Mourning Lincoln (40 page)

For the vanquished to imagine themselves as slaves while simultaneously bemoaning the loss of their own human chattel (whom, like Rodney Dorman, they tended to call
servants
) no doubt struck freedpeople as absurd or at best ironic. Yet to the speakers it was neither. Rather than a careless metaphor, enslavement was precisely the point. For white people who believed that God had intended them to be masters, it was intolerable to live under the domination of others. To those who had so recently owned slaves themselves, it made perfect sense to invoke the condition of bondage, for nothing better captured their imagined post-surrender condition. Defeat, Kate Stone wrote in her Texas diary, served only to “rivet more firmly the chains that bind us.” Another woman proclaimed that white southerners now lived in “bondage worse than slavery.” Ellen House, a Tennessean in exile in Georgia, declared that the white people of the South were “slaves—to the vilest race that ever disgraced humanity,” thereby casting Yankees, both white and black, together into a separate racial category. In an exemplary description of the daily dissemblance once required of enslaved people for the sake of survival, Edmund Ruffin (who also described the Yankees as a separate race) wrote that secessionists not only had to obey their conquerors, they had to do so “without sullenness or apparent dislike, & play their parts of obedient subjects & slaves to Yankee power with cheerfulness & smiling faces.”
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Given such dire circumstances, Confederates resisted giving up the fight. From the moment of Lee’s surrender, diehard rebels among the soldiers had vowed to wage war to the last. An army surgeon in Texas wrote to his wife, admitting that the thought of “Yankee Masters” and “Negro equality”
made him want to “fight on a little longer.” Some of the vanquished went to Europe, or made homes for themselves in Brazil or Cuba, where slavery still existed, and a few, like Edmund Ruffin, committed suicide. But most white southerners could not afford to leave the country, and few acted on suicidal fantasies. Instead, the vanquished tried to envision a time when the future would look more like the past.
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Retribution, many Confederates felt certain, would eventually be theirs. Among Edmund Ruffin’s final thoughts before he killed himself was the hope that outrage would endure in his people long enough for payback. In South Carolina, Charles Hutson, for whom living permanently under Yankee rule with black freedom was out of the question, urged his countrymen to “bear our fate manfully & keep ever ready to renew the struggle, when the right moment comes” (Hutson soon departed for a sojourn in Paris). John Henderson, a North Carolina law student, looked ahead to “years and years” of the “most intense and bitter animosity,” until one day (“May the time soon come!”) when the Yankees would be “reduced to our condition.” A soldier in Lee’s army, making his way home through the wreckage of Richmond, reflected gloomily on the future, then reconsidered, for, he wrote in his diary, something told him that the war “was not all passed through in vain.”
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Confederate women displayed equal or greater vehemence. Cloe Whittle dreamed of a “
second
war for independence”—which was, ironically, just what the Civil War had been for African Americans, excluded as they were from the nation’s original revolutionary ideals. Baptist missionary Martha Crawford echoed and inverted Lincoln’s 1858 speech in which he had claimed (paraphrasing Mark 3:25), “A house divided against itself cannot stand.” In a letter home from China in the summer of 1865, Crawford wrote, “The two countries
cannot
continue as one.” With that conviction, she felt sure her fellow rebels would “await our opportunity and try them again.” Nor would Elizabeth Collier consent to considering the Confederacy part of the United States. “
Reconstruction!
”: she underlined the word in her journal, capping it off with an indignant exclamation point—”how the very word galls.” God may have decreed defeat for the moment, but her people were “bound to rise again.” (Confederate men used that phrase too. “Sooner than submit to wholesale confiscation,” one wrote, “the south will rise again.”) To those mourning defeat, there was one key distinction
between themselves and their former slaves: the slaves had been incited to insurrection by the Yankees, whereas white southerners would rise up to fight for freedom on their own.
