Mourning Lincoln (16 page)

IN JACKSONVILLE, THE ENEMY HAD
been thanking God endlessly since the fall of Richmond, and now it was Rodney Dorman’s turn to pay tribute to the Almighty. “Their time had come,” he puffed into his diary, with news of the assassination. “Thank God!” While Yankee occupiers and black residents fretted over the mysteries of divine intention, Dorman laughed in their faces. “What will they say to that?” he smirked. “Is it not God’s work?” For Dorman, the assassination was an indisputable moment of spiritual certainty, for if Yankees were so sure that God had orchestrated Union victory, had he not also directed the assassination of President Lincoln? Surely if it wasn’t God who had cut down their leader at the exact moment of Confederate defeat, then there was no God at all. Of course, the blind and ignorant Yankees would never discern divine intention in the assassination, for it was only in their “perverted, prostituted” ways and their phony Christianity, he wrote, that “they pretend to see his doings.” At the very least, the sanctimonious hypocrites should tremble and repent.
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Dorman was incensed too that white ministers in the Confederacy were getting in trouble for neglecting to mention Lincoln in their prayers. What sycophancy on the part of those who obeyed!—why, Lincoln, that “ill shapen, deformed, & most evil minded person,” would be “damned to
Hell,” whether anyone prayed for him or not, and the quicker he and his friends got there, the better. Looking toward the future, Dorman composed a prayer of his own. When those in authority were not fit to govern, he exhorted God, “remove them forthwith, in such a manner as, in thy pleasure, may serve as an example to other aspirants & for the good of the people.” He asked God to punish “false teachers & leaders” for “every userpation & excess of power.” With either humility or hubris, Dorman asked God to answer his prayer “for the sake of mankind.” He hoped that the assassination was just the beginning of God’s retribution against those who now ruled over his land, and all through the spring and into summer, Dorman continued to pray, if less formally, for a time when the despots in his midst would be “swallowed in one overwhelming gulp.”
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LIKE MANY ABOLITIONISTS, BOTH BLACK
and white, Sarah and Albert Browne vacillated between spiritual trust and uncertainty in the days and weeks following Lincoln’s assassination. It was easier for Sarah, more sure-footed in her faith. The pulpit of Salem’s Unitarian North Church was draped in mourning and decorated with beautiful flowers, and there she prayed to the “Giver of all good,” grateful to him for the fact that President Lincoln had lived to see victory. Through sorrow and anger, Sarah held fast to her confidence in God’s mysterious plan for the nation.
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Down south, Albert struggled more. With Lee’s surrender, he had readily invoked the glory of God (“the God of righteousness has done this”), but Albert was never as comfortable as his wife in the realm of faith. Now he tried to find solace in the mystery of divine ways, hoping for good to emerge out of such patent evil. Writing home, he quoted Matthew 10:29, about no sparrow falling to the ground without God’s knowledge and consent, and asked his family to pray for the future, asserting freedom and justice as the war’s ultimate outcome. Albert had “not a shadow of doubt” about that, he told Sarah, even as he wrestled with both shadows and doubt. “If I believe at all, I must believe in predestination,” he wrote, straying from liberal Christianity as he tried to convince himself that the “omniscient being whom we call God” had a “plan or scheme, call it what you will,” for without such a plan—even one that was beyond human comprehension—there could be only dark and dismal chaos. Filled with “gloomy doubts,” Albert wondered if he was asserting his faith only because it was “more difficult
not to believe.” Still, he couldn’t keep himself from fretting that perhaps the assassination was a form of divine punishment. While Sarah thought of Lincoln as a Christlike man, Albert could only hope that the president had finished his work on earth. He didn’t want to articulate any “reproach of Mr. Lincoln,” he hedged, but perhaps the president had “erred in too much leniency” toward the rebels. Maybe that was why God had taken him away right after Union victory.
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LIGHT IN THE DARKNESS: THAT’S
how Lincoln’s assassination felt to the downcast Confederates. Like Rodney Dorman, many of those who expressed glee also expressed gratitude to God for arranging the deed. Recall Clara Dargan (she had named Lincoln and Seward a “Royal Suite of the Imperial Apes”), who thanked God for Lincoln’s death, which she called the “first gleam of light in this midnight darkness.” Confederates in Nashville likewise prayed in appreciation to God, who had “
at last
shed the Light of His Countenance upon their cause.” The fact that Good Friday was meant to be a day of thanksgiving for Union victory seemed definitive proof. Surely it had been a divine act against the wicked Yankees, asserted Elizabeth Alsop, to orchestrate Lincoln’s murder on “the very day appointed as a time of
rejoicing
for our misfortunes.” What clearer sign could there be, she asked, of providence “visiting their sins upon their own heads”?
