Mourning Lincoln (4 page)

Dorman’s home, which included his law office, stood downtown on Pine Street (present-day Main Street), just west of the intersection of Ocean and Bay. Over the course of the war, Jacksonville changed drastically. The Union blockade of the Saint Johns halted the city’s lively river trade, and the Confederate army claimed most of its young white men. Slaves either escaped or were forced by their masters into the interior, and many of the northerners who clung to Unionist sentiments fled as well. The homes and churches that lined the once elegant, gaslit streets soon stood empty and shuttered. Weeds choked the sidewalks, the railroad depot lay abandoned, and merchants’ once crowded shelves held precious few goods.
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Even as other well-to-do Confederate men departed with their families, Rodney Dorman stayed, and for him the pivotal event of the Civil War was the third of four Union occupations of Jacksonville. This mission, cut short after a mere three weeks in March 1863, had been intended as a grand one. Two months earlier, Lincoln had issued the Emancipation Proclamation, declaring legal freedom for all slaves in areas in rebellion against the United States and providing for the enlistment of black men into the Union army. Now the Florida expedition was to be undertaken by the First and Second South Carolina regiments, the first black units of the Civil War, recruited
from the ranks of former slaves and led by white abolitionists. Colonel Thomas Wentworth Higginson, commanding the First South Carolina, envisioned the assignment as a moral and political endeavor to prove the capabilities of black soldiers and to help destroy slavery: the presence of black troops would facilitate freedom, as slaves in the Deep South escaped to Union lines. It’s possible that the slave once owned by Rodney Dorman fought with these first black regiments; some of the men were from northern Florida, and as Higginson noted, “Many were owned here & do not love the people.” Indeed, the expedition’s other explicit purpose was to unsettle local whites. A black woman who traveled with the regiment remembered Jacksonville Confederates as “bitterly against our people,” and Dorman accordingly called them “Higginson’s nigger occupation.”
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Rodney Dorman was apoplectic as the occupiers took over his city and threatened imprisonment for any white resident who refused to take an oath of allegiance to the United States. At some point, Dorman left home to live with other refugees west of the city, near enough to make his way in and out of the main streets as he pleased (though he would never take the oath). Then, just when Colonel Higginson decided to raid the interior, higher-ups suddenly ordered the Union regiments out of Jacksonville, probably because white troops were needed in Charleston and the black regiments could not sustain the Florida operation alone. Most observers agreed that it was the white soldiers who set fire to the city, just before leaving. Some said that black men helped out or at least watched with satisfaction as the spring breezes fanned the flames. When the vessels left the docks, a good third of Jacksonville was burning. Fire consumed Dorman’s entire home and law office, scorching even his fences and shrubbery. Sure that the Union forces had invaded his property before they set the building aflame, Dorman declared his losses in a claim filed with the Confederate government: more than sixteen thousand dollars’ worth of property, either stolen or burned. In the same distinctively flat and wide handwriting found in his journals, Dorman itemized everything, from furniture, firearms, and fishing equipment to a gold watch, a chess set, and a silk umbrella—even a hat brush and a dog whistle. Most egregious of all was the destruction of his nearly four-hundred-volume law library.
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Union forces, including the black men of the Fifty-Fourth Massachusetts, returned to occupy Jacksonville in early 1864, and this time they
stayed. One soldier described the city as “heaps of ashes.” Another saw former slaves meeting hungry former mistresses in the sutler stores and noted the once grand homes of white people serving as hospitals for his comrades. In early April, President Lincoln conveyed his pleasure to the abolitionist general David Hunter. “I am glad to see the accounts of your colored force at Jacksonville,” he wrote. “It is important to the enemy that such a force shall not take shape and grow and thrive in the South, and in precisely the same proportion it is important to us that it
shall
.” Still, Rodney Dorman declined to leave, for Jacksonville was the only home he knew. Just to walk in and out of town, he now needed a pass, which he felt sure Union officials would deny him in light of his refusal to take the oath. But Dorman managed to exempt himself from declaring allegiance to the United States by having someone vouch for him—probably his brother, the better-known lawyer Orloff Dorman, who had moved from New England to Chicago to Saint Augustine. Orloff, who had remained a Unionist and served as a paymaster for the Union army in the Department of the South (the Civil War did indeed pit brother against brother), likely assured the occupying authorities that Rodney generally minded his own business.
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Newly free African Americans in Jacksonville, Florida, pose in front of the building appropriated as the Union Provost Marshal’s office, in 1864. The presence of freedpeople and Union army soldiers, especially black soldiers, continually infuriated Rodney Dorman.
Courtesy of Jacksonville Historical Society, with assistance of Dr. Daniel R. Schafer
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By the time the Confederacy surrendered, Rodney Dorman lived a mostly isolated life. Though he recorded occasional interactions with like-minded locals, his journal was his steadiest companion. The first extant tome (the volume covering 1862 and 1863 was destroyed in the fire) opens in 1864, and six more take him through 1886. Each notebook, free of printed dates, contains hundreds of pages of writing. The third and fourth volumes comprise the year 1865 and run nearly seven hundred pages apiece. Dorman later entitled his wartime journals “Memoranda of Events that transpired at Jacksonville, Florida, & in its vicinity; with some remarks & comments thereon,” the last phrase referring to the fact that he inserted additional commentary when he copied them over in the postwar years. Dorman penned lengthy meditations on legal and historical subjects, but the diaries also gave him a place to vent his fury, sheltering extended rants against the federal government, the enemy army, President Lincoln, northern politicians, and especially Yankee abolitionists—people just like Sarah and Albert Browne.

