Mourning Lincoln

by Martha Hodes

  JACKSONVILLE WAS ONE OF THE stops on Albert Browne’s final southern circuit, though if Rodney Dorman was aware of the treasury agent’s presence, he did not write about it. Like Sarah Browne up north, Dorman followed the trial of the conspirators, training his attention on a different set of facts: the armed soldiers guarding the courtroom, the barred windows, the hooded prisoners bound at wrist and ankle. It was all “bastard, corrupt proceedings,” Dorman spat, with one witness a “sycophantic nincompoop,” another a “monkey fool-general,” another a “booby nobody.” As for Judge Advocate General Joseph Holt, in charge of the whole affair, he was merely another “nincompoop knave & prostituter of law.” Holt’s circle of judges, “monsters in human shape,” were, Dorman wrote, “one thousand times guilty of infamous crimes.” For Dorman, it was the defendants who were the true “martyrs for freedom,” and when the conspirators’ sentences were handed down in early July, he was particularly outraged that Mary Surratt was among those sent to the gallows. Surratt “certainly did not kill Lincon,” Dorman fumed, as usual intentionally misspelling the president’s name, but had she done so, “it would have been a deed of heroism & patriotism.”6

  As Dorman filled multiple pages of his diary with a torrent of words about the illegal and corrupt execution of Mrs. Surratt, he consoled himself with visions of eventual retribution, hoping for a “complete & total” overthrow that would someday wipe out everything Union victory had wrought. “Oh! for a thunderbolt to exterminate them all,” he cried yet again. The state convention met in Tallahassee that fall to nullify secession, but even as the white delegates denied voting rights to black men, Dorman wished he could leave the country forever. Instead, he could only rail against the “northern, worthless, vagabond whites” and “their negroes” all around him.7

  As winter came, Dorman continued to feel like “a stranger & mere temporary sojourner in a strange place.” A white resident who had fled Jacksonville during the war came back only to find the city “a desolate looking place, compared to what it used to be.” For Christmas 1865, observed Esther Hawks, a northern doctor and missionary working among Jacksonville’s freedpeople, there was “no demonstration of festivity among the white inhabitants.” They didn’t have “much heart for merry-making,” she wrote, while “the colored folks seem to be having a good time.” Dorman never wrote about white violence in his city, possibly even at his own hands, but Hawks did. “We are hearing reports, every week,” she recorded, “of the shooting of negroes by infuriated white men, and no account is made of it.” In the meantime, Rodney Dorman remained in despair about his own life. “I really have no home,” he wrote three days before Christmas.8

  LINCOLN’S MOURNERS ALSO THOUGHT ABOUT home and homeward journeys. Enslaved African Americans had escaped to Union lines all through the war, and now the pace quickened as former slaves set out in search of loved ones from whom slave traders and masters had separated them, often many years before. They traveled on foot, on horseback, by carriage, and by train. Even with no fixed destination, and even as many encountered hunger, sickness, and disappointment on the road or in Union army refugee camps, the journey into freedom was still something of a journey toward home.

  For Union troops, the literal journey home was a happy occasion. All through the war, black and white soldiers had struggled with homesickness in the form of loneliness and melancholy—in the nineteenth century, the medical diagnosis was called nostalgia. The men had sung the verses of sentimental songs like “Do They Miss Me at Home?” imagining loved ones weeping in their absence. Now even those who had fervently wished to keep fighting after the assassination, and those who had experienced the most intense sorrow over the loss of Lincoln, turned from the battlefield with relief. As Edgar Dinsmore of the Fifty-Fourth Massachusetts put it, he was “very, very happy at the thought of soon returning home.” On the day Lincoln died, a Union soldier in Virginia counted “only 17 Sundays more in the army,” and the day before Lincoln’s funeral in Washington, an Iowa soldier wrote in his diary that the “next campaign will be Homeward.” Another soldier had a single word to describe his feelings for starting home: “joy.” But for the hundreds of thousands who had died in battle, on the march, in army hospitals, and in camp, there was often no journey to parallel that of Lincoln’s body, for only a small number of Union corpses would ever return to their hometowns. With the expense of embalming and transportation out of reach for most, the ceremonies for President Lincoln had to substitute for the rituals of more intimate losses.9

