by Martha Hodes
The gratification that Rodney Dorman expressed at Lincoln’s assassination stemmed from the same convictions that drove his reactions to Union victory: fury, inflamed by the humiliation of defeat. During the war, fellow Confederates and the rebel press had fed that anger, casting Abraham Lincoln as a tyrant who deserved death for barbaric actions like arming the enslaved men of the South. Dorman had always considered Lincoln the quintessential wicked northerner imposing his decrees on the white South, beginning with a party platform that wanted slavery excluded from all future states carved out of the western territories. The Yankee chief’s dictatorship extended to his administration’s abridgment of civil liberties, notably the wartime suspension of the writ of habeas corpus. Now, after the assassination, Dorman seethed as he read in the northern papers about the arrest of those who expressed approval of Lincoln’s murder. “A general hanging of the whole batch of officials, as userpers & outlaws, would be but slight redress to the outraged laws of the country,” he fumed, “yet they talk of treason & traitors with reference to others.” The same kind of corruption prevailed in Jacksonville, and the demagogues in the Yankees’ sham republican government with its phony laws “ought to have their brains blown out immediately.” That is, Dorman added, “if they have any brains.” And speaking of tyranny, the Emancipation Proclamation alone constituted an illegal usurpation of power for which President Lincoln—Lincon—“deserved assassination.” Only public execution would have been better.3
Dorman’s satisfaction at Lincoln’s death was interrupted only by the sight of mourners in his midst. Just as he had so painfully observed celebrations of Union victory all around him, he now watched as black people and Yankee occupiers wept and prayed, lowered their American flags (“hanging out rags,” he called it), and draped the city’s churches. Even worse was the behavior of local whites. They may have been Unionists or they may have been poorer residents who had never much supported the Confederate effort, but either way their sycophantic public laments were nauseating. As far as Dorman was concerned, any white southerner who mourned for Lincoln was either a fool or insane.4
LINCOLN’S MOURNERS INSISTED ON DESCRIBING to themselves and one another a “universal” grief, imagining a once divided nation now united by the assassination of its leader, even as they saw evidence to the contrary. Contradictory evidence aside, mourners nonetheless built an optimistic vision of a nation rising from Union victory, a healed nation to which the vanquished would willingly return as patriots. Perhaps those were the hopes of Union officer Oscar Ireland, who wrote home from Virginia, claiming that “all over the land seems to be the same mind.” Everywhere he looked, he saw “mourning and regret for the loss of the President” and “hatred and scorn for the fiendishness and utter folly of the assassins.” Maybe Ireland intended to include the freshly defeated Confederates in his vision, or maybe he was writing prescriptively (Here is what everyone ought to be feeling) or perhaps just hopefully. Lincoln’s mourners contradicted themselves all the time when they wrote about the grief of “the nation,” sometimes seeming to conjure the entire population of North and South alike, other times clearly excluding the Confederates, and much of the time writing in sweeping phrases too vague to interpret one way or the other.5
Thornier questions stood behind such pronouncements. How could white southerners be subsumed into the victorious Union—or should they be? Should recalcitrant Confederates be coerced into patriotism—or could they be? Should the privileges of citizenship be extended to the defiant among them? These were the questions that would trouble Lincoln’s mourners in the weeks and months to come, most especially black mourners and their white abolitionist allies. From the other side, a white South Carolina journalist wrote that the assassination would “hardly affect the relations of the two countries,” truculent words that defined the Confederacy as a separate nation-state, even after conquest and surrender. Cries of despair in the diaries of the southern elite attest to the same conviction. “Alas! for my poor Country,” wrote a former slave owner in Mississippi. “Oh! my poor Country,” wrote a Louisiana planter. “What have you yet to suffer?” The fact was, for Confederates, Lincoln’s assassination was a different matter altogether. For one thing, most of them hated Lincoln. They had hated Lincoln when he ran for president in 1860, and they hated him through all four years of war. In the rebel press, in textbooks, cartoons, verse, and the theater, Confederates had painted the Yankee executive as a boorish frontier oaf, a buffoon and a drunk, an ape, a gorilla, and a baboon, a bastard and a coward, a warmonger and a butcher, a monster and a tyrant, a Negrophile and a Negro himself. And to think that this creature had walked through the streets of their capital city in triumph, surrounded by free black people who worshipped him as a god!6
