Mourning Lincoln (32 page)

Indeed, the distance of faraway wartime deaths made everything worse for families. Lincoln’s funeral train delivered his body home to Springfield, but for the hundreds of thousands of Union troops who had died in battle, on the march, in camp, and in army hospitals, there would be no such return. From the start, the Civil War disrupted ideal visions of death, in which the expiring patient lay abed at home, surrounded by family and friends. Popular wartime songs portrayed the dying man, far from the hearth, with his mother standing as the symbol of home: “Break It Gently to My Mother” (in the dying soldier’s voice) or “Let Me Kiss Him for His Mother” (in the voice of a kind stranger). Next best for families was to retrieve the body, not least for the purpose of verification, in an era when identification of battlefield corpses was woefully inadequate. But retrieval often entailed disinterment from a makeshift grave wherever a man had fallen, not to mention the expense of embalming and shipment. Unlike Lincoln’s corpse, only a small number of the wartime dead would ever return to their families, for there was simply not enough space, time, resources, or labor for all the procedures of proper burial, let alone travel home.
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A mourner on the home front weeps for a “brave and gallant soldier, and a true patriot.” In this 1863 lithograph, the blank spaces for name, regiment, and place and date of death permitted bereaved families to imagine their own loved one identified on this imposing tombstone. In reality, many of the fallen went unidentified and few families could afford to bring bodies back home. Visible in the background are Union troops and a fluttering American flag.
LC-USZ62-35580, Prints and Photographs Division, Library of Congress
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Sometimes the war took women away from the home front too, depriving them of any last days or moments with a dying loved one. Rose Pickard was volunteering at a Union hospital in Virginia when her brother died in
upstate New York of an illness contracted in the army. Unable to reach her parents’ house until after the burial, Pickard could only take in her brother’s empty room, plagued by his lament: “Rose won’t come. I shall never see her.” Where Pickard had recently expressed shock at Lincoln’s death (“It dont seem possible that it is really the President,” she had written to her brother as Lincoln lay in state), now her despair shifted. “I cant realize that Byron is dead and buried,” she wrote, suffering a grief that would never come to a close.
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News of the president’s assassination also further provoked apprehension about loved ones at the battlefront. On Easter Sunday, when Mary Mellish wrote to her son in the Union army, she opened with “deep feelings of anxiety,” wishing she could “feel assured that you are alive,” then restlessly awaiting the day’s newspaper casualty lists. Prominent Washingtonian Elizabeth Blair Lee felt the same way, with her husband in the Union navy. “I never thought of you more in my life,” she wrote to him during the president’s funeral in Washington. “I am blessed indeed to have you spared to me.” In the other direction, a Union soldier down south who hadn’t written to his parents since the assassination, now penned a letter to let them know “that I am a live.” Those at home also worried about faraway loved ones, no matter where they were. With her husband away on business when Lincoln was shot, Emily Watkins checked the papers for accounts of accidents, then wrote to tell him, “
You are all the world to me
,” double underlining each word.
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Just as those at home worried over news from the battlefield, so too did those at the front wonder about the well-being of loved ones at home. Away in the army three years, one man could only ponder the “many vacancies of which we cannot realize untill our return.” When bad news arrived in letters, soldiers too had to contend with the inability to bid a loved one good-bye around the deathbed. William Gould, the North Carolina slave who ran away to the Union navy, was at sea in the spring of 1865 when he received word from his sister, “bringing me,” he wrote, “the sad news of the death of Mother.” Gould’s ship was docked in England, and his mother had died more than two months earlier. “What sad news for me,” he added to his diary entry. That same spring, a soldier in the Forty-Sixth Illinois read letters from his parents, grieving over the loss of his brother to an unexpected illness three months before. More than a month later, the dead
boy’s father still found it hard to get up in the morning, an unsurprising fact that speaks volumes about the difference between the loss of Lincoln and that of an intimate.
