Authors: Martha Hodes
When word of Jefferson Davis’s capture down south reached Salem, bells rang, flags waved, and guns fired. It was the “great finale of our glorious triumph,” Sarah wrote. (She also delighted in reports that Davis had been “disguised in his wife’s clothing” when Union forces apprehended him, “underneath which he showed his own boots!!”) For Albert’s part, he was thrilled that the “arch traitor and wicked man” was now under federal watch and hoped that Davis would be hanged as a step toward vindicating all
who had died for the Union cause. Albert worried, though, that Davis would be made a martyr, and nothing infuriated him so much as Confederates who insisted on extolling their self-exiled rebel leader. On a trip to Savannah, he’d had to listen to a southern hostess (a northern-born woman, at that!—Albert had socialized with her family in the past) who called Davis “a
pious
and
good man and patriot
.” That prompted a stern lecture to the entire family (all of whom, in Albert’s recounting, listened to him, trembling and aghast), ending with a warning that if he ever heard another apology for Jefferson Davis, he would arrest the speaker, male or female. When the offender’s husband tried to apologize, Albert apparently announced that he would never visit again if the man couldn’t “bridle the tongue of his she rebel.”
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Despite that angry encounter with Confederates, when Albert Browne thought about the nation to be formed in the wake of victory, he remained filled with optimism. On Hilton Head Island, he attended a church meeting of African Americans and marveled at the “gathering of a thousand
human beings
” who so recently had been “Chattel
property
.” It astonished him how fast history was being made, right before his eyes. The destruction of slavery, then Union victory, then the assassination: he had lived through the “momentous transactions” of each one. “I can hardly realise the scenes through which I am passing, so important, so astounding, and following in such quick succession,” he wrote to Sarah in mid-May. “How fast we all live, how much faster I live than most men.” For her part, Sarah connected a sense of involvement in history to faith in God. “A feeling of awe comes over us as we review the events of the last three months,” she recorded in her diary. Looking to past and future alike, Sarah shared her husband’s optimism. “We see God’s hand and feel His power,” she wrote.
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HAUNTED BY VISIONS OF WHAT
was to come, Rodney Dorman spent a good deal of time gazing backward. When he thought about the future, with the Confederacy dismantled and Yankees in charge, it often felt unendurable. Black Union soldiers in Jacksonville served as the first reminder of that humiliation. “The use of them here is an insult & disgrace,” he wrote in his diary, “& intended as an insult!” Interference, meddling, tampering—that’s how Dorman saw emancipation. Much as he hated the freed slaves and black soldiers (and most especially the slaves-turned-soldiers), Dorman
didn’t hold them directly accountable. “I do not blame the negroes,” he wrote, for they were only “put up to & encouraged in all sorts of impudence, brutality, & wickedness” by their white superiors. Never had black people behaved the way they behaved now, he believed, until the Union army—”these Hell-hounds”—came along to incite insurrection. (That was the way masters had always imagined slave uprisings, in keeping with their fantasies about passive and contented bondspeople.) What “contemptible meanness & baseness,” Dorman spat out, “prying into a man’s affairs through his servants” (
servants
, too, was a fantasy of the masters, as if enslaved people performed paid labor of their own volition).
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Rodney Dorman’s venom knew no bounds, and, as usual, he reserved special animosity for the abolitionists, “pitiful, pettifogging scoundrels,” their faces “too brazen to blush,” whose “sickening sentimentality” did nothing but “beshit & befoul every thing they meddle with.” As for the particular Christian missionaries who were in town to teach the former slaves, Dorman found them to be troublemaking fiends whose dastardliness put the devil to shame. What “black hearted devils” were the white “mischief-makers,” Dorman proclaimed. Even stupider than the black people they converted, they “out-negro the negro,” he wrote. For Rodney Dorman, the post-surrender nation remained a war zone of Yankee invasion. “The outrages are not over,” he declared, even “if the war is.”
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Speaking of outrages, the fact that the federals were pursuing the fleeing Jefferson Davis when the Confederacy had already surrendered only increased Dorman’s vexation. True, Davis had been a leader of secession, but according to Dorman, secession had never been a criminal act, not to mention that the abolitionists had started the war in the first place. In the late-arriving northern newspapers, Dorman followed the Union army’s hunt for the Confederate president, and when they captured him in mid-May, it only steeled Dorman’s conviction that “the day of retribution must come.”