When Lincoln was assassinated, Confederates had just stepped into the long grief of surrender, and it was surrender that remained immediate and disastrous, producing apprehension and anxiety, fear and distress, melancholy and depression. Surrender had destroyed their world, including the enslavement of black people, a system that had been central to southern society for nearly two hundred years. Accordingly, whereas African Americans worried about the revival of legal slavery, Confederates agonized over its demise. True, Lincoln’s assassination shifted the mantle of gloom and offered Confederates an unexpected reprieve in the form of their conquerors’ woe. True too, a lone few fantasized that the assassination would reverse defeat, perhaps “produce anarchy in Yankeedom,” which would then make southern independence possible. But most knew that the assassination could not undo defeat. They knew the difference between their own rejoicings at Lincoln’s death and the rejoicings of the Yankees at Union victory. Theirs was nothing more than a temporary lifting of the shadows, a mere postponement of long-term despair. All knew, too, that the steady pain of humiliation had not transferred to the Union. Rodney Dorman’s moment of triumphal vengeance was just that: a moment. What was more, the war’s casualties were colossal—the numbers for the losing side proportionally even greater than for the victors—and now came the crushing awareness that all those losses had been for nothing. For Confederates, the unthinkable calamity, the heart-sinking, time-stopping, faith-defying cataclysm was defeat.7
Preoccupied as they were, then, many white southerners seemed barely to register the assassination. Confederate officer John Taylor Wood noted the news in his often-detailed diary this way: “Heard of Lincoln’s death. Mobile & Columbus lost” (the Alabama city had fallen to the Union army two days before Booth shot Lincoln, the Georgia city on Easter Sunday). Captain Henry Chambers of the Forty-Ninth North Carolina had recently covered two pages of his journal with morose reflections on the “bitter, bitter humiliation” of surrender, waxing poetic about the rain falling like nature’s tears for the loss of white freedom. Now Chambers squeezed in the words “rumors of Lincoln’s death,” and the next day squeezed in “Lincoln’s assassination confirmed.” Others referenced the news as no more than an irritant. A woman in New Orleans, delayed in trying to procure a fashionable hat for a friend in Natchez, explained that “unfortunately on account of Pres. Lincoln’s death, the stores were closed in the city,” the misfortune being the shuttered shops. A Tennessee farmer expressed exasperation at the interruption to planting corn, what with all the fuss, and a young Confederate in Philadelphia worried about getting home to Baltimore, with all trains stopped while the assassin remained at large. “My troubles never cease,” she complained to her diary. In a letter from Richmond, Emmy Welford likewise filled two pages with descriptions of the fallen capital and the mortifying presence of black soldiers, followed by a single line: “Of course you have heard of the assassination of Lincoln.” Confederates “grieved dreadfully,” she added, “at our defeat.”8
Some made no mention at all. The news had already arrived at Fort Delaware when Confederate soldier James McMichael wrote only about the disgrace of losing the war and his “long, dark and miserable year in prison.” When Mary Bethell, a North Carolina plantati
on mistress, picked up her diary after a two-month hiatus, she recorded surrender, the end of slavery, and the return of her two sons from the army but not a word about the assassination. Even more pointed, when a Confederate woman wrote of the “deplorable events” of April 14 and 15, she described how she had watched from her Virginia porch as Union gunboats landed and Yankees marched through the streets. They had come into her very own yard, and eventually her former slaves had departed with them. For her, those events, not the crime at Ford’s Theatre up in Washington, were the tragedies of April 14 and 15, 1865.9
