by Martha Hodes
38. stricken: Odell Shepard, ed., The Journals of Bronson Alcott (Boston: Little, Brown, 1938), 372 (Apr. 19, 1865, entry); needed: John Greenleaf Whittier, “The Question of To-Day,” Liberator, May 26, 1865; drive: Francis Lieber to Henry W. Halleck, New York, Apr. 15, 1865, box 28, Lieber Papers, HL.
Interlude: Peace
1. fight: “From the Regiments,” letter from Richard H. Black, 3rd U.S.C.T., Fernandina, Fla., New York Anglo-African, May 27, 1865; looks: Peter Kitts to “Mrs. Case,” Fort Jefferson, Fla., Apr. 25, 1865, Samuel F. Case Papers, Duke; renewed: Robert Harris to George Whipple, near Norfolk, Va., Apr. 29, 1865, #H1-7036, reel 209, AMA; smoke: Norman Leslie Snow to “Dear Friend,” Camp near Summit Point, Va., Apr. 18, 1865, Snow Letters, NYSL; sad, deep: Rufus Mead Jr. diary, Apr. 17, 19, 1865, Mead Papers, LC; poor: John Mowry to Bob Flinigan and Hamilton Mowry, Newburg, Pa., Apr. 25, 1865, Humer Family Correspondence, HL; talk: “Rebecca” to Jane Wigglesworth Grew, Boston, May 24, 1865, Grew Correspondence, MHS.
2. peace: Benjamin Moran diary, May 22, 1865, Moran Papers, LC; might: Charles Francis Adams to Charles Francis Adams Jr., London, May 19, 1865, Letters Received and Other Loose Papers, Adams Papers, MHS; desecrators: Elizabeth Collier diary, Apr. 25, 1865, ts., SHC; dream: Emma F. LeConte diary, Apr. 20, 1865, reel 22, SHC-AWD-South.
3. hope: Abraham Lincoln, “Last Public Address,” Apr. 11, 1865, CWL, 8:399.
4. fondly, blood, malice, just: Abraham Lincoln, “Second Inaugural Address,” Mar. 4, 1865, CWL, 8:333; banner: “Washington Correspondence,” Christian Recorder, July 15, 1865. I have found no other interpretation of “malice toward none” and “charity for all” pertaining to African Americans rather than Confederates.
Summer 1865 and Beyond
1. Sarah Browne diary, May 11, 1865 (defiant); Sarah Browne to Albert Browne, Salem, Mass., May 14, 1865, one of two letters of this date (merciful), both BFP.
2. Albert Browne to Wendell Phillips, Hilton Head Island, S.C., Sept. 17, 1865 (stupor); Albert Browne to Wendell Phillips, Hilton Head Island, S.C., July 16, 1865 (genuine), both #328, Phillips Papers, HLH.
3. Albert Browne to Wendell Phillips, Savannah River, Ga., Sept. 8, 1865 (rags, mercy, free); Albert Browne to Wendell Phillips, Hilton Head Island, S.C., Sept. 17, 1865 (case, whip), both #328, Phillips Papers, HLH.
4. Albert Browne to Wendell Phillips, Savannah River, Ga., Sept. 8, 1865 (strong); Albert Browne to Wendell Phillips, Hilton Head Island, S.C., July 16, 1865 (rowdies, martinet, no more, 54th, solution); Albert Browne to Wendell Phillips, Hilton Head Island, S.C., Sept. 17, 1865 (boy), all #328, Phillips Papers, HLH.
Frederick Douglass had earlier noted, “You will need the black man there as a watchman and patrol; and you may need him as a soldier”; see “Emancipation, Racism, and the Work before Us: An Address Delivered in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania on 4 December 1863,” FDP, ser. 1, 3:605.
5. Albert Browne to Wendell Phillips, Hilton Head Island, S.C., Sept. 17, 1865, #328, Phillips Papers, HLH.
6. Dorman diary, June 6 (trial, monsters, thousand), May 12 (bastard), July 24 (sycophantic, monkey, booby, knave, certainly, heroism), June 18 (martyrs), 1865.
7. Dorman diary, June 3 (complete), July 9 (thunderbolt), Oct. 7 (leave), Nov. 6 (whites, negroes), 1865.
8. Dorman diary, Dec. 22, 1865.
desolate: Otis Keene diary, Jan. 16, 1866, Department of Special Collections and Area Studies, George A. Smathers Libraries, University of Florida, available at ufdc.ufl.edu/UF00076636/00004/3j; demonstration, hearing: Gerald Schwartz, ed., A Woman Doctor’s Civil War: Esther Hill Hawks’ Diary (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1984), 234, 243 (Dec. 25, 1865, Jan. 14, 1866, entries).
