Mourning Lincoln

by Martha Hodes

  Artifacts also felt precious, and collection began on the night of April 14, at Ford’s Theatre. A government clerk who encountered the crowds on Tenth Street made his way into the playhouse while everyone else was exiting, climbed up to the presidential box, and pocketed Lincoln’s discarded bloody collar. A War Department employee who accompanied the president’s body across the street to Petersen House swiped a blood-soaked towel. The theater itself, closed in the immediate aftermath, became something of a pilgrimage site. Marian Hooper and Annette Rogers, in town from New England for the Grand Review, made their way around back to study the spot where Booth had mounted his horse to escape, and struck up a conversation with a resident of the alley, a black woman who told them she had seen the assassin arrive and depart on the night of the crime. When Catherine Lansing traveled from Albany for the Grand Review, she also toured the White House and the Capitol, attended part of the conspirators’ trial, and stopped to look at Ford’s from the outside, a “very very crestfallen experience,” she wrote. James Moore, a white doctor whose black regiment had marched at the head of Lincoln’s funeral procession in Washington, tucked into an envelope a scrap of the crape tied to his sword and made his way to the theater and Petersen House, places that he knew would become—indeed had already become—historic.4

  Petersen’s was open for business, and Marian Hooper went there too, peering into the tiny room where Lincoln had died, taking in the sight of the blood-soaked pillow, more than six weeks later “left just as it was on that night,” she wrote to a friend. Heartbreaking as it felt, there were two reasons she wanted to survey the frozen scene. First, it was “an historical fact.” Second, it made everything—that even now still seemed unbelievable—”so vivid.”5

  10

  Justice

  THE WORD REBELLION IN PRESIDENT Andrew Johnson’s amnesty proclamation rankled Rodney Dorman. Whether or not the new president pardoned Confederates, he was now “surpassing the demons of Hell in wickedness” just by saying that white southerners had ever been in rebellion. As a lawyer, Dorman firmly believed that the Confederacy had acted constitutionally, since “the people alone,” he wrote in his diary, “have a right to revolutionize & change their government.” In Dorman’s reading, it was the Yankees who were the rebels and who deserved death for their traitorous violations of the nation’s principles. “A thousand hangings” for every Union official couldn’t vindicate all their crimes, and yet, he spluttered, they pronounced Confederates guilty of treason. With each stroke of Dorman’s pen, Lincon, the unfortunately recovering William Seward, Andrew Johnson, the Freedmen’s Bureau agents, the freedpeople, and of course the abolitionists became “damned fools & asses,” “sharks & harpies,” “ninny-hammers,” “blaspheming, hypocritical priests,” “craven hearted knaves,” and “contemptible pukes & cowards.” When Dorman compared the U.S. marshal in Jacksonville to a dog, he apologized to dogs.1

  As for Confederates swearing loyalty to the United States, that was nothing but “flummery” and “trash.” In mid-May, Union general B. C. Tilghman had come to Jacksonville to announce that Confederates who wished to conduct business would have to take the oath of allegiance, and now Dorman despaired as he observed his compatriots obeying, even if it was only out of fear of starvation or a way to get back their confiscated property. On that note, the fact that the return of property didn’t include slaves struck Dorman as one of the greatest injustices of all. Jacksonville was crowded with African Americans that spring and summer, many of them refugees who had made their way to the city, and in Dorman’s view, the U.S. government had stolen them from their masters. The way he saw it, Yankees had forced enslaved men into the Union army in the first place, and now the agents of the federal Freedmen’s Bureau, along with the northern missionaries and “other theives,” were acting as fanatical “inciters of insurrection,” making submissive black people into copies of their horrific Yankee selves. Education was a major culprit, as the northerners made ignorant black people “still more ignorant,” more “insolent, wicked & depraved,” just like themselves. “What worse than the fiends of Hell, these Yankees, & their governments,” Dorman wrote with anguish, remaining silent about the white-on-black violence taking place in the city around him.2

