Mourning Lincoln (42 page)

Now, four years later, a black journalist in Washington extolled the “first Fourth of July of the colored people.” The main orator was a young man named William Howard Day, who spoke of “a sorrow unlike any, nationally, we have ever known,” as the shadow of Lincoln’s death overlay the joy of freedom. Breaking from the jubilation, Day described the circumstances as “ominous.” The monument they would build to Lincoln would be a tribute to liberty, and over the coffin of their late president, Day’s people would resist tyranny, whether in the form of the “iron manacles of the slave” or the “unjust written manacles for the free.” From his home in Rochester, Douglass sent a letter to the cautious black revelers, with the message that “immediate, complete, and universal enfranchisement of the colored people”
was the key to independence. For Douglass, justice demanded black suffrage, and black suffrage was the only road toward “permanent peace.” For the ceremonies, Washington freedpeople inscribed Lincoln’s words
with malice toward none
and
with charity for all
on a banner, more than likely intending them as both appeal and command for their own treatment in the fraught process of reconstructing the nation.
¹²

Across the South that day, victors and vanquished divided sharply. Communities of freedpeople and their white allies celebrated with processions, flags, speeches, prayers, picnics, brass bands, dancing, toasts, fireworks, and illuminations. In Augusta, Georgia, as elsewhere, the ceremonies included a “most glowing tribute to the memory of President Lincoln.” In Wilmington, North Carolina, it was a “glorious fourth,” wrote a member of the occupying black troops, while the white residents “made a failure in their efforts to get up a celebration.” Indeed, Emma LeConte was beside herself that the festivities in Columbia took place in the same building where young white men had once gathered to pledge loyalty to the Confederacy. “Such horrid degradation!” she exploded. In Athens, Georgia, it was the “miserable fourth” for a woman grieving for her husband and “greatly inconvenienced” by the departure of her slaves. In Montgomery, Alabama, “Yankees & negroes” celebrated with readings of the Declaration of Independence and the Emancipation Proclamation, along with a “pyrotechnic display”; former Confederates participated, but a Wisconsin soldier thought it “highly ludicrous to hear them bluster & blow,” since nearly all had so recently been vocal secessionists. Elsewhere, local whites shuddered when the celebrators called Lee and Davis traitors or thanked God that the Union had survived and slavery had not. In some places, celebrations were more muted, “on account of the shadow of the President’s assassination,” as one observer put it. For Alonzo Carr, a white Yankee in the South Carolina Sea Islands, sober feelings arose from a related thought: “It seems that many of the Rebels are to again be citizens of the United States with their former privileges.”
¹³

Up north, noisy festivities made reference to the victorious Union, Confederate defeat, and the end of slavery. In Gorham, Maine, someone hung a likeness of Jefferson Davis in hoopskirt and boots, topped by an image of a black woman holding an American flag. “What a blessed 4th,” wrote Elizabeth Cabot of Boston. “Slavery gone. War at an end. Victory achieved.”
But notes of warning still sounded in the North. At an abolitionist picnic in Massachusetts, the writer and escaped slave William Wells Brown declared in counterpoint that the war had ended too soon, for without suffrage would come a “new form of slavery,” his people “at the mercy of the tyrants of the South.” Frances Harper, the activist and poet (born a free woman in Maryland), together with Wendell Phillips, vowed, “No reconstruction without negro suffrage.” Among African Americans north and south, there were few celebrations without reference to justice as yet unfulfilled.
¹⁴

More immediate justice could be found in the verdicts rendered upon Booth’s conspirators on July 5, 1865. The seven men and Mary Surratt had been held in custody since late April, and their trial had begun in Washington soon after Lincoln’s burial, in a courtroom adjacent to the prisoners’ cells. Like Sarah Browne and Rodney Dorman, people everywhere followed the proceedings closely. “The great Conspiracy Trial is still in progress,” wrote the minister James Ward in his diary, with “every day’s proceedings developing facts of thrilling interest, and showing more and more plainly the diabolical nature and purposes of the Rebellion.” Marian Hooper had come from Boston to watch the Grand Review and on the same visit attended the trial two days in a row, squeezing into the crowd of spectators. “The evidence is not very interesting,” she wrote, “but it is to see the prisoners.” Mary Surratt hid her face behind a fan, Hooper noted, while Lewis Powell appeared as “handsome but utterly brutal.” On the other side, Confederates were infuriated when Judge Holt attempted to prove that Jefferson Davis and other leaders were behind the plot. “If this thing goes on, women will be hanged for having Booth’s photograph in their possession,” one rebel fumed.
¹⁵

