Authors: Martha Hodes
More often, though, mourners moved effortlessly from the catastrophic to the everyday without worry. In the days following the “very sad” news of Lincoln’s death, Emilie Davis, the African American servant, combined descriptions of the public arena with important fragments of daily life: attending school, visits with female friends, a sore throat, and whether or not her suitor had stopped by. As someone who had stood in line for hours across two days in order to catch a glimpse of Lincoln’s body in Philadelphia, Davis made no pretense that the world had come to a halt, and those who wrote in greater detail display similar patterns.
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Nor did Lincoln’s death keep his mourners from pursuing everyday amusements, any more than had four years of war. Immediately following the assassination, and all during the two weeks of the funeral train, bereaved men and women both recorded their grief and enjoyed themselves. They played whist, croquet, and jackstraws, went on shopping excursions, attended dances and balls, and went to the circus. The day after a “solemn & impressive” service for the fallen president, Mary Elliot played Chinese billiards with her friends, then played again the next day. Not only did people engage in such diversions, but most found nothing troubling in recording them right alongside news of the president’s murder and their aggrieved responses. Mourners even went to the theater. A small number faulted Lincoln for that unchristian form of entertainment—even before the crime, the minister James Ward was mortified with the president’s Good Friday plans at a “Temple of Evil” when he should have been in church, and afterward Ellis Hughes wished that Lincoln had saved his own life by resisting the wicked crowds known to frequent auditoriums. But most didn’t give it a thought, and some followed in the late president’s footsteps. As one woman scoffed at New York theatergoers who lined up to exchange their tickets for a future performance (all theaters had closed after the crime), “Grief or no grief they will flock to the play.” She was right, but her interpretation was wanting. The ticket holders were mourning for Lincoln, but they were also diverting their sorrow and finding solace by participating in the ongoing flow of everyday life.
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Romance gave men and women alike an antidote to grief, but even more than that, it called them toward the future. The day after Lizzie Niles wrote in her diary of a weeping nation, she didn’t hesitate to note down news of an entirely different order. “The funniest thing of all is that Nathaniel Bull and Abbie Sabin are
married
,” she marveled. “Well I wonder what will happen next.” Even as Maggie Wylie paid lip service to the idea that life had come to a halt (“We can talk or think of nothing else but the assassination”), she thought a great deal about her fiancé, Arthur Mellette, fighting with the Ninth Indiana. “I had such a plain dream of Arth,” she wrote soon thereafter. “I never had such a one before—I thought we were married.” Young men revealed similar preoccupations. Maryland Unionist Henry Shriver grieved for Lincoln, but evenings spent with his sweetheart overtook those thoughts. After church on Easter Sunday, their evening alone turned out to be, Shriver confided to his diary, the “most intensely delightful one that I ever spent.” When romance turned out badly, the trouble not only intruded on the ideal of wholly focused mourning but also supplanted attention to the president. One Union supporter wrote the words “President Lincoln was assassinated” in her diary, then without so much as skipping a line, launched into a lament about a son who had run off with the wrong girl, concluding (of her son, not Lincoln), “O how sad & heart broken I feel about him.” Happy or sad, the future still mattered precisely because the world had not stood still.
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Matters of the heart were a recurring topic in soldiers’ letters, countering the dreariness of camp life and the ordeals of the battlefield, and the subject lost none of its power in the aftermath of Lincoln’s assassination. Edgar Dinsmore, in Charleston with the Fifty-Fourth Massachusetts, was both deeply dismayed over the president’s death and at once engaged in serious flirtation with a young woman named Carrie Drayton. How, Dinsmore asked, could he “express the pleasure that I experience this evening at the reception of your inexpressibly welcome and more than sweet letter?” He continued in the same vein at considerable length, at one point mentioning that the Fifty-Fourth had been “marching and fighting, for the good old cause—
Liberty
,” but mostly Dinsmore detailed his joy at corresponding with Drayton and the prospect of returning home. When, after many pages, he declared, “We mourn for the loss of our great and good President as a loss irreparable,” he immediately resumed his earnest wooing. Maybe Dinsmore didn’t want to mar his courtship efforts with reference to the assassination.