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IN THE SPRING OF
1865, Union supporters felt themselves palpably immersed in the unfolding of epic events. The fall of Richmond, Lee’s surrender, the assassination, the funeral in Washington and the funeral train, the capture and killing of the assassin: here was history in the making, in one’s own lifetime, before one’s very eyes, at lightning speed, and just like
Albert Browne, Lincoln’s mourners wrote themselves into it. For Horatio Nelson Taft, working in the Patent Office in Washington, the past month was not only “
the
most eventful in the History of our Country,” but “above all in importance which has occurred in the
world
,” for “the President of the United States has been
assassinated
.” For the victors-turned-mourners, the events of the past weeks felt like enough for years, or a lifetime, or five hundred years, or “a century of ordinary history.” April 1865, wrote Edward Everett Hale, was the “most remarkable month in modern history.” Or as one woman told her niece, “You will remember, forever, with satisfaction, that you were alive at this time.”
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At war’s end, with history being made before their eyes, Lincoln’s mourners not only looked back, in efforts to make sense of Union victory followed so closely by the assassination, they also looked ahead, as the nation sped into the future. By writing themselves into the historical events taking place around them, the grief-stricken stood ready personally to shape that future, and they did so by bringing politics into everyday life. As the doctor Elizabeth Blackwell wrote to a friend, “Private lives have all become interwoven with the life of the nation,” so that “every one seems to live two lives,” a personal one and a “great absorbing national one.”
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This was true not only for white men, who exercised the rights of citizenship and suffrage, but also, and most especially, for black men and women, whose lives were so directly connected to the fate of union and slavery. White women, too, immersed themselves. As Anna Lowell asserted on the day Lincoln died, “We had felt as if we too had cast our votes for him.” Children drew themselves into the swirl and fray as well. African American youngsters in the South, who saw the jubilation of emancipation and victory all around them, also heard clearly articulated fears for a future without President Lincoln. Nor could white children remain sheltered, and even some of the youngest grasped the magnitude of events. A week after the assassination, one mother found her son “tired out and very nervous,” yet begging to be read the newspaper reports of Booth’s capture. For all of Lincoln’s mourners, no matter their formal political power, it proved impossible to grieve without also thinking about what kind of nation the victorious United States would become without Lincoln at the helm—whether his absence proved a blessing because of his lenience or a curse because of his statesmanship.
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History-making for Confederates felt entirely different, for it was being made in a nation from which they had failed to secede. Amid their spiritual struggles with God’s apparent desertion, as they wrestled with the destruction of their land and the pointless loss of so many lives, the vanquished looked back with wistfulness and forward with fear and anger. When they added Lincoln’s assassination to their own roster of historic occurrences, it was often only to leaven the gloom. “What exciting, what eventful times we live in!” Emma LeConte had written in her diary when the news arrived. Few of her compatriots were quite so effusive. A musician with a Mississippi regiment glumly reckoned with history as he marched his last fifteen miles home. That day he entitled his diary entry “Reflections upon our situation as a down-fallen people.” He then closed his wartime journal with the words, “The end.” Except of course it was not the end, for he and everyone else could not help thinking about the future.
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The surrender of Robert E. Lee at Appomattox provoked very different visions for the victors and the vanquished, most especially when it came to political rights for black and white southerners. At one extreme lay the restoration of the Union, without legal slavery but with black subordination reinstated, with no interference from the federal government. That was the dream of Rodney Dorman and like-minded Confederates. At the other end of the spectrum lay fully equal rights for African Americans, including voting rights for black men, enforced by federal authorities and coupled with the strict abridgment of the political power of Confederate leaders and elites. That was the hope of Sarah and Albert Browne, of African Americans north and south, and of radical white northerners. In between lay the less clear-cut visions of moderate Republicans, northern Democrats who had supported the war for Union, southern Unionists, and Copperheads.
