Mourning Lincoln (9 page)

Guards stand outside Ford’s Theatre on Tenth Street in Washington, D.C., after the assassination, with black mourning crape festooned in the windows. The gas lamp (lower-left corner) illuminated the way for Lincoln’s body to be carried out of the theater, then illuminated the street’s commotion through the night.
LC-DIG-ppmsca-23872, Prints and Photographs Division, Library of Congress
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Infantry and cavalry tried to control the growing commotion outside Ford’s as crowds gathered on the street between theater and boardinghouse. Half a mile away, thousands of the city’s black residents, men and women, young and old, congregated in front of the White House. Some looked through the iron fence toward the mansion, now heavily guarded, while others sat on the curb or the sidewalk. Some asked passing soldiers if the president was dead. Others wondered aloud if Lincoln’s death meant a return to slavery.
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“My good president! My good president!” a tearful woman lamented. “I would rather have died myself!” Young black men showed their despair with martial spirit, another form of honorable manly behavior. “If the North would just leave
us
to finish this war!” said one. Said another, “Just let them leave the rebels to us!”
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At Petersen’s, one of the doctors eventually described the president as “dead to all intents,” and Secretary of the Navy Gideon Welles watched
as one eye swelled and Lincoln’s face changed color. At six in the morning, Welles stepped out for air, though the day was turning out to be dark and damp. The crowds were more black than white, he noticed, as people stopped him to ask about the president’s condition. Everywhere Welles saw “intense grief,” but the Negroes appeared especially “painfully affected.” Back at Petersen’s an hour later, Welles witnessed Robert Lincoln break down, and soon the doctors officially pronounced Lincoln dead. He was fifty-six years old. The hour and minute of death—7:22 a.m.—would be enshrined in headlines and then again in the personal writings of mourners. Soon, in the parlor of the Kirkwood House Hotel, Chief Justice Salmon Chase swore in Andrew Johnson as president of the United States.
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Lincoln dies at Petersen House. This 1865 lithograph shows a highly idealized version of the deathbed, with Mary Lincoln, Tad Lincoln, and Robert Lincoln weeping as a doctor holds Lincoln’s hand and a line of statesmen look on. In reality, Mary Lincoln was not present when her husband died, Tad never entered the room, the space was far too cramped for such a crowd, and Lincoln lay diagonally across the small bed, his head resting on a bloody pillow and his face showing the effects of the gunshot wound.
LC-USZ62-43633, Prints and Photographs Division, Library of Congress
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For the horse-drawn ride to the White House, Lincoln’s body rested inside a flag-draped casket, inside a hearse. In a guest bedroom on the second floor, doctors sawed off the top of his head, removed the brain, and watched the assassin’s bullet clatter into a basin. Meanwhile, Benjamin
Brown French, the city’s commissioner of public buildings, began to give orders for the ordeal ahead: draping the White House and Capitol Rotunda in mourning fabric, designing and building the catafalque on which the coffin would rest while lying in state, and preparing the city for a massive funeral. By afternoon, French had a terrific headache. Unable to put his feelings into words, he could only borrow from Shakespeare’s
Macbeth:
“O horror, horror, horror! Tongue nor heart / Cannot conceive nor name thee!”
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PEOPLE HAD RUN STRAIGHT FROM
Tenth Street to the telegraph office, spreading word beyond the capital. The government-owned telegraph was central to Civil War military operations, with its speedy transmission over great distances, and Lincoln had spent hours at the office every week, waiting for communications from the front and conversing with the operators, who received and delivered messages day and night. Early transmissions about the crime at Ford’s were not entirely clear as to the president’s state, but in time official confirmation of death reached communities wherever the wires ran. Newspapermen wrote headlines from the dispatches, and printers hurried through their mechanical tasks. Newsboys scooped up the bundles of papers or sheaves of “extras” and set out on their rounds, calling out the tidings. The
Berkshire Courier
extra in Great Barrington, Massachusetts, with a 10:00 a.m. dateline, read “T
ERRIBLE NEWS
! L
INCOLN DEAD
! He is Shot by an Assassin!”
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Beyond Washington on Saturday morning, April 15, laborers and servants were among the first to know. Night watchmen, coal shovelers, and lamplighters passed the news along to one another, as cooks in kitchens, up at dawn preparing breakfast, and valets, building fires in their masters’ bedrooms, stepped outside to investigate the ruckus of shouting and hurried footsteps.

“Oh, Ma’am, President Lincoln was murdered last night in the Washington theater by an actor!” cried Ellen Kean’s maid, entering the bedroom of the English actress who was playing in New York.

“Oh, Mr. Clapp, there is a policeman downstairs, and he says President Lincoln has been killed.” Boston editor William Clapp wasn’t yet dressed when his servant Kate burst into his room, in tears.

“Tell Mrs. Dall Lincoln and Seward have been assassinated,” the milkman ordered a servant in the vestibule of Caroline Dall’s Boston home.

Less than three hours after Lincoln was pronounced dead on Saturday morning, April 15, 1865, the
Berkshire Courier
in Great Barrington, Mass., published this “extra.” The black edging signified mourning.
Call #AB85.L6384.Y865b, Houghton Library, Harvard University
.

“Nonsense,” retorted Dall, who had gone to bed happily thinking of victory.

