. Men and women alike wrote down that Mary Lincoln couldn’t bring herself to attend the Washington funeral and that she was too grief-stricken to travel with the funeral train. One man involved in the funeral preparations recorded that when the carpenters were setting up the East Room of the White House, the bedridden and shattered First Lady cried that each hammer blow sounded to her like a pistol shot. As Lincoln’s body was carried west, a man in California generously suggested that his people, “the colored people of the United States,” contribute a dollar each to buy a home for the president’s widow.4

  Grieving for their own loved ones, Lincoln’s mourners wrote frequently about the afterlife of the departed, happy in heaven, “above all pain,” in a “better world where war and sickness can never come.” At a New England eulogy for the president, the Reverend J. G. Holland offered an image of Lincoln in the next world. “Ah, that other shore!” he said, visualizing the president in heaven “with his army.” In “victory and peace,” Holland continued, the commander-in-chief and the departed troops heard no groans of death or rumbles of cannon fire. Yet Lincoln’s lay mourners rarely evoked images of the president happily reunited with loved ones in heaven, despite their chief’s increasingly careworn expression over the course of four years, and despite the personal losses he and Mary had endured in the deaths of their sons, Eddie in 1859, and Willie in 1862. Some may have grappled with Lincoln’s ambiguous relationship to Christianity, but for most mourners it was simply that the president was not theirs to meet or imagine in heaven. That was another indicator of the distinction they made between the loss of Lincoln and the loss of intimates. To envision reunion in that joyful realm above the clouds was a privilege reserved for Mary, Robert, and Tad.5

  Many of those who sympathized with Mary Lincoln took the time to write to her, and letters of condolence poured in from around the world. Although Queen Victoria did not know the First Lady personally, she sent her a letter detailing her own despair on the death of her husband, Prince Albert, four years earlier. “No-one can better appreciate than I can who am myself utterly broken hearted by the loss of my own beloved Husband,” Victoria wrote, “who was the light of my Life—my stay—my all,—what your sufferings must be.” Nor was it only royalty and dignitaries who wrote to Mrs. Lincoln. When Charles Francis Adams, the U.S. consul in London, received a torrent of cards, letters, and telegrams from across the British Empire, he had to create an entirely separate catalog for the considerable accumulation of mail addressed to Mary.6

  Elizabeth Blair Lee was one of the very few whom Mary Lincoln wished to see in the days and weeks following the murder. During that time, Lee stayed by Mrs. Lincoln’s side in the White House, sometimes nearly around the clock. As the funeral train approached Springfield, Mary Lincoln “begged me so hard,” Lee wrote, “not to leave her,” that she couldn’t refuse, though there was much else on Lee’s mind: her young son, whom she had to leave in the care of others while she sat by the widow’s bedside, her naval commander husband down south, and a lump in her breast that seemed to be growing. After the burial in Springfield, it was time for Mary and the children to leave Washington, and Elizabeth Lee remained a loyal friend throughout the ordeal. “Mrs. Lincoln still sick and miserable,” she wrote to her husband, “tired from the effort she is making to get out of the White House.” One day in mid-May, Lee found Mary Lincoln “wonderfully better”—over the course of three hours, she had mentioned her husband’s death only once, then interrupted herself, saying, “I lived through it. I am now getting well and strong after all those terrible events.” A week later, the two women said good-bye as Mary and her sons boarded a train for Chicago. Despite Elizabeth Lee’s sense that Mrs. Lincoln’s mental health was improving, the president’s widow would long remain troubled by grief and emotional instability, never recovering from the loss of her husband and the trauma of witnessing his murder.7

  9

  Nation

  AS MUCH AS ALBERT BROWNE thought back over the astounding events of the past weeks, he also looked resolutely ahead, envisioning the nation’s future. Mourning the loss of Lincoln also meant reckoning with Lincoln’s successor, and Albert admitted that Andrew Johnson’s behavior at the president’s second inauguration in March 1865 had been questionable, for the vice president had appeared to be inebriated. Nonetheless Albert believed that the new chief executive would nicely finish Lincoln’s work on earth. If Johnson could stay sober, Albert reasoned, he would prove to be “all Lincoln was, and more.” Sarah Browne looked to the new president approvingly too, confident that he would treat the vanquished enemies properly. “We have faith in Andrew Johnson,” she wrote to Albert, “and believe that full measure will be meted out.”1

