Mourning Lincoln (33 page)

Nor was it merely that each death had been in vain. It was that each death had been in vain because the Confederate nation had died too. Virginia planter William Gordon spent much of April consoling friends whose seventeen-year-old son had just fallen in the war, the boy’s family “in the depth of wretchedness & despair.” As for himself, Gordon hadn’t picked up his journal for nearly a month, for he had “no heart to write down the
particulars of our great calamity, culminating in the final overthrow.” A Tennessee farmer was more explicit. “We Will sit down & Mourn in Sack Cloathes & ashes for many days, Weeks, Months, & years to come,” he wrote in his diary. In the combination of lost lives and a nation defeated, there seemed no end to the mourning ahead.
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Indeed, defeat itself felt nearly like the loss of an intimate. Martha Crawford, serving as a Baptist missionary in China, received news of Lee’s surrender in June, overwhelming her with grief. Shocked and shattered, she found it “bitterer than death.” Equally devastated, Cornelia Spencer compared her feelings about defeat to those that had engulfed her upon the death of her husband, Magnus, several years earlier. “I feel a good deal as I did when my beloved M. died,” she wrote from North Carolina, “as if something I had watched & loved & hoped & prayed for so long—was dead,” as if she had “lost an incentive to prayer—or to exertion of any kind.” A Virginia private who looked through his family’s empty larder—no flour, corn, bacon—on his return home from a Yankee prison wondered what was to come. “Ah! what hardships, what sufferings, what trials, what deaths, what sorrows, what tears,” he wrote, “what great losses both of men & of property.” That last word,
property
, referred plainly to the slaves his family had once owned, their departure making clear the end of the Confederate aim of an independent, slaveholding republic.
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Confederate soldiers, like their Union counterparts, also had to contend with losses on the home front. When Samuel McCullough, in a Union prison in Ohio, saw a notice of his father’s death in a newspaper, he was stunned. Truly, it seemed like a dream, he wrote, echoing the initial disbelief of Lincoln’s mourners. “Language is too impotent to portray, & tongue too feeble to tell the indescribable sorrow & anguish,” he elaborated, again echoing the experiences of Lincoln’s mourners searching for ways to articulate their pain. Unlike the vast majority of the president’s bereaved supporters, though, McCullough felt nearly suicidal with grief. Likely reacting to defeat as well, he confided to his brother that, were it not for the rest of the family, he would now “rather die than live.”
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A few of the vanquished consoled themselves by casting Lincoln’s assassination as vindication for their personal losses. Union authorities had convicted and hanged Confederate naval officer John Beall for spying, and after the president’s death, a grieving relative felt sure that Beall’s demise
had been “avenged by the assassination of Lincoln.” More commonly, solace came in thoughts of heavenly happiness, but that conviction had another, more somber dimension to it when the grieving took comfort that the departed would never know the horror of life on earth after Yankee victory. For Elizabeth Alsop, the death of a friend in the Appomattox campaign was “agony itself,” yet at least the man would be “spared the sorrow of seeing our Country’s degradation,” she wrote in her diary. Some survivors even envied the wartime dead, just as the suicidal Edmund Ruffin envied his own fallen son. A private in the Army of Northern Virginia, making his way home in late June, gazed at the wreckage of Richmond, wondering if the “unreturning brave” were better off than he. A prisoner in a Yankee jail thought longingly of those around him who had died of starvation, and a woman on the home front “could not wish them back,” she wrote of the dead, since they rested in peace, spared from “shame & humiliation.” Cloe Whittle knew it was unchristian to think such thoughts, but she imagined that, had she been a soldier, she would have courted death on the battlefield, knowing that the alternative was to “drink the deadly cup of submission to the Yankees.” When Whittle heard news of an explosion at the Charleston depot, she envied those killed in the blast.
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For Confederates, the loss of loved ones only magnified defeat, and defeat only compounded personal loss. For them, the end of their hoped-for slaveholding nation filled the future with uncertainty. Lincoln’s mourners, on the other hand, found in the aftermath of the assassination a complicated alloy of devastation and optimism. When they called Saturday, April 15, 1865, the saddest day they had ever known, that was true only in the most collective, public, and communal sense. If the elaborate ceremonies staged for the president momentarily stood in for the absent bodies of loved ones, survivors still had to cope with terrible absences in their everyday lives. For all Union supporters who had suffered the loss of intimates in the war, the end of fighting called forth retrospective thoughts that intensified grief and yet soothed that grief in the security of victory.

