Mourning Lincoln

by Martha Hodes

  The Assassination

  By a 2011 count, there were fewer than ten books about Lincoln’s assassination written by professional historians out of ten dozen such books (Edward Steers Jr., review of Bill O’Reilly and Martin Dugard, Killing Lincoln: The Shocking Assassination That Changed America Forever, in North and South: The Official Magazine of the Civil War Society 13 [November 2011], 61). On Lincoln’s assassination, see Richard Wightman Fox, Lincoln’s Body: A Cultural History (New York: W. W. Norton, 2015); Thomas A. Bogar, Backstage at the Lincoln Assassination: The Untold Story of the Actors and Stagehands at Ford’s Theatre (Washington, D.C.: Regnery History, 2013); Frederick Hatch, Protecting President Lincoln: The Security Effort, the Thwarted Plots and the Disaster at Ford’s Theatre (Jefferson, N.C.: McFarland, 2011); Harold Holzer et al., eds., The Lincoln Assassination: Crime and Punishment, Myth and Memory (New York: Fordham University Press, 2010); Edward Steers Jr., The Lincoln Assassination Encyclopedia (New York: Harper Perennial, 2010); James L. Swanson, Manhunt: The Twelve-Day Chase for Lincoln’s Killer (New York: HarperCollins, 2006); Thomas Goodrich and Debra Goodrich, The Darkest Dawn: Lincoln, Booth, and the Great American Tragedy (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2005); Michael W. Kauffman, American Brutus: John Wilkes Booth and the Lincoln Conspiracies (New York: Random House, 2004); Elizabeth D. Leonard, Lincoln’s Avengers: Justice, Revenge, and Reunion after the Civil War (New York: W. W. Norton, 2004); Edward Steers Jr., Blood on the Moon: The Assassination of Abraham Lincoln (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2001); Richard Bak, The Day Lincoln Was Shot: An Illustrated Chronicle (Dallas, Tex.: Taylor, 1998); Carolyn L. Harrell, When the Bells Tolled for Lincoln: Southern Reaction to the Assassination (Macon, Ga.: Mercer University Press, 1997); Don E. Fehrenbacher, “The Death of Lincoln,” in Fehrenbacher, Lincoln in Text and Context: Collected Essays (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1987), 164–77; Dorothy Meserve Kunhardt and Philip B. Kunhardt Jr., Twenty Days: A Narrative in Text and Pictures of the Assassination of Abraham Lincoln and the Twenty Days and Nights That Followed (North Hollywood, Calif.: Newcastle, 1985); William Hanchett, The Lincoln Murder Conspiracies (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1983); Thomas Reed Turner, Beware the People Weeping: Public Opinion and the Assassination of Abraham Lincoln (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1982); and George S. Bryan, The Great American Myth: The True Story of Lincoln’s Murder (1940; reprint, Chicago: Americana House, 1990). See also Bill O’Reilly and Martin Dugard, Killing Lincoln: The Shocking Assassination That Changed America Forever (New York: Henry Holt, 2011), in tandem with Edward Steers Jr.’s review in North and South: The Official Magazine of the Civil War Society 13 (November 2011), 61–63. And see the in-progress online collection of primary sources (created too late for my research), “Remembering Lincoln: A Digital Collection of Responses to His Assassination,” Ford’s Theatre, Washington, D.C., fords.org/remembering-lincoln.

  For books on other topics that treat the assassination in some depth, see John McKee Barr, Loathing Lincoln: An American Tradition from the Civil War to the Present (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2014); John R. Neff, Honoring the Civil War Dead: Commemoration and the Problem of Reconciliation (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2005); William C. Harris, Lincoln’s Last Months (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2004); Barry Schwartz, Abraham Lincoln and the Forge of National Memory (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000); Merrill D. Peterson, Lincoln in American Memory (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994); and Michael Davis, The Image of Lincoln in the South (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1971).