LONG AFTER I SELECTED MY
protagonists, I discovered that the Brownes and Rodney Dorman had crossed paths, if obliquely, during the Civil War. In the spring of 1864, Dorman wrote angrily about a “cow-stealing raid” up the Saint Johns River led by one General Birney. He mentioned a local newspaper account of the raid, written by the U.S. treasury agent, a man named Browne (spelled with an
e
, he noted), a tale Dorman found infuriatingly self-aggrandizing, not to mention self-incriminating. Indeed, Albert Browne had been part of that expedition. Moreover, Sarah, Eddie, Alice, and Nellie had left New England that April for an extended visit south, and while Albert was off on his raid, the rest of the family made an excursion to Jacksonville. Sarah found the city disappointing, wrecked as it was by the “havoc of war,” but they all nonetheless had a lovely time as guests of the Union commanders, touring the splendid mansion appropriated for army headquarters, enjoying teatime on the veranda, taking leisurely boat rides, and visiting the men of the U.S. Colored Troops. The family also visited with one Lyman Stickney, the U.S. tax collector to whom Rodney Dorman would later write an angry letter in reference to his destroyed property. When Albert Browne returned in soiled and tattered clothing, he regaled the family with accounts not only of captured cattle and cotton but also of
black people whom he and his men had alerted to emancipation. A year later, Sarah sorted through a parlor closet in Salem during spring cleaning, arranging “little mementoes from Beaufort, St. Augustine—Jacksonville.”
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FOR SARAH AND ALBERT BROWNE
and for Rodney Dorman—just as for so many others—thinking about, articulating, and documenting their responses to the assassination of President Abraham Lincoln became part of working out an understanding of the war. The polyphonic din that followed that night at Ford’s Theatre pointed toward long-lasting legacies that remain part of our world today.

We begin as the battlefield war drew to a close, in early April 1865. At that moment, the call to find meaning had already taken on a new urgency. How would Union victory play out? What did Confederate defeat portend? What kind of nation would the people and their leaders create? Black freedom had been seized and delivered, but would it last? Peace would soon be declared, but could it endure? How could Confederates be brought back into the citizenry? Where and how would former slaves live and work? Could they become citizens too? The pages that follow explore the thoughts, feelings, beliefs, convictions, and questions of Lincoln’s mourners and his antagonists as they confronted an event that transformed both the Civil War and the nation’s history.

1
Victory and Defeat

SARAH BROWNE WAS EXUBERANT
. Exclamation points marched across the pages of her diary, four in a row. In the first hours of Monday, April 3, 1865, news had come into the Salem telegraph office reporting General Grant’s probable victory at Petersburg. Soon after Sarah heard the ringing bells at four o’clock that afternoon, she learned that the Union army had entered Richmond. Telegrams reported the city burning and Grant pursuing Lee, and the next day’s papers told of a crowd gathering in Washington to listen to Secretary of War Edwin Stanton announce the fall of the Confederate capital. That intelligence merited another four exclamation points. From the newspaper columns, Sarah selected particular facts. “Rebels flying toward Lynchburg. Our losses less than 7,000,” she wrote. “Sheridan has headed off Lee!!” By Friday, April 7, the headline of the
Boston Evening Transcript
declared the news glorious: six rebel generals captured, Mobile likely to fall, Lee’s troops cut off from Lynchburg, and President Lincoln in Richmond, walking among the Union soldiers and now-free black population. “All over the North are wild with joy,” Sarah wrote. “Joy—Joy every where!” To continue with her usual household tasks seemed nearly impossible.
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At four o’clock in the morning on Monday, April 10, the Browne house-hold
was roused by bells and gunfire, followed by voices calling out that Lee and his entire army had surrendered. Sarah and the children hurried out of bed to illuminate the outdoor gaslights and unfurl a flag from an upstairs window. In the predawn darkness, neighbors blew horns and tossed firecrackers. In the daylight, walking through Salem, Sarah exchanged happy greetings with everyone who had come outdoors to celebrate, and the news garnered eight exclamation points in her diary. At a special service that week, the minister at church spoke boldly of black suffrage, and Sarah felt grateful to God. It was only when she read through the speech President Lincoln had delivered from the White House on April 11, laying out his ideas for reconstructing the nation, that her mood shifted. “I am much disappointed at finding it unmistakably conservative,” she sighed. “Why can’t he cut down the whole tree, instead of lopping off the branches?”
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Down south, at the same moment, Albert Browne was marveling over the fall of Richmond. “How fast I have lived these past two years,” he exulted. “What a grand period in history is the present moment.” The South, Albert believed, could now emerge from feudalism into the “glorious splendor of the nineteenth century.” And to think of the elevation of Negroes! “A man is a man, be he black, white, or grey,” he wrote to his family up north.
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After Lee’s surrender, came the re-raising of the Union flag over Fort Sumter in South Carolina, where Confederates had won the first battle of the war. Albert was there now, four years later, among those listening reverently to the abolitionist New York minister Henry Ward Beecher, and it was a day he would never forget, a day he hoped his children and grandchildren would never forget, a day “most grand, imposing and soul inspiring.” The battered walls of the fort. The defiant, high-flying flag. The triumph. The glory. Albert described everything in a letter home, even the way the chairs were arranged for the speakers. That was the easy part—it was his emotions that he couldn’t convey, for everything was “
unspeakable
” (he underlined that word). Late into the night, lying awake, Albert heard the public prayers of hundreds of former slaves gathered in the streets of Charleston, praising God for freedom. How unabashedly symbolic was the return to Sumter to raise the Union flag once again over the fort, bringing full circle the revolutionary changes
wrought by four years of terrible war! “The sights I have seen,” Albert Browne told his wife and children, “are written with a piece of steel on my memory.”
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