Mourning Lincoln (26 page)

In a future without Lincoln, those who wanted to honor his legacy would have to navigate between mercy and justice, and at least in this instance, the choice was clear. On Wednesday, April 26, as the president’s body left Albany, the two generals met again at the same farmhouse, this time for Johnston’s surrender under the same terms agreed to by Grant and Lee. Still the excoriation of Sherman continued, mourners unwilling to forget his misstep. A Wisconsin soldier hoped to be home by the Fourth of July, “if Sherman does not hold any more peace conferences,” he wrote. From Alexandria, Egypt, Charles Hale, the U.S. consul, joked that it appeared Sherman had “proclaimed himself President of the Confederacy.”
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As Lincoln’s funeral train headed west toward Buffalo, another worldly event intruded, this one even more disruptive. After leaping from the Lincolns’ box at Ford’s Theatre, John Wilkes Booth had galloped off on a
waiting horse, eluding the uncoordinated searches of federal and municipal authorities. On April 26, after a twelve-day manhunt, and on the same day as Johnston’s proper surrender, men of the Sixteenth New York Cavalry closed in on Booth, who was hiding in a barn in northern Virginia along with one of his accomplices. David Herold was the man who had stood outside the Seward home, holding onto Lewis Powell’s horse while Powell tried to kill the secretary of state, then taken flight when he heard the screams inside. Herold now surrendered, but Booth was armed and refused to yield, even after the captors set the barn on fire. At that moment, one of the soldiers decided to shoot, mortally wounding Lincoln’s assassin. The men then sewed Booth’s body into a blanket and loaded it onto a steamer bound for Washington. It was Secretary of War Edwin Stanton’s idea to bury Booth beneath the floor of a room in the Washington Arsenal, even as the press reported an ignominious burial at sea. At all costs, Stanton did not want Booth’s grave to become a shrine to Lincoln’s enemies.

Passengers on the funeral train got word the very next day, and as the news spread, both glee and anger welled up; for most,
charity for all
by no means extended to John Wilkes Booth. Some rejoiced, glad that the assassin had been “shot and thrown away” into oblivion. “Well done! Rest in obscurity forever,” exclaimed one mourner. “Let him die and be forgotten,” said another. Some regretted the foreclosure of retributive justice. He should have been hanged or, better yet, tortured and then hanged, and in the most cruel manner possible. How terrible, an aggrieved woman pointed out, that Booth had died “in the same way as his illustrious victim.” Some did heed Lincoln’s imperative, and in fact it was the ardent abolitionists, especially the women among them, who most strenuously took up the cry for mercy. “I dare say the wretched crazy fool had suffered enough in his attempt to escape from justice,” wrote Sarah Hale, sure that the “execration of the world” constituted quite enough retaliation. Martha Coffin Wright expressed even greater sympathy, suffering several “restless nights” thinking about Booth, disturbed by the calls for torture, and relieved that he was finally “at rest.” For their part, Confederates didn’t have much to say on the matter. One hoped the shooting would subdue Lincoln’s “fanatical partisans,” while another felt sorry about the killing only because she couldn’t bear the breast-beating Yankee triumph of it all.
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Yankee triumph was indeed the order of the day. While sorrowfully worshipping
the president’s body, most also happily celebrated the handling of the dead assassin. The stark difference between the treatment of the two corpses, one extravagantly revered for two carefully planned weeks, the other disposed of unceremoniously after a nearly two-week search, offered a satisfying symbolic gesture of putting the past to rest and looking toward the nation’s future.

