Mourning Lincoln (2 page)

It was Saturday, April 15, 1865. Word spread across the telegraph wires, north, south, and west. Soon, with dispatches read aloud to gathering bystanders, glances at newspaper headlines, and the sight of stricken faces at front doors, millions across the country knew.
¹

THE STORY OF THE NATION’S
first presidential assassination has been told many times over, in biographies of Lincoln and inquiries into the conspiracy, in chronicles of the Civil War and textbooks of American history. These accounts often portray the nation’s (and the world’s) response by looking to newspapers, sermons, formal expressions of condolence, and the phenomenal crowds that turned out for religious services and civic ceremonies. The outlines of that portrait are consistent, describing shock, grief, and anger. But how well does that familiar picture capture the full range of responses? And how universal were the experiences captured in those public sources?

Two personal experiences of collective catastrophe prompted me to ask: How did people respond—at home, on the street, at work, with their families, by themselves—when they heard the news that Abraham Lincoln had been assassinated?

September 11, 2001, was the first day of the fall semester at New York University. When I set out to teach my 9:30 a.m. class, I’d already heard a phenomenal boom, though I had no idea what it was. In the streets of
Greenwich Village, I joined a knot of people gazing skyward toward the fractured North Tower of the World Trade Center a mile and a half downtown, thick smoke streaming from the upper windows. Then, as the second plane crashed from the other side, I saw an orange ball of fire burst from the South Tower. It astonishes me now that I went on to class, that the students—they too had seen the burning towers—arrived on time and sat in their chairs. Not until someone opened our classroom door with news of the buildings’ collapse did I dismiss the students, all of us just beginning to comprehend the magnitude of the event.

Out on the street, people looked into one another’s faces to verify that it wasn’t a terrible nightmare, then rushed home to confirm everything by television. Most important was to communicate with loved ones, at least until the phone lines and Internet went dead. Especially for those who lost family and friends, life would never again be the same, but the world did not stop that morning. Even those separated from the flames, ash, and bodies by as little as a mile walked their dogs or finished up work that seemed important. At the same time, the city’s residents began to create makeshift shrines, amassing thousands of candles, flowers, flags, and signs. The cellophane-wrapped bouquets made clear that people in flower shops and corner delis were still at work.

At sunrise the next day, I walked north in search of a newspaper—another way to confirm what still seemed like a dream. I fell in step with a neighbor on the same mission, passing through a police checkpoint and continuing on for dozens of blocks before we found an open newsstand.
“U.S. ATTACKED,”
read the
New York Times
headline. Across the country that day, headlines universalized the nation’s reaction:
DEVASTATION
, read the
Baltimore Sun;
OUTRAGE
, cried the
Atlanta Journal-Constitution
.
UNTHINKABLE
, proclaimed the
Salt Lake City Tribune
.

People put their feelings into words by chalking messages onto sidewalks and taping up handwritten or hastily printed signs. Some imparted information that testified to the disaster: “Vigil in park @ dusk” or “For obvious reasons our screening this evening has been cancelled.” The signboard outside a bar read, “Sports Today: None.” Many posters revealed a spirit of unity, thanking police and firefighters, offering compassion, or asking for prayers—in English, Spanish, German, Chinese, Japanese, Hebrew, and Arabic. Others revealed more confusion than conviction: “I don’t
know how to feel,” read one; a slip of paper, posted in multiple locations, read simply, “Why?”

It felt as if the whole world was grieving and in shock, yet evidence of tension and contention could be read everywhere. One sign called for peace, another for “peace after payback.” Messages calling for harmony were defaced with calls to war, in turn answered with cries for justice without revenge. Some signs spewed fury at the peacemakers; others warned mourners to distrust the media.

I began right away to gather tokens and relics: along with the newspapers from that day, I bought special issues of magazines paying tribute to the lost, and searched for postcards of the city skyline with the Twin Towers intact. As if in a trance, I dropped off an armload of warm clothes and helped prepare a meal for rescue workers. Three days later, as I rode a train out of New York, I found myself startled at the conversation in the seats just ahead: someone was talking about something unrelated to September 11.

