by Martha Hodes
In the quest for raw reactions, I have bypassed memoirs. Although all private writings are in some respects written from memory, responses to Lincoln’s assassination from the spring and summer of 1865 differ considerably from the polished reminiscences of burnished recollections. Consider the diary of Union soldier Henry Gawthrop, who lay in an army hospital in Virginia. In April 1865, Gawthrop recorded that President Lincoln had stopped by to shake hands with the wounded soldiers. Some fifty years later, the veteran elaborated on this memory, writing that Lincoln had greeted a Confederate soldier with the words, “I hope you will soon be well and return to your home.” It’s hard to tell whether Gawthrop neglected to record that scene at the time or if he embellished his memory bit by bit over the years until he came to believe it had happened that way. The fact is, the words that Gawthrop later attributed to Lincoln make the most sense in the context of white North-South reconciliation, fully under way by the early twentieth century.2
Many memoirs, moreover, comfortably corroborate a static portrait of a weeping nation. In September 2001 and November 1963, many perceived the whole world to be in grief, and so did Lincoln’s mourners in April 1865. When the bereaved wrote about the immediate aftermath of the assassination, they tended toward extravagant descriptions of everyone, everywhere, of universal grief and worldwide sorrow. When church bells chimed on a hillside, it felt as if bells were tolling across the land. With every building in a village draped in black, it seemed the whole country must be shrouded. Sharing feelings of shock and horror, out on the street or in church, it was easy to envision the entire nation in a state of distress, the whole world under the same spell of gloom.
None of this was literally true, and personal responses from the spring of 1865 make that eminently clear. Grieving men and women described a nation and a world in mourning, but it was they who constructed that universality, nourished by personal rituals: spreading the word to neighbors, tacking black drapery to windows, crowding together into church pews. All of those actions made the calamitous crime both more real and more bearable, and illusions of collective grief served the same purpose. As a black preacher in upstate New York put it, “No deeper sorrow ever filled the universal heart of the country.” In the words of a white Washington correspondent from California, horror “swept over the land,” while “from sea to sea a smitten nation wept.” People made the same kinds of observations in their personal writings. The shock, a mourner wrote to her brother, was soothed by the “universal feeling of one sorrow that overcame all.” After four years of bloody conflict, moreover, the bereaved were ready to see all enmity between Union and Confederate suddenly evaporated. “North & South are weeping together,” a woman wrote to her husband. Around the globe, the chorus echoed. In the West Indies, it seemed to a Christian missionary that even the most bitter sentiments of secession had melted away. In South Africa, a U.S. diplomat thought that “even those who never sympathized with our holy cause” were “overwhelmed with horror.” As the English novelist Elizabeth Gaskell insisted, “Everyone is feeling the same. I never knew so universal a feeling.” Accordingly, black worshippers in San Francisco resolved to “join our grief with that of the World.”3
In fact, though, not everyone was included in this vision of a monolithic grieving nation, nor did everyone wish to be. Even as many of Lincoln’s mourners were eager to universalize their responses, their own accounts contradicted that very yearning. Grand and impressive as the public ceremonies might have been, this end-of-war moment was less a time of unity and closure and much more a time of ongoing dissension. And no matter how comforting was the thought of universal grief, mourners knew that others responded to the assassination with gratitude and glee. Indeed, despite the common invocation of the Civil War as a conflict between North and South, regional boundaries prove inadequate, since the populations of neither section were of one mind. Lincoln’s supporters encompassed black southerners and black northerners and the majority of white northerners. Lincoln’s opponents encompassed the majority of white southerners and a significant minority of white northerners, the so-called Copperheads. In the pages that follow, I thus avoid the popular usage of the North and the South, writing instead about Lincoln’s mourners, Union supporters, and Yankees on the one hand, and Confederates, rebels, and Lincoln’s antagonists on the other.