  For biographies and other books about Lincoln that treat the assassination briefly, see Eric Foner, The Fiery Trial: Abraham Lincoln and American Slavery (New York: W. W. Norton, 2010); Catherine Clinton, Mrs. Lincoln: A Life (New York: HarperCollins, 2009); Ronald C. White Jr., A. Lincoln: A Biography (New York: Random House, 2009); Michael Burlingame, Abraham Lincoln: A Life, 2 vols. (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2008); Richard Carwardine, Lincoln: A Life of Purpose and Power (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2006); Doris Kearns Goodwin, Team of Rivals: The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2005); William E. Gienapp, Abraham Lincoln and Civil War America (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002); and David Herbert Donald, Lincoln (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1995).

  For related articles, see Chandra Manning, “The Shifting Terrain of Attitudes toward Abraham Lincoln and Emancipation,” Journal of the Abraham Lincoln Association 34 (Winter 2013), 18–39; Thomas P. Lowry, “Not Everybody Mourned Lincoln’s Death,” in The Lincoln Assassination: Crime and Punishment, Myth and Memory, ed. Harold Holzer et al. (New York: Fordham University Press, 2010), 95–114; Justin Carisio, “‘Every Soul Shudders’: Delaware Reacts to Lincoln’s Death,” Delaware History 32 (2008), 171–86; Steven J. Ramold, “‘We Should Have Killed Them All’: The Violent Reaction of Union Soldiers to the Assassination of Abraham Lincoln,” Journal of Illinois History 10 (2007), 27–48; Jeffry D. Wert, “‘A Silent Gloom Fell upon Us Like a Pall,’” Civil War Times 44 (January 2006), 50–56; Roger Platizky, “Abraham Lincoln’s Assassination in Victorian England and America,” Lamar Journal of the Humanities 27 (2002), 23–31; Roger L. Rosentreter, “‘Our Lincoln Is Dead,’” Michigan History Magazine 84 (March/April 2000), 28–39; James Marten, “‘I Think It’s Just as Mean as It Can Be’: Northern Children Respond to Lincoln’s Assassination,” Lincoln Herald 101 (1999), 117–21; Trevor K. Plante, “The Shady Side of the Family Tree: Civil War Union Court-Martial Case Files,” Prologue 30 (Winter 1998), archives.gov/publications/prologue/1998/winter/union-court-mar tials.html; Mark H. Dunkelman, “Alas! He Is Gone,” Lincoln Herald 94 (1992), 46–48; Barry Schwartz, “Mourning and the Making of a Sacred Symbol: Durkheim and the Lincoln Assassination,” Social Forces 70 (1991), 343–64; Barry Schwartz, “The Reconstruction of Abraham Lincoln,” in Collective Remembering, ed. David Middleton and Derek Edwards (London: Sage, 1990), 81–107; John M. Barr, “The Tyrannicide’s Reception: Responses in Texas to Lincoln’s Assassination,” Lincoln Herald 91 (1989), 58–64; Don E. Fehrenbacher, “The Anti-Lincoln Tradition,” in Fehrenbacher, Lincoln in Text and Context: Collected Essays (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1987), 197–213; R. L. Reid, “Louisiana and Lincoln’s Assassination: Reactions in a Southern State,” Southern Historian 6 (1985), 20–27; Allan Peskin, “Putting the ‘Baboon’ To Rest: Observations of a Radical Republican on Lincoln’s Funeral Train,” Lincoln Herald 79 (1977), 26–28; Lowell H. Harrison, “An Australian Reaction to Lincoln’s Death,” Lincoln Herald 78 (1976), 12–17; Kathe van Winden, “The Assassination of Abraham Lincoln: Its Effect in California,” Journal of the West 4 (April 1965), 211–30; James P. Jones, “‘Lincoln’s Avengers’: The Assassination and Sherman’s Army,” Lincoln Herald 64 (1962), 185–90; Martin Abbott, “Southern Reaction to Lincoln’s Assassination,” Abraham Lincoln Quarterly 7 (1952), 111–27; Bell Irvin Wiley, “Billy Yank and Abraham Lincoln,” Abraham Lincoln Quarterly 6 (1950), 103–20; and [Editorial Department], “The Assassination of Abraham Lincoln,” Annals of Iowa 4 (1900), 467–68.

