Mourning Lincoln (15 page)

“Secretary Stanton has ordered that all persons expressing treasonable sentiments shall be placed under arrest,” a Philadelphia man wrote in his journal, and citizens of the Union indeed faced legal consequences for demonstrations of glee. In this sense as well, the war was not over, for the army still sought out traitors and prosecuted sedition. In Baltimore, a man was found guilty for proclaiming, “They were building another part in hell for Abe Lincoln”; another for declaring, “The damned old son of a bitch is dead at last.” Both were sentenced to thirty days in jail. In West Virginia, a man was sentenced to a year in prison for stating that Lincoln had ruined the country and that “a few more of our leaders ought to be strung up.” Trouble could come far from the war too. In a Los Angeles saloon, Chat Helms was playing a drinking game when news of the assassination arrived, upon which he announced that “he would walk a thousand miles to have the pleasure of shitting on the president’s grave.” Helms was apprehended under General Order No. 27 of the Department of the Pacific, which called for the arrest of those who celebrated Lincoln’s death, on the theory that they were “virtually accessories after the fact” and therefore threats to the
social order. Helms was found guilty, though released with the explanation that he was no more than “an ignorant person, occupying no social position.”
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Members of the Union armed forces who publicly delighted in the assassination were especially subject to violent treatment, and whether or not authorities brought formal charges, fellow soldiers and sailors frequently took informal retribution upon themselves. These were often public shaming rituals (supposedly rarer in northern culture, compared to the more honor-based culture of white southerners). When a man in the Seventeenth Maine “expressed satisfaction at the murder,” his compatriots hauled him off to a nearby pond, where they dunked him almost to the point of drowning (“He was taken from the water more dead than alive, coated with green slime”). In an Indiana regiment, officers intervened to prevent the drowning of an offender but let the men whip him severely, along with another guilty party. “Searved him right,” a witness wrote to his wife. “I hope they will shoot both of them.”
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Union troops and their officers were expected by law to demonstrate loyalty, and the War Department issued orders requiring expressions of “profound sorrow” over the assassination. Charges varied for those who disobeyed. Sometimes court cases named violation of the Fifth Article of War, which mandated trial by court-martial for speaking of the president with contempt. More often, courts brought charges of disrespectful, disloyal, treasonable, seditious, or mutinous language, disloyal conduct, or (in a regularly invoked phrase) “conduct prejudicial to good order and military discipline.” Quietly declining to wear crape could get you arrested, as could declaring the assassination inconsequential—not particularly sad or “a damned small loss.” A lieutenant colonel from Wisconsin (known to call Lincoln a fool and an imbecile when alive) was arrested for announcing that the country would “suffer nothing” by his death. At Camp Fry in Washington, D.C., Private Elijah Chapman similarly proclaimed that “a damned sight better men than Abraham Lincoln ever was, has died, and not as much fuss made about it.” But the more common alleged offense was public delight. A sergeant in Fort Preble, Maine, said it was “too good to believe,” and the army boatswain on Saint Helena said he’d celebrate if he had a bottle of whiskey. Offensive conduct included laughter, cheering, waving one’s cap, and general joviality. When the news interrupted the victory
celebrations of the 182nd Ohio, Private Eli Smith proceeded to sing anti-Lincoln ditties. In camp in Tennessee, a private shouted, “Hip, hip, hurrah, Lincoln is dead.”
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Copperhead soldiers and sailors let loose all kinds of inflammatory remarks that resulted in arrest. They damned Lincoln and said he’d gone to hell. They called him a cur, a son of a bitch, a damned son of a bitch, “a long slab-sided Yankee son of a bitch,” and a “damned old whoremaster.” Like the saloon patron in Los Angeles, a Union mate on the Mississippi River said he would find Lincoln’s grave and “shit on it.” Praise for the assassin constituted an offense as well. Docked at the Brooklyn navy yard, the crew of a vessel clamored for the April 15 edition of the
New York Sun
, then expressed shock when Captain Thomas Jackson called the murderer a bold and brave man. At camp in Illinois with the Twenty-Fourth Michigan, John Largest was in the privy when another soldier bellowed the news through the door, only to hear Largest retort that the assassin had done right. A Union soldier aboard a ship in Haiti was “only sorry that Jeff Davis did not kill him,” and an Ohio soldier asserted that if Jefferson Davis and Abraham Lincoln “were put up for a target,” he’d “shoot Old Abe first.” All of these naysayers were placed under arrest.
