Mourning Lincoln (41 page)

Pardoning the Confederates who came to the London consulate, Assistant Secretary Benjamin Moran wrote in his diary, “Peace is what all want.” Moran’s superior, Charles Francis Adams, felt the same way, except that one thing troubled him: were it not for Lincoln’s assassination, Adams mused to one of his sons, “we might have been on the road to an era of good feelings.” Both men were wrong, for the defeated did not want peace, and it was not the assassination alone—far from it—that had ushered in ill will between victor and vanquished. Rather, the bitterness of the defeated was immeasurably compounded by their refusal to accept black freedom. In North Carolina, Elizabeth Collier knew her people could never embrace peace, she wrote in her diary, with the “desecrators of our homes & the murderers of our Fathers, Brothers & Sons—
Never
.” In South Carolina, Emma LeConte agreed with Rodney Dorman. “I used to dream about peace—to pray for it,” she wrote in her journal, “but this is worse than war,” and when she contemplated the future, she could write only, “Oh God! it is too horrible.”
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Lincoln’s last reflections on peace had come in his White House speech on April 11. Confederate surrender, he said then, offered “hope of a righteous and speedy peace whose joyous expression can not be restrained.” But the two adjectives Lincoln invoked,
righteous
and
speedy
, would not sit easily together. For peace to be righteous, it had to reach beyond the formal laying down of arms to encompass true freedom and equality.
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Lincoln had also spoken of peace in his second inaugural on March 4, 1865. “Fondly do we hope—fervently do we pray,” he told his listeners that day, “that this mighty scourge of war may speedily pass away.” Yet Lincoln had followed those words with the warning that God intended the war to continue until all the blood shed by slaves at the hands of their masters would be repaid by blood on the battlefield. Lincoln closed with the words that mourners constantly invoked after the assassination, words they etched onto signs and carried with them to funeral processions: “with malice toward none” and “with charity for all.” When freedpeople in Washington
honored Lincoln later that summer with a banner bearing those already famous phrases, they must have interpreted them to apply less to the defeated Confederates and more to themselves: as a command from Lincoln to treat African Americans with the humanity they deserved after two centuries of slavery and four years of patriotism and sacrifice. If that’s what Lincoln meant, in his characteristic subtlety and diplomacy, then the idea of
malice toward none
and
charity for all
fit perfectly with the near-last lines of his address that day: to “strive on to finish the work we are in” meant to achieve “a just, and a lasting peace.” In order to endure, the peace that followed the Civil War would have to be infused with justice toward those once enslaved, and now free.
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Summer 1865 and Beyond

