Mourning Lincoln (22 page)

Blaming the Confederate leadership for Lincoln’s assassination meant exempting white southerners outside the planter classes, but when mourners invoked phrases like “the masses,” it was never entirely clear who exactly fell into that category. From its founding in the 1850s, the Republican Party had envisioned the white population of the South as slaveholding elites in conflict with a degraded class of impoverished and powerless plebeians whose chances for upward mobility were squelched by slave labor. All through the war, white northerners imagined just such a simplistically divided Confederacy, unwilling to differentiate among the majority of white southerners who fell outside the category of large plantation owners. That left a great deal of ambiguity. Where was the dividing line between large and small planters, between small planters and yeoman farmers (who might own a few slaves), and between struggling yeoman farmers and poverty-stricken white families? Just such ambiguity was apparent in the speech
Henry Ward Beecher had delivered at Fort Sumter, right before Lincoln’s assassination, in which he blamed the war squarely on southern slaveholders, accusing them of sweeping “common people” into their ranks with lies “against interests as dear to them as their own lives” and implored fellow victors to treat the deceived masses with mercy. Even if they had cast their wartime lot with their powerful neighbors, Beecher believed, the whole of the ignorant rank and file should be welcomed back into the Union.
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Beecher spoke for most white northerners, who believed not only that the institution of slavery oppressed white people outside the master class, but also that those oppressed whites had always harbored antislavery sentiment. At war’s end, many white Union supporters believed that the majority of white southerners would act on their long-smoldering resentment of aristocratic slaveholders and reveal themselves as natural allies of the Yankees. After the fall of Richmond, Henry Thacher was waiting for “the
people
” to turn their wrath from the Union to their own leaders, once they discovered “the game the Chivalry are playing.” For Union army chaplain Hallock Armstrong, confirmation came from common southern whites themselves, who told him that the Civil War was “a war of the Aristocracy of the South,” prompting Armstrong to project that victory would “knock off the shackles from millions of poor whites.” Passing through Virginia on his way home, Edward Benham and his fellow soldiers were cheered by African Americans, but it was the white natives who startled them, convincing Benham that with the war over, they would now “think for themselves.” From the other side, a soldier in Lee’s army was shocked that the “miserably poor” whites he met in North Carolina expressed delight at the coming of the Yankees. Some of the Union troops, though, voiced skepticism, wondering whether those exulters had given up on the Confederate cause only after the war became too oppressive on the home front. After the fall of Richmond, one Union soldier thought white people were happy to encounter the enemy, “not because they were
Union
from principle, but because they were
Union
by being whipped & tired out by the war.” After surrender, another noticed that the women of destitute white families welcomed Yankees because they were starving yet still defended the Confederate cause.
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Despite any evidence to the contrary, most of Lincoln’s white mourners only amplified their portraits of innocent poor whites in the defeated Confederacy. Leave the “ignorantly deluded” alone, Alonso Quint pled in
his Easter Sunday sermon, and they would “learn better by and by.” In Springfield, Illinois, when the Reverend Matthew Simpson singled out Confederate leaders, he simultaneously extended forgiveness to the “deluded masses.” A Union soldier in Raleigh warned his compatriots to take care in their treatment of the “unwilling, reluctant, enforced accessories” of the wicked leaders, and a Maryland Unionist brought the slain president into the picture, blaming Lincoln-hating Confederates for “inflaming the minds of humbler individuals.”
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Where Confederate soldiers fit into this stark division was less clear. Immediately following the assassination, Union troops had fantasized about brutally attacking their already vanquished enemies on the battlefield, and a few explicitly named the rebel rank and file as culpable. Alfred Neafie, for one, pronounced guilty every soldier who remained loyal to the rebellion after Lincoln’s murder. Alonzo Pickard made the same point more violently. “I was always very lenient in my feelings towards all except the leaders,” he wrote from Virginia, but now he wanted everyone exterminated, leader and follower alike. Yet apart from the anger that flared, especially among Union soldiers, in the immediate aftermath of the assassination, the great majority of Lincoln’s white mourners continued to speak in sweeping terms about the blameless poor white people of the South.
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Trouble was, if the majority of southern whites resented the slaveholding aristocracy, they did not appreciate black freedom either. During the secession crisis and then during the war, the planter classes had indeed taken care to suppress, sometimes with violence, any heterodox antislavery ideas among whites in their midst, and poor and middling folk certainly benefitted from remaining in the good graces of those who held political and social power. But southern whites outside the planter classes allied with the rich not merely out of fear. Comradeship with a wealthy slaveholder could provide a gin to clean their few bales of cotton, a slave or two to borrow for a particularly arduous task, even the opportunity to work as a plantation overseer. Many poor whites also shared an antagonism toward federal power. And though the destruction of slavery might break the cross-class bonds of southern white people, racism easily persisted across class lines.

