Mourning Lincoln (10 page)

Disbelief was most intense for African Americans, whose stake in the war’s outcome and promise was so tangible. Freedpeople in the tiny settlement of Frogmore on Saint Helena Island off the South Carolina coast refused to mourn until they were certain. As the black minister there explained, “They could not think that was the truth, and they would wait and see.” For the soldiers of the Fifty-Fourth Massachusetts, the news was “too overwhelming, too lamentable, too distressing” to comprehend. Many of the men of the Twenty-Fifth U.S. Colored Troops likewise “refused to believe the report” until absolutely confirmed. On Bienville Street in New Orleans, Elizabeth Clark felt very much “agitated,” while her neighbor Mary Jones felt “very much worried” as she sat outside her door so as not to miss any further information. Mattie Jackson, an escaped slave from Missouri, called the assassination “an electric shock to my soul.” Again, the reading of countenances commenced the process of turning the incredible into the credible, of validating feelings and expression of those feelings. In Louisville, “distress was visible in every colored person’s face.”
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For some, it took a long time to concede. Like Confederates who felt time distorted and reality displaced when they learned of defeat and surrender, Lincoln’s mourners thought it must be a lie or, as freedpeople in a Virginia classroom put it, “a secesh lie.” In Baltimore, Edward Greble, a white man, was riding an omnibus when he heard someone say that the president had been assassinated, which he quickly dismissed as “a canard.” Back at his hotel, the proprietor had just been to the telegraph office, and Greble watched as the other guests remained so incredulous as to think it a joke. To Boston merchant Charles French, it all seemed like a sensational getup. It felt like a “dreadful dream,” people said, a “horrible dream” or a play on a stage. To Elizabeth Agassiz, who got the news while traveling in Brazil, it felt like “the last scene in a five act tragedy,” then “a gigantic street rumor,” then a bad dream. “Stunning,” the women’s rights reformer Susan B. Anthony wrote from Leavenworth, Kansas. Walt Whitman would soon capture these feelings in a tribute poem to the president, casting Lincoln as a ship captain, writing, “It is some dream that on the deck, / You’ve fallen cold and dead.” A lie or a joke, a sham or mere gossip, a nightmare or a show: that was how it felt. A deception, an illusion, a performance—the words people invoked conveyed all manner of the unreal. Today we might say,
I felt like I was in a movie
.
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Magnifying the shock was the crime’s timing—Sarah Browne’s “frantic joy” turned into “frantic grief.” In Norfolk, the freedpeople’s schools, already closed for victory celebrations, now remained shuttered for the rituals of mourning. In Nashville, Unionists changed the city from its “
gala
appearance” into a cheerless scene, cannons now booming in sorrow instead of jubilation. Yankee soldiers there had been strutting in a parade when the news came “like a crash,” prompting the musicians to switch from quicksteps to death marches. In New Bern, North Carolina, Mary Ann Starkey looked around her contraband camp, filled with fellow former slaves. Had she written only a few days earlier, she confessed in a dictated letter, “I should only have rejoiced over the
glorious
news”; among the war refugees she assisted as head of the Colored Women’s Union Relief Association, Starkey now saw “little heart left.” In Charleston, the men of the black Fifty-Fifth Massachusetts had just enjoyed the company of Henry Ward Beecher and William Lloyd Garrison. Soon they lowered flags, fired guns,
tolled bells, and draped headquarters, all their actions “feeble expressions of feeling, for so great a loss.” It was, wrote a northern teacher in Virginia, the “
most Joyous
, yet saddest month our country has ever known.”
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A group of two hundred prominent New Yorkers had chartered a steamer to take them to the flag-raising at Fort Sumter and as yet knew nothing as they sailed toward Fortress Monroe, Virginia, one of the stops on their post-celebration tour of Civil War sites. Early on Tuesday, April 18, the passengers were breakfasting when a pilot boat with a lowered flag came into view.

“What’s the news?” someone called out.