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Ambiguous circumstances could also land an offender in jail. For James Tozier, on a naval ship off Norfolk, what began as a playful prank ended with legal charges. When a newspaper extra arrived on board, the men crowded around in high spirits, expecting good news. Someone asked Tozier to read the dispatch aloud, “Johnny fashion”—that is, as a Confederate “Johnny Reb” would do. Thus did Tozier announce Lincoln’s assassination in elated tones, substituting “glorious news” where the bulletin read “sad news,” and calling on the men to give three cheers. Even when someone told Tozier to quit, he persisted, “dancing around the deck holding the hand-bill up and waving it.” Act or no act, Tozier was sentenced to a year in prison. Other trials resulted in dishonorable discharge or military prison terms, ranging from a month to two years or the remainder of one’s term of service. Most included confinement by ball and chain, hard labor, or both. For Lincoln’s antagonists, these military punishments for treasonous expressions only reinforced the unwelcome expanding power of the federal government as an outgrowth of the war.
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Copperheads had always disrupted visions of a unified Union during the
war, and now they did so again, confounding an imagined community of northern mourners. Yet in the face of all this nettlesome evidence, coming from as far north as Maine and as far west as California, many of Lincoln’s mourners continued to paint portraits of collective grief. African Americans everywhere and white Unionists in the border states better understood the tenuousness of this proposition. When black residents of Washington met just after the assassination to compose resolutions, they crafted the phrase, “we, in common with all other loyal citizens,” the word
loyal
pointedly excluding northern dissenters. Communications issued by residents of the border states likewise referred to Kentucky’s “loyal community” and “loyal Missourians.” Otherwise, most white mourners insisted upon sweeping statements, and many, like Sarah Browne, recounted Copperhead offenses right alongside pronouncements of universal bereavement. Immediately after recording the anti-Lincoln outbursts of a local woman, a resident of upstate New York wrote, “I think the sorrow is universal. If Cooperstown is an example the whole country mourns.” From Massachusetts, Henry Thacher asserted that “there are few indeed who do not sincerely mourn at this time,” adding, “Even the genuine Copperheads are remarkably quiet.” Thacher’s slippage is telling, since keeping quiet hardly equaled sincerity. Yet this kind of fabricated cohesion served both as a command about acceptable behavior to outliers and as a soothing fiction, since Lincoln’s supporters knew full well that white northerners had never entirely united behind the president and the war. Now especially, in the immediate aftermath of the assassination, did the victors-turned-mourners yearn for an uncomplicated unity.
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Together, Confederates and Copperheads disrupted the illusion of a continent convulsed by sorrow. Neither the majority of white southerners nor a vocal minority of white northerners belonged to the conjured nation-in-shock. Both groups earned the wrath of Lincoln’s mourners, not only because the mourners loved Lincoln, but also because the words and actions of the subversives played havoc with visions of the nation at the exact moment in which the Union had triumphed, at least on the battlefield.

ALONG WITH CONFEDERATES AND COPPERHEADS
, there was one other segment of the population that was, if far from gleeful over the assassination, nonetheless not entirely sorry that President Lincoln had been removed
as head of state. These were the most radical members of Lincoln’s own Republican Party, whose anguish came mixed with a strain of relief. Along with Frederick Douglass and other African American leaders who had advocated untiringly for emancipation, radical Republicans had criticized Lincoln all through the war and right through surrender, concerned at hints of overly conciliatory policies to come. In the aftermath of the assassination, while African Americans north and south genuinely lamented the loss of Lincoln, some of these white radicals expressed quiet satisfaction, as yet unaware of the troubles that would so soon arise with President Andrew Johnson. Indiana congressman George Julian (who had criticized Lincoln and Seward as “great leaders in the policy of mercy”) found himself surprised and even disgusted at the forthright hostility toward Lincoln expressed by his fellow radicals after the murder. The “universal feeling among radical men here,” Julian wrote in his diary, “is that his death is a godsend.” More diplomatically, radical Republican senator Zachariah Chandler of Michigan wrote to his wife that God had allowed Lincoln to remain in office “as long as he was usefull & then substituted a better man to finish the work.” That was a sentiment that many white mourners would soon express, for unlike African Americans, they looked toward the elevation of the vice president with great hope.
