Mourning Lincoln

by Martha Hodes

  Pardons had already been going forward at a nice clip, at least for Confederates who had exiled themselves during the war. Charles Francis Adams, minister of the U.S. legation in London, was a moderate Republican from Massachusetts who performed his duties with Assistant Secretary Benjamin Moran, a Pennsylvania Democrat and militant Unionist. Stunned by Lincoln’s death, Adams joined many of the president’s mourners in naming slavery as the cause. “It was fitting that what began with perjury, fraud, and treachery should end in private assassination,” Adams wrote in his diary, since that was only “the fruit of the seed that was sown in the slavery of the African race.” Yet when it came to treatment of the Confederates, Adams was more interested in “rehabilitation” than punishment, for retribution should “extend only to a few” rather than “the many.” Slavery had killed Lincoln, Adams believed, and the southern aristocracy alone was to blame.15

  In his London office, Adams therefore dealt quite liberally with a steady stream of Confederates hoping to take the oath of allegiance in order to gain passports for their return to the United States. Even before they had gotten word of President Johnson’s May 29 pardon proclamation, both Adams and Moran freely obliged their applicants, sympathetic to the stories they told. A Confederate army veteran, who explained himself as an “old Whig” carried along by “popular passion,” now struck Adams as “moderate and reasonable.” A Tennessean who had fought for the Confederacy before becoming a blockade runner in Britain also struck Adams as “moderate and reasonable.” A Virginian who announced his secessionist status with all frankness got his way too; “having been fairly whipped he now yielded,” Moran wrote in his diary. Adams and Moran also encountered a brother and sister from Mobile who claimed they had changed their minds since Union victory. The woman “shuddered at the oath,” Moran recorded, “but finally took it, and I gave them both passports.” Conversing with the captain of a Confederate ship, Moran was sure the man was “tired of secession and regrets ever having gone into it.” There was also a drunk Alabamian, once a rebel, “but being beaten has returned to his allegiance” and even professed sympathy “with Mrs. Lincoln in her loss.” Adams and Moran either never asked their supplicants where they stood on policies toward the freedpeople among whom they would be living back at home or, if they did, they were satisfied with the answers. One petitioner had supported the rebellion “to protect his property,” Adams wrote in his diary, adding, “Of course this was a plantation and slaves though he did not say so.” The man promised to “go home and deport himself as an obedient citizen,” and Adams issued him the requisite papers. Thus did men of the U.S. legation concern themselves with justice for white southerners rather than black southerners.16

  Adams and Moran had an even easier time after the London consulate got word of President Johnson’s May 29 proclamation. Two native Virginians who had emigrated to England, for instance, now struck Adams as suffering a “sacrifice of pride” merely by setting foot in the London office. All in all, Adams wanted the U.S. government to be “lenient and merciful” with the Confederates, who he believed had suffered enough in four years of terrible war. That was a very different view of justice than the one put forth by African Americans in their petitions to the president. To black men and their communities, the idea that white men who casually swore loyalty to the Union suffered a “sacrifice of pride” was not only irrelevant but dangerous, since by such actions the white men regained their political rights. “I saw no difficulty in the way of their restoration under the amnesty,” Adams wrote in his diary after reviewing Johnson’s proclamation. “My rule is to treat them all gently,” he elaborated, even as he carried out his duty to “question them closely.” Those interrogations, careful as they may have been, apparently did not include serious consideration of the petitioners’ opinions on black freedom and citizenship.17

  On the same day as the May 29 pardon proclamation came Johnson’s policies for readmitting former rebellious states into the Union, further vindicating the decisions taking place at the London consulate. North Carolina would be the first, with a proclamation that called on white men professing loyalty to the United States to convene a state constitutional convention. African Americans remained excluded by a provision that deliberately limited the franchise to those who had been voters before secession, and by midsummer the same procedure was in place for Mississippi, Georgia, Texas, Alabama, South Carolina, and Florida. All of this raised the hopes of some Confederates, like the Tennessean who wrote to tell the new president that he wanted to see “a white Mans Government in America.” Thanking Johnson, he assured him that “the White People will sustain you.”18

