Mourning Lincoln (21 page)

Confederates and Copperheads alike must have found some relief in the fact that most of Lincoln’s mourners trained a good portion of their wrath on Booth. Editors at the
San Francisco Elevator
called him vile and a
wretch, but mourners didn’t need journalists to tell them that—they readily cast the assassin as a scoundrel, a fiend, a dog, and a demon. To capture John Wilkes Booth alive was the hope of many mourners, since death was a “gift to martyrs,” and it was the president who should be martyred, not his murderer. The bereaved wanted to see Booth suffer, and with blood boiling (mourners invoked that phrase to describe their anger), they devised the means. Like many, seventeen-year-old Clara Allen believed that hanging would be too mild and that Booth should be “tortured in some way.” Outside Ford’s Theatre on the night of April 14, people were already exchanging suggestions for the particulars: Hang him from the first lamppost available or cut him to pieces before a lamppost could even be found. Flog him. Shoot him like a dog. Burn him alive slowly. Hang him until almost dead, then “resuscitate him and repeat the procedure for several days.” In Cincinnati, where another Booth brother was appearing at the opera house, the theater had to be closed on the morning of Lincoln’s death, in the face of a furious mob, as Junius Brutus Booth Jr. hurried out of town on an early train.
¹⁸

The War Department printed up “wanted” posters for John Wilkes Booth, promising a reward of a hundred thousand dollars, but imagining one’s own participation in Booth’s torment offered special satisfaction beyond a monetary reward. Troops gathered around campfires, conjuring their actions should they personally catch the guilty party. Some wanted to operate the hangman’s noose themselves. A white soldier wanted to chain up Booth and place four black men ready to brand him with hot irons if he tried to sleep, “till he died dead,” while Billy Patterson of the Seventeenth Maine wanted to “fry his liver before his very eyes.” Such scenes were influenced by popular travel accounts that purported to disclose the brutal violence of honor and vengeance in the southern backwoods, entertaining readers with depictions of gouged eyes and severed limbs. John Worthington, an upstate New York banker, bested all the soldiers’ plans for Booth when he told his sister that he wanted to “tear him slowly in pieces, kill him by inches, pull out his toe-nails & pick out his rascally eyes with a fork. Cut out his tongue, break his arms & leg’s & at last hang him on a nail by one eyelid.”
¹⁹

Although Lincoln’s mourners envisioned such tortures for Booth in particular, they did not confine their vindictive thoughts to the killer and his immediate circle, not by far. Rather, the Confederacy as a whole had emboldened Booth to commit the deed, and as a rational criminal, he had acted in the spirit of the rebels, including the violation of law and the U.S. Constitution. From Virginia, black Civil War correspondent Thomas Morris Chester explained the assassination as “another one of the infamous crimes which logically followed the efforts of treason to dismember the Union.” According to a Maryland Unionist, Booth had been spurred on by all who had ever prayed for Lincoln’s death, even by anyone who had ever so much as called the president a despot. In the pages of her spare diary, African American servant and night-school student Emilie Davis called Booth the “Confederate villain,” thereby plainly associating him with the rebels, and white schoolgirl Sarah Putnam likewise named all Confederates as guilty when she wrote, “The rebels only hurt their own cause when they assassinated dear old Lincoln.”
²⁰

The War Department’s “wanted” poster promised a reward for the capture of the assassin of the “late beloved President,” displaying an image of John Wilkes Booth, along with conspirators John Surratt and David Herold (with both their names misspelled).
LC-USZ62-11193, Rare Book and Special Collections Division, Library of Congress
.

The bigger culprit was something mourners called the southern “system.” All secessionists were guilty, explained Francis Lieber, legal adviser to the Lincoln administration (and one-time southern slaveholder), because Booth was the servant of a “devilish system and doctrine.” Others invoked the same word: Lincoln was the victim of a “thug system.” The act of assassination comported exactly with “their whole system.” Racial slavery was at the heart of that system. When Union army authorities appealed to African Americans in the greater Washington area to assist with the capture of the assassin, the official bulletin announced that Lincoln had been murdered “because he was your friend.” Though Booth grasped the pistol, the message read, it was “fired by the hands of treason and slavery,” and Lincoln might have been spared had he been “unfaithful to you and to the great cause of human freedom.” In those words were implicated not only all treasonous rebels but also the cause of that treason: slavery.
²¹