WHEN THE NEWS OF LINCOLN’S
assassination first arrived, mourners wrote down all the particulars of the evening at Ford’s Theatre, from Booth’s every motion to the measurements of the room in which the president expired. In the days afterward, they made note of the drapery and flags, the shuttered businesses and immense crowds, the subdued silences, doleful bells, and cannon roar. With Booth’s capture, they painstakingly wrote out narratives of the stand-off, the shooting, and the disposition of the body. During the journey of the funeral train, people set themselves as well to preserving the details. From New York, James Williams told his sister that it was all too upsetting to “think or talk about,” then launched into everything he had seen; when he wrote that the police made sure no one so much as stepped off the curb, he described the granite cubes that paved the street. In the same vein, Elon Lee wrote to his family from Chicago, explaining that the coffin “rested on a slightly inclined plane.” Those who couldn’t attend any of the ceremonies took the journey vicariously, through the newspapers and telegraph dispatches, noting the train’s arrival and departure times, the numbers of viewers, and the order of processions. Mourners pored over reprinted eulogies and snipped out articles to mail to friends or paste into scrapbooks.
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Whether written from their own observations or gleaned from newspapers, the accounts held the same purposes: to substitute descriptive narratives when it was too hard to find words for emotions, to help Lincoln’s mourners “realize” the terrible event, and to insert themselves into the passage of history. “Thus ends a most eventful month,” Martha Anderson wrote in her Massachusetts diary, considering the span of time between the fall of Richmond on April 3 and Lincoln’s upcoming burial on May 4. In between came Lee’s surrender, the re-raising of the flag over Fort Sumter, the assassination, Johnston’s surrender, and the capture and killing of Booth. Now the grand funeral would soon bring the president’s body “to
its resting place.” Or as a woman wrote in her diary after attending the Chicago ceremonies, “So now we have seen the last of Abr. Lincoln that we can ever see on earth.” Such recapitulations and flourishes offered yet another version of turning symbolically from past to future.
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If the funeral and funeral train intermittently implied a vision of universal mourning that pointed toward a reunited nation, the ceremonies simultaneously offered evidence of strife, both present and future. Many antagonists stayed away or kept quiet during the long series of events, but not all. In camp in Virginia, on the day of the funeral in Washington, a Copperhead private in the Thirty-Sixth Ohio loudly damned Lincoln and praised the assassin. With the train at Philadelphia, a Copperhead soldier in Richmond proclaimed that the president should have been shot four years ago and named Jefferson Davis “a better man than Old Abe ever dared to be.” While residents of Columbus were mourning over Lincoln’s body, James Hall was drinking in a Baltimore saloon, telling his companions that John Wilkes Booth had “done right,” prompting one patron to throw down his playing cards in fury, while others shouted, “Knock him down!” In West Virginia that same day, John Craig announced in public that he was damn glad the president had been killed, and with the president’s remains in Chicago, Captain David Parsons in upstate New York hoped aloud that John Wilkes Booth would “sit on the right hand of God.” These incidents inflamed an answering wrath in Lincoln’s mourners. Even where no antagonists made their voices heard, one escorting soldier felt his hatred for the rebels “added to tenfold.”
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There were strains and tensions among the mourners too. Though one journalist swore no exaggeration in reporting that blacks and whites “leaned forth from the same windows” with “no consciousness of any difference of color,” such romanticized accounts of racial unity were contradicted from the start. On Market Street in San Francisco, Irish soldiers broke through the April 19 procession, cutting off black mourners from the rest of the parade. African Americans who came to view the president’s body were often directed to the back of the line, and when officials gave them a place in the processions, it was usually at the end. In New York’s Union Square, George Bancroft delivered an oration that singled out the Emancipation Proclamation as the war’s most important outcome, yet not two years earlier white city residents, largely Irish immigrants, had rioted over the draft,
brutally attacking black New Yorkers. Now city officials wanted to bar black people from the procession altogether, but African Americans protested so strongly that Secretary of War Stanton reversed the decree. Ellen Kean accordingly found it a “curious satire” that black marchers had to be guarded by the police—”Do they not say they have been fighting for the negro?” she asked. Nativism joined racism in slicing through the wished-for communal grieving. Kean herself expressed annoyance at the marching Irish (“in
inconceivable numbers
, they were
never ending
”), not to mention the irritating presence of Scots and Germans, Jews and Roman Catholics. Tensions rose too between African Americans and Confederate sympathizers. With the train stopped at Baltimore, John Glenn fumed that it was “utterly impossible to keep servants in the house or to get any work out of them.” Despite the yearned-for universality, mourners could find signs all through the grand funeral ceremonies that reconstruction would come hard to the postwar nation.
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THURSDAY, MAY 4, WAS AN UNUSUALLY
hot day in Springfield. Lincoln’s body traveled in a lavish hearse drawn by six black horses, preceded by an Illinois regiment, and accompanied by a choir, gun salutes, and drumbeats. Robert Lincoln followed, and African Americans brought up the rear, as the procession marched past the Lincoln home at Eighth and Jackson, then proceeded to Oak Ridge Cemetery. After two weeks and nearly seventeen hundred miles, the president would rest in a vault alongside a stream, with the much smaller coffin of Willie Lincoln beside him.

