Mourning Lincoln (27 page)

For Lincoln’s mourners, the season’s beauty stood in stark contrast to lingering grief. In late April, Lucretia Hale opened the windows and drank in the “loveliest day that was ever made,” but she couldn’t help feeling that
“the President’s terrible death casts such a shadow over all hopes.” On a Sunday evening in mid-May, Union soldier Douglass Taylor wrote to his mother from Washington. It was a lush spring, the blooming trees and flowers incongruous with the “gloomy drapery” still hanging from the Capitol. Were it not for Lincoln’s assassination, it would be the happiest spring he had ever known. Walt Whitman began composing his elegy “When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom’d” almost immediately after Lincoln’s death, writing (though without direct mention of the president) of the rituals of mourning and nature’s annual renewal. “I mourn’d,” his poem announced, “and yet shall mourn with ever-returning spring.”
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Whitman’s poem was both sorrowful and hopeful, and many among the mourners saw affirmation of an optimistic future in springtime. For the victors, the season also served as a natural metaphor, marking the passage from wartime and winter’s darkness to peace and vernal freshness. For women—wives, mothers, daughters, servants—the arduous work of spring cleaning also marked renewal as they labored to sweep away ashes and dirt. Union soldiers described nature’s splendor during the funeral train’s two-week journey, associating sweet-scented flowers or fields of clover with victory, peace, and home. A Massachusetts soldier in Virginia sat outside his tent one balmy morning, grateful for “the world & its beauty.” While Delaware farmer Samuel Canby mournfully kept track of Lincoln’s body, he also noted “everything so fresh & green.” Women wrote particularly effusively. “I cannot describe to you how happy I feel this charming season,” Unionist Harriet Williams wrote to her husband during those weeks, as she communed with nature in Maryland. Even Anna Lowell, among the few who wrote about Lincoln’s death long into May, noticed the “exquisite verdure & rich blossoms.” For the victors, the spring of 1865, the first in four years not overtaken by war, conjured regeneration. For Sarah Browne, the symbolism of the weather helped. Amid the tasks of spring cleaning in Salem, she marveled at the bright sun, green leaves, fragrant flowers, and singing birds creating “a life of beauty,” for which she gave credit to God.
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7
Everyday Life

ON WEDNESDAY, APRIL
19, 1865, Sarah Browne absorbed a funeral sermon in Salem’s North Church, then gazed upon a friend’s new baby, “all sweetness—all Joy,” she wrote, the infant “realizing nothing of the great events which were transpiring in the turbulent world.” Sarah herself would remain preoccupied that spring: with anti-Lincoln sentiments in her own city, Jefferson Davis’s part in the conspiracy, the suffering of Union soldiers in Confederate prisons, Albert Jr.’s trip to Washington for the funeral, and fears for her husband’s safety down south. The next day, April 20, was Eddie Browne’s twelfth birthday, and Albert wrote his son from Charleston, exhorting the boy to work hard in order to be “fitted to enter Cambridge” in the not-too-distant future (he must improve his penmanship and strive to be a good Christian). But up in Salem, the birthday turned out unhappily. Somewhere along the way Eddie misbehaved. It’s easy to imagine the boy confused by nearly a week in which his mother and sister remained in shock, and men wept openly on streets shrouded in dark drapery, all the while his father far away. None of that mollified Sarah though. “It is Eddie’s birth-day,” she wrote to Albert, “but he has been naughty, so I shall not celebrate it.” Soon Albert wrote to his son again, this time asking why he caused others so much pain when he possessed so many privileges.
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As April turned to May, Sarah continued to write in her diary about Lincoln’s funeral train and Booth’s capture. Eddie resumed being a good boy, studying his Latin and French and attending a happy May Day picnic. The local minister had separated from his wife, setting off a rush of gossip. Spring cleaning contributed to Sarah’s sense of renewal, and now she interwove lingering sorrow and anger with matter-of-fact chronicles about organizing the parlor closet, supervising a thorough scrubbing of the house, and contending with the servants’ demand for better wages. In her pages, the realm of war and politics met the affairs of everyday life. “A Proclamation has been issued by President Johnson recognizing the close of the rebellion,” she wrote on May 10. “Alice & I still find enough work in rearranging bureau drawers.”
