Mourning Lincoln (8 page)

Among Confederate prisoners in Virginia, reports circulated for two or three days, while the men attributed the lowered flags on passing ships to the death of some high-ranking Union officer. Near Greensboro, North Carolina, on Wednesday, April 19, people heard that Lincoln and Seward had been murdered, along with rumors that the federals had granted southern independence, with slavery intact, for the next five or ten or maybe twenty years. On Friday, in a small town in Georgia, a man thrust his head into the window of an arriving train, shouting that Lincoln had been assassinated, only to be answered with laughter and a cry that April Fools was over. In Mississippi, a planter heard the first intimation on April 21 but didn’t believe it, since no one he knew even believed that Lee had surrendered—in fact, rumor had it that Lee and Joseph Johnston had united forces and whipped Sherman. Next came stories that Vice President Andrew Johnson was dead too, or maybe that Johnson had ordered Lincoln’s assassination. In upcountry South Carolina, Confederates treated the news as simply too “theatric and improbable” to take seriously. In Griffin, Georgia, people heard that Lincoln had been murdered but assumed it to be just as mythical as the reports that France, England, Spain, and Austria had recognized the Confederacy or, for that matter, just as mythical as reports that Robert E. Lee had surrendered to the Yankees.
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Into the next week, Pennsylvania soldiers in the Deep South were having trouble deciding what news to trust, since so many half-truths and untruths “float from mouth to mouth,” as one man wrote. Toward the end of April,
Union prisoners on the march in Georgia and Florida got the news of Lincoln’s death from their captors, but an Iowan dismissed it with the words, “All kinds of rumors in camp.” When a black regiment in Louisiana heard talk of assassination, the men “discussed the unlikeliness of the affair,” hoping the next editions of the papers would report a contradiction. On the last day of April, a white South Carolina family received word of Lincoln’s murder alongside a report that “the Yankee Congress had a row, and Andy Jonson was killed.” Into May, the men of a Tennessee regiment in Alabama found themselves in the thick of stories that Lincoln had been assassinated and the Confederacy had won the war. One young private prayed to God that both pieces of information “may not prove a myth.”
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In Washington it began earliest, with unconfirmed stories on the night of April 14. James Tanner, a War Department clerk, was watching a play about Aladdin’s lamp at Grover’s Theatre when someone opened the playhouse doors and shouted that the president had been assassinated over at Ford’s. Then someone else shouted for everyone to sit down—it was only a ruse perpetrated by pickpockets. Annie Dudley was awakened at her boardinghouse by the voices and footfalls of men running through the streets, and another lodger said that William Seward had been murdered—which made no sense since Seward was in bed recovering from an accident. On the north side of Lafayette Square, the secretary of the navy had been drifting off to sleep when his wife alerted him to someone outside. When Gideon Welles stuck his head out the window, he found his personal messenger in a state of extreme agitation, incoherently relating that Lincoln, Seward, and Seward’s son had all been killed. Very improbable, Welles thought—indeed, rather melodramatic—especially since the messenger mentioned Ford’s Theatre, and everyone knew that Seward was home in bed.
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John Stonehouse, a Union army officer, was about to retire for the night when someone ran into his house breathlessly inquiring which theater President Lincoln was attending that night—he had to know because William Seward had just been murdered. Hurrying outside, Stonehouse encountered the crowds coming from Ford’s. People were saying Lincoln had been killed, and when Stonehouse reached the theater, he saw that it was neither improbable nor theatrical. By the light of the glowing gas lamp on Tenth Street, he watched men carrying the president’s unmistakably long body out of the auditorium and across the street.
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2
Shock

LINCOLN HAD BEEN DEAD FOR
little more than an hour when Sarah Browne heard. Over breakfast on Saturday morning, April 15, she and the children were talking about the anniversary at Fort Sumter and picturing the festivities Albert had attended when a neighbor came to the door. Thinking that he might have picked up letters for her at the post office, Sarah greeted him happily, then saw immediately, in the man’s face, that something was wrong. He said it all at once.

“There is very bad news, Sarah, this morning. President Lincoln was shot at Ford’s Theatre last evening.” Perhaps Sarah pressed him to see if he were sure, and perhaps he offered proof in the form of a newspaper or telegraph dispatch, for right away she knew it was not a rumor.

“What a shock!” Those were the words Sarah wrote in her diary—”like a thunder clap it came and no words could express enough of horror and grief at this unparalleled outrage.”
Horror. Grief. Outrage
. Sarah Browne’s description encapsulated the emotions of many: first shock, then sorrow, then anger. She copied down parts of the official account by Secretary of War Stanton from the morning newspapers: the time of the shooting, who else had been sitting in the presidential box, Booth’s leap to the stage, the attack on Secretary of State William Seward and his son Frederick (serving
as assistant secretary of state). As Sarah walked through Salem over the following days—so different from the walk she had taken earlier that week, when neighbors had joyously congratulated one another over Union victory—she saw that neighborhood women had hastily sewn black borders onto the flags recently unfurled to celebrate triumph. “Almost every house shows something to symbolize deep grief,” she recorded, noticing as well the miniature black-trimmed flags pinned to children’s clothing.

