by Martha Hodes
Confederate women displayed equal or greater vehemence. Cloe Whittle dreamed of a “second war for independence”—which was, ironically, just what the Civil War had been for African Americans, excluded as they were from the nation’s original revolutionary ideals. Baptist missionary Martha Crawford echoed and inverted Lincoln’s 1858 speech in which he had claimed (paraphrasing Mark 3:25), “A house divided against itself cannot stand.” In a letter home from China in the summer of 1865, Crawford wrote, “The two countries cannot continue as one.” With that conviction, she felt sure her fellow rebels would “await our opportunity and try them again.” Nor would Elizabeth Collier consent to considering the Confederacy part of the United States. “Reconstruction!”: she underlined the word in her journal, capping it off with an indignant exclamation point—”how the very word galls.” God may have decreed defeat for the moment, but her people were “bound to rise again.” (Confederate men used that phrase too. “Sooner than submit to wholesale confiscation,” one wrote, “the south will rise again.”) To those mourning defeat, there was one key distinction between themselves and their former slaves: the slaves had been incited to insurrection by the Yankees, whereas white southerners would rise up to fight for freedom on their own.32
Envisioning a future white uprising, former Confederates rewrote the war’s outcome and meaning to ensure that their cause was not lost. Recall the words of Kate Stone when contemplating the colossal casualties among her people: “The best and bravest of the South sacrificed—and for nothing,” she had written in her diary. “Yes, worse than nothing.” Reckoning with end-of-war desertion, the dwindling will of the soldiers, and war-weariness on the home front, white southerners nevertheless appropriated the sentiments that Robert E. Lee had put forth in his farewell address, swiftly crafting a story of a noble and honorable fight for independence. For Henry Berkeley, a private in Lee’s army who was imprisoned at Fort Delaware, Confederates should always be proud of this part of their history. “We put up a bully fight, if we did go under,” he wrote. Julia Watson, in exile in England, promised that if she ever returned to the United States, she would educate her children to “venerate the memory of those who fell so gloriously in the great strife for liberty.” That was part of future justice too: reshaping the story so that all Confederates on the battlefield, both the survivors and the fallen, had fought gloriously after all.33
WAR, AS THE PRUSSIAN THEORIST Karl von Clausewitz famously stated, is politics by other means. Politics, as the eminent Civil War historian James McPherson has crisply put it, is war by other means. This was to be the battle from the moment of Lee’s surrender: determined African Americans and white radicals who wanted what Frederick Douglass called an “abolition peace” against bitter Confederates who wanted their old world back. God had taken Lincoln away, his more radical mourners now came to believe, in order to alert the victors to the enduring intransigence of their vanquished enemies, most especially the rebel leaders and their elite followers, whom Union supporters had always held responsible for the war. Now these mourners wanted land, education, and voting rights for African Americans—not as vengeance for the assassination but rather to avenge secession and war. By ensuring the fruits of freedom, they wanted also to avenge the cause of the war: slavery, which they understood as well to be the root cause of Lincoln’s assassination. The assassination had opened the eyes of these radicals, both black and white, to the necessity for revolutionary policies following Confederate defeat on the battlefield, because defeated Confederates who held political power could still win the war off the battlefield.34
Recall that African Americans had issued warnings of an unvanquished rebel spirit even before Lincoln was killed. This was Frederick Douglass’s “fiercer and intenser hate than ever before.” This was the call of the New York Anglo-African that “with the cessation of the war our anxieties begin.” Soon after surrender, visions of subdued Confederates obediently rejoining the Union had shattered, as soldiers and other Union supporters down south witnessed the insubordination all around them. The murder of President Lincoln, coming fast on the heels of surrender, had not subdued the rebels in the least. And that made strikingly clear to Lincoln’s mourners the absence of Confederate contrition in the face of defeat.35