  Still intensely galling to Dorman were the occupying black men in uniform, now the “worst, most criminal” of all. William Johnson, with the Third U.S. Colored Troops, felt “great changes” in the making, he wrote from Jacksonville in June, even as he saw the local Confederates “die very hard at the idea of having black troops to guard them.” Accordingly, Dorman raged into his diary over those great changes. General Tilghman had announced that Jacksonville’s black population could go to work for their former masters for wages—a clear recipe for failure, Dorman believed, since the natural inclination of black people was to “enjoy themselves without labor or care.” In freedom, as opposed to slavery, they would have to “labor harder & get less,” he reckoned, and would only find “less comfort & enjoyment.” When Dorman wrote fervently of his wish to end “tyranny & oppression of all kinds,” he remained resolutely blind to any dimension of injustice in the southern institution of racial slavery.3

  Living in temporary quarters beyond the destroyed center of the city, his precious law books gone, his house and personal property burned, Rodney Dorman poured the humiliation of Confederate defeat into the pages of his companionate journal. One June day, he took a walk, tramping seventeen miles into the countryside, taking in the torn-up and burned-out homes of the white people who had once lived there. “All their negroes, nearly every head of their cattle, all their horses & hogs were gone,” he wrote, slaves and farm animals all the same to him. If this was peace, he fumed, then “war, with all its horrors, is preferable,” for war would always be preferable to black freedom. In any case, the reconstructed nation would never know anything but a “one sided treacherous peace,” a peace that was “no better than war.” Even the surrender of Kirby Smith’s forces west of the Mississippi at the end of May made no difference. “Now, as the war is over, as they pretend,” he wrote, “the war has but just commenced.”4

  FOR ALBERT BROWNE, THE WAR was over and done with, and it was time to see that justice came to pass. To that end, he wanted to “disfranchise forever” everyone who had ever participated in the rebellion. “Allow them no political privileges, no ballot,” unless there was definitive proof that a person had been “unwillingly dragged in,” he wrote home. In Albert’s calculus, the highest Confederate authorities should be hanged, the ones beneath them forever expatriated, and the next rung down forever barred from holding office. Then all property should be confiscated from those who were “at all active and earnest in rebellion, male and female.” African Americans, the only truly loyal southerners, should be citizens of the postwar nation, and black men should be voters, or at least all who could read and write (and, for that matter, white men should also have to prove literacy in order to vote). “A ballot now is as useful as a bullet was six weeks since,” he wrote that spring. “Let us fire ballots at these secessionists.”5

  As for the freedpeople, Albert Browne found them “a wonder to all thoughtful minds.” As slaves, they had “supported a corrupt, proud, lazy, wicked aristocracy” and so would have no trouble supporting themselves in freedom, once given access to education, land, citizenship, and suffrage. Albert envisioned independent cultivation on allotments of twenty or forty acres per family, with two years of economic assistance to cover tools and seeds, or as he once proclaimed to Sarah and the children, he wanted the freedpeople, led by armed black soldiers, to “demand of their former masters 2/3 of the produce of the soil.”6

  For all his revolutionary zeal, Albert Browne also exhibited common strains of northern racism, fully on display in his letters. With education and land, the freedpeople would show the world that “human nature, even under a black skin, and repulsive features is still human nature, and capable of progressing in Knowledge and goodness,” he wrote. All men
were lazy, Albert believed, though “the negro man emphatically so.” Although Albert didn’t “fancy the negro,” as did some of his friends, he would “depend and uphold him as I would all the oppressed,” he boasted, explaining, “It is my nature, I can’t help it.” Another time he told Sarah, “I dont love ‘niggers as niggers’ but I support their rights as men, or loyal citizens.” Sarah expressed similar racist assumptions, if in milder terms. During the family’s 1864 sojourn in Jacksonville, the Brownes had spent time among the U.S. Colored Troops, at one point attending a service with the “earnest men” of a regiment organized in Baltimore. “Almost all were slaves in Maryland!” she marveled. “What gifted seer a few years ago could have predicted this event!” Giving away the limits of her abolitionism, she professed amazement at the “black but brave men”—notice the but—”armed & equipped to fight the battles of Freedom.” Now, at war’s end, she filled with hope. Toward the end of May, on a beautiful day in Salem, Sarah breakfasted with her son Albert Jr., discussing current events and the “dear, sweet heavenly Peace which is again to bless our land.” Her heart felt light, as she saw God’s hand in the world around her.7

