Mourning Lincoln (25 page)

Drapery everywhere was thicker than it had been on Saturday, April 15, or on Easter Sunday, or Wednesday, April 19. Shopkeepers sold miles more fabric, as Philadelphians covered the Liberty Bell and New Yorkers decorated the twenty-foot windows of the Lord and Taylor department store in red, white, and blue silk, complemented by black and white bombazine. The weather was at its springtime best in New York, Albany, and Chicago, while heavy rains fell in Baltimore, Harrisburg, and Cleveland, drenching the train’s black drapery and causing the dye of mourning fabric to bleed onto building facades. The rains were so torrential in Indianapolis that the procession accompanying the hearse to and from the State House had to be canceled. Everywhere, hawkers peddled likenesses of the president. Everywhere, banners—both official and homemade—told you how to feel, proclaiming sentiments in words both plain and poetic: “The Nation Mourns” or “The great heart of the Nation throbs heavily at the Portals of his Grave.” Where a week or two earlier mourners had searched one another’s faces for the meaning of the tragedy, now they read the placards. Nearly everywhere they could see the words from Lincoln’s second inaugural:
With malice toward none
.
²¹

Lincoln’s mourners made efforts to connect themselves to the grand and historic events all around them. At each of the major stops, a Veteran Reserve Guard of Escort, consisting of twenty-nine men who rode the entire route, hoisted the coffin to their shoulders and conveyed it to a locally supplied horse-drawn hearse that in turn transported the body to the venue where it would lie in state. Enormous crowds gathered to watch the transfer, then again to witness the elaborate ceremonies planned by local committees. For a man perched in a second-story window in New York, it was, he felt sure, “the most imposing thing I ever saw or ever expect to see again.” In Indianapolis, a spectator thought the display “the most notable & worthy of the age & century.” Still, the experience was far from perfect. Mourners pushed, shoved, and fainted, while pickpockets collected wallets and watches and thieves worked the empty houses. For some, the extensive preparations took a toll on the occasion’s gravity. English actress Ellen Kean detected entirely too much gaiety (women smiling in their spring dresses!) and not enough dignity (Lincoln’s remains shuttled about “to gratify the morbid curiosity of the idle”). A critic in the Midwest thought the ceremonies amounted to “more of a show than respect for Lincoln.” Sometimes it was just exhausting. In Chicago, a woman held up her baby girl to see the parade until the child seemed to weigh a ton.
²²

An anonymous sketcher walked the streets of New York City after the assassination, recording the signs and banners displayed in shop windows and on building facades. This page, with Broadway addresses recorded, documents magnanimous sentiments, taken from Lincoln’s second inaugural address in March 1865 (“With malice toward none, with charity to all”), alongside more vengeful statements (“Death to Traitors”).
McLellan Lincoln Collection, John Hay Library, Brown University
.

Miscalculations and blunders were inevitable, given the scale of the endeavor. The New York procession straggled, with marchers forming pathetic-looking lines that were “twenty a-breast, and only two deep.” In
Philadelphia, everything was running late, and as dusk turned to darkness, no one could see much of anything. Annie Hillborn and her friends stood in a “
Sea
of people” through bursts of rain that occasioned the raising of “thousands of umbrellas,” and after a four-hour wait, they could “scarcely distinguish the procession from the spectators.” For Anna Ferris, straining her eyes, only the “flash of a street lamp revealed the coffin for an instant.” Soon the frustrated viewers became unruly, prompting policemen to “beat the people back with their clubs.” Near Independence Hall, male spectators were “fumbling the women.” Lucy McKim was among the very few to record the occasion without sentimental revision, one of the few to document the impersonal nature of the formal rituals. On Broad Street between Spruce and Arch, McKim pushed against a solid wall of people, “every available perch being black with a seething mass of human beings.” Moving inside at Ninth and Arch, she and her companions waited until after sunset for the procession to appear, at which point a group of boys let out an unseemly cheer. It could hardly be called marching, McKim scoffed, with the lines gaping and no music to be heard. “Play up! Play up!” people shouted at the bands. When the hearse finally appeared, it “bobbed & jolted,” unable to provoke the intended awe. So “entirely ludicrous” was it all, McKim recounted to her fiancé, that she actually burst out laughing. The whole thing was no more than “a miserable, showy, superficial, irreverent farce.”
²³

No matter how satisfying or unsatisfying were the rituals, many of Lincoln’s mourners had come for a single objective: to view the president’s body up close. Again, the contrast with the immediacy of learning the news was unmistakable. In those moments and hours, mourners had gazed at the stricken brows and falling tears across so many countenances for confirmation and comfort, whereas now they came to gaze upon a single face only. For many, to be sure, that turned out to be a reverent experience. In Philadelphia, African American student and servant Emilie Davis anticipated Lincoln’s arrival, recording the upcoming event the day before, then again the next morning. “The President comes in town this afternoon,” she wrote in her diary, as if Lincoln were still alive. Davis’s first two attempts to view the body failed because the crowds were so great, and the next day she waited several hours for a turn. Yet even that briefest glimpse was, for her, “a sight worth seeing.” In Indianapolis, Mattie Jackson was among the last few hundred viewers to glimpse the president, since African Americans
were relegated to the back of the line. Jackson, who had escaped from slavery in Missouri, went to see the body expressly because she wouldn’t believe Lincoln was dead until she set her own eyes on the lifeless corpse.
²⁴