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Providence: that’s how it felt too. All through the war, both sides had judged the outcome of each skirmish and battle, each advance and setback, in terms of God’s purposes, and for the Confederates, the previous weeks, even months, had offered no sign of divine favor. Now the “state of alarm” into which the victorious Yankees were so suddenly thrown, a Richmond resident reasoned, pointed clearly to a “visitation of Providence.” Some appealed for more of the same—Eleanor Cohen, in Charleston (among the small number of Jewish Confederates), prayed that God would make “all our foes perish!” A few even hoped that a reversal of the war’s outcome was imminent. Cloe Whittle thought God wanted to make the assassination “of use to the South,” and Eliza French believed that God’s warning to the victors “may work out yet for our good.” Up north and out west, Copperheads and Confederate sympathizers expressed many of the same thoughts. In New York, some Irish immigrants referred to the assassination
as the “judgment of God for political & religious crimes,” and a man in California felt sure that God had once again remembered the Confederates and “was on their side.” Perhaps, after all, the gloom would lift.
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Good cheer could not be sustained, though, as the realities of defeat persisted, even in church. With the surrender of Robert E. Lee, Union authorities had ordered Confederate clergymen to cease their prayers for Jefferson Davis and to pray for President Lincoln instead. Some obeyed, but even after the assassination many refused, and there were reports that in Charleston and Tallahassee, ministers got in trouble for omitting the slain executive from their services. Elsewhere, Union authorities closed down houses of worship whose ministers would not comply, and those who followed the rules did so only with contempt. One minister prayed first for rebel soldiers, then mouthed the decreed prayer by spitting out the words
United States
, “as if it was a bitter pill,” to which “there were hardly five responses in the whole room.”
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Fantasies of divine payback proved short-lived, and Easter Sunday in the defeated Confederacy was a bleak day indeed. Parishioners in a Richmond church found it hard to celebrate without their pew cushions (appropriated by a nearby hospital) or their bells (melted down for cannonballs by the Confederate army). A woman in Georgia could only unhappily recall the “sunny Easter Sundays” she had once spent with those “now gone forever.” If any grim satisfaction remained, it came in imagining the spiritual struggles of the conquerors, suddenly forced to confront more complicated theories about God’s hand in the Civil War. As Rodney Dorman put it, “What will they say to that?”
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SHOT ON GOOD FRIDAY AND
dead on Saturday: the timing of the assassination made Easter Sunday 1865 a particularly important—and confusing—occasion, as shocked mourners came to church for what should have been a day of rejoicing over both the resurrection of Christ and military victory. The reversal of fortunes was manifested materially, as churchwomen rearranged the colorful springtime displays they had readied. Easter decoration had become something of a commercial enterprise by the mid-nineteenth century, with elaborate presentations meant to reflect religious devotion. Flowers played a central role, and now the women highlighted the white blossoms as they searched for black fabric to cover railings and
arches, chancel and altar, pulpit and organ, and placed portraits of the late president amid the myrtle, tea roses, and heliotrope. As a congregant in Boston recorded, grappling with the juxtaposition of joy and sorrow, “This glorious Easter morn our Church put on the garb of mourning.”
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The crowds were phenomenal. Pews always filled to capacity on Easter, but no one had ever seen anything like April 16, 1865. Wherever the news had arrived, from the East Coast to the Midwest to the Pacific Ocean, black churches and white churches were jammed. Aisles and galleries were full, choir steps packed tight. Men carried in extra settees and benches, leaving not an inch of floor space to spare. Many who spilled out the doors strained to hear the service, and those at the back of the outdoor crowds stood too far away to hear anything at all. The same was true in army camps, where Union officers and soldiers gathered in unprecedented numbers to listen to whoever was preaching and however many sermons were offered. The same as the day before, mourners craved company in order to absorb the tragic event. The shock had not yet dissipated, and just as in the streets on Saturday, on Sunday people observed the grief of their neighbors in church or their comrades in camp, reading the faces around them for confirmation that it was not, after all, a hoax or a dream.
