Mourning Lincoln (36 page)

Divergent experiences down south also occasioned a divide between Lincoln’s more sanguine white mourners and his more distrustful black mourners. To begin with, some white Union soldiers found themselves moved by the disastrous conditions of ruined rebeldom. Ebenezer Gilpin had once entertained thoughts of avenging Lincoln’s murder (“I’m in for making them suffer,” he wrote in his diary), but on his way back to Iowa he suddenly felt sorry for the homeless and hungry enemy veterans he encountered in Georgia. Gilpin, and others like him, were counting on those conditions to make the Confederates compliant, imagining that they would soon embrace the laws of the United States in letter and spirit alike. Northern white soldiers who struck up conversations with their defeated foes
also felt encouraged to exchange their earlier feelings of vengeance for mercy. Confederate officers in Virginia confessed that they were “ready to become good citizens again,” one Yankee wrote to his wife, and even the “very ultra Rebels” would “submit gracefully” for the good of the nation. In North Carolina, Confederates told the white northern soldiers trekking through the South on their way home that they were “completely whipped” and glad for peace. Another northern soldier heard from two of Lee’s paroled men, heading home to Florida, that they were glad the war was over and “hoped that we would forget the past.”
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White mourners who wanted to treat the Confederates gently drew on religious convictions about mercy. Ohio soldier Chauncey Welton had expressed intense anguish at the assassination yet advocated pardons for Confederates from the lowest rank to the highest, since he felt sure that all former rebels would embrace the victorious Union. In the name of God and Christ, Welton would not “eaven disfranchise a single man,” he wrote in a soliloquy of reconciliation, for generosity would both exemplify the true principles of the Union and further “conciliate the animosity of the two sections.” Welton wrote all of this just after Easter Sunday, during which northern ministers confusingly maintained that Lincoln’s own kindness—the very fault for which God had ended his reign on earth—should serve as a model for the treatment of the guilty enemies.
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At the same time, however, other soldiers, both black and white, along with freedpeople and northern missionaries in the South, found their former battlefield enemies a threatening presence after the assassination. On Easter Sunday in Richmond, a Union soldier saw men from Lee’s army returning home, “as bold and defiant as though they were lord of all,” giving their conquerors withering looks and pushing them in the street. As Lincoln’s funeral train set off from Washington, a missionary among the freedpeople in Virginia worried about the large numbers of rebels out and about. “We have been obliged to suspend night-school for a few days till the proper guard can be established,” she wrote. As the funeral train made its way across the country, such apprehensions continued. A white Union officer with a black regiment thought the rebels were “not subdued and humbled as they ought to be,” and as the city of Portsmouth, Virginia, filled up with returning men in gray, it became dangerous to go out at night. In Natchez, Mississippi, the freedpeople and their northern allies were subject
to the lethal enmity of local whites, and a teacher in Richmond feared that “if Mr. Lincoln was not safe who is?”
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The challenge was how to welcome Confederates into a nation rebuilding amid the ashes of racial slavery. The reformer Martha Coffin Wright thought she had a solution. Deeply dissatisfied with President Johnson just a month after Lincoln’s death, Wright condemned the “fatal policy of conciliation.” She was also among the few white mourners who disputed the innocence of the white southern masses, since plenty of “subordinates” were “as guilty as the chiefs,” she asserted. Wright feared reconciliation with the rebels, invoking the former slave and leader of the Haitian Revolution, in hopes that “a Toussaint will be ready when the right time comes, as come it must.” Few stronger articulations of racial equality could be found in the personal writings of white mourners, yet Wright also expressed mercy in two ways. First, she was relieved that John Wilkes Booth had been killed rather than having to suffer as a prisoner; second, she found herself moved by a “genuine Christian sentiment” of forgiveness when she read a sermon delivered by the Unitarian minister Octavius Frothingham. Frothingham had spoken of the “horrible and fiendish” murder of Lincoln to be sure, but he also waxed eloquent about tears washing away vengeance and softened hearts replacing bloodthirsty rage. Like many, Frothingham also looked to the slain president’s temperament for guidance. Lincoln had been “gentle, kind, forgiving,” a “reconciler” and a “forgetter,” and reverence for him should dictate charity. Here, once again, came the paradox of Lincoln’s presumed lenience as either the reason God had taken him away or as the example of how the victors should treat the vanquished. Martha Wright’s solution was to implement political consequences first, and mercy second. First the rebels must be deprived of political power. Then their conquerors could forgive them.
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WHILE UNION SUPPORTERS COMPARED THEIR
new president to the man they mourned, they also considered what they would like done to the president of the defeated rebels. Jefferson Davis stood first in line in the minds of mourners who blamed Confederate leaders for both the war and the assassination. With the fall of the capital in early April, Davis had fled Richmond, moving south and west in hopes of continuing combat: first to Danville and Greensboro by railroad, next by horse and wagon to
Charlotte, where he arrived on the day of Lincoln’s funeral in Washington. Soon Davis’s movements shifted toward escape. Because he was a suspect in the conspiracy leading to the assassination, the Union army was on his trail, with President Johnson offering a reward of one hundred thousand dollars for his capture. Davis had not entirely given up the Confederate cause when he reached Abbeville, South Carolina, in early May, even if his military commanders had. With the enemy army close behind, Davis and a small entourage crossed into Georgia and soon met up with his wife, Varina, and their children. On May 10, 1865, in the town of Irwinsville, regiments from Michigan and Wisconsin finally caught up with the fugitives.