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THE WAR HAD IMMEASURABLY INTERRUPTED
Rodney Dorman’s daily life, most especially when the Union army’s 1863 occupation culminated in the burning of his home and law office. As an exile on the outskirts of Jacksonville, Dorman could provide himself only the “bare necessities,” he wrote in his diary in the spring of 1865, and only with the “greatest difficulty.” Now Dorman watched as white people filled up the city again. They were paroled soldiers, exchanged prisoners, and refugees returning from the interior, but many had nowhere to live and no money. “It keeps me melancholly,” he wrote, for once putting aside his vitriol, to “see so much of the distresses & sufferings.” Though Dorman’s own troubles were considerable, it pained him yet more to observe his compatriots in such dire circumstances, with no prospect of better days ahead. “It would take an immense fortune to administer relief to all,” he knew, frustrated that he couldn’t help. If only he could wreak vengeance on the conquering enemy, he seethed, his anger returning with every thought of the Yankees’ “cursed robbing, theiving, murdering & torturing.”
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Everyday life for Rodney Dorman that spring and summer included active hatred of the Union victors, in particular the black and white Yankees in his midst. Those impudent, lying devils of the U.S. occupation forces spoke of protection, but he knew otherwise. “The only protection we ask or require of them, the fiends, is that they will clear out & keep away,” he told his diary. More than anything, Dorman wished for a return to the lives he and his fellow rebels had known before the war. “What did the
Confederacy want but her own rights?” he inquired rhetorically. “They merely asked from the first but to be let alone,” and now the Yankees, those “black-hearted, miserable cowards,” were doing nothing short of sowing “revolution.”
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Dorman was correct on that count. A revolution had indeed come to pass, for his whole world had been not merely disrupted but demolished. Dorman took some comfort in the “old, familiar faces” among what he called the “new trash” in his city, but he also saw white people begging for food, black men in soldiers’ uniforms, and northerners teaching black men, women, and children to read and write. Clearly it was black freedom that had destroyed Dorman’s old life in Jacksonville. “I really wish I could get away, somewhere, out of the turmoil,” he wrote, displaying a second rare note of melancholy. “I can merely stay now as long as life lasts,” he sighed, resigned to “little, if any comfort.” The luxurious “enjoyment of life” he had once known now seemed entirely out of reach.
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LINCOLN’S ASSASSINATION STOPPED THE
world. That’s what mourners told themselves in the grip of shock and grief. “Nothing is thought excepting the
Horrible event
at Washington,” one man wrote. No one could speak of anything else, a woman in New Haven assured a friend. Julia Shepard, worshipping in Washington after witnessing the crime at Ford’s Theatre, felt, she told her father, “as though my heart had stopped beating.” Clergymen relied on similar descriptions. At Lincoln’s graveside in Springfield, the Reverend Matthew Simpson talked about the whole world coming to a halt. Men abandoned their plows in the field, he intoned, merchants closed their doors, and the hum of factories ceased. Or as the Unitarian minister Edward Everett Hale wrote to his brother, for nearly two weeks “all things stood still when the President was killed” and “no word was read or written that had not reference to him.”
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Mourners indulged in the idea of a halted world. If time had frozen, perhaps it could also reverse course, and Lincoln’s death would prove after all to be a dream, a ruse, or a staged play. Or if reversal proved impossible, a pause would at least permit the bereaved to lay aside every distraction and interference in order to absorb and make sense of the assassination.

Yet the world did not stand still after the assassination, and Lincoln’s mourners well knew that. Union supporters had thought about, talked
about, and written about everyday matters all through the war, and when victory came they kept at it, brewing tea, hauling wood, announcing wedding engagements. The same was true in the immediate aftermath of Lincoln’s death, for it was impossible to keep everyday life at bay. Women could not long neglect their duties, farmers remained concerned with weather and crops, soldiers counted their rations and pay, laborers had to report to work, and merchants looked impatiently toward the resumption of commerce. Perhaps mourners made pronouncements about a halted world precisely because they couldn’t engage in the personal and collective rituals of mourning full-time, and imagining a transfixed world lent greater gravitas to the thoughts and actions they set aside for Lincoln.