  Union soldiers still in the field as summer arrived now anticipated their return in time for the Fourth of July. Before the Civil War, Independence Day celebrations had been marked in North and South alike by black boycotts and white violence, as well as by fears among white southerners that the holiday would rouse the enslaved to envision their own freedom. In 1852, Frederick Douglass had reminded a white New York audience of his own past as a slave, asking them, “Are the great principles of political freedom and of natural justice, embodied in that Declaration of Independence, extended to us?” The day was a “sham” and a “hollow mockery,” Douglass had thundered, filled as it was with “bombast, fraud, deception, impiety, and hypocrisy.” Now, on July 4, 1865, Lincoln’s mourners across the nation saw both heady celebrations and clashes with former Confederates.10

  In Washington, a black minister read the Declaration of Independence—indeed, Lincoln himself had once invoked both this founding document and his own untimely death in the same breath. In 1861, speaking at Independence Hall in Philadelphia on his way to the capital to assume the presidency, Lincoln had referred to the Declaration and spoken of saving the divided nation by extending liberty to all men. If the nation could not endure except by renouncing the principles embodied in that document, Lincoln told his audience, “I was about to say I would rather be assassinated on this spot than to surrender it.”11

  Now, four years later, a black journalist in Washington extolled the “first Fourth of July of the colored people.” The main orator was a young man named William Howard Day, who spoke of “a sorrow unlike any, nationally, we have ever known,” as the shadow of Lincoln’s death overlay the joy of freedom. Breaking from the jubilation, Day described the circumstances as “ominous.” The monument they would build to Lincoln would be a tribute to liberty, and over the coffin of their late president, Day’s people would resist tyranny, whether in the form of the “iron manacles of the slave” or the “unjust written manacles for the free.” From his home in Rochester, Douglass sent a letter to the cautious black revelers, with the message that “immediate, complete, and universal enfranchisement of the colored people” was the key to independence. For Douglass, justice demanded black suffrage, and black suffrage was the only road toward “permanent peace.” For the ceremonies, Washington freedpeople inscribed Lincoln’s words with malice toward none and with charity for all on a banner, more than likely intending them as both appeal and command for their own treatment in the fraught process of reconstructing the nation.12

  Across the South that day, victors and vanquished divided sharply. Communities of freedpeople and their white allies celebrated with processions, flags, speeches, prayers, picnics, brass bands, dancing, toasts, fireworks, and illuminations. In Augusta, Georgia, as elsewhere, the ceremonies included a “most glowing tribute to the memory of President Lincoln.” In Wilmington, North Carolina, it was a “glorious fourth,” wrote a member of the occupying black troops, while the white residents “made a failure in their efforts to get up a celebration.” Indeed, Emma LeConte was beside herself that the festivities in Columbia took place in the same building where young white men had once gathered to pledge loyalty to the Confederacy. “Such horrid degradation!” she exploded. In Athens, Georgia, it was the “miserable fourth” for a woman grieving for her husband and “greatly inconvenienced” by the departure of her slaves. In Montgomery, Alabama, “Yankees & negroes” celebrated with readings of the Declaration of Independence and the Emancipation Pr
oclamation, along with a “pyrotechnic display”; former Confederates participated, but a Wisconsin soldier thought it “highly ludicrous to hear them bluster & blow,” since nearly all had so recently been vocal secessionists. Elsewhere, local whites shuddered when the celebrators called Lee and Davis traitors or thanked God that the Union had survived and slavery had not. In some places, celebrations were more muted, “on account of the shadow of the President’s assassination,” as one observer put it. For Alonzo Carr, a white Yankee in the South Carolina Sea Islands, sober feelings arose from a related thought: “It seems that many of the Rebels are to again be citizens of the United States with their former privileges.”13