  To page through the black Christian Recorder in the summer of 1865 was to learn just how much Lincoln’s African American mourners tempered the optimism of Union victory with keen awareness of white southern determination to reverse emancipation. “Slavery is not dead,” wrote a man from Natchez in the face of tremendous white violence. Hadn’t the federal government known that “enmity between the master and slave would be doubly deepened, and that they could not live together in harmony again?” In North Carolina, J. H. Payne of the Twenty-Seventh U.S. Colored Troops understood that “trouble and destitution, as well as hatred and revenge, await our poor people in these Southern States,” making it feel as if they were “under slavery’s cruel power still.” The death of slavery, wrote another, was simply “a mistaken idea.”19

  As for Lincoln’s white mourners, some moderates still could not quite envision President Johnson’s actions as obstructing black freedom, even after the May 29 pardon proclamation. Union officer Henry Halleck believed that the rebels would return to the nation with no difficulty over the “Slave question,” as long as northern radicals didn’t make “extremist” demands. “The negroes know that they are free, and there is no power at the South that can reenslave them,” he asserted in direct contradiction to black voices. Other moderates, though, found themselves vexed. No policy that “would please the South would agree with enlightened opinion in the North,” Sidney Fisher wrote in his Philadelphia diary. Uneasy about black suffrage and the exercise of federal power alike, Fisher saw “no way out of these difficulties” that would be “consistent with the preservation of the Union & free government.” Maine volunteer Abial Edwards, still in the army that summer, had fought against slavery yet did not believe black men should be voters until they became more accustomed to freedom. Soon, though, Edwards noticed something else: President Johnson quickly taking away “all we have gained in our years of toil & strife.” Former Confederates with the rights of citizenship, Edwards now worried, would only rise up against the Union once again.20

  More radical white mourners easily envisioned the gruesome portrait drawn by their black friends. For General Carl Schurz, the trouble lay in the fact that white southerners hadn’t “abandoned their proslavery sentiments.” Schurz worried that once the seceded states were back in the Union, “the status of the former slaves will be fixed in a way as near slavery as possible.” To his wife, Schurz wrote that white southerners were “unquestionably thinking of subjecting the negroes to some kind of slavery again,” following the withdrawal of Union troops. After Johnson’s proclamation, Martha Coffin Wright likewise felt sure that slavery was “not abolished & never will be,” unless there was no amnesty for any Confederate, with or without an oath of allegiance. As a white commander of black troops wrote home from New Orleans in early summer, “If Andy doesn’t put his foot on slavery hard, they will try to start it again somehow.”21

  Here were the echoes of Frederick Douglass’s prediction, made weeks before Johnson’s pardon proclamation, which in turn echoed the fears of the freedpeople immediately upon Lincoln’s assassination. “In what new skin will the old snake come forth?” Douglass had asked then. “Slavery is not abolished until the black man has the ballot,” he asserted. The former Confederates “would not call it slavery,” he warned, “but some other name.” Indeed, the end of the year would bring the Bla
ck Codes, southern state laws designed to replicate the conditions of bondage in the absence of legal enslavement.22

  THE FIRST OF JUNE BROUGHT yet another historic occasion, this one somber rather than grand. President Johnson appointed that Thursday to be a national day of humiliation and prayer for Abraham Lincoln. In the South, freedpeople paused yet again to try to make sense of the assassination in light of recent dismaying developments, while Confederates looked on with exasperation at the federal command to unite in prayer to request God’s blessing. “I am sorry enough that Lincoln was assassinated,” Eliza Andrews wrote in her Georgia diary, “but this public fast is a political scheme gotten up to throw reproach on the South, and I wouldn’t keep it if I were ten times as sorry as I am.” A Methodist clergyman in Kentucky scoffed at the directive, since he did “not think the assassination of Mr. Lincoln a national sin.” In Richmond, Hattie Powell was delighted at her minister’s solution. “My friends we have been ordered to meet here, by those in authority, for humiliation & prayer on account of the death of Lincoln,” the man told the handful of worshippers who showed up, before adding, “Having met, we will now be dismissed.” As summer approached, Lincoln’s foes hoped this episode would be the last in the drawn-out fuss over the Yankee martyr.23