Maybe there was nothing left to say that the two African Americans didn’t already know. No doubt both hoped that the president’s death would not change the war’s glorious outcome of union and freedom.
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White soldiers flirted too. William Mead first wrote of vengeance and justice, then teased Louisa White not to be jealous if he occasionally corresponded with another “fair, young, interesting, lovely, and k-i-s-s-a-b-l-e damsel.” Some put that kind of banter first, like Nelson Palmer, who cheerfully related his diversions with a southern girl “of some 16 summers,” before reporting that his regiment had fired seventy-six guns for the slain president. Away from the war, young men’s thoughts also strayed from the terrible news. As Henry Adams (son of the U.S. minister in London) wrote from overseas to a male friend back home—in the same letter in which he reflected on Lincoln’s assassination—”If you know Miss Montgomery (the blonde) tell her that she looks like the Venus of Medici.”
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The promise of love proved to be among the best that everyday life could offer heartbroken mourners. On April 19, 1865, the day of Lincoln’s funeral in Washington, a man named Frank sat down to write to his dear friend Henry Morgan, who had long ago chosen that date for his wedding. “I will shut my eyes to all tokens of mourning, and close my ears to all sorrowful tollings to-day,” Frank wrote, “and hear only joy-bells because it is your wedding-day.” Frank tried mightily to stay on the happy topic, though it had been “ghastly,” he admitted, to be “plunged from the heights of joy” following Union victory to the “depths of sorrow by the horrible murder.” Frank confessed that he was grateful for distraction, beseeching Morgan to tell him “all about the wedding, whether you behaved yourself or not,” and “how many mistakes you made in the service.” Indeed, Frank specifically requested information about the most quotidian details, asking about Morgan’s new married life, including “how your rooms look” and “what you can see from their windows.” Mourners like Frank, though bereft, self-consciously immersed themselves in the everyday, both as diversion and as a means to embrace the way forward.
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Participation in everyday life served to distract and to comfort, and to comfort by distraction. But that participation also signified something more. Not only did the hum of daily life give the lie to declarations that the world had come to a halt, but at the core of mourners’ immersion in everyday life stood their tenacious optimism. Driven by Union victory and
the conviction that the assassination would become part of a magnificent divine plan for the nation’s future, Lincoln’s mourners embraced the persistence of daily life—whether mundane, joyous, or distressing—because victory had brought them into a world they welcomed. From Virginia, Nathan Appleton, a Union officer and scion of a New England family of industrial wealth, found Lincoln’s death a terrible blow, then a week later reflected with gusto on the juxtaposition of tragedy and the progress of the nation. “In the midst of our great excitement the game of life runs gaily on,” he wrote home, as Lincoln’s funeral train headed north. “What a marvelous country!” Henry Adams was touring in Italy when a midnight telegram brought him the news of Lincoln’s murder. Writing to a chum, he rambled on for pages about the ordeal of traveling with his mother and siblings, cracking jokes about the weather in Florence and Dante’s
Inferno
, before asserting that he was “much too strong an American” to think “we are going to be shaken by a murder.” For African Americans in particular, chronicling everyday events like working for wages and spending those wages (for William Gould onboard a Union ship) and visits with friends (for Emilie Davis in Philadelphia) took on an added dimension: to be immersed in those activities meant to be free. Pursuing the commonplace activities of freedom served as a tribute to President Lincoln and to the future he had helped them bring about.
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Walt Whitman’s 1865 poem about Lincoln’s assassination, “When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom’d,” is best known for its imagery of lilac, star, and songbird, but Whitman also noticed the persistence of everyday life for the president’s mourners, offering an arresting image of “infinite separate houses, how they all went on, each with its meals and minutia of daily usages.” In their grief over the slain president, Lincoln’s mourners wished for resolution, and certainly the massive public funerals across the country made for a ritual that signaled a turn away from the past. But genuine closure is uneven at best, and any forward movement can come only amid the swirl of daily life.
