Mourning Lincoln (12 page)

Because the sight of men crying in public was far from common, some observers felt obliged to describe them as children, thereby casting their actions as something more familiar. At a Quaker meeting in Philadelphia, a woman watched as a man cried out, “Oh no! no! it
cannot
be” and “wept as a child.” Aggrieved Union soldiers in Raleigh were subdued, some “weeping like children.” Of course those men were still strong. On the street outside Ford’s Theatre, wrote one eyewitness to the murder, “strong men throw their arms around each other’s necks and cry like children.” Anson Henry, Lincoln’s physician and friend, had come to Washington immediately on hearing the news. When he laid eyes on the president’s lifeless body, “the fountain of tears was broken up,” he wrote, “and I wept like a child refusing to be comforted, remaining riveted to the spot.” To his wife, he confided, “I had never before realized the luxury of tears.”
⁴

3
Glee

THE PRESIDENT HAD BEEN DEAD
for a week when a navy ship came into Jacksonville, Florida, carrying the April 15 issue of the
New York Herald
. “
IMPORTANT: ASSASSINATION OF PRESIDENT LINCOLN
,” read the headline, and below that, “
SECRETARY SEWARD DAGGERED IN HIS BED
.” Here was Rodney Dorman’s moment of triumphal vengeance. Good riddance to them, he crowed, presuming that Seward hadn’t survived, for both men were “nuisances to the earth,” and “a thousand deaths each could not atone for their cruelty, crimes & wickedness.” A Union soldier in the city’s occupying forces surmised that local Confederates were “making merry,” even if they remained silent in public, and no doubt Dorman confined his sentiments to the pages of his diary. There he relished the news, grateful to both God and the assassin. Whoever the killer was, he was “a great public benefactor.”
¹

The next evening came further confirmation via another vessel (with no contradiction of Seward’s demise), fanning Dorman’s glee, alongside his ever-present ire. How glorious that neither man could any longer “exult & gloat over the South, & the ruin & devastation they have caused,” he wrote. Among Dorman’s other targets were Henry Ward Beecher (along with all meddling northern ministers), New York newspaperman Horace
Greeley, radical Republican senator Charles Sumner of Massachusetts, and other such “disgraces to humanity & the world.” All these evil people—who Dorman thought of as a “sanctimonious band of self satisfied villians & hypocrites”—should now live in fear that God would strike them down too.
²

The gratification that Rodney Dorman expressed at Lincoln’s assassination stemmed from the same convictions that drove his reactions to Union victory: fury, inflamed by the humiliation of defeat. During the war, fellow Confederates and the rebel press had fed that anger, casting Abraham Lincoln as a tyrant who deserved death for barbaric actions like arming the enslaved men of the South. Dorman had always considered Lincoln the quintessential wicked northerner imposing his decrees on the white South, beginning with a party platform that wanted slavery excluded from all future states carved out of the western territories. The Yankee chief’s dictatorship extended to his administration’s abridgment of civil liberties, notably the wartime suspension of the writ of habeas corpus. Now, after the assassination, Dorman seethed as he read in the northern papers about the arrest of those who expressed approval of Lincoln’s murder. “A general hanging of the whole batch of officials, as userpers & outlaws, would be but slight redress to the outraged laws of the country,” he fumed, “yet they talk of treason & traitors with reference to others.” The same kind of corruption prevailed in Jacksonville, and the demagogues in the Yankees’ sham republican government with its phony laws “ought to have their brains blown out immediately.” That is, Dorman added, “if they have any brains.” And speaking of tyranny, the Emancipation Proclamation alone constituted an illegal usurpation of power for which President Lincoln—
Lincon
—“deserved assassination.” Only public execution would have been better.
³