  Up north, noisy festivities made reference to the victorious Union, Confederate defeat, and the end of slavery. In Gorham, Maine, someone hung a likeness of Jefferson Davis in hoopskirt and boots, topped by an image of a black woman holding an American flag. “What a blessed 4th,” wrote Elizabeth Cabot of Boston. “Slavery gone. War at an end. Victory achieved.” But notes of warning still sounded in the North. At an abolitionist picnic in Massachusetts, the writer and escaped slave William Wells Brown declared in counterpoint that the war had ended too soon, for without suffrage would come a “new form of slavery,” his people “at the mercy of the tyrants of the South.” Frances Harper, the activist and poet (born a free woman in Maryland), together with Wendell Phillips, vowed, “No reconstruction without negro suffrage.” Among African Americans north and south, there were few celebrations without reference to justice as yet unfulfilled.14

  More immediate justice could be found in the verdicts rendered upon Booth’s conspirators on July 5, 1865. The seven men and Mary Surratt had been held in custody since late April, and their trial had begun in Washington soon after Lincoln’s burial, in a courtroom adjacent to the prisoners’ cells. Like Sarah Browne and Rodney Dorman, people everywhere followed the proceedings closely. “The great Conspiracy Trial is still in progress,” wrote the minister James Ward in his diary, with “every day’s proceedings developing facts of thrilling interest, and showing more and more plainly the diabolical nature and purposes of the Rebellion.” Marian Hooper had come from Boston to watch the Grand Review and on the same visit attended the trial two days in a row, squeezing into the crowd of spectators. “The evidence is not very interesting,” she wrote, “but it is to see the prisoners.” Mary Surratt hid her face behind a fan, Hooper noted, while Lewis Powell appeared as “handsome but utterly brutal.” On the other side, Confederates were infuriated when Judge Holt attempted to prove that Jefferson Davis and other leaders were behind the plot. “If this thing goes on, women will be hanged for having Booth’s photograph in their possession,” one rebel fumed.15

  All eight defendants were pronounced guilty. The military tribunal sentenced four of them to death: George Atzerodt, the man who lost his nerve to kill Vice President Johnson; Lewis Powell, Seward’s attacker; David Herold, the man who had guarded Powell’s horse that night; and Mary Surratt, the widowed boardinghouse-keeper. Three more were sentenced to life in prison: Samuel Mudd, the doctor who set Booth’s broken bone after he escaped from Ford’s Theatre; and plotters Samuel Arnold and Michael O’Laughlen. Edman Spangler, who had held Booth’s horse outside the theater, was sentenced to six years behind bars. (John Surratt, Mary’s son, would be arrested in 1866, with a trial ending in a hung jury. In 1869, President Johnson would pardon Arnold and Mudd; by then, O’Laughlen had died of yellow fever. That same year, Johnson granted permission for the body of John Wilkes Booth to be released to his family, who reinterred him in a Baltimore cemetery.)

  The four executions took place on July 7, before a small, ticketed crowd on the grounds of the Washington Arsenal, with Mary Surratt the first woman to be executed by the federal government. Lincoln’s mourners divided over her guilt, but for Confederates and Copperheads all the verdicts were yet another blow. Proslavery Washingtonian William Owner called the hangings a shocking tragedy, while from Cincinnati an anonymous Copperhead wrote to Andrew Johnson to say that the new president had proven himself “not worth a god dam more then old Lincoln Was.” Judge Holt had failed to implicate Confederate leaders, but the verdicts still felt like a triumph for Lincoln’s mourners. “What a sanguinary tribute to the merciful Lincoln!” Anna Lowell wrote in her diary. She remained troubled, though, and not only because of her opposition to capital punishment. The executions could neither bring back the slain chief nor “compensate for the unjust & weak policy” of President Johnson. His plans for reconstructing the rebel states, she wrote, might well “nullify all our victories.”16

