Mourning Lincoln (17 page)

Finding words to speak aloud or write down could be a challenge. Frederick Douglass, who had met President Lincoln for the third time only weeks earlier, had “scarcely been able to say a word” to friends who had grasped his hands and looked into his eyes. A black soldier in Florida saw sorrow and misery on every face, yet still “none could express their feelings.” Silence, allowed another black mourner in the South, was the “sure sign of sorrow, and when the heart is full it is difficult to speak.” The same was true for white mourners. After recording facts and details, many stumbled in their attempts to articulate their sentiments on paper. “I cannot express my feelings” and “I cannot describe my feelings” became common refrains for men and women alike. Some conveyed the point more poetically. A Philadelphia man felt a “dull & stupefied sense of calamity.” The British writer Edward Peacock found himself stymied, since any description of genuine emotion would appear “wildly exaggerated.”
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Others couldn’t write anything at all. “I have heard such dreadful news today that I feel totally unfit for writing a letter,” a Massachusetts woman confessed to her mother. From the battlefront, General Carl Schurz explained to his wife that he would have written earlier had he been able to
“shake off the gloom.” At the same time, those who routinely committed but few words to paper betrayed their sorrow by writing more than usual. Whereas Unitarian minister George Ellis normally kept a bare roster of church doings and dining companions, he now added two descriptive words to his log: “awful consternation.” The perfunctory journal of Elizabeth Childs, usually home to memos like “Fanny dined here,” now carried the notation, “Sad day.”
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Complete listlessness could take over from the inability to speak or write. “Do not feel like doing anything,” wrote sixteen-year-old Margaret Howell in Philadelphia (she then crossed out the word
thing
, and changed it to “work or sewing”). For a Union soldier in Alabama, the news made him feel “so bad,” he told his wife, “that I went to bed and I have not felt like getting up since.” For others, it was just the opposite. “Sleep was out of the question!” wrote a disconsolate Englishwoman. Grief affected people’s physical well-being too, in all kinds of ways: lightheadedness or debilitating headaches, prolonged trembling, “prostration of the nervous system,” even days of indefinable sickness. The declaration of victory had enabled Moses Cleveland, serving outside Mobile, to bear his poor health more easily, but the assassination brought him back to the army surgeon, who dispensed medicine and orders to rest. Henry Gawthrop’s body reacted the other way around; suffering in a Virginia field hospital with an amputated foot and a bleeding stomach, he found that the terrible tidings made him “almost forget bodily pain.” From the start of the ordeal, from the first moments the shock began to wear away to reveal the truth of President Lincoln’s murder, in rushed overwhelming sorrow.
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MOURNERS CAME TO CHURCH ON
Easter Sunday to affirm their sorrow and to make the assassination more believable, but they also came prepared for strenuous religious reflection, longing to make sense of what felt incomprehensible. Grief without faith was impossible for most nineteenth-century Americans, but the graceful acceptance of such a cataclysmic event proved a formidable challenge. Foremost in the minds of many Christian mourners loomed the conundrum of evil. How to explain the existence of evil in the lives of the faithful was a persistent religious problem, but the question also took particular forms at specific historical moments. Before the Civil War, slaves and abolitionists confronted the problem of evil in the
institution of human bondage. During the war, both Union and Confederate confronted the problem of evil in the horrors of the battlefield. Then, with surrender, Union supporters had celebrated victory, the end of the fighting, and the end of slavery all at once, vindicating the terrible war. Now, less than a week later, they faced evil all over again. Lincoln’s death had to be the design of God, but how could it be? How could a good God be the source of such a terrible deed? The bereaved came to church to wrestle with faith and doubt. Some came to wrestle with the meaning of war and death, maybe even the meaning of life itself.

These two badges expressed common sentiments of sorrow among Lincoln’s mourners, the first portraying the slain president as a beloved family member, the second assuming the sense of loss to be shared universally.
