Mourning Lincoln

by Martha Hodes

  Lincoln’s assassination continued to figure in the white-on-black violence in the South after Appomattox. Black soldiers occupying Memphis in the spring of 1866 were giving a cheer for the slain president when a white policeman taunted them with the words, “Your old father, Abe Lincoln, is dead and damned.” That confrontation touched off a riot and massacre in which nearly fifty African Americans died, half again as many were wounded, and white men made the rape of black women a tactic of intimidation. By 1866 too, the Ku Klux Klan, created by Confederate veterans, was riding through southern states, its members drawn from all classes of white southerners. In these ways did rebel dreams of retribution begin to come to fruition.21

  Yet the era of Reconstruction simultaneously brought unprecedented gains for Lincoln’s black mourners and their most radical white allies. In 1867, in the face of so much recalcitrance and brutality, moderate and radical Republicans in Congress joined forces against Andrew Johnson, exchanging presidential Reconstruction for a much more far-reaching program that would establish black suffrage and political participation, labor contracts and education, all overseen by the Union army and the federal Freedmen’s Bureau. Here—if at times faltering from northern racism—was realized much of the vision of African Americans, as formulated in their petitions to President Johnson in the wake of Lincoln’s assassination. Here was the “strong military government” that Albert Browne had wanted “for years to come.” By 1870, the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments had become part of the U.S. Constitution, enshrining the rights of citizenship for all African Americans and the right of suffrage for all black men.

  With the radical program fully under way, Sarah Browne excoriated President Johnson as an odious and disloyal criminal; at the end of 1868, Lincoln’s successor had lived up to Sarah’s worst fears by pardoning all Confederates once and for all, including Jefferson Davis and Robert E. Lee. Meanwhile, white southerners met radical Reconstruction with horrific violence, and Sarah read the newspapers with mounting dread, writing in her diary about “Kuklux Klan outrages.” In Florida, the Klansmen called themselves the “Young Men’s Democratic Club,” and when President Ulysses S. Grant launched an investigation across the South in the early 1870s, African American men and women from Jacksonville came to testify about the gruesome terrorism they had suffered. Whether or not Rodney Dorman joined in, he no doubt appreciated the activities of his white compatriots. Although Dorman had intended to cease his diary-keeping when the war ended, he kept on writing and kept on vilifying the Yankees, still dissatisfied with their “outrages, monstrosities, & knaveries.” Jacksonville hadn’t yet become a comfortable home, and with the “new order of things,” as he put it, Dorman found no solace anywhere. In 1873, he wanted only to “go away & hide.”22

  In November 1876 came the presidential election that would overturn the mighty experiment of radical Reconstruction. By then Rodney Dorman was again working as an attorney and a judge, and before the election he headed north to visit friends and relatives he hadn’t seen in decades. Autumn found him at the Centennial Exhibition in Philadelphia, fulminating into his diary about the Yankee braggarts and their World’s Fair, their pompous ideas about progress and civilization on full display in a lavish spectacle. A sculpture entitled Freed Slave surely infuriated him, but Dorman might have found satisfaction in the concession called “The South,” which offered musical entertainment by “old-time plantation ‘darkies.’” In October he was ready to head home, “or what I call so,” he added with his customary dejection.23

  Republican Rutherford B. Hayes ran for president on the twin vows of black equality and national peace, which by then were nothing less than a fantastical, oxymoronic impossibility. His Democratic opponent, Samuel Tilden, won the vote count, but there had been so much violent intimidation at the polls that Republicans disputed the outcome in South Carolina, Louisiana, and Florida. In the hammered-out compromise, Hayes took office on the condition that the last federal troops in the old Confederacy be rendered inactive. The South was “redeemed” from Yankee rule and Reconstruction was over, yet even then Rodney Dorman railed against the “lost presidential election,” furious that Tilden had been denied office. Nor did Democrats earn his praise for their “imbecility” in agreeing to the compromise. Up in Salem, Sarah Browne was no less anxious about the nation’s future. “I fear for the oppressed, whose shackles are hardly broken,” she wrote. “Would peace & harmony could reign!” she cried, only hoping that President Hayes would act honorably.24