  On Ford’s Theatre, see Patrick O’Brien, “Ford’s Theatre and the White House,” White House History 30 [n.d.], 23–33. On Henry Rathbone and Clara Harris, see Mark E. Neely Jr., The Abraham Lincoln Encyclopedia (New York: McGraw Hill, 1982), 256–57; and [no author], “Major Rathbone and Miss Harris: Guests of the Lincolns in the Ford’s Theatre Box,” Lincoln Lore 1602 (August 1971), 1–3; and see Thomas Mallon’s wonderful historical novel Henry and Clara (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1994). On William Seward, see Walter Stahr, Seward: Lincoln’s Indispensable Man (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2012). On the trial and fates of the conspirators, see Elizabeth D. Leonard, Lincoln’s Avengers: Justice, Revenge, and Reunion after the Civil War (New York: W. W. Norton, 2004); and Elizabeth D. Leonard, “Mary Surratt and the Plot to Assassinate Abraham Lincoln,” in The War Was You and Me: Civilians in the Am
erican Civil War, ed. Joan E. Cashin (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2002), 286–309. Arguing for an official Confederate conspiracy, see William A. Tidwell, April ’65: Confederate Covert Action in the American Civil War (Kent, Ohio: Kent State University Press, 1995), and William A. Tidwell et al., Come Retribution: The Confederate Secret Service and the Assassination of Lincoln (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1988). On the 1861 attempt to assassinate Lincoln, see Daniel Stashower, The Hour of Peril: The Secret Plot to Murder Lincoln before the Civil War (New York: Minotaur, 2013).

  On communication and rumors, see Richard R. John, Network Nation: Inventing American Telecommunications (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2010); Daniel Walker Howe, What Hath God Wrought: The Transformation of America, 1815–1848 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007); Alice Fahs, “Northern and Southern Worlds of Print,” in Perspectives in American Book History, ed. Scott Casper et al. (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2002), 195–222; and Jean-Noël Kapferer, Rumors: Uses, Interpretations, and Images (New Brunswick: Transaction, 1990). On the telegraph, see David Hochfelder, The Telegraph in America, 1832–1920 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2012); Robert Luther Thompson, Wiring a Continent: The History of the Telegraph Industry in the United States (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1947); and David Homer Bates, Lincoln in the Telegraph Office: Recollections of the United States Military Telegraph Corps during the Civil War (New York: Century, 1907). On imagined universality, see Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism, rev. ed. (New York: Verso, 1991). On reading faces in the nineteenth century, see Karen Halttunen, Confidence Men and Painted Women: A Study of Middle-Class Culture in America, 1830–1870 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1982), 153–90. On assassination sermons, see David B. Chesebrough, “No Sorrow Like Our Sorrow”: Northern Protestant Ministers and the Assassination of Lincoln (Kent, Ohio: Kent State University Press, 1994); Rollin W. Quimby, “Lincoln’s Character as Described in Sermons at the Time of His Death,” Lincoln Herald 69 (1967), 178–86 (with an objectionable last line excoriating the radical Republicans); Charles J. Stewart, “The Pulpit and the Assassination of Lincoln,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 50 (1964), 299–307; Jay Monaghan, “An Analysis of Lincoln’s Funeral Sermons,” Indiana Magazine of History 41 (1945), 31–44; and Chester Forrester Dunham, The Attitude of the Northern Clergy toward the South, 1860–1865 (Toledo, Ohio: Gray, 1942). On Easter decorations, see Leigh Eric Schmidt, “The Easter Parade: Piety, Fashion, and Display,” Religion and American Culture 4 (1994), 135–64. On memorabilia and relics, see Teresa Barnett, Sacred Relics: Pieces of the Past in Nineteenth-Century America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013); Ellen Gruber Garvey, Writing with Scissors: American Scrapbooks from the Civil War to the Harlem Renaissance (New York: Oxford University Press, 2013); Michael DeGruccio, “Letting the War Slip through Our Hands: Material Culture and the Weakness of Words in the Civil War Era,” in Weirding the War: Stories from the Civil War’s Ragged Edges, ed. Stephen Berry (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2011), 15–35; Helen R. Purtle, “Lincoln Memorabilia in the Medical Museum of the Armed Forces Institute of Pathology,” Bulletin of the History of Medicine 32 (1958), 68–74; and Matthew Dennis, American Relics and the Politics of Public Memory, forthcoming. On Lincoln’s birthday, see Matthew Dennis, Red, White, and Blue Letter Days: An American Calendar (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2002). On the assassination of President James A. Garfield, see Candice Millard, Destiny of the Republic: A Tale of Madness, Medicine, and the Murder of a President (New York: Doubleday, 2011); on the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, see Martha Hodes, “‘Where Were You When You Heard?’” in The Day Kennedy Died: Fifty Years Later: LIFE Remembers the Man and the Moment (New York: Time Home Entertainment, 2013), 96–99; Ellen Fitzpatrick, Letters to Jackie: Condolences for a Grieving Nation (New York: HarperCollins, 2010); John B. Jovich, Reflections on JFK’s Assassination: 250 Famous Americans Remember November 22, 1963 (Kensington, Md.: Woodbine House, 1968); William Manchester, The Death of a President: November 20–November 25, 1863 (New York: Harper and Row, 1967); Theodore H. White, The Making of the President 1964 (New York: Atheneum, 1965); and “Walter Cronkite Announces Death of JFK,” youtube.com/watch?v=RE-TCzIHrLI. For September 11, 2001, headlines, see “Today’s Front Pages, Wednesday September 12, 2001,” Newseum.org,newseum.org/todaysfrontpages/default_archive.asp?fpArchive=091201.