“President Lincoln is dead!” came the response, prompting the diners to drop their silverware. Had the president “at last worn himself out,” they wondered? Soon other passing ships conveyed the facts, and the New York, Baltimore, and Richmond papers waiting at Fortress Monroe contained the details. The New York revelers canceled their itinerary and headed straight home.
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Up north, with fireworks and victory parades barely over, the outpourings of joy abruptly ceased and reversed course, some victory parties quite literally interrupted. In Chicago, happy shouts and the noise of tin horns subsided into solemnity. In a Maine town, the bells kept ringing, one moment “chiming merrily,” the next “tolling a requiem.” It was “more dreadful by the contrast,” wrote an Ohio man; “all the darker for the previous light,” wrote a woman in Massachusetts. All in the same day, Caroline White recorded in her diary, “the sun rose upon a nation jubilant with victory” and set “upon one plunged in deepest sorrow.” Over and over, people tried to articulate the nature of the change. Edward Everett Hale could not believe he was “in the same world, and in the same week.” A Connecticut soldier in Virginia thought back to his regiment’s victory observances, only to realize that “while we were having such a fine time here, the President was being murdered.” How sad the timing was too for President Lincoln himself, another soldier wrote to his parents, “to be shot just as he was about to see the war closed,” when peace was just about to “crown his honest and earnest efforts.”
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If passing on the news was one way to make sense of the senseless, another was to make a record of the deed. Michael Shiner, a former slave and laborer in the Washington navy yard, noted in his journal a set of details
that a great many would write down: the day, date, and place of the shooting, and the date of Lincoln’s death. Connecting himself personally to the event, Shiner added that the Lincolns had visited the navy yard on the very day of the assassination. The white Washington minister James Ward embellished his own record with underlinings and exclamation points. “
We have the saddest tidings this morning that ever shocked our Country
,” he wrote. Then, like Shiner, he recorded the main fact: “
President Lincoln was murdered at Ford’s Theater last night!!!
” When Sarah Putnam, fourteen years old, heard the news at her Boston breakfast table, she drew a picture of her feelings—a face with two wide, round eyes and a wider circle for a mouth—thereby preserving the essence of the visible expressions that helped make the news believable (the girl would grow up to be a portrait painter). Putnam vowed to her diary to report the facts “without any sentiment,” but when she wrote, “Now president L. is
dead
,” her double underline, along with the face she had rendered, betrayed her emotions.
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The Washington minister James Ward expressed shock and dismay in his diary on April 15, 1865. “
We have the saddest tidings this morning that ever shocked our Country
,” he wrote. “It almost chills my heart’s blood to record it.
President Lincoln was murdered at Ford’s Theater last night!!!
”
James Thomas Ward diary, April 15, 1865, Manuscript Division, Library of Congress
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People flipped back the pages of their diaries in efforts to create an accurate chronological account. A Union soldier who had noted drills, a dress parade, and a package from home on April 14 now squeezed in the words, “President Lincoln shot in Ford’s Theatre.” When the news reached England,
Punch
journalist Shirley Brooks turned back the sheets of his diary twelve days to write, “This evening President Lincoln was killed,” as if he had gotten the news that same night. People wrote long letters, then
asked for them to be returned; “send it back, for I have no other record,” Caroline Dall instructed the recipient of a long missive in which she set down all the details.
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People preserved their reactions on paper in all kinds of ways. They drew heavy black lines to signal the separation of everything that came before the assassination from everything that would come after. They recorded the deed, then drew a box around the words to make them stand out on the page. People drew pictures of graves or penned the facts in beautiful calligraphy. Annie Hillborn wrote the word “Died” at the top of the page, then wrote “April 15” in the left margin and “1865” in the right margin. Beneath that came the words, “Our Loved President” and “At 22 min past 7 O’clock AM.” She added Lincoln’s birth date and age, followed by “A martyr to Justice & Liberty. Killed by the hand of an assassin.” A seamstress in New York City, without the time and supplies available to Hillborn, crammed a record of the event onto a page in her account book, fitting the words around her list of purchases. “The Pres. was assassinated in his seat at Ford’s Theatre,” she wrote, “a ball pass through his brain.”
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Sarah Browne had referred her husband to the newspapers, unable to bring herself to write out the particulars, but unlike Sarah, many mourners drank up and dwelled on the details. Some cut out newspaper columns and pasted them into their journals, while others copied out the facts, refashioning official reports into personal records. Either way, it was a means both to preserve history and to face what still felt incomprehensible, as the act of assembling, organizing, and composing formed another step in the confounding process of “realization.”

They wrote down everything. How the president’s bodyguard went ahead to the theater but was nowhere to be found when the assassin approached. How the president’s personal valet unwittingly let the assassin by. That the assassin was the actor John Wilkes Booth. How Booth entered the anteroom and looked through a peephole in one of the doors that led directly to the box. How he had earlier carved that peephole himself, since he was permitted access to the theater as a recognized actor. How he opened the door and wedged it shut from the inside. How he shot the president once in the back of the head. How Mary Lincoln screamed. How Booth broke his ankle on his clumsy vault to the stage. How he cried out, “Sic semper tyrannis!”—the motto of the state of Virginia—as he leapt, or maybe he said, “The South is avenged.” How the president was conveyed across the street to the Petersen boardinghouse. How another conspirator attacked the Sewards. That the president expired at twenty-two minutes past seven o’clock the next morning.

In his diary on April 15, 1865, Bostonian Francis Brooks drew an upside-down American flag at half-mast, decorated with a mourning ribbon, flying over a grave with a skull and crossbones signaling the assassination’s danger to the nation.
Francis Brooks Journal, April 15, 1865. Courtesy of the Massachusetts Historical Society
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Every detail recorded and absorbed made it less a hallucinated nightmare or a theatrical drama, less a lie or a hoax. After eleven-year-old Gren-ville Norcross wrote in his diary that President Lincoln was “shot through the head by J. W. Booth,” the boy used up four pages transcribing every word of a newspaper article. Anna Lowell selected particular facts: that Lincoln laughed at the play yet looked sad; that Mrs. Lincoln tried to rouse her husband after Booth pulled the trigger. A woman in New Hampshire
described the bullet’s entrance, “three inches back of the left ear.” A man in Washington recorded that Lincoln had entered Ford’s Theatre “from the
dress circle
through a narrow corridor some three feet wide and eight or ten long” and that the room at Petersen’s was “about 9 feet by 15, with two windows and three doors.” In the two days following, Charles French wrote down all the specifics, from Lincoln’s decision to attend the theater that night to a description of the suit the president would wear inside his casket. Every fact made it more possible that it had truly come to pass.
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