  IMMEDIATELY FOLLOWING THE assassination, questions of justice preoccupied Lincoln’s allies and antagonists alike. For mourners, this encompassed not only the proper punishment for the assassin’s conspirators but also the price to be paid for the bloody rebellion born of slavery and—for the more radical among them—the redress to be paid to African Americans for generations of slavery, followed by their patriotism and bravery during the war. For Lincoln’s defeated antagonists, on the other hand, justice meant the right to shape the reunited nation—in which legal slavery seemed no longer to exist—to their own satisfaction.

  When Lincoln died, his mourners likened him to George Washington, Moses, and Jesus, and the slain president’s near-instantaneous elevation was nowhere more apparent than in black mourners’ reflections on the fate of emancipation, equality, and political empowerment. Before Lincoln’s death, black and white abolitionists and the radical Republicans in Congress had criticized the president’s wartime plans for reconstruction precisely because those plans left power in the hands of white southerners and relegated decisions about black suffrage to the individual states. Then came the April 11 speech from the White House balcony, in which Lincoln mixed a conservative conciliation toward the Confederates with more radical ideas. On the one hand, that speech contained only the most meager hints at black citizenship. On the other, it contained enough radicalism that it prompted John Wilkes Booth to plot murder.

  Four days later, Lincoln was dead, and that tentative if potentially radical speech was all his abolitionist mourners had to go on. Radical Republicans, who had once expressed quiet relief at Lincoln’s demise owing to his seemingly lenient stance toward the Confederates, now followed the lead of African Americans. In response to the egregious actions of President Andrew Johnson, black mourners and their white friends martialed Lincoln’s April 11 words as a forceful counterpoint to the alarming unfolding of events. That spring evening in Washington, Lincoln had acknowledged that some of his supporters found it “unsatisfactory” that the new state constitution of Louisiana did not extend the vote to black men. Deferentially, he had also stated his personal preference (“I would myself prefer”) that suffrage be extended to two particular groups of African Americans: the “very intelligent” and those who had fought for the Union. If some form of black suffrage were not permitted, Lincoln stated, the “cup of liberty” held to the lips of former slaves would be dashed to the ground. Moreover, what was true for Louisiana should “apply generally to other States.” All told, it wasn’t a lot, but precisely because Lincoln was murdered and martyred, his black mourners and their white allies were free to extend those ideas however they saw fit in order to accomplish the goals of justice.8

  Even in the face of President Johnson’s dismissals, some of Lincoln’s black mourners continued to express optimism over the ultimate fruits of Union victory, at least in their public pronouncements. Thomas Morris Chester, the war correspondent in Richmond, believed that the “inexorable logic of events” was “fast dissipating all ideas of slavery, all delusions of State rights, and all dreams of a Southern Confederacy.” The editors of the San Francisco Elevator professed to look toward the nation’s reconstruction and the advent of suffrage with confidence, and a reader wrote in to say that soon would come a movement to press Congress for “our right of franchise.” The nation, a minister from Philadelphia wrote to the Christian Recorder, had now “awakened to sympathy and humanity through her late Chief Magistrate, Abraham Lincoln, the champion of freedom.”9

  The last photograph of Abraham Lincoln, taken by Alexander Gardner in February 1865, shows the president’s careworn face near war’s end.

  LC-USZ62-11896, Prints and Photographs Division, Library of Congress.