Dorman’s satisfaction at Lincoln’s death was interrupted only by the sight of mourners in his midst. Just as he had so painfully observed celebrations of Union victory all around him, he now watched as black people and Yankee occupiers wept and prayed, lowered their American flags (“hanging out rags,” he called it), and draped the city’s churches. Even worse was the behavior of local whites. They may have been Unionists or they may have been poorer residents who had never much supported the Confederate effort, but either way their sycophantic public laments were nauseating.
As far as Dorman was concerned, any white southerner who mourned for Lincoln was either a fool or insane.
⁴

LINCOLN’S MOURNERS INSISTED ON DESCRIBING
to themselves and one another a “universal” grief, imagining a once divided nation now united by the assassination of its leader, even as they saw evidence to the contrary. Contradictory evidence aside, mourners nonetheless built an optimistic vision of a nation rising from Union victory, a healed nation to which the vanquished would willingly return as patriots. Perhaps those were the hopes of Union officer Oscar Ireland, who wrote home from Virginia, claiming that “all over the land seems to be the same mind.” Everywhere he looked, he saw “mourning and regret for the loss of the President” and “hatred and scorn for the fiendishness and utter folly of the assassins.” Maybe Ireland intended to include the freshly defeated Confederates in his vision, or maybe he was writing prescriptively (
Here is what everyone ought to be feeling
) or perhaps just hopefully. Lincoln’s mourners contradicted themselves all the time when they wrote about the grief of “the nation,” sometimes seeming to conjure the entire population of North and South alike, other times clearly excluding the Confederates, and much of the time writing in sweeping phrases too vague to interpret one way or the other.
⁵

Thornier questions stood behind such pronouncements. How could white southerners be subsumed into the victorious Union—or should they be? Should recalcitrant Confederates be coerced into patriotism—or could they be? Should the privileges of citizenship be extended to the defiant among them? These were the questions that would trouble Lincoln’s mourners in the weeks and months to come, most especially black mourners and their white abolitionist allies. From the other side, a white South Carolina journalist wrote that the assassination would “hardly affect the relations of the two countries,” truculent words that defined the Confederacy as a separate nation-state, even after conquest and surrender. Cries of despair in the diaries of the southern elite attest to the same conviction. “Alas! for my poor Country,” wrote a former slave owner in Mississippi. “Oh! my poor Country,” wrote a Louisiana planter. “What have you yet to suffer?” The fact was, for Confederates, Lincoln’s assassination was a different matter altogether. For one thing, most of them hated Lincoln. They
had hated Lincoln when he ran for president in 1860, and they hated him through all four years of war. In the rebel press, in textbooks, cartoons, verse, and the theater, Confederates had painted the Yankee executive as a boorish frontier oaf, a buffoon and a drunk, an ape, a gorilla, and a baboon, a bastard and a coward, a warmonger and a butcher, a monster and a tyrant, a Negrophile and a Negro himself. And to think that this creature had walked through the streets of their capital city in triumph, surrounded by free black people who worshipped him as a god!
⁶

When Lincoln was assassinated, Confederates had just stepped into the long grief of surrender, and it was surrender that remained immediate and disastrous, producing apprehension and anxiety, fear and distress, melancholy and depression. Surrender had destroyed their world, including the enslavement of black people, a system that had been central to southern society for nearly two hundred years. Accordingly, whereas African Americans worried about the revival of legal slavery, Confederates agonized over its demise. True, Lincoln’s assassination shifted the mantle of gloom and offered Confederates an unexpected reprieve in the form of their conquerors’ woe. True too, a lone few fantasized that the assassination would reverse defeat, perhaps “produce anarchy in Yankeedom,” which would then make southern independence possible. But most knew that the assassination could not undo defeat. They knew the difference between their own rejoicings at Lincoln’s death and the rejoicings of the Yankees at Union victory. Theirs was nothing more than a temporary lifting of the shadows, a mere postponement of long-term despair. All knew, too, that the steady pain of humiliation had not transferred to the Union. Rodney Dorman’s moment of triumphal vengeance was just that: a moment. What was more, the war’s casualties were colossal—the numbers for the losing side proportionally even greater than for the victors—and now came the crushing awareness that all those losses had been for nothing. For Confederates, the unthinkable calamity, the heart-sinking, time-stopping, faith-defying cataclysm was defeat.
⁷