SARAH BROWNE FOLLOWED THE TRIAL
of Booth’s conspirators from its start in mid-May to the verdicts rendered in early July. She felt no special sympathy for the lone woman among them, Mary Surratt, whom she described in her diary as “defiant & unrelenting.” Instead, Sarah thought execution “too merciful,” death “too lenient for the Authors of these great Crimes,” as she wrote to Albert, adding, “Let them be exposed to the burning sun and heavy dews, all unsheltered.” Thinking of the terrible conditions of the most notorious Confederate prison, Sarah wanted the guilty “unclothed—unprotected and fed after the manner in which the sufferers at Andersonville lived and died.” Only then would there be “righteous retribution.” After that, God alone would “deal with the wicked.”
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As Sarah’s thoughts lingered over the assassination, Albert Browne was nearing the end of his southern sojourn. In the late summer and early fall of 1865, he toured the Union army’s Department of the South, along the way recording his impressions in letters to the abolitionist Wendell Phillips. In South Carolina, Georgia, and Florida, Albert heard war-weary white southerners express resentment toward Confederate leaders, with some professing to accept the end of slavery. But they seemed “in a sort of stupor,” Albert wrote, with loyalty emanating “from the lips only, not from
the heart.” In any case, most were angry and bitter, and it proved difficult to find any “genuine Union men” anywhere among the white population.
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Chaos reigned before Albert’s eyes, and the freedpeople felt it most keenly. They were hungry and lacked sufficient clothing (he saw women with only “a bunch of rags around their waists”), and worst of all African Americans found themselves “at the mercy of their former Masters,” he wrote home, a circumstance of “
extreme
cruelty.” Albert was investigating the case of one paroled rebel soldier who had ambushed a freedman with birdshot, striking him fifty-seven times before running him over with a horse. Albert also had in his possession a cowhide whip with which the wife of a former Confederate senator had lashed a black girl. Some people told him they didn’t even know if they were slave or free.
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Clearly, Albert Browne told his friend Wendell Phillips, white southerners must not be permitted to rule themselves, and a “
strong military government should be upon this people for years to come
.” He underlined every single word of that imperative. When it came to white-on-black violence, though, Albert saw something else too. In Savannah and Charleston, white Union soldiers sometimes collaborated with “rebel rowdies,” ganging up on freedpeople. Union officers might also side with former Confederates (one such man was “a pig headed martinet with no sympathy for the negro”) as they beat up black men and sexually assaulted black women. Any self-defense on the part of the victims would be matched with yet harsher white violence. Albert was currently intervening in the case of a boy slapped hard in the face by a Union officer for speaking up to contradict the account of a lying white aggressor. Although Union authorities talked about justice and equality, Albert could tell that some of them had “no more love for the negro than the devil has for holy water.” Indeed, Union authorities had briefly arrested Albert himself for calling out the officer who slapped the boy. Albert found too that some of the officers themselves initiated violence against the men of the Fifty-Fourth Massachusetts, then suppressed the incidents. He could think of only one solution. No white soldiers at all should be part of the Union army forces occupying the conquered Confederacy. Only black soldiers should be permitted, and their white officers must be abolitionists fully committed to racial equality.
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But Albert was also tired, and the future looked bleak, despite Union victory. His old friend Henry Ward Beecher, with whom he had so movingly
clasped hands when news of Lincoln’s assassination reached them at Fort Sumter, had already expressed his support for President Johnson. In October, Albert Browne would close up his Treasury Department office and head home to Massachusetts.
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JACKSONVILLE WAS ONE OF THE
stops on Albert Browne’s final southern circuit, though if Rodney Dorman was aware of the treasury agent’s presence, he did not write about it. Like Sarah Browne up north, Dorman followed the trial of the conspirators, training his attention on a different set of facts: the armed soldiers guarding the courtroom, the barred windows, the hooded prisoners bound at wrist and ankle. It was all “bastard, corrupt proceedings,” Dorman spat, with one witness a “sycophantic nincompoop,” another a “monkey fool-general,” another a “booby nobody.” As for Judge Advocate General Joseph Holt, in charge of the whole affair, he was merely another “nincompoop knave & prostituter of law.” Holt’s circle of judges, “monsters in human shape,” were, Dorman wrote, “one thousand times guilty of infamous crimes.” For Dorman, it was the defendants who were the true “martyrs for freedom,” and when the conspirators’ sentences were handed down in early July, he was particularly outraged that Mary Surratt was among those sent to the gallows. Surratt “certainly did not kill Lincon,” Dorman fumed, as usual intentionally misspelling the president’s name, but had she done so, “it would have been a deed of heroism & patriotism.”
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As Dorman filled multiple pages of his diary with a torrent of words about the illegal and corrupt execution of Mrs. Surratt, he consoled himself with visions of eventual retribution, hoping for a “complete & total” overthrow that would someday wipe out everything Union victory had wrought. “Oh! for a thunderbolt to exterminate them all,” he cried yet again. The state convention met in Tallahassee that fall to nullify secession, but even as the white delegates denied voting rights to black men, Dorman wished he could leave the country forever. Instead, he could only rail against the “northern, worthless, vagabond whites” and “their negroes” all around him.
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As winter came, Dorman continued to feel like “a stranger & mere temporary sojourner in a strange place.” A white resident who had fled Jacksonville during the war came back only to find the city “a desolate looking
place, compared to what it used to be.” For Christmas 1865, observed Esther Hawks, a northern doctor and missionary working among Jacksonville’s freedpeople, there was “no demonstration of festivity among the white inhabitants.” They didn’t have “much heart for merry-making,” she wrote, while “the colored folks seem to be having a good time.” Dorman never wrote about white violence in his city, possibly even at his own hands, but Hawks did. “We are hearing reports, every week,” she recorded, “of the shooting of negroes by infuriated white men, and no account is made of it.” In the meantime, Rodney Dorman remained in despair about his own life. “I really have no home,” he wrote three days before Christmas.
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LINCOLN’S MOURNERS ALSO THOUGHT ABOUT
home and homeward journeys. Enslaved African Americans had escaped to Union lines all through the war, and now the pace quickened as former slaves set out in search of loved ones from whom slave traders and masters had separated them, often many years before. They traveled on foot, on horseback, by carriage, and by train. Even with no fixed destination, and even as many encountered hunger, sickness, and disappointment on the road or in Union army refugee camps, the journey into freedom was still something of a journey toward home.

For Union troops, the literal journey home was a happy occasion. All through the war, black and white soldiers had struggled with homesickness in the form of loneliness and melancholy—in the nineteenth century, the medical diagnosis was called
nostalgia
. The men had sung the verses of sentimental songs like “Do They Miss Me at Home?” imagining loved ones weeping in their absence. Now even those who had fervently wished to keep fighting after the assassination, and those who had experienced the most intense sorrow over the loss of Lincoln, turned from the battlefield with relief. As Edgar Dinsmore of the Fifty-Fourth Massachusetts put it, he was “very, very happy at the thought of soon returning home.” On the day Lincoln died, a Union soldier in Virginia counted “only 17 Sundays more in the army,” and the day before Lincoln’s funeral in Washington, an Iowa soldier wrote in his diary that the “next campaign will be Homeward.” Another soldier had a single word to describe his feelings for starting home: “joy.” But for the hundreds of thousands who had died in battle, on the march, in army hospitals, and in camp, there was often no journey to parallel
that of Lincoln’s body, for only a small number of Union corpses would ever return to their hometowns. With the expense of embalming and transportation out of reach for most, the ceremonies for President Lincoln had to substitute for the rituals of more intimate losses.
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Union soldiers still in the field as summer arrived now anticipated their return in time for the Fourth of July. Before the Civil War, Independence Day celebrations had been marked in North and South alike by black boycotts and white violence, as well as by fears among white southerners that the holiday would rouse the enslaved to envision their own freedom. In 1852, Frederick Douglass had reminded a white New York audience of his own past as a slave, asking them, “Are the great principles of political freedom and of natural justice, embodied in that Declaration of Independence, extended to us?” The day was a “sham” and a “hollow mockery,” Douglass had thundered, filled as it was with “bombast, fraud, deception, impiety, and hypocrisy.” Now, on July 4, 1865, Lincoln’s mourners across the nation saw both heady celebrations and clashes with former Confederates.
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In Washington, a black minister read the Declaration of Independence—indeed, Lincoln himself had once invoked both this founding document and his own untimely death in the same breath. In 1861, speaking at Independence Hall in Philadelphia on his way to the capital to assume the presidency, Lincoln had referred to the Declaration and spoken of saving the divided nation by extending liberty to all men. If the nation could not endure except by renouncing the principles embodied in that document, Lincoln told his audience, “I was about to say I would rather be assassinated on this spot than to surrender it.”
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