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Envisioning a future white uprising, former Confederates rewrote the war’s outcome and meaning to ensure that their cause was not lost. Recall the words of Kate Stone when contemplating the colossal casualties among her people: “The best and bravest of the South sacrificed—and for nothing,” she had written in her diary. “Yes, worse than nothing.” Reckoning with end-of-war desertion, the dwindling will of the soldiers, and war-weariness on the home front, white southerners nevertheless appropriated the sentiments that Robert E. Lee had put forth in his farewell address, swiftly crafting a story of a noble and honorable fight for independence. For Henry Berkeley, a private in Lee’s army who was imprisoned at Fort Delaware, Confederates should always be proud of this part of their history. “We put up a bully fight, if we did go under,” he wrote. Julia Watson, in exile in England, promised that if she ever returned to the United States, she would educate her children to “venerate the memory of those who fell so gloriously in the great strife for liberty.” That was part of future justice too: reshaping the story so that all Confederates on the battlefield, both the survivors and the fallen, had fought gloriously after all.
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WAR, AS THE PRUSSIAN THEORIST
Karl von Clausewitz famously stated, is politics by other means. Politics, as the eminent Civil War historian James McPherson has crisply put it, is war by other means. This was to be the battle from the moment of Lee’s surrender: determined African Americans and white radicals who wanted what Frederick Douglass called an “abolition peace” against bitter Confederates who wanted their old world back. God had taken Lincoln away, his more radical mourners now came to believe, in order to alert the victors to the enduring intransigence of their vanquished enemies, most especially the rebel leaders and their elite followers, whom Union supporters had always held responsible for the war. Now these mourners wanted land, education, and voting rights for African Americans—
not
as vengeance for the assassination but rather to avenge secession and war. By ensuring the fruits of freedom, they wanted also to avenge the cause of the war: slavery, which they understood as well to be the root cause of Lincoln’s assassination. The assassination had
opened the eyes of these radicals, both black and white, to the necessity for revolutionary policies following Confederate defeat on the battlefield, because defeated Confederates who held political power could still win the war off the battlefield.
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Recall that African Americans had issued warnings of an unvanquished rebel spirit even before Lincoln was killed. This was Frederick Douglass’s “fiercer and intenser hate than ever before.” This was the call of the
New York Anglo-African
that “with the cessation of the war our anxieties begin.” Soon after surrender, visions of subdued Confederates obediently rejoining the Union had shattered, as soldiers and other Union supporters down south witnessed the insubordination all around them. The murder of President Lincoln, coming fast on the heels of surrender, had not subdued the rebels in the least. And that made strikingly clear to Lincoln’s mourners the absence of Confederate contrition in the face of defeat.
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Here again was God’s providence. Frederick Douglass had always hoped the rebels would be punished for slavery as well as for treason. Speaking extemporaneously in Rochester’s City Hall on the day Lincoln died, Douglass had surmised that the assassination was God’s way of creating the circumstances necessary to provoke the harsh treatment that the enemy had all along deserved, God’s way of warning the Union not to readmit into the nation the “spirit which gave birth to Booth.” As the white Unitarian minister James Freeman Clarke told his congregants on Easter Sunday, “As Abraham Lincoln saved us, while living, from the open hostility and deadly blows of the slaveholders and secessionists, so, in dying, he may have saved us from their audacious craft, and their poisonous policy.” On he went: “The revenge we shall take for the murder of Lincoln,” he said, would be to deny power to the leaders of the rebellion, and to make voters of loyal southern African Americans.
Revenge
. Clarke had uttered that word, but he did not mean a mere settling of scores or a simple exchange of Lincoln’s life for Confederate disempowerment. His language could not have been clearer. Without the assassination, the Union “might not have insisted on these conditions”—black suffrage and the disfranchisement of slaveholders, he meant. Thus had it been “necessary for Lincoln to die,” Clarke explained, “to bring the nation to the point of mandating them.” Here was the meaning of God’s mysterious design.