  Death and Mourning

  On death in the Civil War, see especially Drew Gilpin Faust, This Republic of Suffering: Death and the American Civil War (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2008). And see Ian Finseth, “The Civil War Dead: Realism and the Problem of Anonymity,” American Literary History 25 (2013), 535–62; J. David Book, “‘Death Is Every Where Present,’” Vermont History 79 (2011), 26–57; Mark S. Schantz, Awaiting the Heavenly Country: The Civil War and America’s Culture of Death (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2008); and John R. Neff, Honoring the Civil War Dead: Commemoration and the Problem of Reconciliation (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2005). See also Megan Kate Nelson, Ruin Nation: Destruction and the American Civil War (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2012); and Frances M. Clarke, War Stories: Suffering and Sacrifice in the Civil War North (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011). On the numbers of Civil War dead, see J. David Hacker, “A Census-Based Count of the Civil War Dead,” Civil War History 57 (2011), 307–48, including James M. McPherson, “Commentary on ‘A Census-Based Count of the Civil War Dead’”; note that it has proven impossible to estimate Union versus Confederate numbers. See also Nicholas Marshall, “The Great Exaggeration: Death and the Civil War,” Journal of the Civil War Era 4 (2014), 3–27. On mourning practices and ideas about death, see Sarah Nehama, In Death Lamented: The Tradition of Anglo-American Mourning Jewelry, exh. cat. (Boston: Massachusetts Historical Society, 2012); Suzanne E. Smith, To Serve the Living: Funeral Directors and the African American Way of Death (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2010); Vincent Brown, The Reaper’s Garden: Death and Power in the World of Atlantic Slavery (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2008); Lucy E. Frank, ed., Representations of Death in Nineteenth-Century U.S. Writing and Culture (Burlington, Vt.: Ashgate, 2007); Robert V. Wells, Facing the ‘King of Terrors’: Death and Society in an American Community, 1750–1990 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2000); Pat Jalland, Death in the Victorian Family (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996); Gary Laderman, The Sacred Remains: American Attitudes toward Death, 1799–1883 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1996); Colleen McDannell and Bernhard Lang, Heaven: A History (1988; reprint, New Haven: Yale University Press, 2001); Lou Taylor, Mourning Dress: A Costume and Social History (London: Allen and Unwin, 1983); Karen Halttunen, Confidence Men and Painted Women: A Study of Middle-Class Culture in America, 1830–1870 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1982), 124–52; Philippe Ariès, The Hour of Our Death, trans.

