Mourning Lincoln (30 page)

Nonetheless, when Confederates thought about the contours of daily life after the war, some drifted into suicidal broodings. “I think if I were sure of going to Heaven and it pleased God to take me to himself,” Elizabeth Alsop wrote shortly after Lee’s surrender, “I should be
glad to die
.” A despondent soldier thought an early May day’s gloomy weather could “drive a morbid melancholy man to commit suicide.” The desolation of defeat did in fact drive a number of Confederates to take their own lives. The best known was Edmund Ruffin, the fire-eating, proslavery secessionist. Ruffin, living on his farm near Richmond at war’s end, expressed venom toward the Yankees in the pages of his diary as freely as did Rodney Dorman, choking on
the “repulsive” and “disgusting” northern newspapers that compounded his “hatred & abhorrence” of Yankee rule. From the moment Richmond fell, Ruffin prepared for suicide, even envying his own son who had fallen in the war (“Would that I had died with him,” he wrote). Were he himself younger, Ruffin reasoned, he might look forward to a reversal of fortunes in the future, but now it was his “earnest wish that I may not live another day,” as he plainly put it. Ruffin consoled himself with the heterodox view that the Bible permitted the taking of one’s own life, and shortly before he put the musket in his mouth, he once again recorded his “unmitigated hatred” of Yankees. Edmund Ruffin saw no future at all after defeat, and so when Confederate secession failed, he seceded from the world in the most radical way possible.
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In the ideal vision of the president’s mourners, the world came to a halt when Lincoln died. Although it was impossible for events to reverse course, at least the illusion of suspended time permitted proper mourning for the slain chief, as a prelude to looking toward the future of the victorious nation. In the ideal vision of Lincoln’s enemies, on the other hand, the world would stop and reverse course, taking them back, not to the world before the assassination, but much farther than that, to the antebellum South. For white southerners, the revolution wrought by the war altered everyday life too fundamentally to permit much distraction, amusement, or comfort, what with slaves gone, free black men in military uniforms patrolling their land, and white privilege seemingly vanished. Confederates wished now for the world to stop, but Lincoln’s mourners knew that it would not: not for well-to-do New Englanders who put on their wedding finery and shared pancake recipes; not for black and white Union soldiers or the working classes, who kept on marching and laboring; and certainly not for former slaves who looked toward freedom.

There was one thing, though, that made looking toward the glorious future just as unbearable for Lincoln’s mourners as it was for his antagonists: the death of loved ones, those who would never return home to rejoin the stream of daily life. In the Browne household, the loss of their daughter Nellie in 1864 unrelentingly overshadowed the assassination, and with the fearfully high toll of wartime deaths, similar devastation could be found in just about any family at the end of the Civil War.

Young Folk

CHILDREN ON THE UNION HOME
front felt the devastation of Lincoln’s assassination all around them, and none more so than those among the freedpeople. “Uncle Sam is dead,” proclaimed a Virginia boy of five or six years old. When he asked an adult, “Have I got to go back to massas?” he echoed the question he’d been hearing all around him. In the southern classrooms where former slaves learned to read and write, children responded to the news by “ceasing from play” or expressed their grief with “tearful inquiries.” Up north too, in an Ohio classroom, free black children “felt the weight of the sorrow,” a teacher wrote, whispering to one another, “The president is dead! The president is dead!” As parents, instructors, and ministers spoke of black freedom, these young ones grasped the import of Lincoln’s death, and no doubt white observers accurately captured their reactions. What went unrecorded, given that missionary teachers had a stake in portraying their charges as pious and serious, was the likelihood that the children remained immersed in their daily lives, the younger ones perhaps jumping rope or playing ball on their way home from school that day.
¹

