Mourning Lincoln (7 page)

EVEN AS THE VICTORS REJOICED
, few dispensed with the doings of everyday life. As fourteen-year-old Sarah Putnam told her diary, “Mr. Charles Mills is killed. Oh! dear! Lillie Jackson is engaged to Mr. Henry Winsor.
Richmond is surrendered to us!!!!!
Everybody is happy with the news. Grandma Upham came to tea.” Putnam’s ingenuous sentences intertwined the momentous war tidings with ever-present news of battle-front casualties and an imminent marriage that signaled the forward march of daily life. She also took a moment to record something much more mundane:
teatime with her grandmother. Someone, whether Grandma Upham or a servant, had to brew and serve that tea, and for northern women, neither the news of Richmond’s fall nor that of Lee’s surrender suspended their domestic duties. Accordingly, after a night sitting up with the baby, Rachel Cormany ironed, made the beds, mended, and bordered a shawl. Only after recording those chores did she note in her diary the firing of guns in honor of Petersburg and Richmond. A week later, Elizabeth Cabot followed the exclamation “Lee’s army surrender!” with “I put up furs and woolens all day.” Laboring men also blurred the glorious and the humdrum, like John Orton of Kalamazoo, Michigan, who remembered April 14 with a diary entry that read, “Took little load of stove wood to Lockport, sold hams at 20, Government has ordered recruiting stopped, Lee having Surrendered. Split rails.” Men in the service did the same. From the Spanish port city of Cádiz, escaped slave and Union navy sailor William Gould was a kindred spirit to Sarah Putnam, recording the mail’s tidings this way: “Heard of the marrage of Miss R.K. to V.R.,” followed by, “Heard of the Surrender of Lee to Grant of his entire force.”
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None of that diminished the import of the historic news. It was more that everyday life persisted in tandem with even the grandest of national and global events. If victory made it feel momentarily as if all the world had stopped, in fact it had not stopped at all, a truth made especially apparent in the continuing casualties. Like Sarah Putnam with her consternation (“Mr. Charles Mills is killed. Oh! dear!”), Sophia Perry was about to celebrate Lee’s capitulation by illuminating her Maine home when a friend came in with the news that a neighbor’s husband had been killed in battle. “I took far less pleasure than I anticipated,” Perry wrote. “I could not keep his poor wife out of my mind.” The man had been home on furlough so recently, she lamented, “and now—can never come again.”
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Still, comfort came to the victors in the knowledge not only that the toll of battlefield deaths would soon cease, but also that no life had been given in vain. For Confederates, by contrast, the persistence of everyday life felt far different. Mississippi planter Alden Forbes wrote in his diary about the difficulty of planting potatoes in the rain, then recorded that he had ridden into town and “heard of the surrender.” All that week, Forbes charted the progress of his farm labor, occasionally adding news of the war, until he came to: “worked on fence all day. News of an armistice with the Federal
Govt. rec’d to day & I think the Confederacy has gone up.” Forbes had no choice but to maintain an account of his crops, since one season’s results mattered for the next, even if visions of those future seasons were now filled with great uncertainty.
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DESPITE THE CONTINUITIES IN PEOPLE’S
lives, a great deal was about to change, in ways no one could yet fathom. On Tuesday evening, April 11, 1865, President Lincoln stood on the White House balcony, speaking to an initially rapturous crowd gathered below. To the dismay of some, the president dispensed with the expected triumphal speech, offering instead something of a policy statement about what was to come. He spoke briefly of “speedy peace,” General Grant, and God, but mostly Lincoln talked about reconstructing the nation, an endeavor, he admitted, that would be “fraught with great difficulty.” Soon the president brought up the subject of the reconstructed state government of Louisiana. The Thirteenth Amendment, abolishing slavery, had been passed by Congress in January, and Louisiana’s voters—largely moderate Unionists who had taken the oath of allegiance—had already ratified it. But African American men wanted the right to vote, and the white men who wrote the state constitution declined to include them. That evening, Lincoln offered the opinion (“I would myself prefer” is how he put it) that suffrage should be extended to black men who had fought for the Union and those deemed (by whom he did not say) “very intelligent.”
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Reactions were mixed. Pennsylvania soldier Franklin Boyts, in the audience, thought the president a noble man, equal to none less than George Washington. Abolitionists were, like Sarah Browne, more circumspect. Confederates, unsurprisingly, were wholly unmollified. John Glenn, a well-to-do Marylander, thought Lincoln a despot, his talk of black rights plainly demonstrating that the South would be “kept in subjugation by armed Negroes.”