Hazier in my memory (and undocumented in my personal archives) is the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, about which Americans continue to ask one another, or their elders, “Where were you when you found out?” My sole recollection of that day in November 1963, when I was five years old, consists of walking up Third Avenue in the Murray Hill neighborhood of New York with Mary Gallagher, the devout Catholic woman who took care of us while my father was at work. Schools had been dismissed early, and Mary and I were going to pick up my sister. How Mary loved Kennedy! His murder might as well have been the crucifixion, my father would say later—or if he was not quite Jesus, then JFK felt to Mary like a brother or a son, and she must have asked God why, struggling to find spiritual consolation. Up the avenue we walked, tears streaming down Mary’s face as she pressed a transistor radio to her ear. Other grown-ups on the street must have been weeping too, searching one another’s faces to make sure the awful tidings were true. In my sister’s first-grade classroom, the loudspeaker had crackled with an announcement that the president had been shot. At a Ford dealership on the West Side, my father had been paying for auto parts when the man behind the counter gruffly announced the news to his customers, then turned the volume up high on his back-room radio. Along with everyone else at the counter, my father completed his purchase.

If I’d been watching our small black-and-white television that afternoon, I’d have seen Walter Cronkite break into a soap opera broadcast to announce the shooting. When the camera switched to the CBS affiliate in Dallas, viewers saw the hotel ballroom where so many had gathered to hear President Kennedy deliver a speech. For a long moment, the lens trained on an African American man in waiter’s vest and bowtie, wiping his eyes repeatedly with a linen napkin. The Texas reporter soon passed on the emergency room’s unofficial pronouncement of death, informing viewers that the doctor himself was in tears. Minutes later, from the New York studio, Cronkite told his audience that Kennedy had died at 1:00 p.m. central standard time. Looking into the camera, he struggled just a bit to remain composed.

The grown-ups around me knew they were part of history-in-the-making that day, yet the world had not stood still then either. The next day, my father taught his dance class at the Martha Graham School, and Mary, still stricken, came to work. Soon I joined the one hundred million viewers watching the funeral on television. Surely it felt as if the shock and sorrow were universal, yet I now know that despite the overwhelming grief, there were also disagreements and anger, even fistfights between mourners and exulters. Indeed, just before Walter Cronkite officially announced Kennedy’s death on air, he told the nation that Dallas had called out an extra four hundred policemen owing to “fears and concerns” for the president.

THESE EXPERIENCES, ENCOMPASSING ONLY A
fraction of the range of reactions to transformative events, led me to wonder what stories we might find if we listened for immediate personal responses to Lincoln’s assassination: of northerners and southerners, Yankees and Confederates, African Americans and whites, soldiers and civilians, men and women, rich and poor, the well known and the unknown. What would we find by reading extensively through the diaries people kept and the letters they wrote during the momentous hours, days, weeks, and months that followed the crime at Ford’s Theatre? Here was a key moment of confusion and conflict that has been left out of the story or glossed over with generalities. The record of personal responses overlaps with public pronouncements, but the two are not the same, as individual writings reveal experiences that
cannot be recovered elsewhere. Drawing on evidence from hundreds of letters, diaries, and other sources that disclose personal responses,
Mourning Lincoln
delves into the moment of Lincoln’s assassination to uncover a profusion of real-time sentiments, creating a multivocal narrative history that takes us far beyond the headlines to tell the story, and illuminate its meanings, on a human scale.

In the quest for raw reactions, I have bypassed memoirs. Although all private writings are in some respects written from memory, responses to Lincoln’s assassination from the spring and summer of 1865 differ considerably from the polished reminiscences of burnished recollections. Consider the diary of Union soldier Henry Gawthrop, who lay in an army hospital in Virginia. In April 1865, Gawthrop recorded that President Lincoln had stopped by to shake hands with the wounded soldiers. Some fifty years later, the veteran elaborated on this memory, writing that Lincoln had greeted a Confederate soldier with the words, “I hope you will soon be well and return to your home.” It’s hard to tell whether Gawthrop neglected to record that scene at the time or if he embellished his memory bit by bit over the years until he came to believe it had happened that way. The fact is, the words that Gawthrop later attributed to Lincoln make the most sense in the context of white North-South reconciliation, fully under way by the early twentieth century.
²