“I wonder what they will say next,” marveled fifteen-year-old Sadie Dall, as she and her mother descended to breakfast. That’s when Sadie picked up the newspaper on the doorstep, turned pale, shrieked, and began to cry. Soon the bells began to toll. Northerners were used to turning to the morning paper’s “telegraphic column” for the latest war news, and for many that Saturday, the headlines explained the confusing off-hour chimes. For others, like the Dalls, the bells confirmed the seemingly inconceivable headlines.
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Passing on the news became a first act of mourning. Saying the words aloud was one way to make it more real, and telling someone else meant you didn’t have to be alone with it. Just as laborers out on the street had informed one another, and just as servants passed the news to their employers,
now those at home began to knock on neighbors’ doors and call into windows.
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“Have you heard the terrible news?” the man at the front stoop asked Charles Mallory in Mystic, Connecticut. It was Mr. Woodward, Mallory’s blind neighbor, and he was crying. “They have killed our good president.”

“Oh! Horrible, horrible news!” Those were the words Lucy McKim heard as she readied to catch the nine o’clock train out of Philadelphia. Her cousin Annie had just spoken with a neighbor and was now sobbing.
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Everywhere, people gathered, and everywhere they searched one another’s faces for verification. Just as Sarah Browne had instantly absorbed the distress on the visage of the man at her door, mourners read the meaning in eyes, brows, lips, and complexions, telling of genuine consternation, alarm, and woe. For one’s face to reflect sincere feelings was an ideal that had become increasingly untenable in middle-class Victorian culture, with the growing acceptance of artful cosmetics and fashion, but at this cataclysmic moment, all masks seemed to fall away, as people turned earnestly to the countenances around them, not simply to affirm the news but also for guidance about how to respond to such an unprecedented event.

To authenticate the news further, people had to leave the house in order to engage with others. Out on Boston’s State Street, Caroline Dall saw the bare heads of men buried in newspapers and realized that they had rushed outside too quickly even to put on their hats.

Anna Lowell ordered her driver to take her through the streets of Boston in her horse and buggy, from where she “could see people looking at me & at each other.”

“Is it true what they say, that our president—” called out a man in a passing wagon.

“Yes—murdered!” Lowell called back.

“Oh dear, oh dear!” the man moaned, driving on.

Boston businessmen headed to the Merchants’ Reading Room, where members gathered spontaneously to pray together, while women accepted guests at home and paid visits to neighbors.
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On that Saturday morning, news of the crime reached small towns in northern New England and the Mid-Atlantic, as well as Chicago, Kansas, and Salt Lake City. In Sacramento, the first mentions arrived at nine in the morning, local time. That afternoon, outside the telegraph office in a northern
California mining town, a crowd gathered to listen to a public reading of the telegram, “word by word” as it arrived. By the next day, smaller cities in Ohio, Wisconsin, and Minnesota knew. Where no telegraph lines ran, people wouldn’t know until newspapers arrived by mail—Santa Fe and the remoter parts of Utah Territory didn’t hear until May. Speed of transmission to the South varied, what with rail lines cut by the Union army and newspaper offices abandoned by fleeing Confederates. Some small towns received telegrams that same Saturday. New Orleans got the news four days later, via newspaper. More than a week after the assassination, some Texans were just hearing rumors of the fall of Richmond, and Iowa soldiers in Alabama got word at the end of April. For some freedpeople, both adults and children, the first announcement came in the classroom, from Yankee teachers or school superintendents. Confederates might see the occupiers’ flags flying at half-mast. Verification then came in letters and newspapers arriving on steamships from the North.
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On the water, word passed from ship to ship, as U.S. vessels ordered other boats to lower their flags. Across the oceans, steamships arrived with bundles of telegrams and newspapers. On the day Lincoln died, William Gould, the Union navy runaway slave, was in Cádiz, Spain, just learning of the fall of Richmond. The timing was the same in London; as Lincoln’s funeral was under way in Washington, the legation there was crowded with elated Americans congratulating themselves on Richmond’s fall, and a week after Lincoln’s death, they had just begun to celebrate Lee’s surrender. In Jamaica, news of victory and the assassination arrived simultaneously at the end of April, obliging residents to “rejoice with trembling.” Gould and his fellow sailors were en route to Lisbon in early May when a U.S. vessel brought the “awful tidings,” he wrote in his diary. The news reached Sierra Leone and China in mid-June, Australia in late June.
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For Lincoln supporters who heard of the assassination long after, the feelings and rituals were the same. Charles Hale, U.S. consul in Egypt, had been enjoying himself in the diplomats’ stand at early May horse races in Alexandria, cooling off with ices, savoring bonbons, and accepting felicitations over Union victory, when a woman called out, “Come here, Mr. Hale, here’s some news for you.” She had just gotten word from Constantinople, where the telegraph connected with London, and as this particular dispatch had it, Lincoln had been shot in Richmond. Shaken, and thinking the interruption
“thoughtlessly abrupt,” Hale returned to his seat, “very much overcome,” even as he wondered if it could possibly be true. The news was later confirmed and corrected via ships from Malta and Italy, and in a batch of mail from Marseille that included letters from home, a copy of the official telegram from Edwin Stanton, and the April 15 editions of the New York and Boston newspapers. Hale stayed up most of the night and into the next day, poring over the “tale of horror,” making himself believe what everyone at home had known for weeks.
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ASTONISHED. ASTOUNDED. STARTLED
. Stupefied. Thunderstruck. A calamity. A catastrophe. A dagger to the heart. A thunderbolt. A thunderclap from a clear blue sky. The feelings that had engulfed the Confederates less than a week earlier now overtook their conquerors. It was “too horrible to be true” and “too terrible to believe.” It was simply impossible to “realize”—that was a favored nineteenth-century locution, meaning
to make real
, and over and over again people invoked that word; “I can scarcely realize it.” “I cannot realize it.” “But how can we realize it?” People could not and would not believe it. “I cannot have it so,” one woman wrote; “it must not be so.”
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