Mourning Lincoln (13 page)

In their own way, then, Confederates mourned for Lincoln too. Paradoxically, or perhaps hypocritically, despite their relentless assertions of the president as a tyrant, they felt uneasy precisely because they suspected that Lincoln would ultimately have treated them with lenience, a view that followed logically from the comparative moderation he demonstrated all during the war. “Horrible news!” Margaret Wight wrote in her diary, for without Lincoln, Confederates could expect only “the hardest terms.” A state senator wrote to his sweetheart that Lincoln “would have been more liberal to the Southern people than any one else,” while another agitated Confederate agreed that he “would have shown
mercy
& pardon.” A North Carolina slave owner spoke for many when he wrote that Lincoln’s death was “to us politically disastrous,” letting slip his genuine regret when he explained that “old Abe with all his apeishness, was a kind hearted man and disposed to treat us generously.” Many Union supporters accordingly understood
that when Confederates wept for Lincoln, it was largely because “they know their loss,” because “they could not hope for a more lenient chief ruler,” because they had “lost a friend.”
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Out in public, Confederates in Union-occupied areas often found silence to be the most prudent response, for despite surrender, it felt a lot like the war was still on. On the home front, tensions with the occupying troops were palpable. “We were all right uneasy,” an imprisoned soldier confided to his diary, “lest the Yankees might retaliate on us.” In Vicksburg, where bells tolled and black Union soldiers displayed their mourning badges, the defeated exercised caution. “No guests tonight,” one woman recorded. “We are all going to bed early.” In Raleigh, rumors of reprisal swirled. “How uneasy we were!” wrote Bessie Caine; “frightened to death,” she and her comrades filled their pockets with valuables and slept in their clothes. As for those who dared to mingle outside, they carefully expressed regret at the crime, afraid that nightfall would bring the complete destruction of their city. Likewise in New Orleans, the “
Rebs
had to keep very quiet,” Union men observed, even if they were “secretly rejoicing.”
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Again, Lincoln’s mourners looked into the faces of those around them, now with rancor and mistrust, searching for what might lie behind mute masks, looking for attitudes that could destroy hopes of a healed nation unified in sorrow. In Charleston, as flags were lowered and guns fired, the white residents stayed aloof, and with good reason, a northern missionary asserted, since “every native is looked at suspiciously.” In Richmond, Union soldiers “looked sharp at those who passed.” In Savannah, the soldiers walked the streets, “looking each man in the face” for traces of “so much as a smile.” In Raleigh, it was a good thing the Confederates stayed “mighty mum,” since “they would have been served the same way”—as the slain Lincoln, that is—”if they had shown any pleasure about it.”
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Silence and absence were harder to read definitively, but it was the matter of black drapery that proved most vexing. As much as Lincoln’s mourners wanted to read the festooned buildings around them as the whole world’s bereavement, they worried that mourning crape could make for a relatively effortless deception of true feelings, and they knew that such displays of fabric did not always indicate genuine loyalty or grief. Even as a Washington correspondent wrote that “a smitten nation wept” from “sea to sea,” the capital’s mourners knew otherwise. Secessionists, one noted, “
all
draped their houses in crape.” The secesh, another explained, “fling out their mourning through fear.” On the waters, a Confederate gunboat sailed in broad daylight with American flags slung at half-mast until it had passed the federal fleet, whereupon the sailors completely lowered the enemy flag and hoisted their own. In Baltimore, more subtly, some Confederate sympathizers draped their homes with the “scantiest possible amount of mourning,” while conversely in New Orleans, observed Confederate Sarah Morgan, “the more thankful they are for Lincoln’s death, the more profusely the houses are decked with the emblems of woe.” Even those who “hated Lincoln with all their souls” decorated their homes out of fear. As one of Morgan’s neighbors cried, “This vile,
vile
old crape!”