  When word of Jefferson Davis’s capture down south reached Salem, bells rang, flags waved, and guns fired. It was the “great finale of our glorious triumph,” Sarah wrote. (She also delighted in reports that Davis had been “disguised in his wife’s clothing” when Union forces apprehended him, “underneath which he showed his own boots!!”) For Albert’s part, he was thrilled that the “arch traitor and wicked man” was now under federal watch and hoped that Davis would be hanged as a step toward vindicating all who had died for the Union cause. Albert worried, though, that Davis would be made a martyr, and nothing infuriated him so much as Confederates who insisted on extolling their self-exiled rebel leader. On a trip to Savannah, he’d had to listen to a southern hostess (a northern-born woman, at that!—Albert had socialized with her family in the pa
st) who called Davis “a pious and good man and patriot.” That prompted a stern lecture to the entire family (all of whom, in Albert’s recounting, listened to him, trembling and aghast), ending with a warning that if he ever heard another apology for Jefferson Davis, he would arrest the speaker, male or female. When the offender’s husband tried to apologize, Albert apparently announced that he would never visit again if the man couldn’t “bridle the tongue of his she rebel.”2

  Despite that angry encounter with Confederates, when Albert Browne thought about the nation to be formed in the wake of victory, he remained filled with optimism. On Hilton Head Island, he attended a church meeting of African Americans and marveled at the “gathering of a thousand human beings” who so recently had been “Chattel property.” It astonished him how fast history was being made, right before his eyes. The destruction of slavery, then Union victory, then the assassination: he had lived through the “momentous transactions” of each one. “I can hardly realise the scenes through which I am passing, so important, so astounding, and following in such quick succession,” he wrote to Sarah in mid-May. “How fast we all live, how much faster I live than most men.” For her part, Sarah connected a sense of involvement in history to faith in God. “A feeling of awe comes over us as we review the events of the last three months,” she recorded in her diary. Looking to past and future alike, Sarah shared her husband’s optimism. “We see God’s hand and feel His power,” she wrote.3

  HAUNTED BY VISIONS OF WHAT was to come, Rodney Dorman spent a good deal of time gazing backward. When he thought about the future, with the Confederacy dismantled and Yankees in charge, it often felt unendurable. Black Union soldiers in Jacksonville served as the first reminder of that humiliation. “The use of them here is an insult & disgrace,” he wrote in his diary, “& intended as an insult!” Interference, meddling, tampering—that’s how Dorman saw emancipation. Much as he hated the freed slaves and black soldiers (and most especially the slaves-turned-soldiers), Dorman didn’t hold them directly accountable. “I do not blame the negroes,” he wrote, for they were only “put up to & encouraged in all sorts of impudence, brutality, & wickedness” by their white superiors. Never had black people behaved the way they behaved now, he believed, until the Union army—”these Hell-hounds”—came along to incite insurrection. (That was the way masters had always imagined slave uprisings, in keeping with their fantasies about passive and contented bondspeople.) What “contemptible meanness & baseness,” Dorman spat out, “prying into a man’s affairs through his servants” (servants, too, was a fantasy of the masters, as if enslaved people performed paid labor of their own volition).4

  Rodney Dorman’s venom knew no bounds, and, as usual, he reserved special animosity for the abolitionists, “pitiful, pettifogging scoundrels,” their faces “too brazen to blush,” whose “sickening sentimentality” did nothing but “beshit & befoul every thing they meddle with.” As for the particular Christian missionaries who were in town to teach the former slaves, Dorman found them to be troublemaking fiends whose dastardliness put the devil to shame. What “black hearted devils” were the white “mischief-makers,” Dorman proclaimed. Even stupider than the black people they converted, they “out-negro the negro,” he wrote. For Rodney Dorman, the post-surrender nation remained a war zone of Yankee invasion. “The outrages are not over,” he declared, even “if the war is.”5

  Speaking of outrages, the fact that the federals were pursuing the fleeing Jefferson Davis when the Confederacy had already surrendered only increased Dorman’s vexation. True, Davis had been a leader of secession, but according to Dorman, secession had never been a criminal act, not to mention that the abolitionists had started the war in the first place. In the late-arriving northern newspapers, Dorman followed the Union army’s hunt for the Confederate president, and when they captured him in mid-May, it only steeled Dorman’s conviction that “the day of retribution must come.”6

  IN THE SPRING OF 1865, Union supporters felt themselves palpably immersed in the unfolding of epic events. The fall of Richmond, Lee’s surrender, the assassination, the funeral in Washington and the funeral train, the capture and killing of the assassin: here was history in the making, in one’s own lifetime, before one’s very eyes, at lightning speed, and just like Albert Browne, Lincoln’s mourners wrote themselves into it. For Horatio Nelson Taft, working in the Patent Office in Washington, the past month was not only “the most eventful in the History of our Country,” but “above all in importance which has occurred in the world,” for “the President of the United States has been assassinated.” For the victors-turned-mourners, the events of the past weeks felt like enough for years, or a lifetime, or five hundred years, or “a century of ordinary history.” April 1865, wrote Edward Everett Hale, was the “most remarkable month in modern history.” Or as one woman told her niece, “You will remember, forever, with satisfaction, that you were alive at this time.”7