The unbearable loss of the ordinary people they loved, and the unfathomable loss of their leader: both gained meaning from the context of victory. In that context too, Lincoln’s mourners had to think concretely about reconstructing the nation without slavery—and without President Lincoln either.

Mary Lincoln

POOR MRS. LINCOLN
. HOW OFTEN
the president’s mourners invoked that phrase, thinking of the great man’s own loved ones! It was a thought that occurred more often to women, who could more readily imagine themselves in her place, but male mourners felt sorry for the president’s widow too.

“Poor Mrs. Lincoln,” wrote John Downing, eyewitness at Ford’s Theatre, in a letter from Washington. “How I pity her.”

“Poor Mrs. Lincoln has not left her bed,” Helen Du Barry, another eyewitness to the crime, wrote to her mother on Easter Sunday.

“Poor Mrs. Lincoln, her utter desolation,” wrote Sarah Hale from Boston, “and how many years she has got to struggle on.”

“Poor Mrs. Lincoln,” wrote Samuel Lee, whose wife was a close friend of the First Lady. “I feel very acutely for her great loss & her suffering under it.”

“Poor Mrs. Lincoln!” cried a London socialite. “What a grief! what a horror for her!”

Even the wife of a New York Democratic judge (she had once referred to Lincoln as “Uncle Ape”) couldn’t help exclaiming into her diary, “Poor Mrs. Lincoln!”
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The president’s mourners knew that if anyone’s world had come to a halt in the aftermath of the assassination, it was that of Mary Lincoln, who shut herself up in a White House bedroom, unwilling to attend her husband’s funeral, unwilling to accompany his body along the route of the funeral train, and unwilling to be present at his burial in Springfield. When Lizzie Moore wrote, “O, how sad it must be to those who knew him personally,” she named the difference between mourning for a statesman and mourning for a loved one. Secretary of the Navy Gideon Welles recorded in his diary that at the White House on Saturday, the president’s twelve-year-old son, Tad, had asked him, “Oh, Mr. Welles, who killed my father?” Strangers to the president thought about the boy too. “Poor little Tad,” wrote Anna Lowell, recording (from the newspapers) how he was “overcome with grief” at his father’s death. Some included the older son, Robert, in their thoughts as well. “The tears of sympathy flow for the widow & orphans of our martyred chief,” Caroline White told her diary.
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Mourners also dwelled on the effects of the harrowing circumstances: the president’s sudden, violent assassination before his wife’s very eyes. “Poor Mrs. Lincoln,” wrote the English novelist Elizabeth Gaskell, “it adds to the depth of the crime that it should be done in her presence.” Another mourner wondered how she felt “as she sat by him, and saw him shot!” Unlike so many Civil War soldiers, Lincoln had not died in a place far away from his family, but neither had he died peacefully at home. Rather, he had passed his final hours in a too-small bed, in a cramped room at a random boardinghouse, with a steady stream of visitors coming and going, an investigation into his murder taking place in the very next room, even before he had breathed his last. As for the First Lady, the men who took charge soon excluded her from the bedroom where her husband lay dying, finding her state of extreme distress overly irritating. All in all, there was little comfort to be taken in being with her husband on that night, only devastation and lifelong trauma.
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Newspaper accounts of Mary Lincoln’s screams in Ford’s Theatre, and of her delirium during the long hours at Petersen House, troubled mourners too. One woman recorded Mrs. Lincoln’s “agonizing inquiries” about her husband’s life and the “heart rending response” she ultimately received. Men and women alike wrote down that Mary Lincoln couldn’t bring herself to attend the Washington funeral and that she was too grief-stricken
to travel with the funeral train. One man involved in the funeral preparations recorded that when the carpenters were setting up the East Room of the White House, the bedridden and shattered First Lady cried that each hammer blow sounded to her like a pistol shot. As Lincoln’s body was carried west, a man in California generously suggested that his people, “the colored people of the United States,” contribute a dollar each to buy a home for the president’s widow.