  The end of Reconstruction left white southerners free to reassert unchecked violence for the sake of restoring the world they had never stopped fighting to get back. What was more, many exhausted white northerners now complied, eager for reconciliation. Even Albert Browne’s zeal had run its course. By 1877, he had given up on the idea of black soldiers and abolitionist white officers ruling the former Confederacy. Thoroughly disenchanted with the so-called carpetbaggers (northerners in the South) and scalawags (southern white Republicans), Albert condemned them all as corrupt, the “vilest of the vile.” By then his ideals about the natural virtues of free-labor capitalism had been eclipsed too by a wage-labor proletariat at war with men of industry, nowhere more apparent than in the railroad strikes that roiled the nation in 1877, with workers fighting the might of their employers in the streets. Albert had been tired in the autumn of 1865, but now he was entirely worn out, ready to reconcile with the old Confederates, “showing them,” he wrote to Sarah while on a trip to New York, “that we are at one with them in trying to build them up & restore prosperity.” Whether he understood that the prosperity of white southerners would leave some African Americans in conditions akin to enslavement is unclear. While Sarah hoped meekly for the best for former slaves, Albert hoped only that President Hayes would step up to fight government corruption. Though preferable to the Democratic Party that represented still-enraged former Confederates, the Party of Lincoln now changed course, turning away from racial equality.25

  The restoration of white supremacy turned out to be a protracted process. Although the majority of Lincoln’s white mourners were too tired, too apathetic, or ultimately too bound by racism to match the determination of their former enemies, African Americans and their radical white friends continued to fight valiantly for justice, thereby forestalling the visions of former Confederates—those who were determined to rise again after defeat, to seek retribution in a “second war for independence,” as Cloe Whittle had put it, to “renew the struggle and throw off the hateful yoke,” in Emma LeConte’s words. For this reason, Rodney Dorman’s rage burned on past the end of Reconstruction. When Thomas Wentworth Higginson visited Jacksonville in 1878, he found African Americans maintaining their own church and school in the bustling city. He saw black men working in the fishing and lumber trades, and black families working their own land on the Saint Johns River. In the mid-1880s, Charlotte Forten came to Jacksonville with her husband, the minister Francis Grimké. Forten was the black student who had befriended Nellie Browne as a schoolgirl in Salem in the 1850s. As a young woman during the war, Forten had traveled to the Sea Islands to work with the freedpeople, and now she arrived in Jacksonville to teach black children, work with a freedmen’s committee, and organize black women into a missionary society, while her husband preached at a black church.26

  All of that no doubt infuriated Rodney Dorman too, and even as he traveled north to visit relatives for a second time, he continued to write in his diary about ongoing “warfare” with Yankees, portraying the new northerners in town as even worse than the abolitionists and missionaries he had so deeply despised twenty years earlier. As for the black men who continued to exercise their right to vote until the turn of the century—when whites effected near-complete black disfranchisement in the South—Dorman could surmise only that they were political slaves of the Republican Party. Rodney Dorman lived in Jacksonville for the rest of his life but never again made a home for himself there. Though he eventually moved back to the center
of town, he only rented rooms in various boardinghouses. He last appeared in the city directory in 1887, at seventy years old.27

  Like Dorman, who reread and added commentary to his past diary entries during the post-Reconstruction decades, others who had once despaired at defeat also turned back the pages of their wartime journals. For Martha Crawford, word of Lee’s surrender had left her “stunned” and “crushed,” her heart torn with grief. “The two countries cannot continue as one,” she had written in 1865, vowing that “we’ll await our opportunity and try them again.” Sixteen years later, as Crawford reviewed her own words, she paused. “How time and reflection modify our opinions and soften our emotions!” she wrote in 1881. Though time and reflection no doubt played a role, Crawford’s uplifted heart resulted more from the fact that her compatriots were by then on the road to re-creating a regime of white supremacy. In the 1890s, Richmond resident Lucy Fletcher perused her end-of-war diary, where she had written in despair about “negro & Yankee, Yankee & negro, ad nauseum.” Nearly thirty years later, Fletcher took a moment to explain that her bitterness had arisen from the “cruel injustice & unreasonable persecution to which we were subjected during those days of Reconstruction, that ‘Decade of Horror’ worse even than the war itself.” To Fletcher’s satisfaction, the 1890s saw the near-complete process of segregation and disfranchisement, along with the height of the lynching epidemic, which activist Ida B. Wells (born into slavery during the war) explained was the result of white fury for “giving the Afro-American his freedom, the ballot box and the Civil Rights Law.” Confederate veteran John Johnston, leafing through his Civil War diary in 1905, came across an entry from April 1865 in which he had prayed to God that the rumors of Lincoln’s assassination were true. Forty years later, Johnson added a note: “This was a sincere prayer,” he wrote, “and, I think, included Lincoln’s death and all.”28