THE CIVIL WAR WAS A revolutionary war, and Lincoln’s assassination complicated its ending. The strife provoked by conflicting political stakes at war’s end was inseparable from irreconcilable personal responses to Lincoln’s assassination. No single moment can by itself explain the war’s meaning, and responses to the startling burst of violence in Ford’s Theatre cannot explain what lay in the future any more than can the Emancipation Proclamation, the military turning point at the Battle of Gettysburg, or the president’s stirring second inaugural address. If one legacy of the war was an extraordinary moment of black freedom and equality during radical Reconstruction that foreshadowed the Civil Rights Movement, we can find the beginnings of that historical development in the post-assassination determination of African Americans and their white allies. If another legacy was a replication of the violent and oppressive conditions of racial slavery that lasted well into the twentieth century, we can find the roots of that trajectory in the Confederate defiance that followed Lincoln’s death.
Responses to the crime at Ford’s Theatre were intertwined with different understandings of the war that had just ended and, in turn, different hopes and fears about what would come next. When Lincoln was assassinated, mourners cast him as the best friend Confederates could have hoped for, and some Confederates reluctantly agreed, as Union victory and the end of black slavery seemed to usher in their subjugation to tyrannical Yankees. Whether they imagined Lincoln as merciful or malicious, defeated white southerners hoped the assassination was God’s plan to vindicate their downfall, looking back to the days when military victory and independence had seemed certain, and farther back to the lost world of white mastery. When Confederates looked ahead, it was to a day when God would ultimately prove their cause right and righteous, or at least to a time when they could wreak vengeance upon their conquerors.
Lincoln’s mourners, by contrast, wanted to believe that the assassination was part of God’s plan to render the outcome of the four-year conflict more meaningful and long-lasting. They had just experienced the exhilaration of victory, and for African Americans and white abolitionists, that triumph encompassed the remarkable achievement of black freedom. With the overthrow of secession and slavery, and now with a martyred chief, the victors looked optimistically toward a reconstructed nation, to God’s graces for themselves, and to divine punishment for their enemies, out of whose ranks had emerged the assassin. Yet catastrophe and crisis can breed contradiction, and in shaping visions for the future, Lincoln’s mourners portrayed their slain leader in two different ways. On the one hand, they pointed to evidence of the president’s moderation and lenience; on the other, they drew attention to hints of his political radicalism. If the lenient Lincoln was an ally of Confederates, the radical Lincoln was an ally to African Americans. Had Lincoln lived, he could hardly have been both, but while President Andrew Johnson recoiled from demands for equal rights, Lincoln’s martyrdom permitted black Americans and their white friends to invoke his name in the quest for post-emancipation equality. Amid fears for the future, they looked to Lincoln’s most admirable actions—and to what little he had said on the subject in his last days—to fortify their impassioned calls for justice.
MOURNING LINCOLN BEGINS WITH THE fall of the Confederate capital and the surrender of General Robert E. Lee in early April 1865. The story continues through the execution of four of the conspirators in early July, concluding with a brief look at the postwar decades. Each chapter tells a story, and together the chapters complicate the larger story of the assassination, charting the optimism evinced by the victors-turned-mourners and exposing the formidable challenges to visions of a unified nation, includi
ng fissures between black and white mourners.
The experiences of three protagonists, for whom surviving records are particularly rich, open each chapter and serve as a template for broader investigations. The first two, husband and wife Sarah and Albert Browne, were white abolitionists from Salem, Massachusetts, who despaired mightily at Lincoln’s death. The third, Rodney Dorman, was a Confederate lawyer living in Jacksonville, Florida, who delighted in Lincoln’s murder. The Brownes and Dorman represent two ends of the ideological spectrum and two of the most powerful ideologies of the Civil War era—abolitionism on the one hand and diehard rebeldom on the other—and thus together serve as excellent conduits through which to understand the conflicts that raged on after Union victory and Lincoln’s death. Although the Brownes and Dorman never met, at times they seem to be talking directly to each other. Here I introduce them more fully.
