Mourning Lincoln (5 page)

AS APRIL ARRIVED IN JACKSONVILLE
, Rodney Dorman was in despair over the city’s unsanitary conditions: the torn-up sidewalks layered thickly with sand and soil, the heaps of foul trash and fish carcasses fermenting under the southern sun. Worse, though, were the enemy occupiers. If they didn’t pack up soon, and take their “nonsensical, outrageous-to-humanity dogmas & knavery” with them, Dorman wrote in his journal, he would have to find a way to leave. Most horrific of all, the gunboats from Fernandina and Charleston brought in the northern newspapers proclaiming Confederate defeat. The Union men in his midst cheered and hugged, fired a two-hundred-gun salute, lit rockets, set barrels of tar afire, and got drunk, all of which sent Dorman into a rage, the flames from their tar barrels perhaps conjuring visions of his own torched home. The black soldiers irked him the most, even though he was sure their white comrades and the northern missionaries had put them up to their insolent behavior, since the white Yankees were, he fumed into his diary, “blacker than the negroes.” Why should he believe the news, anyway? After all, there had been a dozen false reports that Richmond had fallen. Still unconvinced, even in the face of the carousing Yankees, Dorman wrote the words “if the North succeeds in this war.” Soon enough, he was confronted with a jubilant meeting of African Americans at the Methodist church led by, he could only scowl, “some negro, abolitionist incendiary chaplain.” If only, he pled, “a thunder bolt would grind the whole of them to powder.”
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Dorman then turned his thoughts to Abraham Lincoln, whose name he always wrote as
Lincon
, intentionally misspelling the second syllable to emphasize the scoundrel’s wily nature. The collapse of the Confederacy was, he reasoned, akin to the Roman defeat of Carthage or the English defeat of the Irish: a tyrant had gotten his military victory, but now he had a badly fractured country on his hands, one he would never be able to control. Turning pensive for only a moment, Dorman paused his tirade. “Summer is coming on now, & I don’t know what I am going to do,” he wrote. “It will be intolerable to spend it here, & I don’t know where else I can go.” Jacksonville had become hell incarnate, and he no longer had a home.
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Dorman read all about the Union flag raising at Sumter in those late-arriving New York newspapers too—”some kind of a tom-foolery celebration” by a bunch of “fools & knaves,” he called it. How Dorman hated Henry Beecher, leading the festivities in South Carolina, gabbling to his geese, more wicked than the devil himself. That Beecher wasn’t a radical like William Lloyd Garrison made no difference. It was all the same, the Yankee preacher’s shameful charisma and activism having spread antislavery ideology like wildfire. For Rodney Dorman, not even “a hundred hangings” would be enough for Henry Ward Beecher.
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RICHMOND HAD FALLEN! ON SUNDAY
, April 2, 1865, the white congregation at Saint Paul’s Church watched as the sexton entered to deliver a message, then watched President Jefferson Davis slip out of his pew. The worshippers soon learned that the telegram, from Robert E. Lee, had alerted Davis that the city would shortly come under Union control. Davis left the Confederate capital that night, soon to be followed by the rest of his government. With impending occupation, white residents could stay or go, and the streets were chaotic, crowded with loaded-down horses, carriages, and wagons. Rebel troops would burn parts of the city on their way out.

When Union troops marched in the next morning, they sang “Babylon Is Fallen.” Union soldiers, black and white, met crowds of black men and women who shook their hands, blessed them, and thanked God for answering their prayers. “You’ve come at last,” they said. “We’ve been looking for you.” Their people had fought for freedom, and now they were free. The elderly praised God that they had lived to see the day. Right from the start, the runaway slave and abolitionist Frederick Douglass had proclaimed the Civil War “a war for and against slavery,” and from the start, black men had pressed the federal government to let them fight. But even now, for some, the downfall of Richmond could barely avenge generations of enslavement. “They sold my father, they murdered my mother,” one freedman said. Another looked around at the wounded Confederates, wanting to do violence to every one of them.