  At war’s end, with history being made before their eyes, Lincoln’s mourners not only looked back, in efforts to make sense of Union victory followed so closely by the assassination, they also looked ahead, as the nation sped into the future. By writing themselves into the historical events taking place around them, the grief-stricken stood ready personally to shape that future, and they did so by bringing politics into everyday life. As the doctor Elizabeth Blackwell wrote to a friend, “Private lives have all become interwoven with the life of the nation,” so that “every one seems to live two lives,” a personal one and a “great absorbing national one.”8

  This was true not only for white men, who exercised the rights of citizenship and suffrage, but also, and most especially, for black men and women, whose lives were so directly connected to the fate of union and slavery. White women, too, immersed themselves. As Anna Lowell asserted on the day Lincoln died, “We had felt as if we too had cast our votes for him.” Children drew themselves into the swirl and fray as well. African American youngsters in the South, who saw the jubilation of emancipation and victory all around them, also heard clearly articulated fears for a future without President Lincoln. Nor could white children remain sheltered, and even some of the youngest grasped the magnitude of events. A week after the assassination, one mother found her son “tired out and very nervous,” yet begging to be read the newspaper reports of Booth’s capture. For all of Lincoln’s mourners, no matter their formal political power, it proved impossible to grieve without also thinking about what kind of nation the victorious United States would become without Lincoln at the helm—whether his absence proved a blessing because of his lenience or a curse because of his statesmanship.9

  History-making for Confederates felt entirely different, for it was being made in a nation from which they had failed to secede. Amid their spiritual struggles with God’s apparent desertion, as they wrestled with the destruction of their land and the pointless loss of so many lives, the vanquished looked back with wistfulness and forward with fear and anger. When they added Lincoln’s assassination to their own roster of historic occurrences, it was often only to leaven the gloom. “What exciting, what eventful times we live in!” Emma LeConte had written in her diary when the news arrived. Few of her compatriots were quite so effusive. A musician with a Mississippi regiment glumly reckoned with history as he marched his last fifteen miles home. That day he entitled his diary entry “Reflections upon our situation as a down-fallen people.” He then closed his wartime journal with the words, “The end.” Except of course it was not the end, for he and everyone else could not help thinking about the future.10

  The surrender of Robert E. Lee at Appomattox provoked very different visions for the victors and the vanquished, most especially when it came to political rights for black and white southerners. At one extreme lay the restoration of the Union, without legal slavery but with black subordination reinstated, with no interference from the federal government. That was the dream of Rodney Dorman and like-minded Confederates. At the other end of the spectrum lay fully
equal rights for African Americans, including voting rights for black men, enforced by federal authorities and coupled with the strict abridgment of the political power of Confederate leaders and elites. That was the hope of Sarah and Albert Browne, of African Americans north and south, and of radical white northerners. In between lay the less clear-cut visions of moderate Republicans, northern Democrats who had supported the war for Union, southern Unionists, and Copperheads.11

  When Lincoln spoke to the crowd outside the White House on April 11, two days after Lee had surrendered, no one knew that it would be his last speech, that it was the last time he would articulate his ideas about reconstructing the nation. That evening, Lincoln mentioned his personal preference for at least partial black suffrage. Among those who reacted with dismay was John Wilkes Booth, who stood among the listeners (“That means nigger citizenship. Now, by God, I’ll put him through”). That evening, Lincoln also told his audience that the process of reconstruction would be “fraught with great difficulty,” and so it was proving to be, right from the start.12

  Four days later, just hours after Lincoln expired, Chief Justice Salmon Chase swore in Andrew Johnson as president. Lincoln had chosen the Tennessean as his 1864 running mate for strategic reasons. As an ardent anti-secessionist, Johnson was the only senator from a seceded state to retain his seat in the federal government and therefore a good bet for appealing to northern Democrats. Johnson’s background was not so different from Lincoln’s own. Lincoln had been born in a dirt-floor cabin in Kentucky, to parents critical of slavery; Johnson had been born to poor and illiterate parents in North Carolina and grew up bitter toward the rich whites of the South. Yet the two men’s lives ultimately followed very different trajectories.

  When Lincoln’s mourners looked ahead to the fate of the nation, they again confronted the paradox of which lesson to draw from the assassination: in the slain chief’s kindness and generosity could be found either a divine reason for his death (since he would have treated the defeated rebels too indulgently) or a model for political strategy after his death (because the defeated rebels should in fact be treated with mercy).