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Very sad:
those two words conveyed the heavy sorrow that had mixed with the initial shock from the first moment Lincoln’s supporters had counted the news as credible. In Baton Rouge, a Union army chaplain found the hundreds of freedpeople “all very sad.” In Minnesota, “the people all feel very sad,” a soldier wrote in his diary. It was, Mary Emerson wrote from Paris, in her
petit souvenir journalier
, the “saddest saddest news we ever heard.” Others employed more vivid vocabulary. The news “threw a mantle of sadness over every heart,” or people were “struck down” in anguish, “crest fallen and agitated.” One soldier thought even the defeat of Sherman or Grant would have brought less gloom to camp. Just as mourners had draped their churches, so too did they imagine nature attired in grief. Where it rained, people saw the clouds “weeping copiously,” where skies were blue, “the very sunshine looked mournful.” A former slave in Washington said that even the trees were weeping for Lincoln.
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For communities of freedpeople across the South, grief washed through like a tidal wave. From Norfolk and Portsmouth, Beaufort and Charleston came the most “heartfelt sorrow,” “troubled countenances,” and “
very great
”
grief. Everywhere, children cried audibly and grown-ups wept bitterly. Some cried all night, others just felt numb. One woman described herself as “nearly deranged” with grief. Black soldiers were utterly bereft. Edgar Dinsmore of the Fifty-Fourth Massachusetts felt “a loss irreparable.” One man compared the circumstances to a horrific scene he had witnessed as a slave: a mother whipped forty lashes for weeping when white people took away her children. The violence had traumatized him, “but not half so much as the death of President Lincoln,” he confessed. Some white officers in black regiments felt the sense of loss magnified. “Oh how Sad, How Melancholy,” James Moore wrote to his wife. Such intense sorrow overcame him that it seemed “an impossibility to rally from it.” In Petersburg, Thomas Morris Chester saw both “unfeigned grief” and an “undisguised feeling of horror,” for the question hadn’t gone away: Would they “have to be slaves again”?
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African Americans claimed for themselves a special place in the out-pouring of sorrow, and the prayers and sermons of Easter Sunday magnified Lincoln’s role as the Great Emancipator. A New Orleans minister asserted that his people felt “deeper sorrow for the friend of the colored man,” and black clergymen in the North allowed that their people felt the loss “more keenly” and “more than all others.” Journalists singled out the “dusky-skinned men of our own race” as the “chief—the truest mourners,” and black soldiers maintained that “as a people none could deplore his loss more than we.” Frederick Douglass, speaking extemporaneously in Rochester on Saturday, told the overflowing crowd that he felt the loss “as a personal as well as national calamity” because of “the race to which I belong.” Even the most stricken white mourners conceded the point. Secretary of the Navy Gideon Welles thought the “colored people” to be the “truer mourners.” In the words of one minister, “We who are white know little of the emotions which thrill the black man’s heart to-day,” and as another told his congregation, “intense as is our grief,” no white person could “fathom the sorrow” of black people. White mourners also pondered this difference in their personal writings. “How I pity the poor colored people,” wrote one, “who share
perhaps most
deeply in our
great calamity!
”
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From the moment the news arrived, Lincoln’s mourners cried as they recorded their emotions, smudging the ink in their journals and letters. Up Broadway in New York, with black drapery obscuring all facades,
everything “looked so—sorrowful—& sad,” Emily Watkins wrote haltingly to her husband, her dashes perhaps standing in for intermittent sobs. In a small town in Indiana, a young southern Unionist likewise drew dashes (and comforted herself with imagined universality): “The horror and the sorrow are intense—Tears are in all eyes—sobs in every voice—old men and children—rich and poor, white and black.” By the rules of American culture (which applied most strictly to the middle and upper classes), expressions of grief were meant to be properly bounded: too much, and one was overly self-indulgent; too little, and one was not quite sensitive enough. Still, the antebellum decades had witnessed a new sentimentalization of death, as the harshness of the Puritan legacy crumbled, and communities and families increasingly attended to the emotions of earthly survivors. On this particular day, all societal pressure lost its power, and most mourners made little effort to conceal their feelings. For the second day in a row, men wept openly, including clergymen. One minister “broke down & the tears rolled down his cheeks.” Children saw their male Sunday school teachers barely able to get through a prayer. “Even the boys,” Anna Lowell wrote, appeared stricken through the hymns.
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