  MOURNERS WANTED TO BELIEVE THAT God had permitted the assassination of Abraham Lincoln so that an even more glorious nation could emerge from the ashes of the Civil War, but the immediate postwar world without Lincoln was turning out to be anything but glorious. “Let us not be in too much haste in the work of restoration,” Frederick Douglass had warned on the very day of the president’s death. “Let us not remember our enemies and disenfranchise our friends,” he had said then, but that was exactly what was coming to pass in the former Confederate states under Johnson’s program of Presidential Reconstruction, with voting rights reserved for white men only. On Saint Helena Island, free black men and women saw their former masters, once refugees, returning under Johnson’s pardon proclamation. “They no longer pray for the President—our President, as they used to call Lincoln,” a northern teacher wrote that autumn. “They keep an ominous silence and are very sad and troubled.” Anna Ferris had welcomed Union troops home to Delaware over the summer, grateful for peace, but by winter she was disgusted with Johnson’s “infamous treachery,” discouraged over the renewed “armed antagonism,” and immensely anxious for the nation’s future.17

  Four of the conspirators swing from the gallows in Washington, on July 7, 1865. This photograph shows the hooded and bound George Atzerodt (assigned to kill Vice President Johnson), Lewis Powell (William Seward’s attacker), David Herold (who waited outside the Seward residence until the screams inside scared him away), and Mary Surratt, far left (the widow whose properties sheltered the conspirators). With the execution completed, the small crowd of nonmilitary onlookers begins to depart.

  LC-DIG-cwpb-04230, Prints and Photographs Division, Library of Congress.

  If Lincoln’s mourners were unhappy, so too were his antagonists. The president’s gleeful enemies had tried to convince themselves that the assassination would vindicate their defeat on the battlefield, maybe even that it was God’s doing, but now it seemed they had been wrong, for the postwar world, even without the tyrant Lincoln, was turning out to be a dreadful place—maybe the late president would have been their best friend after all. Just as Albert Browne observed on his coastal tour, some white southerners were exhausted and ready to give up. “I do not write often now,” South Carolina plantation mistress Mary Chesnut explained to her diary in the summer of 1865, “not for want of something to say, but from a loathing of all I see and hear. Why dwell upon it?” Others could not help but dwell upon it. “Oh! Oh! Just to contemplate the miserable changes that four years have brought to our happy country,” Amanda Edmunds exclaimed in her Virginia journal, writing as if the Confederacy still existed. It was “enough to run the strongest crazy.” In Louisiana, Sarah Wadley had no choice but to perform her own household labor now that her slaves had left, and she did so in a cloud of sadness. “Oh melancholy months, months in which we have learned what it is to be subjugated, to lose our country and the great glory of freedom,” she wrote, following the pattern of casting her people as the slaves of Yankee rulers. That summer too, John Henderson, studying law in North Carolina, picked up the diary he had neglected for six months. “Last December I was a citizen of a free country,” he wrote, “now I am a subject of a most grinding despotism.”18

  At the same time, though, other erstwhile Confederates believed that the glee over Lincoln’s death had been well placed, that something better was indeed in store for those suffering God’
s chastisement in defeat. Zillah Brandon hadn’t written in her diary since late 1864 when she picked up the volume again in the summer of 1865. Four of her sons had fought in the war, and two had died, and now Brandon extolled the noble soldiers in gray, so recently “fighting for our countrys rights, the liberties of their wives and children”—and therein lay her hope: the fight was not yet over. True, Brandon described her countrymen and women as “despoiled of every right claimed by a free people” in the face of northern occupation, but she also proclaimed that the “patriotism of 76 is burning in our souls,” confident that God remained on the side of white people fighting for revolutionary freedom, a freedom that depended on black subjugation.19

  Former Confederates knew they would have to work hard to re-create the world they had lost when they lost the war. “I have been talking with some of our best citizens here and they are very uneasy about the state of affairs,” William Carter wrote to his father from Petersburg, Virginia, in the late summer of 1865. The Carters had been wealthy planters, and President Johnson now seemed to be the “only hope of the South,” he wrote. Carter worried, however, about the way the Republican Congress was crossing Johnson, and he knew that white southerners would have to stand up for the new executive in the face of pressure from the radicals. With foreboding, he warned his father, “I will tell you when I see you what I do not like to write.” At the end of 1865, the Thirteenth Amendment would become part of the U.S. Constitution, legally abolishing slavery; perhaps Carter intended to speak to his father about the white violence necessary to suppress black freedom.20