  Up north, meanwhile, mustering the required awe yet again proved an effort for some of Lincoln’s mourners. Although it was indeed likely to be the last of the public ceremonies, Caroline White found the whole thing tiring, not to mention that it seemed “more like a festival” than a day of grief. Other mourners agreed that June 1 was all too much “a show & holiday” or just a poor imitation of the two-week funeral ceremonies. For their part, children enjoyed the time off. “No work to-day, it is fast day,” wrote fifteen-year-old Alpheus Kenyon in Connecticut. “I have been swimming.” After church in Newport, Rhode Island, sisters Kate and Carrie Hunter played croquet and went sailing for a “most glorious & jolly time.” Grownups followed suit. Men played chess. Women played backgammon. Soldiers did nothing for a change, dreaming of home. Weariness with public performances did not, however, mean that people had stopped grieving. Anna Lowell didn’t feel like facing the crowds in Boston, so she observed the day in her heart instead, “more truly,” she believed, than those who showed up for the civic rituals. In Michigan, a soldier reflected on God’s will and wisdom, writing in his diary that Lincoln “still lives within our hearts.” For many the day was sacred, even if not everyone could put aside their responsibilities. “National Fast Day,” another mourner recorded, along with the notation, “Tom & the man hauling logs to mill.”24

  For those willing to attend abolitionist-themed observances, the rituals were accompanied by reflections on the challenges ahead for the post-victory, post-assassination nation. In New York, Frederick Douglass offered a eulogy, painting a portrait of the slain president in all his complexity. “Abraham Lincoln, while unsurpassed in his devotion to the welfare of the white race,” Douglass claimed, was also “the black man’s President: the first to show any respect to their rights as men.” In Massachusetts, Martha Anderson listened to her minister speak of the “real cause” of Lincoln’s death, “slavery,” advocating to “do justice to the blacks by giving them the ballot.” Lucretia Hale was in the audience at Boston’s mourning-draped Music Hall when Senator Charles Sumner made the same appeal, emphasizing, Hale related to her brother in her own words, that without black suffrage, “the slave power would rise again, and it would all have to be done over again.”25

  JUST AS AFRICAN AMERICANS AND their white allies looked to President Andrew Johnson with trepidation, invoking Abraham Lincoln to make sure he had not died in vain, the vanquished Confederates also looked to Johnson with dread, still hoping that rebel soldiers had not died in vain either. When a white preacher in North Carolina asked his listeners (echoing the words of Lincoln’s second inaugural) to lay aside “all malice, and hatred, and wrath,” the man recorded his parishioners’ reaction in his diary: “Exception, I learn has been taken to it.” For twenty-one-year-old Sarah Wadley in Louisiana, talk of reconstructing the nation made her livid—”How hateful are the words, yes hateful!” she wrote in her journal, for never would she call herself a citizen of the United States. Gloating Yankees were particularly hard to take. For Elizabeth Alsop, it was nearly unbearable to see them walking the streets of Fredericksburg, forcing men to take the oath of allegiance. Not only that, but now she had to live among free black people, which, as one Georgia man described to his wife, was as horrific as the sight of “the exulting & tyrannical Yankee.”26

  One mid-May night, Emma LeConte and her family took a walk, picking their way through the shattered walls and broken chimneys of the former mansions of Columbia, South Carolina. Only by the lack of moss and vines could they tell that the ruins were not ancient. Her family’s home had been spared, but LeConte still had to endure the sight of white Union men fraternizing with black residents, not to mention Yankees standing right in front of her house, their blue uniforms filling her with “such horrid feelings” that she closed the front blinds and hid away in the back parlor. In Alexandria, Virginia, Anne Frobel likewise recoiled: “In a few years,” the white Yankees had chillingly told her, “we will have a negro President.”27