  Sarah and Albert Browne thought back too. For Sarah, the most personally significant aspect of the Civil War years was the loss of her daughter Nellie, in 1864. Forever after, Sarah continued to record Nellie’s birthday and the anniversary of her death, each time punctuated with phrases like “Oh! God!” or “agony—our Gethsemane.” One year Sarah wrote of reliving “each one of the closing days of our darling’s precious life,” while Albert recorded the “very hour!” of Nellie’s passing, making note of his restless sleep and troubled dreams, as he struggled still with the incomprehensible will of God. For her part, even as she gazed in pain at a photograph of her daughter frozen in youth, Sarah tried to assure herself that the angel Nellie had been spared all earthly trials and that they would meet once again in the world beyond. “Oh! the agony of that surrender!” she wrote in 1881, on the seventeenth anniversary of Nellie’s death.29

  Sarah Browne also wrote about politics, though in all the many postwar volumes of her diaries, there is only a single commemoration of Abraham Lincoln, when, for an unexplained reason, she noted his birthday in 1878. When Republican James Garfield narrowly won the presidency in 1880, Sarah exclaimed into her journal, “Our anxieties over! The country saved!” The following summer, soon after Sarah had recorded what would have been Nellie’s fortieth birthday, President Garfield was shot in a Washington railway station. Wounded gravely, he lingered until September, and when he died, Sarah called up a gloom that should have felt familiar. “We are all sad—sad—sad,” she wrote, naming Garfield as “him, who was so dear to the nation—to the whole world.” All around her, people could “read—talk—think of nothing but our heavy loss!” she claimed, likening the president to a father or brother. Sarah recorded the progress of the funeral train that carried Garfield’s body from his deathbed on the New Jersey shore to the capital, and then from the capital home to Ohio. “Never before was so much sad earnestness shown,” she wrote, as if entirely forgetting the sorrow that had seemed universal in the spring of 1865. She didn’t even mention Abraham Lincoln.30

  Three years later, in 1884, Sarah celebrated the election of Grover Cleveland, the first Democrat to occupy the White House since the Civil War. It had been a close vote, and Cleveland won by the slimmest of margins, dwelling as he did on Republican corruption. “The electoral count in New York is over and Cleveland is elected!” Sarah wrote. “Let the people now be one family—no north, no south. Let us give a full meaning to the word ‘United.’” Sarah had nothing to say about race or violence in the South, or, for that matter, in the North either. She had nothing to say about abolition or emancipation or freedom, nothing to say about black landownership or education, citizenship or suffrage. Sarah and Albert Browne both died in 1885, she near seventy-five, he near eighty.31

  BACK IN DECEMBER 1865, FREDERICK Douglass had written out a speech about Abraham Lincoln, opening with thoughts of the “ominous clouds that hang on the political sky.” Douglass described the horror of the assassination, the reversal from the “wildest joy and exultation of victory” to the “dust and ashes of sorrow and mourning.” With the year drawing to a close, white mourners were now exchanging their “justly kindled wrath” for “clemency and forgiveness towards the rebels,” Douglass wrote. Slavery had been at the root of Lincoln’s murder, he maintained, and the assassination could still serve the causes of black freedom and equality by inspiring mourners to stand vigilant against the reassertion of white supremacy. Toward the end of his remarks, Douglass turned to Lincoln’s second inaugural address. Bypassing the oft-invoked directives about malice and charity, he instead wrote down the sentence about peace: “Fondly do we hope, fervently do we pray that this mighty scourge of war shall soon pass away.” Douglass kept writing, pulling the sentences from memory. “Yet if God wills it continue till all the treasure piled by two hundred and fifty years of the bondman’s unrequited toil shall have been wasted,” and “each drop of blood drawn by the lash shall have been paid for by one drawn by the sword,” then “the judgments of the Lord are true and righteous altogether.” By those words, Douglass knew, Lincoln had meant that God would not let the war end until slavery ended.32