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Death on the home front also forced the president’s mourners to revise any romantic thoughts of Lincoln’s assassination as a final loss. On Saturday, April 15, before people received word of the assassination, they were already at funerals burying loved ones. Likewise, after preaching at Easter services the next day, Boston minister Edward Everett Hale called on a dying parishioner, and on the day of the president’s funeral in Washington, Hale attended the funeral of a local woman, then another for a seventeen-year-old boy who had starved to death in a Confederate prison; the day after that, a parishioner’s baby died. For some, a more personal loss resulted directly from the assassination, as for William Brooks, whose boyhood friend had already been “depressed,” Brooks admitted, then hanged himself on hearing of Lincoln’s murder.
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A home-front death meant that survivors could engage with the body, and those encounters differed considerably from the experiences of Lincoln’s mourners rushing past the president’s corpse in a crowd. In Philadelphia, Annie Hillborn watched Lincoln’s body pass through her city, but only after she had attended the funeral of young Clementine Mifflin earlier the same day. The girl had died of an illness the night before, and Hillborn and her friends gazed for as long as they liked upon her white cashmere robes, the rosebuds arranged in her hands, and the flowers strewn about the coffin’s interior. The same was true when a bereaved family could afford to have a soldier’s body returned. Jennie Smith, whose dear friend Otis had been thrown from his army horse, stood by his body marveling that he “looked so
natural
,” with “his hair combed
beautifully
” and “such a
pleasant
, such a
sweet
expression” on his face. Not only could Smith spend time with Otis’s body, but the corpse’s return had been swift enough that the face remained well preserved, allowing her to commune with the departed in a way infinitely more satisfying than permitted by Lincoln’s decaying visage. After writing five pages about the deceased young man, Smith turned to the assassination, composing more formulaic phrases about “
universal
mourning” and the “beautiful show of respect” by thousands when the funeral train passed through Syracuse at midnight.
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Throughout the spring, mourners interwove their thoughts about the
president with the loss of intimates. On the Sunday after Easter, Anna Lowell thought a sermon preached for a deceased soldier contained passages “much applicable to our martyred chief.” For William Brooks, with the funeral train nearing the end of its journey, “how vividly does the loss of our dear son George come before us,” he wrote, adding that the boy had “died in a glorious cause.” Even when death came far from the battlefield and apart from the war, those personal losses melded with Lincoln’s assassination. On Saturday, April 15, residents of a Massachusetts town attended a burial for a ten-year-old girl who had succumbed to scarlet and typhoid fevers. “The funeral was doubly sad,” one woman wrote, “for at noon we heard our President was dead and the bell was tolled for a long time.” Annie Hillborn drew an even more direct parallel when she attended the funeral of Clementine Mifflin on the day Lincoln’s body traveled through Philadelphia. “Here too is a great sacrifice!” Hillborn wrote, without compunction equating the girl’s death with the president’s murder.
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Anniversaries of personal losses also resonated in the aftermath of the assassination. Laura Lamson had just started her Saturday morning ironing when a neighbor brought the news of Lincoln. Dutifully, Lamson recorded the time of the president’s death as 7:22 a.m., then drew a dash and added, “Two years ago today at 6 a.m. our little Willie died.” For Sarah Gilpin, it was the anniversary of her mother’s passing that preoccupied her. “These are very sad days to me,” she wrote in her diary, as Lincoln’s funeral took place in the capital. Gilpin noted New York’s closed shops and dark drapery, but that wasn’t her main concern. “I scarcely feel the public events,” she admitted, “my mind is so filled by the associations of last year hour by hour.” Gilpin noted when Lincoln’s body was nearing her city, but she also found it trying that, with so much attention focused on the president, “no one else
seems
to remember.”