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Listening to Lincoln that evening was the aggrieved actor and proslavery Confederate sympathizer John Wilkes Booth. Conspirator David Herold later testified that Booth muttered about “nigger citizenship” as the president spoke, but whatever he said aloud that night, Booth had already written down his conviction that “this country was formed for the
white
not for the black man.” Now Booth was angrier than ever, as he witnessed what he would turn into Lincoln’s last public speech.
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ON THURSDAY, APRIL 13, WASHINGTON
remained “all alive with enthusiasm,” a magnificent illumination making every street and square “one continuous blaze of light” as darkness fell. Walking with his wife and daughter, the white minister James Ward saw a “blaze of glory” that was “brilliant and splendid beyond the powers of words to describe.” The next day was Good Friday, and still the capital’s streets were jammed, every house and public building “blazing with candles from top to bottom,” everyone still “wild with excitement” and “crazy with joy.”
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Friday, April 14, offered the occasion for yet another celebration: the re-raising of the flag over Fort Sumter. Four years earlier, on April 12, 1861, the first shots of the Civil War were fired in the waters off South Carolina. Sumter, a federal fort, had been running out of food that spring, prompting President Lincoln to give notice to his enemies that he would send unarmed ships bearing provisions for the soldiers stationed there. Interpreting the resupply mission as an act of aggression, Confederates fired on the fort. Lincoln had prepared for that reaction, but his waiting warships were thwarted by mixed-up orders and high seas. After some thirty hours of bombardment, Sumter fell to the Confederacy. Now, four years later, the victors returned to re-raise the rightful flag over the fort’s ruins—the very same flag, in fact, the one shot through with bullet holes.

The 1865 observances took place at Sumter and across the harbor in the city of Charleston, which had fallen to the Union just two months before Lee’s surrender. The lineup of luminaries included Robert Smalls, a former South Carolina slave and future U.S. congressman who had won his freedom by piloting a Confederate vessel into the hands of the Union navy; Martin Delany, abolitionist and black nationalist, writer, physician, recruiter of black soldiers, and major in the Union army; and the son of Denmark Vesey, whose enslaved father had been hanged for plotting an uprising for freedom more than forty years earlier. The famous white abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison was also there, as generals, senators, congressmen, Supreme Court justices, and their families converged, packing the parade grounds and stands, along with black and white soldiers and sailors.

There were prayers and psalms, the singing of the national anthem, a reading of the dispatch announcing the fort’s fall in 1861, and a one-hundred-gun salute. President Lincoln had asked the Reverend Henry Ward Beecher to orate, and now Beecher fashioned the American flag into a character. Torn down by the Confederates four years earlier, it had brooded and cried out to God. Now again it gazed over the bay with “starry eyes.” No longer, Beecher proclaimed to great applause, would that banner wave over slavery, for in the restored nation, slavery would be “utterly and for ever abolished!” The planter class was to blame for everything, Beecher told his listeners. Aristocratic slaveholders, those “arrogant instigators of war,” had provoked the common white folk, bribed them with lies against their own interests, and for that they should suffer “endless retribution” (“Amen! Amen!” shouted the crowd). As to those duped white folk, the victors should let “not a trace of animosity remain,” Beecher counseled. But neither should “aimless vengeance” against the planter class sully the hearts of the conquerors, who must not forget the enemy’s sorrow (“Millions mourn for millions slain,” he preached). The best policy, Beecher concluded, was pardon “but no concession,” amnesty “but no honied compromises.”
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African American men, women, and children paraded, made speeches, and yet again sang “John Brown’s Body.” When Garrison, elated to witness their celebrations of freedom, talked about Abraham Lincoln, the people cheered. When Massachusetts senator Henry Wilson mentioned Lincoln’s name, the crowd waved their hats and hurrahed. Southern slaves had been loyal to the United States, Wilson proclaimed, and their old masters were now powerless (more cheers). The U.S. government, the English abolitionist George Thompson told the freedpeople, “regards you as equally entitled, with Abraham Lincoln himself, to exercise the rights and privileges of citizenship.” The sentiments at Sumter and Charleston reverberated north and west, as Union soldiers in the field echoed the hundred-gun salute, and towns and cities staged their own parades, complete with speeches, songs, and fireworks. Everywhere, the victors recorded the day’s event. It was the “very
same flag
,” thrilled Wilmington farmer Samuel Canby; the same flag, wrote Boston businessman Daniel Child, once torn down by “slaveholding traitors.”
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The unending combination of merriment and solemnity taxed the vanquished.