  The victors, both black and white, invoked the violent language of slavery at war’s end, speaking of “whipped and cowed” rebels and a “badly whipped” people (at the London consulate, Benjamin Moran accordingly described the southern petitioners as “whipped” and “beaten”). Confederates used the same language to describe themselves, like the homeward-bound soldiers who told their conquerors they were “completely whipped,” and many now extended the metaphor. Just as four years earlier, secessionists had cast themselves as slaves of the North in their fevered appeals for disunion, in 1865 the defeated spoke of their own bondage and oppression. As Captain Henry Chambers had written in his diary the day after surrender, “Nature weeps over Liberty’s death.” On the home front back then, Caroline Thornton had referred to her compatriots as “a subjugated people.” These kinds of depictions multiplied as spring turned to summer. Recall the laments of Cornelia Spencer, wondering whether Confederate marriages would be legally recognized and describing her ransacked home without furniture or silverware, and “flies every where in doors,” all without a word about the conditions of the enslaved. Spencer was far from alone in the imagery she invoked.28

  For the vanquished to imagine themselves as slaves while simultaneously bemoaning the loss of their own human chattel (whom, like Rodney Dorman, they tended to call servants) no doubt struck freedpeople as absurd or at best ironic. Yet to the speakers it was neither. Rather than a careless metaphor, enslavement was precisely the point. For white people who believed that God had intended them to be masters, it was intolerable to live under the domination of others. To those who had so recently owned slaves themselves, it made perfect sense to invoke the condition of bondage, for nothing better captured their imagined post-surrender condition. Defeat, Kate Stone wrote in her Texas diary, served only to “rivet more firmly the chains that bind us.” Another woman proclaimed that white southerners now lived in “bondage worse than slavery.” Ellen House, a Tennessean in exile in Georgia, declared that the white people of the South were “slaves—to the vilest race that ever disgraced humanity,” thereby casting Yankees, both white and black, together into a separate racial category. In an exemplary description of the daily dissemblance once required of enslaved people for the sake of survival, Edmund Ruffin (who also described the Yankees as a separate race) wrote that secessionists not only had to obey their conquerors, they had to do so “without sullenness or apparent dislike, & play their parts of obedient subjects & slaves to Yankee power with cheerfulness & smiling faces.”29

  Given such dire circumstances, Confederates resisted giving up the fight. From the moment of Lee’s surrender, diehard rebels among the soldiers had vowed to wage war to the last. An army surgeon in Texas wrote to his wife, admitting
that the thought of “Yankee Masters” and “Negro equality” made him want to “fight on a little longer.” Some of the vanquished went to Europe, or made homes for themselves in Brazil or Cuba, where slavery still existed, and a few, like Edmund Ruffin, committed suicide. But most white southerners could not afford to leave the country, and few acted on suicidal fantasies. Instead, the vanquished tried to envision a time when the future would look more like the past.30

  Retribution, many Confederates felt certain, would eventually be theirs. Among Edmund Ruffin’s final thoughts before he killed himself was the hope that outrage would endure in his people long enough for payback. In South Carolina, Charles Hutson, for whom living permanently under Yankee rule with black freedom was out of the question, urged his countrymen to “bear our fate manfully & keep ever ready to renew the struggle, when the right moment comes” (Hutson soon departed for a sojourn in Paris). John Henderson, a North Carolina law student, looked ahead to “years and years” of the “most intense and bitter animosity,” until one day (“May the time soon come!”) when the Yankees would be “reduced to our condition.” A soldier in Lee’s army, making his way home through the wreckage of Richmond, reflected gloomily on the future, then reconsidered, for, he wrote in his diary, something told him that the war “was not all passed through in vain.”31