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In a letter to her children, Sarah Hale skipped back and forth, reflecting first on the assassination, then passing on the news of the death of a friend’s baby. “Other forms of grief and bereavement may be severe,” she wrote, alluding to the assassination, but nothing, she insisted, could cause greater pain to a mother than the loss of an infant. Anne Neafie would have agreed. On the day Lincoln’s funeral train left Albany, Neafie, in a small town eighty miles south, wrote to her husband in the army in Savannah. She commented on the “grief and rage” occasioned by the assassination,
but she also had “family matters of importance” to convey: their young son might not survive scarlet fever. Now Alfred Neafie looked for his wife’s letters with dread, and soon Anne wrote to tell him that “we have no longer a little boy on earth.” Anne felt, she confessed to Alfred, “as if I could not take up again the burden of my life,” and as she appealed to God, her “stricken heart” cried out in rebellion. In Savannah, Alfred recorded the date and hour of death on a photograph of his boy, then turned to God with an “aching void” in his heart—the same words Alice Browne had invoked after the death of her sister, Nellie. Just as for the Brownes, there was no solace or closure for the Neafies, with every glance at a toy or a piece of the boy’s clothing tearing at Anne. “Oh, darling it is killing me,” she wrote to her husband.
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For some, despair at the loss of an intimate eclipsed both Lincoln’s assassination and Union victory. Louisa Hughes had watched her husband die of a long illness during the war; in a state of nearly suicidal grief, she found herself unable to accept God’s will in the “months of weeping and desolation” that followed. In the spring of 1865, when Hughes recorded Confederate surrender in her Connecticut diary, she addressed her thoughts to her absent beloved. “Alas my husband,” she wrote, “you are silent and feel nothing now.” The joy of victory meant little, since she enjoyed no occasion “until I had shared it with you,” she told his ghost. In church on Easter Sunday, gazing upon the flowers symbolizing the resurrection of Christ, Hughes found herself wishing it was her husband who could be raised from the dead—not Jesus Christ, not Abraham Lincoln, but her husband. Others, consumed by private shock and sorrow, made no mention of the assassination at all. In New Hampshire, Mary Russell wrote to her aunt Eunice Stone after Easter services, with a “heavy heart,” not to impart reflections on the slain president, but because she had received news of the death of Stone’s husband (in the case of this divided family, he died fighting for the Confederacy). When the fallen man’s sister, an ardent Union supporter, wrote to the widow Stone on the day of the Washington funeral, she too had nothing to say about Lincoln. “Try and think it is the will of God,” she advised, echoing the preaching ministers but referring instead to the husband’s death. Just as men of the pulpit foretold a luminous future for the nation, she added, albeit more prosaically, “I hope there is better days in store for you.”
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Terrible as Lincoln’s death was for those who loved him as statesman and metaphorical friend or father, the loss of intimates was devastating in an entirely different way. Sarah and Albert Browne well knew this, and they were far from alone in a grief that could not be put to rest, for the death of a spouse, child, sibling, parent, or dear friend proved resistant to the comforts of divine design, whether that death came on the battlefield for a glorious cause, at home in bed, or anywhere else. The march of death in the spring and summer of 1865 made eminently clear to Lincoln’s mourners that the assassination had brought neither life nor death to a halt.

AS WHITE SOUTHERNERS IN THE
spring of 1865 confronted their own enormous death toll, the hardest part was the knowledge that every soldier seemed to have died in vain. That understanding was precisely what drove Rodney Dorman to such fury over the lost lives of Confederates in Union prisons. Over time, the grim thought of so many pointless deaths would be assuaged by “Lost Cause” ideology, first advanced by General Robert E. Lee in his farewell address to his troops the day after surrender. All rebel soldiers, Lee asserted, had fought bravely for independence, and defeat had resulted only from the Union’s “overwhelming numbers and resources.” Oft-repeated, Lee’s formulation would quickly take root, nurturing the idea that every Confederate death was a noble one. But that spring, as the conquered asked God why their loved ones had died, nothing at all seemed noble. In South Carolina on the Sunday after Easter, plantation mistress Mary Chesnut listened to her compatriots putting the unfathomable outcome into words: “so many left dead on battlefields, so many dead in hospitals and prisons,” others suffering “with hideous wounds and diseases” or “frozen to death—starved to death,” leaving “brokenhearted women” everywhere. What Chesnut and her friends implied, Kate Stone articulated directly: “The best and bravest of the South sacrificed—and for nothing,” she wrote in her Texas diary. “Yes, worse than nothing.”
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