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Swayed by the dream of post-victory unity, some of Lincoln’s mourners took Confederate laments as sincere. A Baltimore Unionist thought the secessionists around her showed the “strongest feelings of sympathy,” and in Montgomery, Alabama, even though grieving Confederates had been “
bitter rebels
,” a Union observer willingly embraced their about-face. Skepticism was the order of the day for most mourners, however, with African Americans the least inclined to attribute authentic grief to white southerners (many former slaves, after all, knew personally that their masters had displayed a duplicitous paternalism to the world). Black men in Richmond who saw Confederate officers wearing crape on their uniforms declared themselves the only ones who wore such badges as “truthful expressions.” The best assessment came from the pen of Thomas Morris Chester, the black Richmond journalist. Rebel officers sporting black crape signified either “feigned regret for the assassination” or “sincere sorrow for the death of the Southern Confederacy.” Morris was right: Confederates were grieving, but not for President Lincoln.
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Neither apprehensions about their own future nor fear of Union vengeance stopped Confederates from reveling privately, and Rodney Dorman was hardly alone in gloating over Lincoln’s murder as retribution for conquest. “Pity it hadn’t been done years ago,” one rebel soldier wrote. Another thought Booth had committed the “best
act
of his life,” adding that the assassin’s cry of “Sic semper tyrannis” should be translated as “Bully for Booth.” When William Ellis, marching home from Lee’s army, got the news from trains passing through South Carolina, he wrote in his diary, “Thus passeth from earth one of the greatest monsters who ever lived.”
In Texas, a doctor wrote to his son-in-law, overjoyed at the “killing of the cold hearted tyrant Lincoln,” hoping the assassin would live to “burst the sculls” of a few more despots (the doctor signed his letter “Thine in Christ”). Fire-eating secessionist and proslavery proselytizer Edmund Ruffin rejoiced privately at home, enjoying a rare interruption to his consuming depression over defeat. While Lincoln’s grieving supporters earnestly copied down the details of the assassination, Ruffin perused the northern papers with a different purpose. Like Dorman, he believed that the Yankee president deserved death for the destruction of slavery, and thus did he find the details of the crime to be “entertaining reading.”
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Gleeful expressions filled the personal writings of Confederate women on the home front too. Secure in their lack of full citizenship, and perhaps construing themselves as powerless in the wake of a war that had in fact empowered them at home, they felt even less constricted in recording sentiments offensive to the victors. The day before she got word of the assassination, seventeen-year-old Emma LeConte had been “sick at heart,” wondering “what fresh misfortune will I have to chronicle tomorrow?” When the news arrived the next day, during a German lesson, LeConte positively cheered. “Hurrah!” she wrote. “Old Abe Lincoln has been assassinated!” The lesson forgotten, everyone around her was “so excited,” talking endlessly about the wonderful surprise. Soon LeConte took off, “trembling and my heart beating with excitement,” mixed with “gratified revenge.” She stopped first at her aunt Josie’s, where everyone shouted, “Isn’t it splendid?” A similar scene of jubilation awaited her at home. As for the “
vile
Seward,” LeConte was disappointed only that he had escaped death. Best of all was picturing the abrupt end to Union victory celebrations. Stopping for a moment to wonder if it was all a “Yankee lie,” she added, “If it is
only
true!”
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Cloe Whittle prayed that God would prevent her from “feeling
glad
at this awful & most horrible transaction,” but most Confederates prayed in the other direction. Clara Dargan wrote in her diary about the assassination and the attack on Seward, calling the two victims a “Royal Suite of the Imperial Apes” and thanking God fervently for a “first gleam of light in this midnight darkness.” Twenty-one-year-old Sarah Wadley was likewise “electrified” by the tidings, which readily shook her out of her surrender-induced melancholy. Wadley took comfort in the assassin’s motto, hoping his words
would “find an echo in every southron’s heart.” More laconic expressions were no less sincere. “I glory in the
assassinator
,” wrote a Texas woman, while another in South Carolina called the news “very cheering.”
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This kind of spiteful gratification rose from the ongoing war in hearts and minds, in which Lincoln’s violent death avenged the destruction of the Confederate nation and its precious institution of slavery. It was not simply that Lincoln had been killed, it was also that Confederates could now return the humiliating glee that Yankees had expressed in the process of conquering their land. For Amanda Edmunds, the despised Lincoln and Seward had now “felt the suffering which they have inflicted on our Southern people.” Kate Stone, who had lost two brothers in the war, honored Booth in her journal, naming him the “brave destroyer” of the tyrant Lincoln, who could no longer “rejoice in our humiliation.” Should Booth escape to the South, Stone felt sure he would “meet with a warm welcome.”
