Mourning Lincoln (44 page)

Had Lincoln lived, African Americans would have petitioned him and visited him in the White House, advancing the same demands for equality and rights that they asked of his successor. The difference was that Lincoln would have answered without Johnson’s defensiveness, ridicule, and dismissal. Lincoln’s record of words and actions all during the war, even if marked by slow deliberation, indicated that he would have listened to, absorbed, and responded to the demands of African Americans. Perhaps Douglass was right that Lincoln would ultimately have taken political power from former Confederates and given it to former slaves. No matter, with Lincoln gone, he and other radical mourners were free to reimagine Lincoln’s politics in their own image.

Whoever else mourned for Abraham Lincoln, Frederick Douglass concluded in December 1865, “to the colored people of the country, his death is an unspeakable calamity.” Decades later, former slaves thought back to the assassination. “Abraham Lincoln!” exclaimed eighty-five-year-old Octavia
George in Oklahoma City. “I wouldn’t miss a morning getting my black arm band and placing it on in remembrance of Abraham, who was the best friend the Negroes ever had.” In Tarrant County, Texas, Ann Edwards called up that time too. “I can’t describe the emotions of the people,” she said, except that it felt “as if everyone had suddenly experienced the death of their most beloved child.” In Mississippi, James Lucas remembered the fears of reenslavement, and in Alabama, Louis Meadows recalled the freedpeople around him vowing never to return to slavery. In light of the post-Reconstruction decades of Jim Crow segregation, disfranchisement, and lynching, Lincoln’s assassination was tragic indeed.
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And had Lincoln lived? The elderly African Americans speaking in the 1930s thought back on that question too. Louis Meadows believed that “things was hurt by Mr. Lincoln getting killed.” John Matheus, in Ohio, thought that if Lincoln had remained president, “he would have done lots of good for the colored people.” William Irving, about fifteen years old when the war ended, likewise felt sure that his people would have had an easier time of it with Lincoln as president. George Conrad of Oklahoma City said simply, “I don’t think his work was finished.” In Arkansas, near one hundred years old, Rosa Ingram was sure that Lincoln had been murdered for freeing the slaves.
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For Lincoln’s antagonists, the assassination was either the work of a lone madman, an act of heroic patriotism, or God’s design for eventual Confederate retribution. For Lincoln’s mourners, the meaning of the assassination became more complicated in the post-Reconstruction world, the question
Why?
becoming unanswerable once again. If slavery had indeed been the root cause of the assassination, had God intended Lincoln’s death as a means to ensure enduring equality by showing the victors that they must remain vigilant over their vindictive enemies? Or was the assassination, as Frederick Douglass conceded, nothing more than a catastrophe that slowed the long journey toward justice?

Mourners knew that Lincoln’s assassination had changed the world irrevocably, but no one could know what would have happened had he lived. The blast of the derringer at Ford’s Theatre on the night of April 14, 1865, was the first volley of the war that came after Appomattox—a war on black freedom and equality. That war still ebbs and flows in American history, a century and a half after the assassination of President Abraham Lincoln.

TO WRITE THIS BOOK, I
read through perhaps a thousand diaries, collections of letters, and other relevant writings from the spring and summer of 1865. That left thousands of relevant sources unconsulted, and indeed I could have researched this book for another decade, with published letters and diaries alone occupying me for years to come, not to mention the ever-increasing volume of digitized primary sources. I stopped not only in the interest of producing the book in a timely manner but also because I reached a point where new material no longer altered or challenged the patterns I had identified.