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Politicians put forward the same message, bringing the argument about
Lincoln’s lenience full circle. God had permitted the assassination because Lincoln was not the right man to reconstruct the nation. Lincoln was not the right man to reconstruct the nation because he would have treated the vanquished rebels with too much kindness. Lincoln’s assassination at the hand of John Wilkes Booth, as inspired by the rebels and permitted by God, signaled to the victors that their fallen enemies had never intended to rejoin the post–Civil War nation willingly and had never intended willingly to participate in the destruction of slavery. On the day Lincoln died, the radical Republican George Julian wrote in his diary that the assassination eradicated “every vestige of humanitarian weakness” so that “justice shall be done and the righteous ends of the war made sure.” Without the signal of Lincoln’s death, he meant, Union treatment of the rebels would have been too forgiving. On the Sunday after Easter, the abolitionist Wendell Phillips told his listeners that land and ballots for loyal black men was the “lesson God teaches us in the blood of Lincoln,” not as payback for the assassination, he made clear, but rather “to teach the nation in unmistakable terms, the terrible foe with which it has to deal.” If Lincoln’s mourners hoped to avenge slavery, secession, and the war that resulted, then the best plan was to ensure the political impotence of slaveholders, coupled with the political power of former slaves.
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Lincoln’s mourners understood that slavery—and Lincoln’s antislavery statements in particular—had caused both secession and the assassination. Now, in the political struggles that followed Union victory, the abolitionists among them wanted to complete the circle by seeking rights for African Americans and the abridgment of rights for Confederate leaders and elites. Lincoln needed to be “stricken down by the slaveholder’s bullet,” reflected Bronson Alcott, “to rouse the people to vigilance” in policing the actions of their now-vanquished enemies. On the brink of conciliation with Confederates, John Greenleaf Whittier wrote, the nation “needed one more terrible lesson.” That lesson had come in the assassination, which would prevent the victors from treating the rebels too generously. Even a moderate like Republican Francis Lieber wanted complete exile, and for the same reason. “Drive the fiends from our soil,” he advised, until the Confederates “offer themselves, re-revolutionized, back to the Union, freed from Slavery and assassins,” those last two transgressions one and the same.
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For Lincoln’s mourners, his assassination symbolized the unwillingness
of the defeated to give in and give up. The enduring recalcitrance of Confederates forced mourners to transform the meaning of Lincoln’s wartime moderation and diplomacy. No longer a model for postwar political strategy, the slain chief’s kindly disposition now became, without question, the explanation for God’s purpose in permitting his death at war’s end. Then, paradoxically, with Lincoln gone, his mourners could cast their martyred leader as a political radical. Mourning for Lincoln, African Americans north and south, along with their white allies, wanted to ensure justice with the weapons of freedom, equality, and political power. Mourning the end of slavery and their failed nation, enraged Confederates displayed the greater thirst for vengeance, and Lincoln’s successor took their side. In the end, revenge and its fruits came more readily, not to Lincoln’s mourners, but to his enemies.

Peace

AS THE BATTLEFIELD FIGHTING CAME
to an end, visions of a nation at peace tempered the grief of Lincoln’s mourners yet could hardly assuage all anxieties. African Americans welcomed the end of the war, but some also stood at the ready. If the U.S. government favored the rights of Confederates over the rights of his people, asserted a soldier in the Third U.S. Colored Troops, stationed near Jacksonville, “
We will fight it out on this line
until to all be distributed an equal share.” Other mourners expressed sorrow that President Lincoln would never witness the fruits of his victory. “It looks as though peace was near us,” wrote a white Union soldier in Florida ten days after Lincoln died, “and what a happy people we should be if we only had our beloved President to help inaugurate its reign.” Still others found relief and good cheer even while mourning. On the southern home front, even in the face of white violence, northern teachers and missionaries working among the freedpeople detected “renewed hope and energy” at the “prospect of Peace.” In camp, white soldiers especially rejoiced. With the “smoke of Battle” gone, one man soothed himself with thoughts of the war’s end, “so long dreamed of.” Another, who had written of grief “too sad for utterance” now recorded his emotions at the dawning of peace: joy “too deep for utterance.” White people on the home front rejoiced too. A
Pennsylvania farmer lamented that “poor old Abraham is gone,” grateful nonetheless that the war was over, and a woman in Boston was happy just to be able to “talk about other things than wars and fightings.” All spring and into the summer, relief mixed with lingering sorrow and newfound anxieties.
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