  “Had Mr. Lincoln lived,” Frederick Douglass reflected that December, things would have turned out differently. Invoking Lincoln’s April 11 speech, with its endorsement of suffrage for black soldiers and intelligent black men, Douglass offered an assessment of the late president. “He was a progressive man, a humane man, an honorable man, and at heart an antislavery man,” Douglass wrote. “He had exhausted the resources of conciliation upon rebels and slaveholders and now looked to the principles of Liberty and justice, for the peace, security, happiness and prosperity of his country.” Then Douglass moved forcefully away from the providential story in which God had permitted Lincoln’s death for the sake of a more glorious future. “I assume therefore, had Abraham Lincoln been spared to see this day,” he wrote, “the negro of the South would have more than a hope of enfranchisement and no rebels would hold the reins of Government in any one of the late rebellious states.” Had Lincoln lived, Douglass now declared, black men would be voters in the South and former Confederates would not be back in power. Mourners must still stand vigilant against white supremacy, but optimism about divine designs had given way to a different view: Lincoln’s assassination was just plain tragic.33

  Had Lincoln lived, African Americans would have petitioned him and visited him in the White House, advancing the same demands for equality and rights that they asked of his successor. The difference was that Lincoln would have answered without Johnson’s defensiveness, ridicule, and dismissal. Lincoln’s record of words and actions all during the war, even if marked by slow deliberation, indicated that he would have listened to, absorbed, and responded to the demands of African Americans. Perhaps Douglass was right that Lincoln would ultimately have taken political power from former Confederates and given it to former slaves. No matter, with Lincoln gone, he and other radical mourners were free to reimagine Lincoln’s politics in their own image.

  Whoever else mourned for Abraham Lincoln, Frederick Douglass concluded in December 186
5, “to the colored people of the country, his death is an unspeakable calamity.” Decades later, former slaves thought back to the assassination. “Abraham Lincoln!” exclaimed eighty-five-year-old Octavia George in Oklahoma City. “I wouldn’t miss a morning getting my black arm band and placing it on in remembrance of Abraham, who was the best friend the Negroes ever had.” In Tarrant County, Texas, Ann Edwards called up that time too. “I can’t describe the emotions of the people,” she said, except that it felt “as if everyone had suddenly experienced the death of their most beloved child.” In Mississippi, James Lucas remembered the fears of reenslavement, and in Alabama, Louis Meadows recalled the freedpeople around him vowing never to return to slavery. In light of the post-Reconstruction decades of Jim Crow segregation, disfranchisement, and lynching, Lincoln’s assassination was tragic indeed.34

  And had Lincoln lived? The elderly African Americans speaking in the 1930s thought back on that question too. Louis Meadows believed that “things was hurt by Mr. Lincoln getting killed.” John Matheus, in Ohio, thought that if Lincoln had remained president, “he would have done lots of good for the colored people.” William Irving, about fifteen years old when the war ended, likewise felt sure that his people would have had an easier time of it with Lincoln as president. George Conrad of Oklahoma City said simply, “I don’t think his work was finished.” In Arkansas, near one hundred years old, Rosa Ingram was sure that Lincoln had been murdered for freeing the slaves.35

  For Lincoln’s antagonists, the assassination was either the work of a lone madman, an act of heroic patriotism, or God’s design for eventual Confederate retribution. For Lincoln’s mourners, the meaning of the assassination became more complicated in the post-Reconstruction world, the question Why? becoming unanswerable once again. If slavery had indeed been the root cause of the assassination, had God intended Lincoln’s death as a means to ensure enduring equality by showing the victors that they must remain vigilant over their vindictive enemies? Or was the assassination, as Frederick Douglass conceded, nothing more than a catastrophe that slowed the long journey toward justice?