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When Lincoln spoke to the crowd outside the White House on April 11, two days after Lee had surrendered, no one knew that it would be his last speech, that it was the last time he would articulate his ideas about reconstructing the nation. That evening, Lincoln mentioned his personal preference for at least partial black suffrage. Among those who reacted with dismay was John Wilkes Booth, who stood among the listeners (“That means nigger citizenship. Now, by God, I’ll put him through”). That evening, Lincoln also told his audience that the process of reconstruction would be
“fraught with great difficulty,” and so it was proving to be, right from the start.
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Four days later, just hours after Lincoln expired, Chief Justice Salmon Chase swore in Andrew Johnson as president. Lincoln had chosen the Tennessean as his 1864 running mate for strategic reasons. As an ardent anti-secessionist, Johnson was the only senator from a seceded state to retain his seat in the federal government and therefore a good bet for appealing to northern Democrats. Johnson’s background was not so different from Lincoln’s own. Lincoln had been born in a dirt-floor cabin in Kentucky, to parents critical of slavery; Johnson had been born to poor and illiterate parents in North Carolina and grew up bitter toward the rich whites of the South. Yet the two men’s lives ultimately followed very different trajectories.
When Lincoln’s mourners looked ahead to the fate of the nation, they again confronted the paradox of which lesson to draw from the assassination: in the slain chief’s kindness and generosity could be found either a divine reason for his death (since he would have treated the defeated rebels too indulgently) or a model for political strategy after his death (because the defeated rebels should in fact be treated with mercy).
Now, with the Confederacy and Lincoln both gone, the future of the nation lay with Andrew Johnson, the man empowered to determine the status of former rebels and former slaves in the postwar nation. For their part, the rebels—including all who rejoiced over the assassination—had to confront a fresh set of anxieties. They had feared Lincoln for his hatred of slavery, and they now feared Johnson for his hatred of slaveholders. It was hard to tell which was more troublesome. “Many think Andy Johnson worse than Lincoln,” wrote Kate Stone, a war refugee in Texas, “but that is simply impossible.” Emma LeConte shrugged off any distinction, scoffing that a “rail-splitter” had been replaced by a “drunken ass.” Most rebels cared little about Johnson’s rumored behavior at the inauguration, though, training their worries instead on the loss of Lincoln, the man they despised and simultaneously imagined would have acted as their best friend after surrender. “All the citizens about here regret the occurance,” wrote a Union officer in Virginia after the assassination, “not so much for love of Lincoln as for fear of Johnson.”
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Warily, Confederate nurse Kate Cumming read a speech the new president
had delivered to an Indiana delegation during his first week in office, in which he spoke of the “diabolical and fiendish rebellion” and asserted (to applause) that treason was a crime and traitors should be “punished and impoverished.” As for the Confederate leadership, “their social power must be destroyed,” Johnson maintained, to ensure that they would never rise again. He even suggested that Confederate property be handed over to Union supporters, including poorer white southerners who had been coerced into the rebellion by powerful elites. As for John Wilkes Booth, Johnson equated him with all the Confederate higher-ups who had tried to “assassinate this nation.” After that, Cumming felt sure that the war wasn’t yet over, unless Johnson promptly took back everything he had said to the Indianans. The fervent secessionist Edmund Ruffin, before he committed suicide, had recorded his thoughts on the new president, decreeing him an evil traitor who would treat the Confederates even worse than would an abolitionist. A Louisiana planter likewise thought Johnson would “out Herod, Herod.” As the black journalist Thomas Morris Chester put it, “From Mr. Johnson they expect no mercy.”
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A few angry Confederates confronted the new executive personally. The “same spirit,” an anonymous rebel wrote to Johnson, “still burns within us, & cannot be crushed.” Signing himself “a Southern man,” the writer warned that Johnson could either reconcile with white people or “exasperate them” until “
revenge revenge revenge
takes deep root in their hearts.” A Confederate in exile in Canada spelled out the consequences. Should Johnson take any untoward action against Lee or Davis, this man wrote (signing himself “A Southerner for life”), “I will shoot you.” From the other side, a Virginia Unionist was so sure that Johnson would be assassinated on account of his vigorous stand against the rebels that she implored him to protect himself. “Oh! in Heaven’s name & for the sake of our loved country,” he should go nowhere without personal security. Fearing for her own life, the woman withheld a signature.
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