In any archive, my starting points were collections that included the writings of Civil War soldiers and officers, along with collections of personal and family papers that held letters or diaries from the spring of 1865. This meant that I asked librarians and archivists to retrieve untold numbers of boxes and folders that I quickly sent back, if, say, a soldier’s wartime diary ended in 1864 or a family’s papers skipped from March to September 1865. Still, my research unearthed far more relevant diary entries and letters than appear here, and the totality of the sources I read deeply informed both the evidence I ultimately selected for my narrative and my interpretations and conclusions. When I invoke phrases like “many of Lincoln’s mourners” or “some Confederates,” the words
many
and
some
are not random; rather, they stem from my immersion in personal responses to Lincoln’s assassination. Citations in the endnotes must stand in for many more that would have made the notes unwieldy. For certain topics—for example, shock and sorrow at the assassination or the persistence of everyday life—there is comparable evidence from uncountable numbers of sources.

The voluminous number of real-time personal responses to Lincoln’s
assassination nonetheless presented challenges. First among these was submerged voices, since only certain people possessed the skills of literacy and the time to write. I originally hoped to include a sustained African American voice as one of my protagonists, but that proved more difficult than I’d imagined. It’s an old story. The archival papers of men in black Civil War regiments turned out to be the papers of the white officers. The papers of black Reconstruction politicians did not begin until after 1865. In Charlotte Forten’s detailed diary, the year 1865 does not exist, and much of Frederick Douglass’s personal writings burned in a fire. Because black experiences are central to the story I tell, I turned to two kinds of sources to augment the comparatively small number of personal writings: letters and editorials published in black newspapers, and the writings of whites who related black people’s words and sentiments (for example, northern missionaries who taught school to freedpeople down south).

Personal responses to Lincoln’s assassination are not the same as private responses. Though ostensibly more private than letters, diaries can nonetheless be deceptive in this regard. Not all diarists wrote for themselves alone. The most religious wrote for the eyes of God, while others crafted their prose for real or imagined audiences. Boston businessman Amos Lawrence, for example, betrayed the presumption of privacy by indexing his volumes (including an entry for “Lincoln, Abraham”), implying a readership of posterity, biographers, or both, while fellow Bostonian Anna Lowell littered her pages with enough cross-outs and rewordings to suggest imagined readers. As for letters, their degree of intimacy varied widely. Business correspondence presumed a certain public quality, and personal letters could also be composed for an audience beyond the named recipient, for example, if a writer knew that a missive would be passed around among relatives or neighbors. Personal responses to Lincoln’s assassination also include words spoken aloud in public or semipublic settings, never intended to be private. When I worked with evidence of spoken responses (notably when mourners recounted gleeful commentary), I made every effort to bypass stories based on hearsay, for maximum accuracy using only eyewitness accounts unless writing specifically about rumors.
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Another challenge lay in the fact that many writers recorded unadorned facts without reference to thoughts or feelings (“Heard of the assassination of Lincoln” or “The President’s funeral today”). People wrote down only
that John Wilkes Booth remained at large or that William Seward was recovering from his wounds; some merely transcribed the headlines. Civil War–era sentimentalism presented a different challenge. In the eighteenth century, diarists most commonly penned chronicles of daily life, whereas by the end of the nineteenth century, the nature of diaries had been heavily influenced by Romanticism and a focus on the individual self. The Civil War years saw a transition from the older pattern of tersely recorded information to the newer art of effusive introspection. Both sorts of journals can be found in the archives of personal responses to Lincoln’s assassination. Though the latter sort may strike modern readers as overwrought, I have approached these documents as reflecting the writer’s emotions.
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A few notes about word choices and quotations are in order. I have referred to Rodney Dorman by his last name, as I did for all historical actors, but because Sarah and Albert Browne shared a last name, I have referred to them by their respective first names. I have used the words
diary
and
journal
interchangeably. I have described my white southern actors as
Confederates
, rather than
former Confederates
, almost all the way through; although their identity became more ambiguous as the war drew to a close, they continued to think of themselves as members of their own nation. When writing from the perspective of a nineteenth-century actor, I have occasionally used
Negro
without quotation marks.