Persistence paid off for Emilie Davis and Mattie Jackson, but not all mourners found what they hoped for in the viewing ritual. Just as in Washington, workers at each venue had built elaborate catafalques for the coffin. Everywhere the lines were frightfully long and time permitted in the casket’s presence astonishingly short. In New York, more than 100 people filed by each minute, in Cleveland perhaps 180 per minute across fifteen hours. In Philadelphia, some 300,000 caught a glimpse. In Chicago, 7,000 people saw the body each hour the coffin remained open, in Columbus, 8,000. All in all, perhaps a million people glanced at Lincoln, each for no more than a second or two. A soldier in Philadelphia who felt “rushed right through” returned to the queue twice more. To see the body in New York, mourners had to make their way through a basement and a set of narrow, poorly lit stairs. One man made “3 ineffectual attempts,” then lined up at one o’clock in the morning before he got a quick look. “The whole live long night the crowd poured through,” he wrote to his sister, the line as long at three o’clock in the morning as it had been at noon.
²⁵

Even those who stole an extra moment or lined up more than once might come away disappointed. The fact was, the one face that mourners had waited so long to see was faded and decayed, powdered and worked over. By the time the funeral train got to New York, the discoloration was evident, with viewers describing it either as “wan and shrunken” or “shrunken & dark.” In Albany, mourners noticed the putrefying, lead-colored skin. By Chicago, the face had darkened nearly beyond repair. People there expressed surprise at its thinness and retreating chin, disillusioned that Lincoln didn’t look “as they fancied great men did.” Even before full deterioration set in, the face seemed more a mask of artful disguise than anything else—eyes shut and mouth artificially set—unable to impart either emotion or meaning to those hurrying past. A few figured this out beforehand. “Sally & Annie Kennedy asked me to go with them,” a Washington woman wrote in her diary, but she declined, preferring to remember Lincoln “as I saw him last,” orating at his second inauguration. Some avoided the capital’s ceremonies altogether. “Funeral of President Lincoln,” the nurse Clara Barton wrote in her diary. “I remained in doors all day.” When William Webster lined up in Philadelphia at eight in the morning, he was told he wouldn’t reach the coffin until three that afternoon. “I am glad I did not go on,” he wrote to his brother. “I shall remember Mr. L. as I saw him in Trenton, with that bright smile playing in his face.” The glances and glimpses could not accomplish anything close to that, making it harder still to extract meaning or find closure.
²⁶

Mourners file past Lincoln’s body at New York’s City Hall on April 24 and 25, 1865. The real scene was not nearly as orderly as depicted in this 1865 lithograph.
LC-USZC2-1982, Prints and Photographs Division, Library of Congress
.

AS THE FUNERAL CAPTIVATED AND
frustrated mourners, there was still the war to distract them from any illusion of unbroken solemnity. Now, during the journey of the funeral train, came the matter of General William Tecumseh Sherman’s negotiations with Confederate general Joseph Johnston, which Rodney Dorman found encouraging and Sarah Browne pronounced outrageous.

By mid-March 1865, much of the Confederacy had been transformed into a ruined landscape with a shattered economy and rapidly deserting soldiers. The only slim-as-thread possibility to stave off defeat lay in combining the forces of Robert E. Lee and Joseph E. Johnston, the latter commanding the remnants of the Army of Tennessee. But Lee postponed that plan, thereby forming two parallel contests: Grant versus Lee in Virginia and Sherman versus Johnston in North Carolina. Then, when Johnston got news of Lee’s surrender, he told Jefferson Davis in no uncertain terms that the war was over, that his men could not and would not fight any longer, for it was simply impossible to conquer Sherman. Johnston communicated with Sherman too, requesting a meeting under a flag of truce, and in the two days between Easter Sunday and the Washington funeral, the generals conferred at a North Carolina farmhouse, agreeing to terms on April 18, the day mourners lined up to view Lincoln’s body at the White House. If Sherman had his way, the United States would recognize fully restored governments for the former Confederate states, contingent on no more than officials taking an oath of allegiance; amnesty would be granted to former Confederates, including the restoration of property rights—the terms contained no qualification, not even to disallow the return of property in slaves. Sherman believed that he was acting on the wishes of the late executive, but in fact he had significantly overreached his position by effectively engaging in reconstruction policy. Indeed, the terms Sherman proffered far exceeded those to which Grant and Lee had agreed at Appomattox.
As Caroline White wrote in her diary, Sherman was “confounding all his friends & former admirers” by “treating with rebels on subjects quite beyond & foreign to his powers.”
²⁷

Mourners engrossed in the progress of the funeral train now shook themselves back into the world of formal politics, forced to choose between the two contradictory interpretations of Lincoln’s political sensibilities. Either Lincoln’s kindheartedness stood supreme (
with malice toward none
and
charity for all
) or it was precisely such generosity of spirit that had prompted God to take Lincoln away. As much as mourners had copied those merciful words onto their funeral banners, in this instance most chose to draw upon the opposite conviction. “Shermans inglorious treat with Johnston,” a Michigan soldier jotted in his diary on the day of Lincoln’s funeral in Washington. On April 21, the day the funeral train departed from the capital, President Andrew Johnson rejected the agreement, but the firestorm among mourners continued. Anna Lowell thought Sherman’s behavior “startling & alarming.” Henry Thacher thought the assassination itself “hardly more astounding” than Sherman’s actions. If others didn’t go quite so far, they nonetheless sympathized. It was a “stupendous blunder.” Sherman had “made an ass of himself.” He was the “most astonishing ignoramus of the age,” as Anne Neafie put it to her husband. Francis Lieber compared Sherman’s actions to the fall of a virtuous woman, and Lydia Maria Child found herself using “language quite too muscular for polite circles.”
²⁸