Albert Browne Sr. and Sarah Browne, about 1865.
Browne Family Papers, The Schlesinger Library, Radcliffe Institute, Harvard University.
The Brownes lived within a passionate ideological universe of abolitionist Protestant ethics. Though not radicals like the followers of William Lloyd Garrison—the man who publicly burned a copy of the U.S. Constitution for its complicity with slavery—they were liberal Christians (first Congregationalists, then Unitarians) who prayed for black freedom and demanded suffrage for black men. Steeped in convictions about the virtues of individual striving in a burgeoning capitalist nation, Sarah and Albert dedicated themselves to the moral superiority of free labor, a central tenet of the new Republican Party that had risen from the ashes of the antebellum Whigs. In this promising view, work was an inherently noble and dignified enterprise, and unfettered opportunity guaranteed that hard work would bring uplift and upward mobility.
When they looked to the South, antislavery Republicans like the Brownes saw both an un-Christian evil and a backward civilization of economic exploitation and stagnation. Slave labor, the exact opposite of free labor, permitted no incentive or chance for improvement and, worst of all, degraded the very act of work, thereby spreading indolence and immorality throughout the population, black and white, rich and poor. The problem was that the Brownes’ brand of free-labor ideology glorified landowner-ship just when the northern landscape was seismically shifting from farm to factory. As the North saw a steadily growing and increasingly divided population of employers and wageworkers (the latter including women and children), the Brownes held fast to their ideals, pressing for the transfer of southern land from former masters to former slaves in order to emulate a northern economic system that was already rapidly breaking down. At the same time, a conventional brand of paternalistic racism marred their earnest professions of equality.
Albert Browne was a rope manufacturer, a partner with Whiton, Browne, and Wheelwright, a maritime supply dealer in Salem and Boston. Between 1863 and 1865, he worked for the Union army, as an agent of the U.S. Treasury Department, taking charge of abandoned enemy property in South Carolina, Georgia, and Florida. General William Tecumseh Sherman remembered Albert as a “shrewd, clever Yankee,” crediting him with the idea of sending a telegram about the fall of Savannah to President Lincoln in December 1864; that advice resulted in Sherman’s then-and-now famous message to the president, “I beg to present you as a Christmas-gift the city of Savannah.” Albert made his southern home in the town of Beaufort, on Port Royal Island in the South Carolina Sea Islands. When the Union occupied the islands early in the war, much of the native white population fled, and Beaufort’s gracious homes stood empty. Along the streets, Albert likely encountered only Yankee soldiers and former slaves—one visitor saw black children playing happily, “now that the dark shadow of slavery hangs over them no more.” Albert’s job included raiding expeditions that yielded mostly bales of cotton left behind by fleeing Confederates, though he and his men seized everything from scrap iron to buried silver. They also halted blockade running and personally informed African Americans of their freedom.4
Back home in the dynamic port town of Salem, Sarah Browne tended their spacious residence at 40 Summer Street on the corner of Broad. She managed the household, including directing a group of servants (likely Irish immigrants) who lightened her day-to-day burdens considerably. Sarah sewed, tended to the family’s health, and taught her younger son French and Latin. She advised her husband on professional matters, visited neighbors, and received guests. She worked hard, though with plenty of time for reading and the luxury of lying down midday whenever she felt tired. In the spring of 1865, Sarah was living with Edward, nearly twelve (two more sons had died in infancy), and Alice, in her early twenties. The eldest child, Albert Jr., had graduated from Harvard College in 1853, at eighteen the youngest member of his class. Through the war, Albert Jr. served as military secretary to Massachusetts governor John Andrew, making frequent visits home to his mother and siblings. Nellie, the Brownes’ other daughter, had died the year before, at the age of twenty-two.5
Sarah Browne avidly kept up with the war news. Salem had supplied the Union with more than three thousand soldiers and sailors over the course of four years (out of a population of just over twenty thousand). Black residents served in the Fifty-Fourth and Fifty-Fifth Massachusetts regiments, and white residents served as their officers. Salem men fought at Bull Run and Antietam, Fredericksburg and Chancellorsville, Gettysburg and Cold Harbor. They also stepped in to quell the New York City draft riots in 1863 and marched through Georgia and the Carolinas with General Sherman. Men from Salem entered the fallen Confederate capital of Richmond at war’s end, and some were present for Lee’s surrender at Appomattox. When the war was over, more than a hundred came home wounded, and more than two hundred never came home at all.