  Helen Weaver (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1981); David R. Roediger, “And Die in Dixie: Funerals, Death, and Heaven in the Slave Community, 1700–1865,” Massachusetts Review 22 (1981), 163–83; Martha V. Pike and Janice Gray Armstrong, eds., A Time to Mourn: Expressions of Grief in Nineteenth-Century America (Stony Brook, N.Y.: Museums at Stony Brook, 1980); Philippe Ariès, Western Attitudes toward Death: From the Middle Ages to the Present, trans. Patricia M. Ranum (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1974); Ann Douglas, “Heaven Our Home: Consolation Literature in the Northern United States, 1830–1880,” American Quarterly 26 (1974), 496–515; and Lewis O. Saum, “Death in the Popular Mind of Pre–Civil War America,” American Quarterly 26 (1974), 477–95. On embalming, see Glenna R. Schroeder-Lein, The Encyclopedia of Civil War Medicine (Armonk, N.Y.: M. E. Sharpe, 2008); Edward C. Johnson et al., “The Origin and History of Embalming,” in Embalming: History, Theory, and Practice, ed. Robert G. Mayer (New York: McGraw-Hill, 2000); and F. L. Sarmiento, “Ancient and Modern Embalming,” Beadle
’s Monthly: A Magazine of To-Day 3 (January 1867), 408–15. On the funeral of George Washington, see Jerry Hawn, “The Funeral of George Washington,” Mall Times 1 (September 2007), 1; and Gerald E. Kahler, “Washington in Glory, America in Tears: The Nation Mourns the Death of George Washington, 1799–1800” (PhD diss., College of William and Mary, 2003). See also Sarah J. Purcell, “All That Remains of Henry Clay,” Common-Place 12 (April 2012), common-place.org/vol-12/no-03/purcell/. On Lincoln’s funeral in Washington and the funeral train, see, in addition to sources about the assassination, Martin S. Nowak, The White House in Mourning: Deaths and Funerals of Presidents in Office (Jefferson, N.C.: McFarland, 2010); Richard E. Sloan, “Abraham Lincoln’s New York City Funeral,” in The Lincoln Assassination: Crime and Punishment, Myth and Memory, ed. Harold Holzer et al. (New York: Fordham University Press, 2010), 55–93; Scott D. Trostel, The Lincoln Funeral Train: The Final Journey and National Funeral for Abraham Lincoln (Fletcher, Ohio: Cam-Tech, 2002); Ralph G. Newman, “In This Sad World of Ours, Sorrow Comes to All”: A Timetable for the Lincoln Funeral Train (Springfield: State of Illinois, 1965); and Victor Searcher, The Farewell to Lincoln (New York: Abingdon, 1965). On the railroads, see Richard White, Railroaded: The Transcontinentals and the Making of Modern America (New York: W. W. Norton, 2011); and Douglas J. Puffert, “The Standardization of Track Gauge on North American Railways,” Journal of Economic History 60 (2000), 933–60.

  Everyday Life

  On the study of everyday life, my ideas were deeply influenced by Robin Bernstein and Samuel Zipp’s seminar, “Everyday Life: The Textures and Politics of the Ordinary, Persistent, and Repeated,” Charles Warren Center for Studies in American History, Harvard University, 2012–13. See Paul Steege et al., “The History of Everyday Life: A Second Chapter,” Journal of Modern History 80 (2008), 358–78; Geoff Eley, “Labor History, Social History, ‘Alltagsgeschichte’: Experience, Culture, and the Politics of the Everyday—A New Direction for German Social History?” Journal of Modern History 61 (1989), 297–343; and Alf Lüdtke, ed., The History of Everyday Life: Reconstructing Historical Experiences and Ways of Life, trans. William Templer (1989; Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1995). More specifically, see Peter John Brownlee et al., eds., Home Front: Daily Life in the Civil War North (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013); James Marten, ed., Children and Youth during the Civil War Era (New York: New York University Press, 2012); Anya Jabour, Topsy-Turvy: How the Civil War Turned the World Upside Down for Southern Children (Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 2010); Alice Fahs, The Imagined Civil War: Popular Literature of the North and South, 1861–1865 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2001); James Marten, The Children’s Civil War (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1998); and J. Matthew Gallman, The North Fights the Civil War: The Home Front (Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 1994).