Unadorned narrations or studious silences could reflect fears of committing one’s true sentiments to paper that might pass through Yankee hands, and no doubt some Confederates censored their reactions. In the Yankee capital, William Owner had entitled his diary “Notes & Incidents of the B.R. War To Subjugate the South And Steal Niggers.” B.R. stood for “Black Republican,” a common epithet for antislavery politicians, and during the war Owner wrote reams of vitriol to match that phrase, including gleefully celebrating the news of William Seward’s carriage accident in early April. When Lincoln was shot, though, Owner recorded nothing beyond the bare facts. More to the point, for many Confederates there was simply no contest: their own defeat and the destruction of slavery easily trumped the death of the Yankee president. When Confederates did write in greater detail about the assassination, many added their trepidations to the record. “I fear it bodes no good for the south,” wrote Marmaduke Shannon, former editor of the Vicksburg Whig, to his daughter. Lucy Fletcher despaired that the man who had once been a “living buffoon” was now a martyr, fretting likewise that his murder “bodes no good to us.” During the war, Mary Chesnut’s plantation-class friends had caricatured Lincoln as a baboon, and even as they continued to do so after the assassination, Chesnut felt afraid. “This foul murder will bring down worse miseries on us,” she confided to her diary, revealing a sense of unease about both the crime and its effects on her circle. A Confederate officer in a Union prison summed up his people’s anxiety most accurately: “The principal cause of our feeling the matter so strongly,” he wrote, “is the question of how it will affect us.”10
In their own way, then, Confederates mourned for Lincoln too. Paradoxically, or perhaps hypocritically, despite their relentless assertions of the president as a tyrant, they felt uneasy precisely because they suspected that Lincoln would ultimately have treated them with lenience, a view that followed logically from the comparative moderation he demonstrated all during the war. “Horrible news!” Margaret Wight wrote in her diary, for without Lincoln, Confederates could expect only “the hardest terms.” A state senator wrote to his sweetheart that Lincoln “would have been more liberal to the Southern people than any one else,” while another agitated Confederate agreed that he “would have shown mercy & pardon.” A North Carolina slave owner spoke for many when he wrote that Lincoln’s death was “to us politically disastrous,” letting slip his genuine regret when he explained that “old Abe with all his apeishness, was a kind hearted man and disposed to treat us generously.” Many Union supporters accordingly understood that when Confederates wept for Lincoln, it was largely because “they know their loss,” because “they could not hope for a more lenient chief ruler,” because they had “lost a friend.”11
Out in public, Confederates in Union-occupied areas often found silence to be the most prudent response, for despite surrender, it felt a lot like the war was still on. On the home front, tensions with the occupying troops were palpable. “We were all right uneasy,” an imprisoned soldier confided to his diary, “lest the Yankees might retaliate on us.” In Vicksburg, where bells tolled and black Union soldiers displayed their mourning badges, the defeated exercised caution. “No guests tonight,” one woman recorded. “We are all going to bed early.” In Raleigh, rumors of reprisal swirled. “How uneasy we were!” wrote Bessie Caine; “frightened to death,” she and her comrades filled their pockets with valuables and slept in their clothes. As for those who dared to mingle outside, they carefully expressed regret at the crime, afraid that nightfall would bring the complete destruction of their city. Likewise in New Orleans, the “Rebs had to keep very quiet,” Union men observed, even if they were “secretly rejoicing.”12
Again, Lincoln’s mourners looked into the faces of those around them, now with rancor and mistrust, searching for what might lie behind mute masks, looking for attitudes that could destroy hopes of a healed nation unified in sorrow. In Charleston, as flags were lowered and guns fired, the white residents stayed aloof, and with good reason, a northern missionary asserted, since “every native is looked at suspiciously.” In Richmond, Union soldiers “looked sharp at those who passed.” In Savannah, the soldiers walked the streets, “looking each man in the face” for traces of “so much as a smile.” In Raleigh, it was a good thing the Confederates stayed “mighty mum,” since “they would have been served the same way”—as the slain Lincoln, that is—”if they had shown any pleasure about it.”13