Call #MS Am 2605, Houghton Library, Harvard University
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The spiritual dilemmas of April 1865 came in the context of religious change. Orthodox Calvinism preached an immovable and mysterious God, human depravity, and salvation predestined from birth, in which only the elect few would be saved and only God knew who would go to heaven or hell. In a nation of increasingly democratic ideals, Protestant theologians, ministers (Henry Ward Beecher among them), and worshippers began to reject those premises, insisting instead on a more benevolent God who had endowed human beings with reason and free will along with the prospect of renewal through Jesus Christ. Liberal Protestantism also entered the realm of politics in a peculiarly American “civil religion,” in which citizens understood God as deeply concerned with the fate of the nation, calling on his believers to fulfill divine intention through civic action. Lincoln himself had advocated this idea at Gettysburg in the summer of 1863. In his address at the battlefield cemetery in Pennsylvania, Lincoln spoke of the nation’s “new birth of freedom,” upholding the promise of human beings in control of their own moral destiny, in a “government of the people, by the people, for the people.”
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But if human beings were responsible for their own salvation through their own moral agency, then the problem of evil became even more nettle-some. What had the victors done that made God take Lincoln away? The puzzle was so overwhelming that some liberally minded mourners (like Albert Browne, in his invocation of predestination) could only turn back toward the rigidity of Calvinism. Mourners also found comfort looking back to the Calvinist tones of Lincoln’s second inaugural address, delivered just six weeks before his death—which stood in tension with what the president had earlier implied about human beings controlling moral destiny. No one had expected the war to go on for so long, Lincoln reflected at his second inauguration, vividly invoking the sin of slavery, but “the Almighty has His own purposes.” Conversely, invoking the sin of slavery may have been Lincoln’s way of suggesting that the length of the war was due to human failing, thereby making God’s actions more understandable. Now the assassination brought liberal Protestants up against the same question: of seemingly unfathomable divine purpose on the one hand and punishment for human sinfulness (clearly slavery) on the other.
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The line between acceptance of God’s will and the effort to understand God’s will was a fine one, and nearly every utterance on the subject could be read both ways: assertions of faith shot through with ambivalence, or assertions of uncertainty shot through with trust in God. Where mourners recorded a struggle, they also asserted faith. Where they asserted faith, they hinted at inner conflict. Like Albert Browne, many entertained doubt. “I
Cannot
believe it was for the best,” a Union soldier admitted, stumped as to why God would take away the nation’s leader at just this moment. A white captain in the Twenty-Second U.S. Colored Infantry (his regiment had welcomed Lincoln to Richmond) wondered if God had forsaken them all and the nation was “drifting into Anarchy.” For Quaker Anna Ferris, Lincoln’s death was such an “incredible atrocity” that she couldn’t tell “whether love & mercy still reign in Heaven.” Even those who proclaimed spiritual certainty betrayed themselves. Abolitionist and reformer Lydia Maria Child wrote of a trust in God so strong that the assassination “did not shake that faith for an instant,” yet a sentence later she described herself as one who “trusted in Providence till the breeching broke” and the horse ran away.
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No matter how confusing and distressing were the questions, Lincoln’s mourners did find solace at church, as they listened for affirmations of what they struggled to believe. Outside the White House on the morning of April 15, Gideon Welles had passed African Americans in mourning, then recorded in his diary their “hopeless grief.” But hopelessness was not quite the right description for many black mourners. The idea, as a letter-writer to the
San Francisco Elevator
put it, was to “draw some consolation out of this great calamity.” The loss of Lincoln, Jacob Thomas told his congregation in upstate New York, was “more than we can bear”—strong words indeed, but Thomas reminded his flock that “in God is our consolation” and asked them to “hope for the best.” The task was to mourn without losing trust, to mourn without losing hope, as Philip Alexander Bell, editor of the
Elevator
, implored his readers. Chauncey Leonard, one of the few black chaplains in the Union army, knew that Lincoln had piloted the soldiers through the war in order to achieve “Liberty, and Equal Political right,” and yet he knew too that God, “in his wise Providence,” had taken Lincoln away.