This was the problem that Lincoln’s white mourners elided. By exempting those beyond the planter classes, they let slide the fact that the vast majority of white southerners in 1865 remained loyal to white supremacy.
Though African Americans had joined the chorus that blamed the Confederate leadership for secession, war, and the assassination, they were also among the few who raised the problem of racism among the so-called white masses of the South. In the speech he delivered in Rochester on the day Lincoln died, Frederick Douglass pointedly divided the South into two distinct populations: not rich and poor but, rather, black friends and white foes, mindful of the fact that all white southerners held a sturdy stake in black subjugation. A writer for the
New York Anglo-African
likewise wrote that “poor and ignorant” white people in the slave states should be emancipated from the “tyranny of the rich and educated” but doubted that they could be “emancipated from negro-hate.” A writer for the
Christian Recorder
wrote of the “class of ignorant white loyalists” who also believed that his people were “made to be slaves.”
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When this complication occurred to Lincoln’s white mourners, they tended only to expand their idealism. Hallock Armstrong admitted that “poor white trash” in the South appeared to hate black people (he believed they craved “somebody more degraded than themselves”), yet he confidently imagined that by treating them with benevolence, the occupying Yankees could embark on the mission of “regenerating the misguided millions.” Just as the followers of William Lloyd Garrison had once imagined themselves ending slavery purely through the moral suasion of slaveholders, white mourners now imagined themselves enlightening poorer white southerners out of their racism. On the home front, in the days following the assassination, Anna Lowell attended a meeting of Bostonians who wished to “instruct & civilize,” not only freedpeople, but also poor whites, who “needed it even more.” The “white trash” of the South, John Green-leaf Whittier wrote in the
Liberator
(he put the phrase in quotation marks), looked toward African Americans “with a bitter hatred,” yet education, he believed, would cure the racism of these pitiable “misguided masses”—note the contrast with the black writer who described the Negro-hating wealthy classes of the South as “educated,” aware that education made no difference.
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These convictions about moral uplift were sincere, part and parcel of deep-rooted ideas about the social mobility inherent in a system built on capital and labor, standing in turn on a foundation of faith in the inevitable progress of human civilization. Yet by implying that the institution of slavery
alone fueled racism, these white mourners exempted themselves from their own paternalism and prejudices.