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Public delight in the assassination could be safely manifested where there was no Union presence to interfere. When the news arrived at a Georgia train station just north of where Sherman’s army had marched to the sea, Confederates laughed and clapped. But white southerners did not have to be isolated to react honestly. From the moment of victory, the joy coursing through black communities in the South had been tempered by unease, with wartime hostilities further stirred up. “We are surrounded by a people who hate us with a deadly hatred,” wrote a northern teacher working among former slaves in Natchez, Mississippi. The night schools for freedpeople in Hampton, Virginia, had to be suspended, another teacher explained, because of all the paroled rebel soldiers “let loose here to prowl around the country, threatening the lives of Union men and colored people.” In Richmond, the “
wrath
and hatred” of former masters, who watched their own former slaves (for some, their biological children) walk freely to church and school, was “
terrible, terrible
.”
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Lincoln’s assassination only exacerbated this antagonism, even more vividly giving the lie to mourners’ deluded, if soothing, assertions of a nation united by the terrible crime. While Confederates feared retaliation from angry mourners, worries went both ways. In Portsmouth, Virginia, it was dangerous to venture out at night “since the assassination of the Pres. and since the return of so many Rebel prisoners,” wrote a northern missionary. As soldiers from Lee’s defunct army filled the streets of Richmond,
no more would Thomas Seymour, a young white man working with freedpeople, amble over to the telegraph office at night, since “by the citizens we are known to be Yankees.” In Saint Augustine, Florida, downhearted rebels brightened at news of the assassination, “taunting the colored people” about reenslavement, and in Lexington, Kentucky, a white man named Thomas Outten assaulted a black man, calling out, “Old Lincoln is dead, and I will kill the goddamned Negroes now.” When news of the assassination arrived in New Orleans, Patrick Shields, whose slaves had left during the war, pointed to the newspaper being passed among his black neighbors and laughed in approval. Shields attracted a crowd of black and white onlookers as he proclaimed that “all the niggers” would now “go home to their masters.” Jefferson Davis, he went on, was coming to “hang all the niggers to the trees.”
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Merrymakers weren’t necessarily deterred by the presence of black Union soldiers either, and some were downright emboldened, aiming their actions directly at them. Confederates in Key West demonstrated “expressions of Joy” in front of the black troops, and a white woman in Jacksonville asked black men if they were “going to celebrate.” Extra soldiers were called out to patrol the streets of New Orleans after dark, “fearing some trouble with the Negroe Regiment stationed here,” and black occupiers in Petersburg witnessed paroled officers “strutting about” with their swords and pistols, making known “the most jubilant manifestations of satisfaction.” In Tennessee, a white woman jeered at African American soldiers, telling them, “Your father is dead.” Gleeful rebels ignored white enemies too. Unionists in Baltimore saw returning Confederate soldiers “partying it about,” while a Richmond Unionist reported local women exulting over the assassination.
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For all that, Confederates who expressed glee in public did not always get away with it, and any such demonstration might become a symbolic battlefield on which to put down unfinished rebellion. In a variant of “hard war,” in which the Union understood Confederate soldiers, leaders, and civilians alike as enemy and target, authorities might react with violence to any impudent or imprudent act in the wake of Lincoln’s assassination. As Albert Browne wrote home from Charleston, “Woe be to him who should dare to utter one word of jubilation.” In prison camps in particular, Union officials saw little reason to withhold retaliatory discipline. When one inmate
in Chicago responded to the news with the words, “That’s bully,” a Yankee commenced “kicking him about like a brute,” then hung him twenty feet off the ground for hours, with irons tied to both legs. At Fort Delaware, a prisoner who called Lincoln a “goddamned old nigger-loving son of a bitch” was knocked down and slapped by a Union general, hung by his hands for an hour, and ordered whipped by a black man. When prisoners at Fort Jefferson, Florida, cheered Lincoln’s death, they were tied up and suspended, their feet barely touching the ground. The men begged and prayed and cursed to no avail, prompting remorse from some of their captors; other Union men, though, wanted to shoot them right there.
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