“I suppose the Yankees are holding a great jubilee in Charleston today,” scoffed Emma LeConte, “raising their wretched
flag
over noble old Sumter.” Wistfully she recalled the day four years earlier: how the bells began to ring, how her family had run to the veranda and front gate to gather tidings of the fallen fort, everyone in a tumult of excitement. “Poor old Sumter—dear old fort!” she wrote now. “What a degradation!”
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The Sumter festivities capped twelve days that propelled Union supporters into a palpable sense of participation in history. “Your letters are all carefully saved,” Nathan Seymour wrote from Ohio to his son volunteering among former slaves in Richmond, for the nation could endure such a trial only “once in five hundred years.” Caroline White wrote down that Appomattox marked a week “unparalleled in the annals of this war,” maybe even in all of history. The wealthy merchant Amos Lawrence literally inscribed victory in stone, instructing his workmen to engrave the new chimney of his Boston home with the appropriate dates and the Latin phrases for “Richmond taken” and “Confederate army surrendered.” By the same token, Confederates wrote history into their letters and journals, using similar language with exactly the opposite meaning. “How fast I have lived these past two years,” Albert Browne had declared. In the words of Confederate Emma LeConte, “What changes—what a lifetime we have lived in the four years past!” Albert Browne had described the sights he had seen as “written with a piece of steel on my memory.” For Confederate Mary Cabell, the day of Lee’s surrender was “written on my brain in letters of fire.” These were days Albert Browne wanted his descendants never to forget. For a Virginia woman, the day that orders came for the evacuation of Richmond was one “never to be forgotten,” whether or not she or anyone else wanted to remember it.
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If the sense of participating in history was interchangeable between Yankee and Confederate, nothing else was. With the long war on the battlefield drawing to a close, Union supporters spoke the language of gratitude and jubilation, white southerners the language of incredulity and misery. At Sumter, after sundown on Friday evening, lanterns and bursting rockets lit up the fort. At home in Salem, Sarah Browne felt keenly aware of springtime’s beauty, surveying the buds and flowers, leaves and green grass. “Above the clouds how plainly visible the divine hand!” she wrote in her diary. Sarah was certain that with the battlefield war concluded, the
nation had already seen the triumph of justice. She did not know then that the laying down of arms could not end the war in people’s hearts. Nor did she know just how soon Yankees and Confederates would exchange the moods of glee and gloom. No one did. Amos Lawrence did not know that he would soon request a third inscription from his stonecutters: “The joy of the people succeeded by the greatest grief.”
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Rumors

AMONG THE SOLDIERS, THE TALK
started on Saturday, April 15. People were saying that President Lincoln had been shot, but soldiers were accustomed to untrustworthy news. Even in an age of swift communications, where it seemed the telegraph could instantaneously set everything straight, rumors always flew faster than dispatches arrived. The soldiers called it the “grapevine telegraph,” joshing about “the latest grape” and “Madam Rumor.” People were saying Grant had been killed too, or maybe it was Secretary of War Edwin Stanton, or Secretary of State William Seward, or Seward’s son Frederick. Some said Lincoln and his son Tad had both been killed.
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“Lincoln is said to have been shot and Seward’s throat cut, but dont believe it yet,” wrote an Iowa soldier in Mobile Bay that morning. It was the same for Ohio soldiers in Tennessee, for the news “could be traced to no reliable source.” As another man put it, “I don’t hardly believe the story, for it seems too absurd.” The unreliable reports continued through Easter Sunday— “Hope it is not so,” yet another soldier jotted in his diary that day. At Appomattox the men swore at the preposterousness of it all, and at Nottoway Station, even after General Philip Sheridan read a dispatch aloud, the men still weren’t sure. It was circulating around Richmond by
noon, but Union supporters dismissed it as a secessionist concoction, and Confederates didn’t know what to think. When word came to the 114th U.S. Colored Troops near Petersburg on Monday (they heard that Lincoln, Seward, and Seward’s son had all been killed), the men talked about it into the evening, trying hard to “treat it as a camp story.” In North Carolina, the soldiers who passed on the news were branded “rumor makers.” When the 149th New York heard that Lincoln had been killed in Richmond, one man recorded the deed in his diary, then told himself, “No no it is only a rumor I’m sure of it.” The next day came confirmation (“Lincoln is dead & a nation mourns”), only to be contradicted that afternoon (“Lincoln is alive & well”). Illinois soldiers down south heard the bad news via the telegraph, but when northern papers arrived with no mention, they were sure that rebels had “operated the wires.”
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