Preoccupied as they were, then, many white southerners seemed barely to register the assassination. Confederate officer John Taylor Wood noted the news in his often-detailed diary this way: “Heard of Lincoln’s death. Mobile & Columbus lost” (the Alabama city had fallen to the Union army two days before Booth shot Lincoln, the Georgia city on Easter Sunday).
Captain Henry Chambers of the Forty-Ninth North Carolina had recently covered two pages of his journal with morose reflections on the “bitter, bitter humiliation” of surrender, waxing poetic about the rain falling like nature’s tears for the loss of white freedom. Now Chambers squeezed in the words “rumors of Lincoln’s death,” and the next day squeezed in “Lincoln’s assassination confirmed.” Others referenced the news as no more than an irritant. A woman in New Orleans, delayed in trying to procure a fashionable hat for a friend in Natchez, explained that “unfortunately on account of Pres. Lincoln’s death, the stores were closed in the city,” the misfortune being the shuttered shops. A Tennessee farmer expressed exasperation at the interruption to planting corn, what with all the fuss, and a young Confederate in Philadelphia worried about getting home to Baltimore, with all trains stopped while the assassin remained at large. “My troubles never cease,” she complained to her diary. In a letter from Richmond, Emmy Welford likewise filled two pages with descriptions of the fallen capital and the mortifying presence of black soldiers, followed by a single line: “Of course you have heard of the assassination of Lincoln.” Confederates “grieved dreadfully,” she added, “at our defeat.”
⁸

Some made no mention at all. The news had already arrived at Fort Delaware when Confederate soldier James McMichael wrote only about the disgrace of losing the war and his “
long, dark
and
miserable
year in prison.” When Mary Bethell, a North Carolina plantation mistress, picked up her diary after a two-month hiatus, she recorded surrender, the end of slavery, and the return of her two sons from the army but not a word about the assassination. Even more pointed, when a Confederate woman wrote of the “deplorable events” of April 14 and 15, she described how she had watched from her Virginia porch as Union gunboats landed and Yankees marched through the streets. They had come into her very own yard, and eventually her former slaves had departed with them. For her, those events, not the crime at Ford’s Theatre up in Washington, were the tragedies of April 14 and 15, 1865.
⁹

Unadorned narrations or studious silences could reflect fears of committing one’s true sentiments to paper that might pass through Yankee hands, and no doubt some Confederates censored their reactions. In the Yankee capital, William Owner had entitled his diary “Notes & Incidents
of the B.R. War To Subjugate the South And Steal Niggers.”
B.R
. stood for “Black Republican,” a common epithet for antislavery politicians, and during the war Owner wrote reams of vitriol to match that phrase, including gleefully celebrating the news of William Seward’s carriage accident in early April. When Lincoln was shot, though, Owner recorded nothing beyond the bare facts. More to the point, for many Confederates there was simply no contest: their own defeat and the destruction of slavery easily trumped the death of the Yankee president. When Confederates did write in greater detail about the assassination, many added their trepidations to the record. “I fear it bodes no good for the south,” wrote Marmaduke Shannon, former editor of the
Vicksburg Whig
, to his daughter. Lucy Fletcher despaired that the man who had once been a “living buffoon” was now a martyr, fretting likewise that his murder “bodes no good to us.” During the war, Mary Chesnut’s plantation-class friends had caricatured Lincoln as a baboon, and even as they continued to do so after the assassination, Chesnut felt afraid. “This foul murder will bring down worse miseries on us,” she confided to her diary, revealing a sense of unease about both the crime and its effects on her circle. A Confederate officer in a Union prison summed up his people’s anxiety most accurately: “The principal cause of our feeling the matter so strongly,” he wrote, “is the question of how it will affect us.”
¹⁰