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Hopelessness was not the state of mind of most white mourners either.
A woman who at first felt that “all was over” and “anarchy would follow” soon soothed herself with her minister’s “trust & confidence in God.” Like Albert Browne, many repeated the formulaic phrases. Mourners wrote about leaving all affairs to God, “who doeth all things well,” that it was by God that “all things are permitted.” They wrote about God’s “wise purpose,” exhorting themselves to “acquiesce in His will,” and they asked themselves to accept the “unfathomable designs of Providence.” Formulaic or not, such words could hold off despair. As one woman wrote on Easter Sunday, “Everybody here seems trying to remember that God will bear us safely through this new & terrible trial, if we are faithful.”
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That was the key: remaining steadfast in one’s faith. Steadfastness of faith required resignation to God’s incomprehensible ways, which if sincerely achieved turned out to be the most spiritually satisfying stance, precisely because it consigned evil to the hands of a deity in control of all, for the purpose of eventual good. That did not exactly contradict liberal Christian ideas about human moral agency and control, because God’s will still stemmed from the choices made by human beings on earth. Rather, resignation served as a consoling alternative to thoughts of untethered evil beyond divine rule.

For the faithful, then, a divine explanation of Lincoln’s tragic death would become clear at some point in the nation’s future. Frederick Douglass conveyed this conviction, with only a touch of uncertainty: “It may be,” he told the crowd in Rochester the day before Easter, “that the blood of our beloved martyred President will be the salvation of our country.” Wavering sentiments like that could be heard everywhere among lay mourners. A northern missionary among the freedpeople thought that “in
some way
God will bring good out of it.” A New England woman offered just a tad more certitude. “There is doubtless good to come from this great calamity and wickedness,” she wrote, “but as yet it is impossible to see.” Nor did spiritual confidence preclude acknowledging the terrible deed. The way a Vermont man tried to see it, God had lowered “a cloud of more than midnight darkness,” yet that cloud would eventually rise, revealing “His will concerning this great Republic.”
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Sad as people were, it helped to keep in mind that grief by its very nature was a form of resistance to God’s will, thereby reinforcing the conviction that only resignation would bring consolation in the form of God’s
mercy. Jews made this point too: “stricken with sorrow,” the members of a California synagogue nonetheless “most resignedly and most humiliatingly” bowed to “divine decree.” Yet uncertainty crept in everywhere, forcing mourners to struggle with a sense that their heartfelt grief cast them as disobedient to God. “It must be all right as God permitted it,” reflected North Carolina freedwoman Mary Ann Starkey, before allowing that “it does seem very hard to us.” That Lincoln’s death was a matter of divine intention was “the view taken by almost every public speaker,” wrote a New England woman, “and every time it is expressed it meets the approval of the audience.” That approval, however, was given in front of religious authorities; in private, doubt lingered. After church on Easter Sunday, Charlotte Blech prayed to “understand & have reason to rejoice even in view of this dark dispensation.” The president’s death, Georgia Treadway mused, after coming home from two Easter services, “seems to be looked upon as Providential,” her uncertain language revealing her spiritual ambivalence.
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It was a tall order for clergymen, forced to dispense with their prepared sermons. On a day’s notice, they had to find a way to address the palpable sorrow without entirely jettisoning Easter season rejoicing. They had to think about the problem of calamitous evil in the world God had created, and they had to make sense of Union victory and the end of slavery, followed by the president’s murder. As Unitarian minister Edward Everett Hale wrote to his brother on Saturday, Lincoln’s assassination represented the “triumph of Palm Sunday” on the one hand and the “wretchedness and agony of the crucifixion” on the other. James Ward, the Methodist minister in Washington, mulled over in his diary whether the assassination foreshadowed the “dawn of the glorious day” or “a renewed darkness” that would continue on for a long time to come.
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