When quoting sources, I have not corrected spelling or punctuation, except for the sake of readability if it left the meaning unchanged: inserting a period at the end of a sentence, adding a comma where absolutely necessary, removing excessive commas for the sake of clarity (Rodney Dorman was particularly dedicated to the comma), exchanging upper- and lowercase letters, omitting quotation marks within quotation marks, or occasionally adding an apostrophe. (Note also that commas, periods, and dashes are not always easy to distinguish in manuscript sources, and some nineteenth-century writers used dashes as stand-ins for periods.) When people wrote
Johnson
in reference to Confederate general Joseph E. Johnston, I have made a silent correction so as not to confuse the general with the new president. Likewise, where the name of a person was rendered with different spellings, I have chosen a single one (the Brownes, for example, mostly spelled their daughter’s name as
Nellie
but occasionally rendered it
Nelly
). In selecting published diaries and letters, I did my very best to
reject those that were heavily revised or polished, either by the writers or by later editors.

In two instances, I have taken a bit more liberty with the sources. First, when writers recounted conversations or other spoken words, I corrected spelling and punctuation, or changed capitalization, in order to reflect what people heard, rather than how they captured the words on paper. Second, when white people wrote down the words of African Americans in dialect, I silently corrected the spelling, on the theory that everyone speaks with an accent, including upper-class New Englanders and elite white southerners. Because those variant pronunciations are rarely transcribed with improper spelling, nor should be the spoken words of African Americans; to write
was
when spoken by a white person, and
wuz
when spoken by a black person, makes no sense beyond racist stereotyping. (It was refreshing indeed to read the journalist Thomas Morris Chester, whose dispatches spelled the words of his fellow African Americans properly.)

Finally, a word about Rodney Dorman’s diary. The journals in the Library of Congress manuscript collection are anonymous—that is, no author’s name appears anywhere on or in them. The collection’s donor believed the writer to be her great uncle Orloff M. Dorman, whom she described in 1936 as a northern man living in Jacksonville during the Civil War. As I began to work with the diary, however, I realized that the writer could not be Orloff Dorman, a Unionist who had once met with President Lincoln and asked for an appointment as the provisional wartime governor of Florida. A search in the digital American Historical Newspapers for the words “Jacksonville” and “Dorman” yielded an article in the
National Intelligencer
that listed the names of those whose homes had burned in the 1863 Union attack on the city. Among them was a “Judge Dorman,” and the 1860 federal census recorded an attorney named Rodney Dorman, who turned out to be the brother of Orloff, confirmed by the database Ancestry. com. Then, in a search through Confederate Papers Relating to Citizens or Business Firms, in the National Archives and available in the online database Fold3.com, I found Rodney Dorman’s 1863 lost-property claim. The handwriting there perfectly matched the handwriting of the anonymous journals in the Library of Congress.
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AAS: American Antiquarian Society, Worcester, Mass.

ACWLD: The American Civil War: Letters and Diaries, Alexander Street Press, alexander street.com/products/american-civil-war-letters-and-diaries

ADAH-AWD-South: Alabama Department of Archives and History, American Women’s Diaries: Southern Women, Readex Newsbank, microform

AMA: American Missionary Association Archives, Amistad Research Center, Tulane University, New Orleans, microform

BAP: Black Abolitionist Papers, ProQuest,
bap.chadwyck.com

BFP: Browne Family Papers, Schlesinger Library on the History of Women in America, Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, Harvard University, Cambridge, Mass.

BHS: Brooklyn Historical Society, Brooklyn, N.Y.

Brown: John Hay Library, Brown University, Providence, R.I.

Chicago: Special Collections Research Center, University of Chicago

CHM: Chicago History Museum Research Center

Columbia: Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Columbia University, New York

Cornell: Division of Rare and Manuscript Collections, Cornell University Library, Ithaca, N.Y.

CP: College of Physicians, Philadelphia

CWF-RSP: Colonial Williamsburg Foundation Library, Records of Ante-Bellum Southern Plantations from the Revolution through the Civil War, University Publications of America, microform