Here again was God’s providence. Frederick Douglass had always hoped the rebels would be punished for slavery as well as for treason. Speaking extemporaneously in Rochester’s City Hall on the day Lincoln died, Douglass had surmised that the assassination was God’s way of creating the circumstances necessary to provoke the harsh treatment that the enemy had all along deserved, God’s way of warning the Union not to readmit into the nation the “spirit which gave birth to Booth.” As the white Unitarian minister James Freeman Clarke told his congregants on Easter Sunday, “As Abraham Lincoln saved us, while living, from the open hostility and deadly blows of the slaveholders and secessionists, so, in dying, he may have saved us from their audacious craft, and their poisonous policy.” On he went: “The revenge we shall take for the murder of Lincoln,” he said, would be to deny power to the leaders of the rebellion, and to make voters of loyal southern African Americans. Revenge. Clarke had uttered that word, but he did not mean a mere settling of scores or a simple exchange of Lincoln’s life for Confederate disempowerment. His language could not have been clearer. Without the assassination, the Union “might not have insisted on these conditions”—black suffrage and the disfranchisement of slaveholders, he meant. Thus had it been “necessary for Lincoln to die,” Clarke explained, “to bring the nation to the point of mandating them.” Here was the meaning of God’s mysterious design.36
Politicians put forward the same message, bringing the argument about Lincoln’s lenience full circle. God had permitted the assassination because Lincoln was not the right man to reconstruct the nation. Lincoln was not the right man to reconstruct the nation because he would have treated the vanquished rebels with too much kindness. Lincoln’s assassination at the hand of John Wilkes Booth, as inspired by the rebels and permitted by God, signaled to the victors that their fallen enemies had never intended to rejoin the post–Civil War nation willingly and had never intended willingly to participate in the destruction of slavery. On the day Lincoln died, the radical Republican George Julian wrote in his diary that the assassination eradicated “every vestige of humanitarian weakness” so that “justice shall be done and the righteous ends of the war made sure.” Without the signal of Lincoln’s death, he meant, Union treatment of the rebels would have been too forgiving. On the Sunday after Easter, the abolitionist Wendell Phillips told his listeners that land and ballots for loyal black men was the “lesson God teaches us in the blood of Lincoln,” not as payback for the assassination, he made clear, but rather “to teach the nation in unmistakable terms, the terrible foe with which it has to deal.” If Lincoln’s mourners hoped to avenge slavery, secession, and the war that resulted, then the best plan was to ensure the political impotence of slaveholders, coupled with the political power of former slaves.37
Lincoln’s mourners understood that slavery—and Lincoln’s antislavery statements in particular—had caused both secession and the assassination. Now, in the political struggles that followed Union victory, the abolitionists among them wanted to complete the circle by seeking rights for African Americans and the abridgment of rights for Confederate leaders and elites. Lincoln needed to be “stricken down by the slaveholder’s bullet,” reflected Bronson Alcott, “to rouse the people to vigilance” in policing the actions of their now-vanquished enemies. On the brink of conciliation with Confederates, John Greenleaf Whittier wrote, the nation “needed one more terrible lesson.” That lesson had come in the assassination, which would prevent the victors from treating the rebels too generously. Even a moderate like Republican Francis Lieber wanted complete exile, and for the same reason. “Drive the fiends from our soil,” he advised, until the Confederates “offer themselves, re-revolutionized, back to the Union, freed from Slavery and assa
ssins,” those last two transgressions one and the same.38
For Lincoln’s mourners, his assassination symbolized the unwillingness of the defeated to give in and give up. The enduring recalcitrance of Confederates forced mourners to transform the meaning of Lincoln’s wartime moderation and diplomacy. No longer a model for postwar political strategy, the slain chief’s kindly disposition now became, without question, the explanation for God’s purpose in permitting his death at war’s end. Then, paradoxically, with Lincoln gone, his mourners could cast their martyred leader as a political radical. Mourning for Lincoln, African Americans north and south, along with their white allies, wanted to ensure justice with the weapons of freedom, equality, and political power. Mourning the end of slavery and their failed nation, enraged Confederates displayed the greater thirst for vengeance, and Lincoln’s successor took their side. In the end, revenge and its fruits came more readily, not to Lincoln’s mourners, but to his enemies.