All eight defendants were pronounced guilty. The military tribunal sentenced four of them to death: George Atzerodt, the man who lost his nerve to kill Vice President Johnson; Lewis Powell, Seward’s attacker; David Herold, the man who had guarded Powell’s horse that night; and Mary Surratt, the widowed boardinghouse-keeper. Three more were sentenced to life in prison: Samuel Mudd, the doctor who set Booth’s broken bone after he escaped from Ford’s Theatre; and plotters Samuel Arnold and Michael O’Laughlen. Edman Spangler, who had held Booth’s horse outside the theater, was sentenced to six years behind bars. (John Surratt, Mary’s son, would be arrested in 1866, with a trial ending in a hung jury. In 1869,
President Johnson would pardon Arnold and Mudd; by then, O’Laughlen had died of yellow fever. That same year, Johnson granted permission for the body of John Wilkes Booth to be released to his family, who reinterred him in a Baltimore cemetery.)

The four executions took place on July 7, before a small, ticketed crowd on the grounds of the Washington Arsenal, with Mary Surratt the first woman to be executed by the federal government. Lincoln’s mourners divided over her guilt, but for Confederates and Copperheads all the verdicts were yet another blow. Proslavery Washingtonian William Owner called the hangings a shocking tragedy, while from Cincinnati an anonymous Copperhead wrote to Andrew Johnson to say that the new president had proven himself “not worth a god dam more then old Lincoln Was.” Judge Holt had failed to implicate Confederate leaders, but the verdicts still felt like a triumph for Lincoln’s mourners. “What a sanguinary tribute to the merciful Lincoln!” Anna Lowell wrote in her diary. She remained troubled, though, and not only because of her opposition to capital punishment. The executions could neither bring back the slain chief nor “compensate for the unjust & weak policy” of President Johnson. His plans for reconstructing the rebel states, she wrote, might well “nullify all our victories.”
¹⁶

MOURNERS WANTED TO BELIEVE THAT
God had permitted the assassination of Abraham Lincoln so that an even more glorious nation could emerge from the ashes of the Civil War, but the immediate postwar world without Lincoln was turning out to be anything but glorious. “Let us not be in too much haste in the work of restoration,” Frederick Douglass had warned on the very day of the president’s death. “Let us not remember our enemies and disenfranchise our friends,” he had said then, but that was exactly what was coming to pass in the former Confederate states under Johnson’s program of Presidential Reconstruction, with voting rights reserved for white men only. On Saint Helena Island, free black men and women saw their former masters, once refugees, returning under Johnson’s pardon proclamation. “They no longer pray for the President—
our
President, as they used to call Lincoln,” a northern teacher wrote that autumn. “They keep an ominous silence and are very sad and troubled.” Anna Ferris had welcomed Union troops home to Delaware over the summer, grateful for peace, but by winter she was disgusted with Johnson’s “infamous treachery,” discouraged over the renewed “armed antagonism,” and immensely anxious for the nation’s future.
¹⁷

Four of the conspirators swing from the gallows in Washington, on July 7, 1865. This photograph shows the hooded and bound George Atzerodt (assigned to kill Vice President Johnson), Lewis Powell (William Seward’s attacker), David Herold (who waited outside the Seward residence until the screams inside scared him away), and Mary Surratt, far left (the widow whose properties sheltered the conspirators). With the execution completed, the small crowd of nonmilitary onlookers begins to depart.
LC-DIG-cwpb-04230, Prints and Photographs Division, Library of Congress
.