Sarah did not write to Albert for five days, wanting to be absolutely sure that he had already heard, that she would not be the one to convey the news. “By this time, the
atrocious deed
must have been made known to you,” she wrote then, imagining her husband’s state of mind: “
Your
heart as a part of the heart of
our
Nation must be distracted by feelings of honor and indignation.” Then Sarah helped Albert imagine the scene at home in Salem. She described the black-bordered flags and the black and white bunting on the houses and public buildings. After that, she attempted to convey something of her own experience. “The terrible news came to us in the midst of our great rejoicing,” she wrote, “on the very day too when the eyes of the nation were turned towards Fort Sumter—what a change! from frantic joy to frantic grief!” Unable to bring herself to rehearse the details, she bundled up the newspapers, adding a perfunctory, “I refer you to the daily press.” Later that day, Sarah wrote to Albert again, realizing that she had told him nothing else about herself or the family. “We have not recovered from the terrible shock,” she explained, adding that they all remained haunted by visions of the scene in the theater.
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Albert Browne was among a party of dignitaries accompanying Henry Ward Beecher when the telegram arrived at Saint Helena Island, between Charleston and Savannah, on Tuesday, April 18. The message was addressed to Senator Henry Wilson of Massachusetts and contained, Albert told Sarah, the “astonishing intelligence of the assassination of Mr. Lincoln.” Beecher decided to return to New York at once, and so the two bade farewell with sentiments restrained. “I took his hand in mine, he took mine in his,” Albert wrote, “and we parted without saying goodbye.” Stoic silence was an acceptable reaction to devastating news, comporting with conventions of manly behavior, as were the responses Sarah had imagined for her husband: identification with the nation and indignation for national honor. Even more than Sarah, Albert could find few words to express
his feelings on paper, settling for a sentence with less emotion than his wife’s horror, grief, and outrage: “I cant say more & am too full.” Emotion crept in only when he once again recorded his sense of participation in history: “O how much I have lived in these few days!”
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Events in Charleston better permitted Albert to articulate his shock and sorrow. The Union-occupied city was draped and flags were lowered, while officers wore black bands on their left arms, as ordered by the War Department. Although he took in the “unmistakable evidence of its truth,” the whole thing still seemed truly unbelievable, coming as it did amid the celebrations at Sumter. “The reaction has been so sad so sudden, as to take from me the power of just thought,” Albert wrote to his family.
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THE MURDER OF GREAT LEADERS
is at least as old as Julius Caesar, and death threats and attempts had not been unknown to Abraham Lincoln. But the assassination of an American president seemed nearly unimaginable before it happened. The shock professed by Sarah and Albert Browne echoed through the Union, as new questions became suddenly pressing. How would the nation be reconstructed now? How would President Andrew Johnson contend with the Confederates? What would become of Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation? Would black suffrage come to pass? What would happen the next day?

If Lincoln’s mourners everywhere felt themselves in a state of amazement, those who had been inside Ford’s Theatre had to cope as well with the trauma of witnessing the crime. None had a closer view than those in the presidential box. “Henry has been suffering a great deal with his arm, but it is now doing very well,” Clara Harris wrote to a friend, sheltered in her father’s home off Lafayette Square, a half-mile from Ford’s and just down the street from the White House. “The knife went from the elbow nearly to the shoulder inside—cutting an artery, nerves & veins,” she explained, describing the wound inflicted on her fiancé by the assassin. “He bled so profusely as to make him very weak.” As for herself, she felt tremendously unsettled, unable to undertake even the slightest task. Harris recounted how her clothes had been “saturated literally with blood, & my hands & face—.” But she couldn’t go on so drew a dash instead, adding only, “you may imagine what a scene.” She was haunted too by Mary Lincoln’s screams, recalling how the First Lady had stared at the blood
from Henry Rathbone’s gashes, thinking it had gushed from the gunshot to her husband’s head. Harris hadn’t intended to write so many details, it was just that she couldn’t think about anything else. “I cannot sleep & really feel wretchedly,” she confessed to her friend, doubly panicked that John Wilkes Booth remained at large and might still be in Washington. Harris and Rathbone would marry two years later. He enjoyed a successful career with the U.S. military, they had three children and later moved to Germany, with Rathbone posted at the American consulate in Hanover. Yet he never fully recovered from the mental anguish of his encounter with Lincoln’s assassin. Years later, Rathbone would murder his wife and end his life in an asylum.
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Some of the theatergoers that night were Washington residents, others visitors to the city. Some had reserved seats in advance, expressly to view the president, while others had gone to the play on a whim. Afterward, either they couldn’t sleep at all or their dreams were nightmares. Julia Shepard’s brother had died in the Battle of Cold Harbor, and she had come to the capital to accompany his body home to upstate New York. On her way out of the theater that night, she tried not to step on the blood that was all over the stairs. “Sleeping or waking, that terrible scene is before me,” she wrote to her father, finding herself unable to be alone. Frederick Sawyer, a Massachusetts man, had come to Washington from Charleston, where he was teaching school. “I cannot sleep,” he wrote from his room at Willard’s Hotel at one o’clock in the morning, completely agitated. The city around him remained in an uproar, and, he knew, “only horrid dreams await my slumbers.”
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Word spread quickly through the night, as people rushing out of the theater told people walking by on the street. Someone had awakened the vice president with the news, and Andrew Johnson now paid a brief visit to the dying executive at Petersen’s boardinghouse. Officers made the rounds to the homes of other high-ranking men, and after a colonel told Minerva Meigs, wife of the quartermaster general, her nephew guarded the door with pistol in hand. At the sprawling Armory Square Hospital on the mall, an elderly ward master hoarsely called out to the soldier patients, “Have you heard the terrible news? The president was assassinated tonight at the theater.” On the streets outside the hospital windows, people were screaming and shouting—a nurse made out the words
awful
and
horrible
. News of the attack on William Seward spread too.
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