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Meanwhile, when the news reached a black school in Norfolk, the boys and girls gave three cheers, then sang “Colored Volunteer” and “Battle Cry of Freedom,” enunciating the words
Not a man shall be a slave
and
Union forever
. When they came to “John Brown’s Body,” with the words
We’ll
hang Jeff Davis from the sour apple tree
, a little girl named Rose wanted to know if the Confederate president had been sent to the gallows. A little boy announced he was “glad Uncle Sam beat the Secesh,” and with the help of the missionary teachers from up north, the children made wreathes and banners for the upcoming parade. They talked of finding parents or siblings who had been sold away or forced by their masters to leave the city during the war. Rose felt indignant when she learned that Jefferson Davis was still alive, but Union victory now seemed certain, and that meant freedom forever.
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The next day, Tuesday, April 4, President Lincoln arrived in Richmond, holding the hand of his twelve-year-old son, Tad, as he walked among the people. All along the route to the former executive mansion—where Lincoln would sit at the desk of the fleeing Jefferson Davis—thousands of overjoyed African Americans encircled and followed, spreading word of Lincoln’s presence. Some of the city’s middling and poorer whites joined in, but it was the black residents who shouted praises to God, calling the president “father” or “master Abraham.” The black Philadelphia journalist Thomas Morris Chester was already referring to his people as citizens in his dispatches. At a jubilee celebration, black families filled every church pew and aisle. Outside, people climbed up to the windows, the crowd so immense that many stood too far away to hear a single word.
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“We thought Lincoln was risking too much to go into Richmond,” wrote Annie Dudley, a white woman who worked at the Bureau of Indian Affairs in Washington, “very much afraid he would get killed by some of those defeated arch rebels.”
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The news of Richmond’s fall came to Union troops by telegram, with mounted officers galloping along the lines, or by northern newspapers delivered by passing locomotives or docking steamers. The men threw their hats in the air and cheered. “By jove I never thought men had such lungs,” exclaimed a Michigan soldier. They threw their shoes in the air too, fired muskets and cannons, lit firecrackers, jumped up and down, and danced to the music of regimental bands. Soldiers who got word at nine in the morning reveled till past midnight, gulping whiskey and malt liquor. “Glory to God!” an Ohio man wrote in the pages of the address book he used as a wartime diary. In Tennessee, a bunch of soldiers repeatedly fired a cannon in front of a Confederate residence until every pane of glass was smashed,
then joked that the burning building could now pass for an illuminated Unionist home. When word arrived at the Union hospitals, the sick and wounded could all of a sudden “bear their pain better.”
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President Lincoln walks through the streets of Richmond, Virginia, just after the Confederate capital fell to the Union. In this 1866 drawing, Lincoln holds the hand of his twelve-year-old son, Tad, while African Americans celebrate their freedom and pay tribute to their “best friend.”
Picture Collection, The Branch Libraries, The New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundations
.

Wild. Crazy. Agog. That’s how people described the mood when the news reached the northern home front. In Wilmington, New York, Cincinnati, Chicago, Sacramento, and everywhere in between, it was huzzas, songs, speeches, pealing church chimes and clanging fire bells, tooting steam whistles and roaring guns and cannons. Crowds collected around the newspaper and telegraph offices. Classroom doors burst open as teachers dismissed school. Washington was in an intoxicated uproar all day April 3 and for three days afterward, the White House “resplendent with candles,” the Capitol dome decorated with “tiers of lights.” The War Department and Post Office were lit up too, and in front of the Patent Office, gas jets spelled the word
Union
in enormous letters.
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“Richmond has fallen,” Emilie Davis wrote in her Philadelphia diary. The young woman’s words were spare but the occasion grand, for her brothers had fought with black units in the war, she had attended an emancipation celebration in 1863, and she had listened to Frederick Douglass deliver a lecture only a few months earlier. Young folks in the city, both black and white, took in the illuminations on Chestnut, Walnut, and Arch Streets, and to sixteen-year-old Margaret Howell, the night felt like “New Year’s Eve, Christmas Eve, and Fourth of July all combined.” In Boston, boys piled into a wagon, waving flags and handkerchiefs, shaking rattles and banging drums, stopping in front of each house to shout the news and catch an answering cheer in return. At the state legislature, the men adjourned and broke into “Old John Brown.” When the news reached the California mining town of Weaverville, the workers quit and took their families dancing at the local theater late into the night. Across the Atlantic, the U.S. consul and future novelist William Dean Howells had been entertaining American guests at his home in Venice when word came (it was late April by then), prompting exultation and “great handshaking.”