Sarah and Albert’s antislavery sentiments emerged even more strongly in some of their children. As a law student, Albert Jr. had gotten himself arrested for participating in a violent fight outside the Boston courthouse on behalf of a fugitive slave. At school, Nellie Browne befriended Charlotte Forten, the daughter of a well-to-do black family in Philadelphia. Forten had moved to Salem at sixteen, eager for an education unavailable in the segregated classrooms of her native city. Boarding with a family of prominent black abolitionists, she nonetheless found life trying in the “conservative, aristocratic old city of Salem,” as she put it, for African Americans in and around Boston still suffered “insulting language” and could be treated as pariahs. Girls at school might be “kind and cordial,” Forten confided to her diary, while out on the street “they feared to recognize me.” In her journal, Forten referred to Nellie Browne as Brownie. “There is one young girl and only one,” she wrote of Nellie, “who I believe thoroughly and heartily appreciates anti-slavery, radical anti-slavery and has no prejudice against color.” In 1855, when Charlotte was eighteen and Nellie fourteen, the two went together to join the Salem Female Anti-Slavery Society. When Nellie left Salem to attend school in Cambridge in 1856, Charlotte missed her white friend. “More lonesome than ever now,” she wrote one day, longing for Nellie’s company, and on another day, “Feel sorry that Brownie has gone.”6
Beginning in 1858, Sarah Browne kept a diary that would continue through 1884, the year before she died. In pocket-sized annual journals, she captured her activities and thoughts in neat handwriting. The wartime separation of husband and wife meant that the couple also wrote each other long letters during those years, and Albert’s, often addressed to the whole family, were particularly loquacious, serving nearly as his own diary. In the Brownes’ experiences, we find not only the complexities of shock, sorrow, and ferocious anger over Lincoln’s assassination but also a record of preoccupation with private loss: the death of Nellie Browne in 1864.
IN JACKSONVILLE, RODNEY DORMAN COULD count himself a devotee of the most virulent proslavery ideology to emerge in the antebellum South, characterizing the enslavement of African Americans as economically efficient and benevolent, rooted as it was in white superiority and black inferiority. Dorman
further understood black people as incapable of desiring or fighting for freedom and thus blamed meddling white abolitionists for everything that proved otherwise. For Dorman, the entire Civil War was an act of Yankee aggression that unlawfully interfered with the natural and constitutional rights of white southerners, and he rapidly became a diehard rebel, utterly despising the enemy and conceding no possibility of reconciliation. The only satisfactory sequel to Confederate defeat would be retribution and ultimate redemption.
Jacksonville lay on the Saint Johns River in the northeast corner of Florida, just inland from the Atlantic, and Dorman had arrived there as a young man, from up north. That this zealous Confederate was a native of western Massachusetts who spent part of his boyhood in Ohio is not surprising. With other economically ambitious New Englanders, Dorman had come to Florida in the late 1830s. Many such men made their fortunes in the lumber business, but Dorman became a prosperous attorney and never looked back. In 1850, nearly half the city’s population was enslaved, and Dorman owned a forty-year-old black man, whom he likely hired out to the sawmills. Also in Dorman’s household in 1850 lived a free black woman, listed in the census as his servant, and it’s possible that their relationship encompassed sexual exploitation in return for legal freedom. Ten years later, on the eve of the Civil War, Dorman no longer owned a slave or had a live-in servant, though his personal wealth had increased five times over. He never married.7