Silence and absence were harder to read definitively, but it was the matter of black drapery that proved most vexing. As much as Lincoln’s mourners wanted to read the festooned buildings around them as the whole world’s bereavement, they worried that mourning crape could make for a relatively effortless deception of true feelings, and they knew that such displays of fabric did not always indicate genuine loyalty or grief. Even as a Washington correspondent wrote that “a smitten nation wept” from “sea to sea,” the capital’s mourners knew otherwise. Secessionists, one noted, “all draped their houses in crape.” The secesh, another explained, “fling out their mourning through fear.” On the waters, a Confederate gunboat sailed in broad daylight with American flags slung at half-mast until it had passed the federal fleet, whereupon the sailors completely lowered the enemy flag and hoisted their own. In Baltimore, more subtly, some Confederate sympathizers draped their homes with the “scantiest possible amount of mourning,” while conversely in New Orleans, observed Confederate Sarah Morgan, “the more thankful they are for Lincoln’s death, the more profusely the houses are decked with the emblems of woe.” Even those who “hated Lincoln with all their souls” decorated their homes out of fear. As one of Morgan’s neighbors cried, “This vile, vile old crape!”14
Swayed by the dream of post-victory unity, some of Lincoln’s mourners took Confederate laments as sincere. A Baltimore Unionist thought the secessionists around her showed the “strongest feelings of sympathy,” and in Montgomery, Alabama, even though grieving Confederates had been “bitter rebels,” a Union observer willingly embraced their about-face. Skepticism was the order of the day for most mourners, however, with African Americans the least inclined to attribute authentic grief to white southerners (many former slaves, after all, knew personally that their masters had displayed a duplicitous paternalism to the world). Black men in Richmond who saw Confederate officers wearing crape on their uniforms declared themselves the only ones who wore such badges as “truthful expressions.” The best assessment came from the pen of Thomas Morris Chester, the black Richmond journalist. Rebel officers sporting black crape signified either “feigned regret for the assassination” or “sincere sorrow for the death of the Southern Confederacy.” Morris was right: Confederates were grieving, but not for President Lincoln.15
Neither apprehensions about their own future nor fear of Union vengeance stopped Confederates from reveling privately, and Rodney Dorman was hardly alone in gloating over Lincoln’s murder as retribution for conquest. “Pity it hadn’t been done years ago,” one rebel soldier wrote. Another thought Booth had committed the “best act of his life,” adding that the assassin’s cry of “Sic semper tyrannis” should be translated as “Bully for Booth.” When William Ellis, marching home from Lee’s army, got the news from trains passing through South Carolina, he wrote in his diary, “Thus passeth from earth one of the greatest monsters who ever lived.” In Texas, a doctor wrote to his son-in-law, overjoyed at the “killing
of the cold hearted tyrant Lincoln,” hoping the assassin would live to “burst the sculls” of a few more despots (the doctor signed his letter “Thine in Christ”). Fire-eating secessionist and proslavery proselytizer Edmund Ruffin rejoiced privately at home, enjoying a rare interruption to his consuming depression over defeat. While Lincoln’s grieving supporters earnestly copied down the details of the assassination, Ruffin perused the northern papers with a different purpose. Like Dorman, he believed that the Yankee president deserved death for the destruction of slavery, and thus did he find the details of the crime to be “entertaining reading.”16
Gleeful expressions filled the personal writings of Confederate women on the home front too. Secure in their lack of full citizenship, and perhaps construing themselves as powerless in the wake of a war that had in fact empowered them at home, they felt even less constricted in recording sentiments offensive to the victors. The day before she got word of the assassination, seventeen-year-old Emma LeConte had been “sick at heart,” wondering “what fresh misfortune will I have to chronicle tomorrow?” When the news arrived the next day, during a German lesson, LeConte positively cheered. “Hurrah!” she wrote. “Old Abe Lincoln has been assassinated!” The lesson forgotten, everyone around her was “so excited,” talking endlessly about the wonderful surprise. Soon LeConte took off, “trembling and my heart beating with excitement,” mixed with “gratified revenge.” She stopped first at her aunt Josie’s, where everyone shouted, “Isn’t it splendid?” A similar scene of jubilation awaited her at home. As for the “vile Seward,” LeConte was disappointed only that he had escaped death. Best of all was picturing the abrupt end to Union victory celebrations. Stopping for a moment to wonder if it was all a “Yankee lie,” she added, “If it is only true!”17