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With Lincoln gone, his antagonists, north and south, asked the same questions as his mourners: about the path of reconstruction and the fate of the vanquished—for Confederates, that meant their own fate. Like Lincoln’s mourners, his antagonists also wondered what would happen the next day. Lincoln had died on Saturday, April 15, and as it turned out, the next day was Easter Sunday.

Public Condolences

A TORRENT OF CONDOLENCES FROM
across the British Empire bombarded Charles Francis Adams, the Boston Brahmin who served as the U.S. minister in London. From England, Scotland, and Ireland, from “British Jews” to “Mauritian colored residents,” came cards, letters, resolutions, and telegrams, and it was his burden to respond to every single one of them. At the same time, Adams and Assistant Secretary Benjamin Moran saw their offices crowded with weeping Americans and Britons, including one elderly fellow who, Moran wrote with exasperation, “cried like a child.” Moran also expressed irritation at the hordes, “nearly all of them bores,” he added. Adams and Moran were in fact taken by surprise at encountering any mourners at all, since, as Adams marveled, many of the British had quite recently considered Lincoln “an ignorant boor” and William Seward “an ogre.” Adams promptly returned a condolence letter from the Confederate Aid Society in Manchester, and as for the Confederate-sympathizing
London Times
, the newspaper had, sniffed Moran, “made a complete somersault.”
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Not that anti-Lincoln sentiments had gone entirely underground with the assassination, for Moran recorded “much secret exaltation among our enemies,” while Adams read a letter from a worker in Hull who castigated
his town’s Confederate sympathizers. There was the case too of the Londoner who shouted vindictively about the murder while wishing for an earthquake to “swallow up the whole north.” Adams’s mailbag also held anonymous anti-Lincoln doggerel, including a verse portraying the late president conversing with the devil on his way down to hell (“My Dear Abe Lincoln, I’m glad beyond measure / This visit unlooked for, gives infinite pleasure”). Back across the Atlantic, mourners accordingly read the English newspapers and scoffed at the “
crocodile tears
of the Rebel Sympathisers.” Even Confederates mocked the sudden “bootlicking tones” of the English journalists.
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Charles Francis Adams held in his hands plentiful evidence of divided reactions, yet (perhaps unsurprisingly) when he fulfilled his diplomatic duty to spread news of the assassination to British consulates across the globe, he felt compelled to write of “regret universally felt,” and when he forwarded messages of condolence to Mary Lincoln, he assured her that those sentiments were “felt universally in this Kingdom.” Adams was far from alone in the words he chose for his formal communications.
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From across the Continent and the world, official tributes poured in to Washington. From Europe and the Mediterranean, Central and South America, Liberia, Russia, China, and Japan, the testimonials came from lords and princes, prime ministers and presidents; the church, the press, and universities; temperance societies, ladies’ societies, and secular societies; cotton brokers, railroad companies, and workers’ associations. From groups as disparate as Creoles of African descent in Guadeloupe and Polish refugees in Switzerland, nearly all such messages invoked the language of universality. News of the assassination produced “throughout the civilized world a sentiment of indignation and of horror” (a French minister), insured that “all the political factions” spoke in “one unanimous cry” of denunciation (the Italian Chamber of Deputies), and caused “horror and indignation wherever it has gone” (the Hanseatic Republics). Right in the U.S. capital, where secessionists and Copperheads alike could be seen and heard, a group of mourning German immigrants drew up resolutions calling the assassination “shocking to all mankind.”
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God