The fact was, the amount of ink that mourners devoted to the doings of daily life readily contradicted their own statements that they were too overwhelmed to think about anything but the president’s death. If the assassination interrupted everyday life, then everyday life also intruded into the assassination, for cataclysmic events never come to pass apart from daily life, but only in the midst of it.
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JOURNALISTS AND MINISTERS CLAIMED
that all labor ceased in the aftermath of the tragic event, but women and girls knew that was patently untrue. Female labor was burdensome in the mid-nineteenth century. Ashes and soot had to be swept from stoves and fireplaces every day. Water had to be hauled inside for washing and cooking, then back outside once dirtied. Chamber pots had to be emptied. Soap had to be manufactured from grease and lard. Linens and clothing had to be scrubbed on wash-boards, hung up to dry, then pressed with leaden irons. Recall the New York seamstress who crammed the astounding tidings into her account book. “Funeral Obsequies of Pres. Lincoln in Washington—Stores closed and business of all kind suspended,” she wrote in a circle around the edges of a page. “The Pres. was assassinated in his seat at Ford’s Theatre—a ball pass through his brain.” The fact that she crowded those words onto a page of her ledger (not even a diary) reveals not just the momentousness of the event but also the centrality of daily labor for this working-class woman.
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Everywhere, mourning women wrote in their diaries simultaneously about the assassination and domestic labor without comment or self-consciousness, interweaving the terrible news and its aftermath into their
records of planting gardens, darning socks, ironing clothes, whitewashing walls, dyeing cloth, sweeping chimneys, replacing parlor curtains, making mustard poultices, and tending to children’s injuries. Typically, a Pennsylvania woman sandwiched a remark about the journey of Lincoln’s body between two mundane incidents. “Tom ploughing to day,” she wrote. “The Presidents body is to be taken to Baltimore to day. Fan coughed nearly all last night, & seemed very cranky.”
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An anonymous seamstress recorded the funeral in Washington on Wednesday, April 19, 1865, fitting the words into a circle around a list of purchases and sales for that day, which included postcards (“Card Visites”) and frames. “Funeral Obsequies of Pres. Lincoln in Washington—Stores closed and business of all kind suspended,” she wrote. “The Pres. was assassinated in his seat at Ford’s Theatre—a ball pass through his brain.”
Anonymous account book, Anonymous Diaries and Account Books, The Schlesinger Library, Radcliffe Institute, Harvard University
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For some, the assassination offered the briefest reprieve. Lizzie Moore nearly fainted when she heard the news, then couldn’t finish the day’s baking (which only meant she would have more work the next day). Margaret Howell didn’t “feel like doing anything” when she first heard, but the next day had to sew her pillowcases before going out to inspect the mourning drapery. Most women got no reprieve at all. As Caroline Dall wrote in her diary, capturing the ongoing cycle of domestic labor, “We are cleaning house, but I don’t care.” Yet it wasn’t merely that women couldn’t neglect the everyday. It was also that going through the motions of routine or onerous tasks could be a welcome distraction. As Caroline White wrote on Easter Sunday, “I keep busy about my household duties—going through with them mechanically.” In Vermont, Harriet Canfield admitted to her husband that she “dare not think of the future” in the wake of the president’s death. How much easier it was to ponder a new bedroom carpet than the fate of the nation, and indeed Canfield wrote as well about lambs
and sheep, grain and hay, fences and manure. For Rachel Cormany, a young mother living with her Pennsylvania in-laws while her husband was away in the army, the ceaseless tasks of household labor felt overwhelming. “I nearly gave out before I got done,” she wrote on the day Lincoln died, yet her burdens also allowed her to push aside the horror. “O! how dreadful it seems,” she wrote that day. “My God what does it all mean—Is anarchy & destruction coming upon us?” When the funeral train arrived fifty miles away in Harrisburg, Cormany recorded only her work in the house, barn, and garden. “I nearly gave out,” she wrote again. “I cannot stand it.” Cormany’s oppressive labor also kept away thoughts of the destruction of the world.
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