Young white children who wrote their own narratives expose just such ingenuous absorptions. On the day of the president’s funeral, nine-year-old
Edward Martin wrote that his school had let out early, adding, “In the after noon I played ball.” On the day he got the news of Lincoln’s assassination, eleven-year-old Grenville Norcross traded adventure books with friends, lending
The Three Daring Trappers
and borrowing
The Pioneer Boy, and How He Became President;
if Grenville chose a book about the late executive on purpose, he wrote only, “All the houses are being hung in black on account of the
death of Abraham Lincoln
.”
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Like the grown-ups around them, children on the Union home front, both black and white, experienced grief at Lincoln’s loss in the context of everyday life. Accordingly, a child might grasp the gravity by thinking of President Lincoln as a father, free of metaphorical meaning. When a Vermont mother explained to her five-year-old son that the slain president had two boys of his own, her son thought those bereft children might “try to die too.” Or a young person might attempt to imitate the sorrow of her parents, like the little girl who refused to kiss her father because, she explained, “good President Lincoln’s dead, and I feel
so
bad!” On the other hand, younger children might unwittingly break the spell of solemnity. One little girl, entranced by marching soldiers at the Chicago funeral, exclaimed, “Oh
ain’t
it nice! I’m so glad I came,” while another, filing past Lincoln’s body at the Chicago courthouse, remarked frankly that she liked looking at “dead folks” so much that she wished she were the president’s embalmer. Older children, or more precocious ones, understood more. In a Virginia classroom of freedpeople, some expressed anxieties about President Andrew Johnson’s policies. In Nashville, the twelve-year-old daughter of an ardent white Unionist family paced up and down, wringing her hands over the assassin and his conspirators. “Catch the murderers!” she cried. “Oh, if
I
was only a
man
, I would kill the very last one of them!”
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But like Eddie Browne in Salem, some older white children rebelled against the grown-ups’ grief. In Newport, Rhode Island, on the morning Lincoln died, Carrie Hunter, about fifteen, wrote to her sister in New York, describing everything as “rather dismal,” what with all the prostrated adults, black drapery, and shut-up shops. Seeking the company of schoolmates, Carrie “could not help laughing to see Katey Powell & Fannie Ogden looking so dreadfully grave & solemn.” When the three girls encountered another friend, they playfully instructed her that she “must look sober.” Among the group was Georgiana King, who had learned of
Lincoln’s death when someone rushed into her parents’ home, “weeping and screaming,” and she too was glad to get away. To her diary, Georgiana confessed how handsome she found John Wilkes Booth, before writing about the good-looking new boy in town, with whom she and her friends resolved to “have a
flirtation
.” Lincoln’s assassination had intruded on the carefree lives of Newport’s privileged youth, and they made sure to intrude right back. Indeed, at least some adults must have felt the same kind of impatience expressed by young folk like Carrie and Georgiana.
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Privileged young Confederates also found time for distraction amid the terrible gloom of defeat. Seventeen-year-old Emma LeConte, who had written gleefully about the assassination and poured the bitterness of conquest into the pages of her diary, brightened up a bit in May. With a group of contemporaries, including young men home from the army, Emma took walks in the woods, where, she wrote, “we sit and talk and laugh and tease each other till almost dark.” Sometimes they had little parties—”How long it had been since any of us had danced!” she exclaimed, and how good it was to “throw off the trouble and gloom for a little while.” Emma admitted that in a way it felt wrong to be happy, thereby illuminating an important difference with Lincoln’s mourners—their lightheartedness could be excused by victory. Instead, Emma LeConte consoled herself that she and her friends had fun “only among ourselves” and offered a reasonable excuse: “Young people cannot be depressed and gloomy
all
the time.”
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8
Everyday Loss

THE FUSS OVER THE SLAIN
Yankee president infuriated Rodney Dorman, and not merely because he found it sickening to treat the despotic leader as royalty. Dorman also found the spectacular pageantry offensive because it detracted from the “thousands other slain, since the war began!” Casualties on both sides were enormous, but Dorman’s anger no doubt sprang from the especially colossal death rate among the rebels—somewhere between two and three times higher than that for Union soldiers.
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The Confederate toll also prompted Dorman to pen a furious diatribe about Yankee prisons. “How many prisoners did they starve & freeze, in a land of plenty?” he asked his diary. “How many did they freeze to death?” Conditions in all Civil War prisons were deplorable, often horrific, though captured Union men tended to suffer greater material want because of the collapsing Confederate economy. To defend the sorry treatment of Union soldiers, Dorman explained to himself that the rebels were forced to crowd Yankees into camps as a result of President Lincoln’s tyrannical policies—namely that prisoner exchange had broken down when Confederate authorities refused to include African Americans, on the theory that runaway slaves on the battlefield remained stolen property, which comported with Dorman’s views exactly. The Yankees “put it beyond the power of the Confederacy
to treat prisoners very well,” he reasoned, yet “compelled them to hold them indefinitely! & then complained of the treatment!” It was “an outrage upon humanity,” though only in keeping with the barbaric nature of his enemies. “How many did they wontonly murder?” Dorman asked. “Answer this, you murderers & thieves without a parallel in the history of the world.” For Rodney Dorman, that so many Confederate men had died in the war was a result of Yankee savagery, both on and off the battlefield.
²