Blaming slavery for the assassination was not necessarily the same as upholding racial equality, since Union supporters fought a war against slavery for a variety of reasons, ranging from the moral opposition of abolitionists to much more broadly based economic objections that saw slave labor as competing unfairly with the freedom of white wageworkers. Vermont soldier George Mellish, for one, deeply mourned Lincoln, even as he recorded his hatred of the black people he encountered down south. Mellish supported
emancipation, he explained, but he wanted the freedpeople sent off to Africa. Likewise, Pennsylvania soldier John Smith mourned Lincoln and hated Confederates, while he also hated abolitionists and black people (he was going to bring his gun home, he told his mother, “to shoot nigers”). Conversely, to believe in black inferiority and subordination was not necessarily to endorse the institution of slavery, and in fact mourners all along the political spectrum invoked slavery as the cause of the president’s murder. Abolitionists certainly made this cry, but more moderate Union supporters did so too. An eyewitness at Ford’s Theatre, writing out his experiences on the night of April 14, exclaimed, “How many more martyrs to slavery!” At seven o’clock in the morning in New York City, even before Lincoln was pronounced dead, Francis Lieber wrote to Union general Henry Halleck, “It is Slavery, Slavery!” All day Saturday, the accusations continued. Lincoln had been sacrificed to slavery, taken by “an agent of that accursed system of Slavery and State Rights.” It was the fault of “all the hate, wickedness, & guilt of Slavery.” In London, with the official telegram from Secretary of War Edwin Stanton at hand, Charles Francis Adams was stunned, but soon, he confessed to his diary, he understood the crime as the “fruit of the seed that was sown in the slavery of the African race.”
²²

In church on Easter Sunday, ministers affirmed these convictions. “It was slavery that killed our President,” pronounced Joseph Prime, a black minister in upstate New York. For a white minister in Cincinnati, “Booth was the Agent but Slavery was the murderer.” Abolitionist clergymen explained that God had taken Lincoln in order to punish the nation for its sins, and that included the North, which was complicit in slavery. At a black church in San Francisco, mourners agreed that Lincoln’s death would “expiate a nation’s guilt” and listened to a disquisition on the national, rather than sectional, “sin of slavery.” Indeed, Lincoln himself had articulated that idea in his second inaugural address, first singling out the South (slavery was “localized in the Southern part” of the nation and “constituted a peculiar and powerful interest”) but also implicating the North (God brought war to both sections, as punishment to “those by whom the offence came”).
²³

No matter if both sections of the country were implicated, all through the weeks afterward, as mourners thought and talked about the relation
between slavery and the assassination, they focused their anger on the Confederacy. The crime, asserted African Americans north and south, was the “natural fruit” of the “barbarous institution of slavery” and the “natural outcrop” of slavery’s cruelty. Whites agreed that whether or not Booth was a slaveholder (he was not) mattered little, since he had acted on behalf of slaveholders’ interests. As one man put it, “Slavery, Rebellion and Assassination form but one word.” A woman “deepley afflicted” by Lincoln’s death sent ten dollars to a charity for work among the freedpeople so that the “last vestage of slavery” would be “swept from the earth.” A freed-woman in Maryland put it most directly of all, telling her former mistress, “You are the slayer of my deliverer!”
²⁴

On the most straightforward level, mourners insisted that Lincoln had died because he was a foe of slavery. On deeper levels, slave-ownership and the workings of the institution led whites to depravity, which led to the assassination. Slavery, wrote Francis Lieber, ruminating on the murder, had “perverted the minds of the Southerners,” turning them into “fiends and fools.” Mourners crafted their official proclamations to make the same point in more lyrical language. The citizens of Pennsylvania detected in the assassination “but another illustration of the diabolical spirit of American slavery.” The citizens of Ohio perceived in the crime an “appalling exhibition of the brutalizing and relentless spirit engendered by slavery.” Men of the Union League Club of Philadelphia loathed equally the “pistol and dagger of the assassin” and the “lash of the slave-driver.” The malevolence, violence, brutality, heartlessness, and treachery of slavery, they wrote, were all “embodied in that miserable assassin.”
²⁵