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Grieving for their own loved ones, Lincoln’s mourners wrote frequently about the afterlife of the departed, happy in heaven, “above all pain,” in a “better world where war and sickness can never come.” At a New England eulogy for the president, the Reverend J. G. Holland offered an image of Lincoln in the next world. “Ah, that other shore!” he said, visualizing the president in heaven “with his army.” In “victory and peace,” Holland continued, the commander-in-chief and the departed troops heard no groans of death or rumbles of cannon fire. Yet Lincoln’s lay mourners rarely evoked images of the president happily reunited with loved ones in heaven, despite their chief’s increasingly careworn expression over the course of four years, and despite the personal losses he and Mary had endured in the deaths of their sons, Eddie in 1859, and Willie in 1862. Some may have grappled with Lincoln’s ambiguous relationship to Christianity, but for most mourners it was simply that the president was not theirs to meet or imagine in heaven. That was another indicator of the distinction they made between the loss of Lincoln and the loss of intimates. To envision reunion in that joyful realm above the clouds was a privilege reserved for Mary, Robert, and Tad.
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Many of those who sympathized with Mary Lincoln took the time to write to her, and letters of condolence poured in from around the world. Although Queen Victoria did not know the First Lady personally, she sent her a letter detailing her own despair on the death of her husband, Prince Albert, four years earlier. “No-one can better appreciate than I can who am myself
utterly broken hearted
by the loss of my own beloved Husband,” Victoria wrote, “who was the
light
of my Life—my stay—
my all
,—what your sufferings must be.” Nor was it only royalty and dignitaries who wrote to Mrs. Lincoln. When Charles Francis Adams, the U.S. consul in London, received a torrent of cards, letters, and telegrams from across the British Empire, he had to create an entirely separate catalog for the considerable accumulation of mail addressed to Mary.
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Elizabeth Blair Lee was one of the very few whom Mary Lincoln wished to see in the days and weeks following the murder. During that time, Lee stayed by Mrs. Lincoln’s side in the White House, sometimes nearly around the clock. As the funeral train approached Springfield, Mary Lincoln “begged me so hard,” Lee wrote, “not to leave her,” that she couldn’t refuse, though there was much else on Lee’s mind: her young son, whom she had to leave in the care of others while she sat by the widow’s bedside, her naval commander husband down south, and a lump in her breast that seemed to be growing. After the burial in Springfield, it was time for Mary and the children to leave Washington, and Elizabeth Lee remained a loyal friend throughout the ordeal. “Mrs. Lincoln still sick and miserable,” she wrote to her husband, “tired from the effort she is making to get out of the White House.” One day in mid-May, Lee found Mary Lincoln “wonderfully better”—over the course of three hours, she had mentioned her husband’s death only once, then interrupted herself, saying, “I lived through it. I am now getting well and strong after all those terrible events.” A week later, the two women said good-bye as Mary and her sons boarded a train for Chicago. Despite Elizabeth Lee’s sense that Mrs. Lincoln’s mental health was improving, the president’s widow would long remain troubled by grief and emotional instability, never recovering from the loss of her husband and the trauma of witnessing his murder.
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9
Nation

AS MUCH AS ALBERT BROWNE
thought back over the astounding events of the past weeks, he also looked resolutely ahead, envisioning the nation’s future. Mourning the loss of Lincoln also meant reckoning with Lincoln’s successor, and Albert admitted that Andrew Johnson’s behavior at the president’s second inauguration in March 1865 had been questionable, for the vice president had appeared to be inebriated. Nonetheless Albert believed that the new chief executive would nicely finish Lincoln’s work on earth. If Johnson could stay sober, Albert reasoned, he would prove to be “all Lincoln was,
and more
.” Sarah Browne looked to the new president approvingly too, confident that he would treat the vanquished enemies properly. “We have faith in Andrew Johnson,” she wrote to Albert, “and believe that full measure will be meted out.”
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