INTERLUDE
Peace
AS THE BATTLEFIELD FIGHTING CAME to an end, visions of a nation at peace tempered the grief of Lincoln’s mourners yet could hardly assuage all anxieties. African Americans welcomed the end of the war, but some also stood at the ready. If the U.S. government favored the rights of Confederates over the rights of his people, asserted a soldier in the Third U.S. Colored Troops, stationed near Jacksonville, “We will fight it out on this line until to all be distributed an equal share.” Other mourners expressed sorrow that President Lincoln would never witness the fruits of his victory. “It looks as though peace was near us,” wrote a white Union soldier in Florida ten days after Lincoln died, “and what a happy people we should be if we only had our beloved President to help inaugurate its reign.” Still others found relief and good cheer even while mourning. On the southern home front, even in the face of white violence, northern teachers and missionaries working among the freedpeople detected “renewed hope and energy” at the “prospect of Peace.” In camp, white soldiers especially rejoiced. With the “smoke of Battle” gone, one man soothed himself with thoughts of the war’s end, “so long dreamed of.” Another, who had written of grief “too sad for utterance” now recorded his emotions at the dawning of peace: joy “too deep for utterance.” White people on the home front rejoiced too. A Pennsylvania farmer lamented that “poor old Abraham is gone,” grateful nonetheless that the war was over, and a woman in Boston was happy just to be able to “talk about other things than wars and fightings.” All spring and into the summer, relief mixed with lingering sorrow and newfound anxieties.1
Pardoning the Confederates who came to the London consulate, Assistant Secretary Benjamin Moran wrote in his diary, “Peace is what all want.” Moran’s superior, Charles Francis Adams, felt the same way, except that one thing troubled him: were it not for Lincoln’s assassination, Adams mused to one of his sons, “we might have been on the road to an era of good feelings.” Both men were wrong, for the defeated did not want peace, and it was not the assassination alone—far from it—that had ushered in ill will between victor and vanquished. Rather, the bitterness of the defeated was immeasurably compounded by their refusal to accept black freedom. In North Carolina, Elizabeth Collier knew her people could never embrace peace, she wrote in her diary, with the “desecrators of our homes & the murderers of our Fathers, Brothers & Sons—Never.” In South Carolina, Emma LeConte agreed with Rodney Dorman. “I used to dream about peace—to pray for it,” she wrote in her journal, “but this is worse than war,” and when she contemplated the future, she could write only, “Oh God! it is too horrible.”2
Lincoln’s last reflections on peace had come in his White House speech on April 11. Confederate surrender, he said then, offered “hope of a righteous and speedy peace whose joyous expression can not be restrained.” But the two adjectives Lincoln invoked, righteous and speedy, would not sit easily together. For peace to be righteous, it had to reach beyond the formal laying down of arms to encompass true freedom and equality.3
Lincoln had also spoken of peace in his second inaugural on March 4, 1865. “Fondly do we hope—fervently do we pray,” he told his listeners that day, “that this mighty scourge of war may speedily pass away.” Yet Lincoln had followed those words with the warning that God intended the war to continue until all the blood shed by slaves at the hands of their masters would be repaid by blood on the battlefield. Lincoln closed with the words that mourners constantly invoked after the assassination, words they etched onto signs and carried with them to funeral processions: “with malice toward none” and “with charity for all.” When freedpeople in Washington honored Lincoln later that summer with a banner bearing those already famous phrases, they must have interpreted them to apply less to the defeated Confederates and more to themselves: as a command from Lincoln to treat African Americans with the humanity they deserved after two centuries of slavery and four years of patriotism and sacrifice. If that’s what Lincoln meant, in his characteristic subtlety and diplomacy, then the idea of malice toward none and charity for all fit perfectly with the near-last lines of his address that day: to “strive on to finish the work we are in” meant to achieve “a just, and a lasting peace.” In order to endure, the peace that followed the Civil War would have to be infused with justice toward those once enslaved, and now free.4