GRIEVING CLERGYMEN CALLED FOR VENGEANCE
, but they also helped diffuse anger with concurrent calls for mercy. Some mourners may have come home from church on Easter Sunday with their initial fury fanned, yet many found greater comfort in commands to forgive. For Anna Ferris, “the feeling of indignation & rage melted away” after Sunday services, replaced by an understanding of Jesus’s prayer “Father forgive them for they know not what they do.” On each successive Sunday after Easter, the assassination-themed sermons became less harsh, and vengeful human feelings paled before the knowledge that God would serve as the final judge of the criminals. As the Washington minister James Ward wrote in his diary, “It is God, to whom alone vengeance belongeth,” and as Caroline Laing wrote to her daughter, paraphrasing Romans 12:19 (and likely a sermon she had heard), “Vengeance is mine saith the Lord.”
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Wrestling with blame and forgiveness, people turned to President Lincoln’s second inaugural address. Drawn to the words “malice toward none” and “charity for all,” and to Lincoln’s directive to “bind up the nation’s wounds,” mourners came to two different conclusions. Some invoked these words to demonstrate that the president’s lenience would have made him unfit to reconstruct the nation, hence God had taken him away at just the right moment. Others invoked the same words to prove that mercy constituted the proper attitude toward their vanquished enemies, since that was what the slain president would have wanted (and some invoked both interpretations at the same time). Even though the very fact of the assassination only further complicated those words—if Lincoln had advocated for clemency when he was alive, did that still hold true after the Confederate system had murdered him?—many nonetheless focused on the message of forgiveness. Black minister Jacob Thomas told his Easter Sunday listeners that Lincoln had shown Christian grace by exercising mercy “even toward his foes,” and white minister J. G. Holland refrained from speaking aloud the vengeance he felt inside, for Lincoln’s kind spirit spoke of charity and “Christian forbearance.”
With malice toward none
and
with charity for all
were the words that mourners frequently chose to inscribe onto their signs and banners in the wake of Lincoln’s death.
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Yet if President Lincoln appeared to have been encouraging clemency, he had closed the second inaugural with a more complicated imperative: “to do all which may achieve and cherish a just, and a lasting peace.” At the inauguration, Lincoln had reflected on divine judgment for the national sin of slavery, making clear that slavery was the cause of the conflict (“All knew,” he said, that slavery was “somehow, the cause of the war”). All hoped and prayed the war would soon end, Lincoln went on, but if God willed the war to continue “until every drop of blood drawn with the lash, shall be paid by another drawn with the sword,” so it must be. Lincoln was less clear about what, precisely, constituted the end of slavery—simply its legal demise or the fuller project of black citizenship and equality—and that was why his words were hard to interpret in light of the assassination.
Malice toward none
and
charity for all:
that was either why God had taken Lincoln (because of his lenience toward the enemy) or how Lincoln would have wanted the defeated enemies treated in his own absence (with mercy).
A just, and a lasting peace:
that implied that peace without enduring justice was not enough. Since these words followed Lincoln’s reflections on slavery as the cause of the war, the idea of a democratic and egalitarian peace seemed to pertain especially to the future of the freedpeople.
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Many fewer mourners attended to this last point. Anna Lowell may have been thinking of the juxtaposition of the two imperatives when she read the address to her Sunday school students the week after Easter. Lincoln’s words, she wrote in her diary, “almost sublimely mingle the ideas of Justice & Mercy.” More direct were the words of a Chicago woman who signed herself only as “Ruth” in a letter to the black
Christian Recorder
. “We all remember well the late President’s last Inaugural Address,” she wrote, “and what he said about paying back the blood drawn by the lash.” Yet Anna Lowell and Ruth were both unusual in calling up the second inaugural as a way to point toward Lincoln’s desire, not only for black freedom, but also for justice—for equal political rights—after emancipation.
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If the ultimate meaning of Lincoln’s second inaugural address was hard to decipher in the aftermath of the assassination, so too did clergymen preach multilayered messages of mercy and vengeance, and so too did Lincoln’s lay mourners struggle with clashing impulses. For all the anger and calls to reprisal, for all the imagined and real violence toward the demonized enemy, for all the blame they placed on slaveholders and slavery,
Lincoln’s mourners, both black and white, took at least a measure of refuge in their end-of-war optimism, nurtured by victory and emancipation. Now, amid sorrow and anger, they looked toward the president’s funeral, hopeful that it would offer both resolution for their grief and a path forward for the postwar nation.

Best Friend

ENVISIONING LINCOLN’S GENEROSITY TOWARD THE
defeated Confederates—contrasting him with the ruthlessness of Generals Sherman and Grant, or with President Andrew Johnson’s hatred of the planter classes, and no doubt thinking of the words
with malice toward none
—the victors cast him as their enemy’s best friend. As the “best friend of the
South
,” a white mourner wrote in his diary on April 15, Lincoln would have leavened justice with love. A letter writer to the
New York Anglo-African
declared that the Confederates had “murdered their best friend,” and the black editors of the
Christian Recorder
and the
San Francisco Elevator
likewise named Lincoln the best friend of the rebels. Ministers chimed in too, and mourners echoed the imagery from pulpit and press, ranging from cabinet members (“In the Murder of Lincoln the rebels have killed their best friend,” Secretary of the Interior John P. Usher told his wife), to Union generals (Carl Schurz thought the assassin had “killed the best friend of the South”), to army officers (“They have lost their best friend,” Francis Barnes wrote home from Alabama), to Union soldiers (“They murdered their best friend,” wrote Franklin Boyts), to women on the home front (“The South have lost their
best
friend” and “murdered their
own
cause,” Caroline Laing told her daughter). President Lincoln was the “best friend the South ever
had,” Albert Browne fairly gloated, “and how have the dastardly cowardly wretches repaid him.”
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