Many memoirs, moreover, comfortably corroborate a static portrait of a weeping nation. In September 2001 and November 1963, many perceived the whole world to be in grief, and so did Lincoln’s mourners in April 1865. When the bereaved wrote about the immediate aftermath of the assassination, they tended toward extravagant descriptions of
everyone, everywhere
, of universal grief and worldwide sorrow. When church bells chimed on a hillside, it felt as if bells were tolling across the land. With every building in a village draped in black, it seemed the whole country must be shrouded. Sharing feelings of shock and horror, out on the street or in church, it was easy to envision the entire nation in a state of distress, the whole world under the same spell of gloom.

None of this was literally true, and personal responses from the spring of 1865 make that eminently clear. Grieving men and women described a nation and a world in mourning, but it was they who constructed that universality,
nourished by personal rituals: spreading the word to neighbors, tacking black drapery to windows, crowding together into church pews. All of those actions made the calamitous crime both more real and more bearable, and illusions of collective grief served the same purpose. As a black preacher in upstate New York put it, “No deeper sorrow ever filled the universal heart of the country.” In the words of a white Washington correspondent from California, horror “swept over the land,” while “from sea to sea a smitten nation wept.” People made the same kinds of observations in their personal writings. The shock, a mourner wrote to her brother, was soothed by the “universal feeling of one sorrow that overcame all.” After four years of bloody conflict, moreover, the bereaved were ready to see all enmity between Union and Confederate suddenly evaporated. “North & South are weeping together,” a woman wrote to her husband. Around the globe, the chorus echoed. In the West Indies, it seemed to a Christian missionary that even the most bitter sentiments of secession had melted away. In South Africa, a U.S. diplomat thought that “even those who never sympathized with our holy cause” were “overwhelmed with horror.” As the English novelist Elizabeth Gaskell insisted, “
Everyone
is feeling the same. I never knew so universal a feeling.” Accordingly, black worshippers in San Francisco resolved to “join our grief with that of the World.”
³

In fact, though, not everyone was included in this vision of a monolithic grieving nation, nor did everyone wish to be. Even as many of Lincoln’s mourners were eager to universalize their responses, their own accounts contradicted that very yearning. Grand and impressive as the public ceremonies might have been, this end-of-war moment was less a time of unity and closure and much more a time of ongoing dissension. And no matter how comforting was the thought of universal grief, mourners knew that others responded to the assassination with gratitude and glee. Indeed, despite the common invocation of the Civil War as a conflict between North and South, regional boundaries prove inadequate, since the populations of neither section were of one mind. Lincoln’s supporters encompassed black southerners and black northerners and the majority of white northerners. Lincoln’s opponents encompassed the majority of white southerners and a significant minority of white northerners, the so-called Copperheads. In the pages that follow, I thus avoid the popular usage of
the North
and
the South
, writing instead about Lincoln’s mourners, Union supporters, and
Yankees on the one hand, and Confederates, rebels, and Lincoln’s antagonists on the other.

THE CIVIL WAR WAS A
revolutionary war, and Lincoln’s assassination complicated its ending. The strife provoked by conflicting political stakes at war’s end was inseparable from irreconcilable personal responses to Lincoln’s assassination. No single moment can by itself explain the war’s meaning, and responses to the startling burst of violence in Ford’s Theatre cannot explain what lay in the future any more than can the Emancipation Proclamation, the military turning point at the Battle of Gettysburg, or the president’s stirring second inaugural address. If one legacy of the war was an extraordinary moment of black freedom and equality during radical Reconstruction that foreshadowed the Civil Rights Movement, we can find the beginnings of that historical development in the post-assassination determination of African Americans and their white allies. If another legacy was a replication of the violent and oppressive conditions of racial slavery that lasted well into the twentieth century, we can find the roots of that trajectory in the Confederate defiance that followed Lincoln’s death.