Summer 1865 and Beyond
SARAH BROWNE FOLLOWED THE TRIAL of Booth’s conspirators from its start in mid-May to the verdicts rendered in early July. She felt no special sympathy for the lone woman among them, Mary Surratt, whom she described in her diary as “defiant & unrelenting.” Instead, Sarah thought execution “too merciful,” death “too lenient for the Authors of these great Crimes,” as she wrote to Albert, adding, “Let them be exposed to the burning sun and heavy dews, all unsheltered.” Thinking of the terrible conditions of the most notorious Confederate prison, Sarah wanted the guilty “unclothed—unprotected and fed after the manner in which the sufferers at Andersonville lived and died.” Only then would there be “righteous retribution.” After that, God alone would “deal with the wicked.”1
As Sarah’s thoughts lingered over the assassination, Albert Browne was nearing the end of his southern sojourn. In the late summer and early fall of 1865, he toured the Union army’s Department of the South, along the way recording his impressions in letters to the abolitionist Wendell Phillips. In South Carolina, Georgia, and Florida, Albert heard war-weary white southerners express resentment toward Confederate leaders, with some professing to accept the end of slavery. But they seemed “in a sort of stupor,” Albert wrote, with loyalty emanating “from the lips only, not from the heart.” In any case, most were angry and bitter, and it proved difficult to find any “genuine Union men” anywhere among the white population.2
Chaos reigned before Albert’s eyes, and the freedpeople felt it most keenly. They were hungry and lacked sufficient clothing (he saw women with only “a bunch of rags around their waists”), and worst of all African Americans found themselves “at the mercy of their former Masters,” he wrote home, a circumstance of “extreme cruelty.” Albert was investigating the case of one paroled rebel soldier who had ambushed a freedman with birdshot, striking him fifty-seven times before running him over with a horse. Albert also had in his possession a cowhide whip with which the wife of a former Confederate senator had lashed a black girl. Some people told him they didn’t even know if they were slave or free.3
Clearly, Albert Browne told his friend Wendell Phillips, white southerners must not be permitted to rule themselves, and a “strong military government should be upon this people for years to come.” He underlined every single word of that imperative. When it came to white-on-black violence, though, Albert saw something else too. In Savannah and Charleston, white Union soldiers sometimes collaborated with “rebel rowdies,” ganging up on freedpeople. Union officers might also side with former Confederates (one such man was “a pig headed martinet with no sympathy for the negro”) as they beat up black men and sexually as
saulted black women. Any self-defense on the part of the victims would be matched with yet harsher white violence. Albert was currently intervening in the case of a boy slapped hard in the face by a Union officer for speaking up to contradict the account of a lying white aggressor. Although Union authorities talked about justice and equality, Albert could tell that some of them had “no more love for the negro than the devil has for holy water.” Indeed, Union authorities had briefly arrested Albert himself for calling out the officer who slapped the boy. Albert found too that some of the officers themselves initiated violence against the men of the Fifty-Fourth Massachusetts, then suppressed the incidents. He could think of only one solution. No white soldiers at all should be part of the Union army forces occupying the conquered Confederacy. Only black soldiers should be permitted, and their white officers must be abolitionists fully committed to racial equality.4
But Albert was also tired, and the future looked bleak, despite Union victory. His old friend Henry Ward Beecher, with whom he had so movingly clasped hands when news of Lincoln’s assassination reached them at Fort Sumter, had already expressed his support for President Johnson. In October, Albert Browne would close up his Treasury Department office and head home to Massachusetts.5