If Lincoln’s mourners were unhappy, so too were his antagonists. The president’s gleeful enemies had tried to convince themselves that the assassination would vindicate their defeat on the battlefield, maybe even that it was God’s doing, but now it seemed they had been wrong, for the postwar world, even without the tyrant Lincoln, was turning out to be a dreadful place—maybe the late president would have been their best friend after all. Just as Albert Browne observed on his coastal tour, some white southerners were exhausted and ready to give up. “I do not write often now,” South Carolina plantation mistress Mary Chesnut explained to her diary in the summer of 1865, “not for want of something to say, but from a loathing of all I see and hear. Why dwell upon it?” Others could not help but dwell
upon it. “Oh! Oh! Just to contemplate the miserable changes that four years have brought to our happy country,” Amanda Edmunds exclaimed in her Virginia journal, writing as if the Confederacy still existed. It was “enough to run the strongest crazy.” In Louisiana, Sarah Wadley had no choice but to perform her own household labor now that her slaves had left, and she did so in a cloud of sadness. “Oh melancholy months, months in which we have learned what it is to be subjugated, to lose our country and the great glory of freedom,” she wrote, following the pattern of casting her people as the slaves of Yankee rulers. That summer too, John Henderson, studying law in North Carolina, picked up the diary he had neglected for six months. “Last December I was a citizen of a free country,” he wrote, “now I am a subject of a most grinding despotism.”
¹⁸

At the same time, though, other erstwhile Confederates believed that the glee over Lincoln’s death had been well placed, that something better was indeed in store for those suffering God’s chastisement in defeat. Zillah Brandon hadn’t written in her diary since late 1864 when she picked up the volume again in the summer of 1865. Four of her sons had fought in the war, and two had died, and now Brandon extolled the noble soldiers in gray, so recently “fighting for our countrys rights, the liberties of their wives and children”—and therein lay her hope: the fight was not yet over. True, Brandon described her countrymen and women as “despoiled of every right claimed by a free people” in the face of northern occupation, but she also proclaimed that the “patriotism of 76 is burning in our souls,” confident that God remained on the side of white people fighting for revolutionary freedom, a freedom that depended on black subjugation.
¹⁹

Former Confederates knew they would have to work hard to re-create the world they had lost when they lost the war. “I have been talking with some of our best citizens here and they are very uneasy about the state of affairs,” William Carter wrote to his father from Petersburg, Virginia, in the late summer of 1865. The Carters had been wealthy planters, and President Johnson now seemed to be the “only hope of the South,” he wrote. Carter worried, however, about the way the Republican Congress was crossing Johnson, and he knew that white southerners would have to stand up for the new executive in the face of pressure from the radicals. With foreboding, he warned his father, “I will tell you when I see you what I do not like to write.” At the end of 1865, the Thirteenth Amendment would become
part of the U.S. Constitution, legally abolishing slavery; perhaps Carter intended to speak to his father about the white violence necessary to suppress black freedom.
²⁰

Lincoln’s assassination continued to figure in the white-on-black violence in the South after Appomattox. Black soldiers occupying Memphis in the spring of 1866 were giving a cheer for the slain president when a white policeman taunted them with the words, “Your old father, Abe Lincoln, is dead and damned.” That confrontation touched off a riot and massacre in which nearly fifty African Americans died, half again as many were wounded, and white men made the rape of black women a tactic of intimidation. By 1866 too, the Ku Klux Klan, created by Confederate veterans, was riding through southern states, its members drawn from all classes of white southerners. In these ways did rebel dreams of retribution begin to come to fruition.
²¹

Yet the era of Reconstruction simultaneously brought unprecedented gains for Lincoln’s black mourners and their most radical white allies. In 1867, in the face of so much recalcitrance and brutality, moderate and radical Republicans in Congress joined forces against Andrew Johnson, exchanging presidential Reconstruction for a much more far-reaching program that would establish black suffrage and political participation, labor contracts and education, all overseen by the Union army and the federal Freedmen’s Bureau. Here—if at times faltering from northern racism—was realized much of the vision of African Americans, as formulated in their petitions to President Johnson in the wake of Lincoln’s assassination. Here was the “
strong military government
” that Albert Browne had wanted “
for years to come
.” By 1870, the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments had become part of the U.S. Constitution, enshrining the rights of citizenship for all African Americans and the right of suffrage for all black men.