Services at the cemetery opened with a prayer that invoked grief for the slain chief and acknowledged that millions had “come out of bondage.” In his funeral oration, Bishop Matthew Simpson, from Washington (the same man who had so irritated George Templeton Strong at the White House services), spoke of “sadness inexpressible” and “anguish unutterable,” of God’s will and of mercy—”with malice toward none.” Already Lincoln’s words had become the scripture of civil religion; another minister had recited the whole second inaugural before the sermon, adding his own phrasing, “free from all feelings of personal vengeance, yet believing that the sword must not be borne in vain, let us go forward even in painful duty.” Simpson now forgave the “deluded masses” of the Confederacy, promising to “take them to our hearts” as the nation went forward “to work out a
glorious destiny.” After the tomb was closed, African Americans continued to reserve for themselves a special place among the bereaved. One man in Springfield asserted that “none mourn more sincerely than our race, who have lost their Moses.”
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Across the nation, mourners read about the burial and recorded its details. Some preserved the facts only: “To day the funeral of our President Abraham Lincoln took place in Springfield Illinois” or “The remains of the President have found their resting place in the West.” Some wrote more ritualistically, like Washington minister James Ward, who noted that the obsequies had begun in his own city on April 19 and “continued from day to day in the cities on the route to his old home-place.” Now it had all come to an end, Ward recorded in his diary, as Lincoln’s “mortal remains were deposited in the earth.” Others, more often women, recorded their emotions. “Oh! how our hearts
ache
when we think of the cruel deed which ended his noble life,” Caroline White wrote on May 4. Others were willing to think of Lincoln, finally, as a replaceable leader. His influence would be mighty, Elon Lee acknowledged from Chicago, yet “the world will move on,” he believed, “with other men” to “guide our national affairs.”
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Confederates once again had to contend with the Lincoln worship they so despised. In Chattanooga on May 4, Union authorities closed businesses, lowered flags, and draped doors. Anyone acting “at all noisy and boisterous”—in fact, anyone so much as caught laughing—could be arrested. In Alexandria, Virginia, Confederates had to listen to the gun blasts from Washington all day. “I do hope it is the last we are to hear of President Lincoln,” wrote Anne Frobel, exasperated that “the yanks have been dragging him about for exhibition,” wasting money on “that miserable old carcass”—why, she had never even heard of a
catafalque
before and figured Lincoln wouldn’t have known that word either. May 4 was also the day Confederate general Richard Taylor surrendered the last forces in the Department of Alabama, Mississippi, and East Louisiana, though intermittent skirmishing would continue.
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In Washington, less than a week after the burial, Benjamin Brown French thought the city had settled down into an “old jog trot mood that interests nobody.” In Danville, Illinois, where Lincoln had once had a law office, his death had been the “all absorbing theme” for three full weeks, wrote one resident, but by mid-May it was “quickly wearing off.” Cities
that had hosted the president’s remains left their mourning decorations in place long after the train departed. Drapery still hung from Philadelphia’s Independence Hall in late April, and soldiers passing through Indianapolis in late May noticed the faded bunting. Imagined universality, hopes for closure, and dreams of a bright future aside, it wasn’t as if anybody knew just how the nation would heal. All the while, moreover, Lincoln’s mourners and antagonists alike had to contend with the tasks and trials of their everyday lives.
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Springtime

FOR THE VANQUISHED, SPRINGTIME
among the ravaged southern landscape offered varied messages. “It is humiliating, very indeed to be a conquered people,” wrote Georgia plantation mistress Ella Thomas in her diary, “but the sky is so bright, the air so pure, the aspect of nature so lovely that I can but be encouraged, and hope for something which will benefit us.” For a Confederate nurse in Georgia, the brilliant colors of the meadows and woodlands arrived just in time to soothe her people’s “troubled spirits.” The warm weather, in tandem with the end of war, also promised homecoming. “Life will be one long summer’s day when you are once again with me,” a woman wrote to her husband in a Yankee prison. Others among the defeated, however, could eke out but little comfort. “Oh! that our national prospects were as bright & encouraging,” cried a Virginia woman for whom springtime tried unsuccessfully “to woo us to be cheerful.” For another, the “flowers & bright days” seemed “to mock our sorrow.” To Rodney Dorman and his fellow diehard rebels, springtime made no difference at all.
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