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DEFEAT HAD WROUGHT CHANGES IN
the lives of Confederates that no mourner of Lincoln could fathom. Where Union soldiers looked eagerly toward mustering out, thoughts of home were more confusing for boys and men in gray. “Blues awfully,” wrote a Tennessee private in the final entry of his wartime diary. “Anxious thoughts of home.” While Lincoln’s mourners
grieved for their leader, Confederates grieved for an entire world and way of life. It was a grief that disrupted the quotidian in ways that the assassination of President Lincoln could not.
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For white southerners whose lives had been upended by the war, romance supplied one of the few refrains of everyday life’s persistence. In the same letter in which he celebrated Lincoln’s murder, a Confederate soldier in Louisiana facetiously wished to be wounded, “so as to produce a reaction in the female hearts.” Ellen House, despite her despair at surrender, described a May wedding in Knoxville that included a “delightful little dance” and flirtations all around. The same was true for an ardent rebel who detailed her gloom before adding, “Mr. Meade & Miss Leaton are—engaged!! & will be
married
in three weeks & go to Canada!” For Elizabeth Alsop, a friend’s marriage proved a distraction, albeit a short-lived one. One night, Alsop stayed up with two friends until two o’clock in the morning, talking about the approaching wedding, but once the occasion had passed, she found herself again bereft. “My heart is so rebellious,” she told her diary, “that instead of forgiving our enemies, I hate them more every hour of my life.” Alsop spoke for many as she found the routines of daily life taking place against a steady state of misery and anger.
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The end of slavery constituted the most consequential disruption of all for the planter classes. Enslaved people had left their masters throughout the war, and Union victory both precipitated more departures and finalized the meaning of earlier ones. When white Mississippian Nancy Robinson recorded that “all are mourning & their hearts are crushed,” President Lincoln was nowhere in her thoughts, for Robinson estimated that she had been deprived of sixty-five thousand dollars’ worth of human chattel. When yet another former slave informed Robinson that she and her family would be leaving (emphasizing that “they were
Free
”), Robinson felt, she wrote, “restless with a dread I cannot describe.” In Georgia, Eva Jones wrote to her mother about the “dark, crowding events of this most disastrous year,” of “a life robbed of every blessing.” She specifically meant emancipation and runaway slaves, which she called an “unprecedented robbery,” expressing shock that those who left (“in search of freedom,” she fully admitted) had neglected to say proper good-byes. Jones signed off in “an abyss of despair.”
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Cornelia Spencer felt so distraught about all the changes in her day-to-day
life in North Carolina that it seemed plausible she would lose her mind. She worried that marriages performed in the Confederate states would no longer be legally recognized, and she envisioned “a life of continued toil.” Notably, the future she pictured for herself bore obvious parallels with the daily lives of slaves: marriage unrecognized and labor unending. Whether she was oblivious to those parallels or intended deliberately to portray masters as the slaves of Yankees, when Spencer described her home, she might as well have been describing a slave cabin: “not a chair … not a fork … nor a single set of table ware of any sort,” she wrote, “not a carpet or a curtain or a napkin” and “
flies
every where in doors.” How different from the imagery conjured by Henry Morgan’s friend Frank, up north, picturing Morgan’s cheerful life as a newly married man, including “how your rooms look” and “what you can see from their windows.”
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Cornelia Spencer was not alone. Everyday life in a postwar, post-emancipation future became unbearable for some Confederates. Many of the vanquished, and veterans in particular, suffered anguish and torment manifested as apathy, humiliation, bitterness, and defiance. Combined with the physical wounds of the returning troops, the financial ruin of families and communities, and a racial world turned upside-down, unknown numbers faced lives of depression and mental instability, including alcoholism and family violence. For many there were no words to describe their feelings, much less adequate medical categories to define their conditions. And yet perhaps none at all could admit that their newfound hardships paled in comparison to legal enslavement, living day in and day out as a piece of property to be bought and sold, with the never-ending threat or reality of separation from loved ones, of sexual exploitation and horrific violence.