ON A VISIT TO FORT WAGNER
, in Charleston harbor, in the spring of 1865, Albert Browne happened upon bones, the “remains of our brave soldiers,” he wrote, from the battle that took place there in 1863, in which so many men of the Fifty-Fourth Massachusetts had perished. This was the battle that had proven to skeptical white northerners that African Americans were capable of fighting. Now Albert’s eyes alighted on part of a skeleton clad in a decayed blue uniform. “All these should be carefully gathered and buried,” he wrote home.
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While Albert decried bones on the battlefield, he and his family had another, more personal, experience with death on their minds: less than a year before Lincoln’s assassination, the Brownes’ daughter Nellie had died at the age of twenty-two. In the spring of 1864, Sarah and the children had traveled from Massachusetts for an extended visit with Albert in Beaufort, South Carolina. With her sister, Alice, also in her early twenties, Nellie visited wounded soldiers at the Union hospital, went sailing and horseback riding, and socialized with other northern military families in the occupied Sea Islands. When the Brownes took an excursion to Jacksonville, Nellie Browne met and instantly fell in love with Captain Lewis Weld, provost marshal of the District of Florida and recruiter of black troops. Lewis was more than ten years Nellie’s senior, and within two weeks the couple was privately engaged and planning to wed in June. “
Burn this letter
,” Nellie wrote to her older brother, Albert Jr., back in Boston, underlining every word. “
Keep everything secret
” (the last word got an extra underscore). When the Browne family returned to Beaufort, Nellie and Lewis wrote back and forth, expressing their longing for each other. Though her brother, and eventually her father, tried to dissuade Nellie from such recklessness, there was nothing the family could do to slow the impulsive romance.
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Then, in late May, Nellie suddenly fell ill. Doctors diagnosed poisoned
blood and provided quinine, arsenic, and brandy. They ordered Nellie’s hair shorn to relieve her brain. She recognized no one at her bedside but called for Lewis. Typhoid fever was the likely culprit, and on the sixth day of delirium, Albert tried to resign himself to his daughter’s fate by appealing to God’s will—”trying to deceive myself” is how he put it. The family had written to alert Lewis in Jacksonville, and now he wrote back with alarm. “Why did you get sick my darling,” he asked his beloved. “I am terribly anxious about you.” By the time Lewis wrote those words, Nellie was gone. She died on June 2, 1864.
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From that day forward, the Browne family began a mourning that would last their whole lives. They now looked toward Lewis with gratitude, reversing their earlier objections with the belief that God had sent him to make Nellie’s last weeks on earth the happiest of her short life. Sarah, the inveterate diarist, left every page of her 1864 pocket journal blank between May 28 and June 5. “The sad task is over, amid tears and agony,” she wrote on June 6, as the family prepared to sail north, taking Nellie’s body home. After that, Sarah didn’t write another word for nearly three weeks, living in an “aching void” of loneliness, as Alice disclosed to Lewis (taking that phrase from a hymn about death and mourning). Toward the end of June, Sarah recorded that Albert had placed flowers on Nellie’s grave in Salem’s Harmony Grove Cemetery and that she could feel her daughter’s spiritual presence. Sarah neglected her diary again until the end of August, when she went to church for the first time since returning from the South. Albert, in a stupor of despair, had more trouble accepting God’s will. His daughter’s sudden death a stunning blow, his heart bitter and rebellious, he invoked an image that would later be repeated by so many of Lincoln’s mourners: it felt like a “thunder bolt from so clear and unclouded a sky.” Truth was, Albert’s spiritual doubts left him with too little comfort in God’s supposedly right and merciful ways. “I am past all that,” he told the minister who attempted religious consolation. Unable to conjure a future “blessed reunion” in heaven, the thought that so sustained his wife, Albert was “wretchedly miserable.”
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