Two-inch headlines, telegraph dispatches, and the cries of newsboys spread word north and west, and Yankees celebrated with bells, cannons, and fireworks—the joyous kind that hadn’t been heard since Lee’s surrender—even as the festivities “
mingled
with sorrow when we think of our
own
loved President,” as one mourner wrote in her diary. Another piece of the story meanwhile took on a life of its own. With Union cavalry closing in, Davis had attempted to disguise himself in an effort to dupe the search party coming into camp. Donning cloak and shawl he had feigned an innocent amble toward a nearby stream, as if to fill the bucket slung over his arm. Union general James Harrison Wilson, commanding the cavalry forces, admitted in a personal communication that Varina Davis had exclaimed something along the lines of, “Oh! do let us pass with our poor old mother who is so frightened and fears to be killed,” before her husband’s boots gave him away. The northern press expanded on this information, spinning a tale of the Confederate president dressed in petticoats, hoopskirt, and bonnet, with his army footgear peeking out below. Just as Sarah Browne recorded that Davis had been caught “disguised in his wife’s clothing underneath which he showed his own boots!!” so too did many Union supporters seize on the narrative of the emasculation of the southern aristocracy. It was ridiculous. It was ludicrous. Women tut-tutted that Jefferson Davis had disgraced their garments. For Edgar Dinsmore of the Fifty-Fourth Massachusetts, the “fall of King Jeff” was utterly comical. Just as “a southerner always relys on the women,” Dinsmore wrote, Davis had left “Mrs. Southerner” to “face the music.” Even more gleefully, Ellis Hughes of Maryland crowed into his journal, “
Jeff
was a
woman
!!!” mocking “chivalry in petticoats & frocks!” Cartoonists put their talents to work,
and shopkeepers placed caricatures in their windows for brisk sales. Poetry and sheet music soon followed.
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Jefferson Davis, dressed in hoopskirt and military boots, hangs above an open grave. This 1865 cartoon lithograph, entitled “Freedom’s Immortal Triumph!” and “Finale of the ‘Jeff Davis Die-Nasty,’” shows a glowering sour apple tree upon which nooses await “Confederate Mourners,” with Robert E. Lee first in line and John Wilkes Booth bringing up the rear. The ground is littered with broken artillery, skulls, and copperhead snakes, while the figures of Liberty and Justice hover above. A man breaking the chains of slavery stands between a grieving soldier and sailor, and angels escort President Lincoln to heaven.
LC-USZ62-88772, Prints and Photographs Division, Library of Congress
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Levity aside, there remained the matter of Jefferson Davis’s fate. “Shall not his life atone (however poorly) for Abraham Lincoln’s?” asked one mourner. The death of Davis, thought another, would “in a small measure compensate us for the loss of our beloved President.” Edgar Dinsmore hoped to see him hanged—”fitted with a hempen cravat,” as he phrased it, “cut in the latest fashion.” Drawing on a verse from the song “John Brown’s Body” (
Hang Jeff Davis to a sour apple tree
), runaway slave William Gould hoped the apple tree would be “all ready.” The song from which Gould repeated these lyrics was enormously popular with Union soldiers; all embraced the message of fighting and marching onward, while the antislavery men among them reveled in portraying the executed white leader of the failed 1859 slave uprising as inspiring them from his grave. Abolitionist mourners made the same claims for President Lincoln: slavery had caused his death, and his death would inspire black equality. The Confederate president, by contrast, should be hanged as a traitor, and an effeminate one at that. Fourteen-year-old Sarah Putnam wanted Davis not only executed but also, she wrote in her diary, “roasted, starved, burnt, and skinned.” Abolitionist Lydia Maria Child, who opposed capital punishment, decided that as long as execution was legal, Davis should suffer that way, or else “no other man in the country ever ought to be hung.”
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In his diary on May 15, 1865, Maryland professor Ellis Hughes drew a picture of Jefferson Davis in a dress. “
Jeff
was a
woman
!!!” Hughes wrote, followed by the words, “playing Nancy & Sally, or the French Woman / feminizing / chivalry in petticoats & frocks! / crinolining & Horses laughed at him! The last Ditch found!” The first line may refer to Nancy Hanks Lincoln and Sally Bush Lincoln, the president’s mother and stepmother, with Nancy also a popular epithet for an effeminate man. References to chivalry, petticoats, and crinoline were ubiquitous in the mocking imagery and popular songs that followed Davis’s capture at Irwinsville, Georgia, on May 10, 1865.
Ellis Hughes diary, May 15, 1865, Hughes-Gray Family Papers, David M. Rubenstein Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Duke University
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Unless, of course, hanging would make Jefferson Davis a martyred hero equal to John Brown and Abraham Lincoln. From Venice, U.S. consul William Dean Howells reasoned that he didn’t want “the force of Davis’s capture in his wife’s clothes, taken away by the tragedy of his execution.” In London, U.S. consul Charles Francis Adams found his Confederate-leaning British friends “too anxious about the fate of
poor
Jefferson Davis!” At receptions and garden parties, Adams heard endless consternation over the suggestion that Davis had been part of the assassination conspiracy, leading Adams to worry that the death penalty would only martyr him. A better solution, one Union soldier reckoned, would be for Davis to commit suicide.
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Though plenty of Confederates were fed up with their president by war’s end, neither the gallows nor suicide proved necessary to turn Davis into a martyr, for his imprisonment—he was even shackled in irons for a few days—readily did so. In South Carolina, Emma LeConte had been studying her German lessons when her father came in to impart news of the capture. In despair, she laid her head on the table, thinking that the only hope now was either a foreign war or a guerrilla war. Or maybe hope lay in another war with the Yankees in years to come, she wrote in her diary, to “renew the struggle and throw off the hateful yoke.” LeConte was not alone in her imagined scenario. If Lincoln’s white mourners thought Confederates would return to the nation as willing patriots, they very soon found themselves gravely mistaken.
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