  But alongside such hopes, African Americans voiced serious apprehensions. If they had articulated forebodings about the future of the nation from the moment Richmond fell, then their anxieties multiplied after Lincoln’s assassination. Freedman and Union army chaplain Garland White wrote a personal letter to the recovering Secretary of State William Seward, asking him to be extra mindful of the Confederates or, as White called them, the “many enemies yet to be arested who must be watched with a vigolent eye.” A reader likewise wrote to the New Orleans Black Republican, appalled to think that following the murder of “‘our’ noble President,” Confederates would return home to the ballot box (“because they are white”) while loyal African American soldiers possessed no such power (“because they are black”).10

  As black mourners cast Lincoln as a champion of freedom, his successor was rapidly turning out to be just the opposite. Ten days after the assassination, President Andrew Johnson addressed himself to the population he called “loyal southerners”—by which he meant white, not black, southerners—thinking largely of those outside the upper classes. Johnson first declared his intentions to mete out “justice toward the leaders,” then made clear his wish to extend “amnesty, conciliation, clemency, and mercy” to the many thousands who had been “deceived or driven into this infernal rebellion,” thereby echoing the idea that nonslaveholding whites had been duped and coerced into the war.11

  A little more than a month later, just after the Grand Review in Washington, President Johnson issued his first pardon proclamation, the one that so frustrated Rodney Dorman by invoking the phrase in rebellion. It was May 29, a little over three weeks after Lincoln’s burial and three days after the surrender of General Kirby Smith in the Trans-Mississippi Department made the end of the war that much more official. Congress would not be back in session until later in the year, and so the new president acted on his own. His proclamation decreed amnesty, including the restoration of all property except slaves, to “all persons who have, directly or indirectly, participated in the existing rebellion,” on the condition of taking the oath of allegiance. Dorman may have cringed at Johnson’s choice of words and chafed at the required oath, but the fact was, Johnson had just granted voting rights to the white men who had fought against the United States while leaving the black men who had fought for the Union without access to land or political rights.12

  To be sure, the proclamation came with a lengthy list of exceptions, encompassing Confederate leaders both military and political, as well as economic stipulations intended to exclude the wealthiest planters. But any excluded individual had the right to apply for a personal pardon, and these the new president would grant liberally, including to property-holding women of the elite classes who wanted to protect their assets—a far cry from Albert Browne’s dream of confiscating the property of all rebellious men and women. As the runaway slave William Gould wrote ominously in his shipboard diary, “We see that the Rebels are being pardon’d verry fast.” Right away, the editors of the San Francisco Elevator worried that Confederate leaders would pay few or no consequences for secession and rebellion. The
Union victors, they feared, would let most of them escape, and “after a few years they will be pardoned, and return and re-commence their treason anew.” In his April 11 speech, President Lincoln had told his listeners that “we, the loyal people, differ among ourselves” as to the best plans for reconstructing the nation. Unlike President Johnson, however, Lincoln included African Americans among the loyal people.13

  Andrew Johnson’s late May pardon proclamation exacerbated the apprehensions of African Americans, its terms clearly disregarding the petitions they had brought before him when he assumed office. Now, after the proclamation, black spokesmen continued to bring their concerns to the new executive. Pointedly beckoning the ghost of Lincoln, they called Johnson their “best friend,” the phrase so many had chosen to describe their relationship to the slain chief. A public meeting in Richmond yielded a June delegation reminding Johnson that black people alone had welcomed Lincoln to the fallen Confederate capital and that they alone among their city’s residents had mourned his death. Now again, the petitioners called attention to white violence and repeated the imperative of black suffrage. A group of men from Louisville visited the White House in June to request a “Political Settlement,” asking Johnson to retain martial law in the state of Kentucky, without which whites would continue to treat black residents “with four fold the Venom and Malignanty” as they had before surrender. The Richmonders likewise informed Johnson that the “negro laws” of Virginia, still on the books, gave license to the bitter Confederates who took “special pleasure in persecuting and oppressing us.” A petition from nearly fifteen hundred “colourd Citizens” of South Carolina in late June named suffrage as the sole means of “protecting ourselves and our interest, against oppression.” Patiently again, African Americans made clear that their men had enlisted to fight for the Union and “poured out their blood lavishly,” and that their women on the home front had assisted the Union army. For his part, Johnson continued to brush them off, telling them impatiently not to “expect progress to be too rapid” or asserting that there were “a great many things we would all prefer to have different” in the immediate aftermath of the war.14