THE COMPLICITY OF ALL WHITE
southerners might have been implied in such assertions but, like Sarah and Albert Browne, Lincoln’s mourners often pointed in particular to the Confederate leadership. Lincoln’s supporters had all along blamed rebel leaders and powerful slaveholders for secession and war, believing that their poorer compatriots had been coerced into supporting the conflict. Just before the outbreak of fighting, Lincoln himself had put forward the idea that the majority of white southerners would demonstrate loyalty to the Union—after all, the majority of white southerners did not own slaves—thereby foiling secession. Wrong as Lincoln had been, the vision of Confederate leaders as responsible for the
assassination was a logical extension of the idea that the rebel government and elite slaveholders were ultimately responsible for the war.
²⁶

Right there at Petersen House, as President Lincoln breathed his last, Secretary of War Stanton began to collect accounts from eyewitnesses for the criminal investigation, working from the premise that Confederate authorities, with Jefferson Davis at the top, had hatched the plot and sent Booth as their emissary. Judge Advocate General Joseph Holt, who would soon take over from Stanton and serve as chief prosecutor at the trial of the conspirators, agreed with the secretary of war (though Holt would ultimately be unable to prove the involvement of the Davis administration). On the day Lincoln died, mourners likewise pointed to Confederate officials, naming “the Jeff Davis crew,” as one put it, or in the words of another, “some Black hearted Rebel Hireling of the Tyrant Jeff Davis.”
²⁷

Clergymen confirmed this idea, focusing largely on leaders and elites, as they cast John Wilkes Booth as product and symbol of the slave South. Take the particularly angry sermon preached by Alonso Quint on Easter Sunday in New Bedford, Massachusetts. Quint, a white man, fired up his congregation with calls for black citizenship and the confiscation of rebel property, characterizing the generic southern white person as lazy, ignorant, deceitful, greedy, licentious, and barbaric (thereby turning the tables on white stereotypes of black people). Yet Quint was speaking of slaveholders only, evident in his imagery of whips and chains. By the same token, some ministers advocated the death penalty, not only for the assassin, but also for Jefferson Davis, Robert E. Lee, and other higher-ups. In New Haven, Georgia Treadway attended two Easter services, both of which placed Davis, along with Lee and other Confederate generals, “on the same level as the
murderer
.” Journalists also singled out Confederate authorities, with the
New York Anglo-African
hoping to see such men tried in the courtroom. Once their “connection with the murder of the President” was proven, the black editors wrote, it would be “impossible to save their necks.”
²⁸

Unsurprisingly, Confederates expressed dismay that their conquerors would think to place blame anywhere beyond Booth and his accomplices or the Copperheads. “I dont see why they should take revenge on us,” an imprisoned private wrote in his diary, while Edmund Ruffin—the zealous secessionist known for firing a shot in Charleston harbor at the war’s outset—was infuriated to read a sermon in the New York papers
that equated Booth with the “spirit which fired on Fort Sumter.” Eliza Andrews, believing Booth alone to be guilty, called the “wanted” handbills for Jefferson Davis “villainous slander.”
²⁹

Lincoln’s mourners meanwhile kept up a steady chorus, naming as guilty the “leading men,” the “secession party,” the “upper classes of the South,” and the “hot-headed leaders.” As a black man in California claimed, “The leaders of the rebellion have always aimed at one thing, and that is the destruction of the Chief Magistrate,” while a white woman in Vermont wanted Jefferson Davis hanged from the same gallows as John Brown. In the two days after Easter, lawyer George White recorded in his diary a long list of Confederates potentially responsible for the assassination. Along with Davis and Lee, he identified Judah Benjamin (secretary of state), John Breckinridge (secretary of war), John Campbell (assistant secretary of war), Robert Toombs (previous secretary of state), James Mason and John Slidell (diplomats), Robert Hunter (Virginia senator, and peace commissioner in early 1865), Jacob Thompson (agent to Canada), and Generals P. G. T. Beauregard, Richard Ewell, A. P. Hill, and Joseph E. Johnston. Women of the slaveholding classes held an uncertain position in these assertions. Mostly they went unmentioned, though the minister Quint saw fit to pity them as suffering widows. Occasionally a mourner implicated them fully, like the man who fumed over “shedevils” or the one who pronounced Confederate ladies even “worse than the Men in their Sentiments.”
³⁰