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Like Emilie Davis, and like Sarah and Albert Browne, those who counted themselves foes of slavery were immeasurably overjoyed. At eighty-seven years old, John Prentiss of New Hampshire had prayed he would live to see the day. The rebels had fought for slavery as their “
Corner Stone
,” the elderly white man wrote in his diary, referring to the 1861 “cornerstone
speech” of Alexander Stephens, in which the Confederate vice president had proclaimed the “great truth that the negro is not equal to the white man,” that enslavement was his natural condition. Now, Prentiss rejoiced, the slaveholders were “doomed
forever
.” Abolitionists knew this was the work of God.
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TO THE VICTORS, THE ENTIRE
nation appeared to be celebrating, but that impression was accurate only if they ignored the evidence of Confederate distress. For Secretary of the Navy Gideon Welles it seemed the “entire population” was celebrating in the streets of Washington, even as he noted in his diary that all secessionists living in the capital “must have retired.” Notably, the Confederates themselves refrained from describing scenes of universal celebration; Henry Berkeley, an imprisoned private from Lee’s army, named the revelers only as “all yankeedom.” True, some of Richmond’s white residents joined in the festivities, but most stayed inside. Union soldiers could read their “sour faces,” reflecting both anguish and apprehension. Thomas Morris Chester could see them standing silently at their front steps or peering from their windows. He knew it was an occasion they had scarcely ever imagined, and for the vanquished it was frightening indeed. Henri Garidel, in town from Louisiana, watched as black people greeted his conquerors amid billowing Union flags. Listening to their hurrahs, his heart felt “heavy as a mountain.” Lincoln’s carriage, it seemed to Garidel, was “followed by the entire Negro population of Richmond,” and now his own heart was breaking. Nor was every white person up north thrilled—one New Yorker surmised that the “contemptable Copperheads” were keeping quiet out of fear, some even deceitfully waving flags, despite their hatred of Lincoln, black people, and the whole Civil War.
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For Lee’s men, the last months in the Army of Northern Virginia had been an ordeal of despair and exhaustion accompanied by steady desertion. A member of the Richmond Howitzers, watching the bursting mortar shells through the night, thought “the world would fall to pieces.” Civilians invoked the language of doom too. “Every body is dying with the blues,” Amanda Edmunds wrote from her family’s thousand-acre Virginia plantation. Diehard rebels tried mightily to keep up their spirits, but Yankee glee made it worse, or maybe it was their pious gratitude. Seventeen-year-old Emma LeConte had been living in Columbia, South Carolina, in February,
when the combined actions of Union soldiers, slaves, evacuating Confederates, and escaped prisoners set the city afire, sparing the college campus where her father taught. The family also owned a large plantation, and now LeConte had to suffer heretofore unknown hardships, reading by candlelight instead of gas and wearing undergarments cut from rough cloth. Still, anything was worth avoiding surrender. “The South
will
not give up,” she wrote in her diary. “I can not think that.” As for President Lincoln, the Richmond papers echoed the people’s sentiments. He was a fool and a tyrant.
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Unthinkable or not, rumors of surrender—originating from speculation, a wish, a worry, or a lie—began the day after Richmond fell. A Union soldier had to discard a jubilant letter announcing the capitulation of Lee’s whole army; “as it isn’t so,” he wrote, “I begin again, crestfallen.” Michigan soldiers in camp near Detroit heard that Robert E. Lee had surrendered, then that it was only Fitzhugh Lee, cavalry commander in his uncle’s army. On the home front, Wilmington Unionists celebrated surrender until the evening papers set the record straight. In Boston, a postman stopped Anna Lowell on the street to impart the thrilling news of final victory, which all too soon, she lamented, “proved
bogus
.” Rumors also overtook the Confederates. Prisoners at Fort Delaware heard talk of the “heartsickening” possibility, while rebel soldiers in Texas heard that Robert E. Lee had been killed.
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