9. songs: Irwin Silber, ed., Songs of the Civil War (New York: Bonanza Books, 1960), 131–33; happy: Edgar Dinsmore to Carrie Drayton, Saint Andrews Parish, S.C., May 29, 1865, Dinsmore Papers, Duke; Sundays: David F. Cushman to Caroline D. Cushman, Martinsburg, Va., Apr. 15, 1865, #250, octavo vol. 1, Civil War Collection, AAS; next: John N. Ferguson diary, Apr. 18, 1865, LC; joy: Alfred Baker Smith diary, Apr. 29, 1865, NYHS.
10. principles: Frederick Douglass, “What to the Slave Is the Fourth of July?: An Address Delivered in Rochester, New York, on 5 July 1852,” FDP, ser. 1, 2:367, 371.
11. about: Abraham Lincoln, “Speech in Independence Hall, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania,” Feb. 22, 1861, CWL, 4:240.
12. first, banner: “Washington Correspondence,” Christian Recorder, July 15, 1865; Day: Celebration by the Colored People’s Educational Monument Association in Memory of Abraham Lincoln, on the Fourth of July, 1865 (Washington, D.C.: McGill and Withernow, 1865), 10, 18, 11, 16.
13. glowing: “The Freedmen’s Celebration,” Christian Recorder, July 29, 1865; glorious: James H. Payne, “Letter from Wilmington,” Wilmington, N.C., July 4, 1865, Christian Recorder, published July 15, 1865; horrid: Emma F. LeConte diary, July 5, 1865, reel 22, SHC-AWD-South; miserable: Mrs. William Gaston Delony to Maria Osbourne Delony, Athens, Ga., July 4, 1865, J. W. Gunnison Papers, HL; Yankees: Samuel Pickens diary, July 4, 1865, in Voices from Company D: Diaries by the Greensboro Guards, Fifth Alabama Infantry Regiment, Army of Northern Virginia, ed. G. Ward Hubbs (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2003), 390; ludicrous: James K. Newton to sister, ca. July 5, 1865, in A Wisconsin Boy in Dixie: Civil War Letters of James K. Newton, ed. Stephen E. Ambrose (1961; reprint, Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1989), 164; shadow: Anna M. Ferris diary, July 4, 1865, Ferris Family Papers, FHL; seems: Alonzo A. Carr to unknown, fragment, after July 4, 1865, Cynthia Anthonsen Foster Papers, SL.
14. north: see, e.g., Anna Cabot Lowell diary, July 4, 1865, MHS; Davis: Sophia E. Perry diary, July 4, 1865, CP; blessed: Elizabeth Rogers Mason Cabot diary, July 4, 1865, MHS; Brown, Harper, Phillips: “Anti-Slavery Celebration at Framingham, July 4th, 1865,” Liberator, July 14, 1865.
15. great: James Thomas Ward diary, May 30, 1865, Ward Papers, LC; evidence: Marian Hooper to Mary Louisa Shaw, Boston, May 28, 1865, in The Letters of Mrs. Henry Adams, 1865–1883, ed. Ward Thoron (Boston: Little, Brown, 1936), 10 (referring to Powell by his alias last name, “Paine”); if this: John Glenn diary, July 6, 1865, Glenn Papers, MDHS.
16. Surratt: Annie G. Dudley Davis diary, June 4, 1865, HL (innocent); Benjamin Brown French, Witness to the Young Republic: A Yankee’s Journal, 1828–1870, ed. Donald B. Cole and John J. McDonough (Hanover, N.H.: University Press of New England, 1989), 483 (July 8, 1865, entry) (guilty); Anna Cabot Lowell diary, July 8, 1865, MHS (uncertain); tragedy: William Owner diary, July 8, 1865, LC; not worth: “K.W.R.” to Andrew Johnson, Cincinnati, July 8, 1865, PAJ, 8:375; sanguinary: Anna Cabot Lowell diary, July 8, 1865, MHS.
17. haste, remember: Frederick Douglass, “Our Martyred President: An Address Delivered in Rochester, New York, on 15 April 1865,” FDP, ser. 1, 4:78, 79; no longer: Laura Towne to unknown, Saint Helena Island, S.C., Oct. 15, 1865, in Letters and Diary of Laura M. Towne: Written from the Sea Islands of South Carolina, 1862–1884, ed. Rupert Sargent Holland (1912; reprint, New York: Negro Universities Press, 1969), 167; peace, infamous: Anna M. Ferris diary, July 14, 1865, Sept. 3, 1866 (second entry of this date), Ferris Family Papers, FHL.
18. do not: C. Vann Woodward, ed., Mary Chesnut’s Civil War (1981; reprint, New Haven: Yale University Press, 1993), 834 (July 26, 1865, entry); contemplate: Amanda (Edmonds) Chappelear diary, Sept. 6, 1865, Chappelear Papers, ts., ser. D, part 3, reel 8, VHS-SWF; melancholy: Sarah Lois Wadley diary, Sept. 26, 1865, Wadley Papers, ser. A, part 3, reel 6, SHC-SWF; citizen: John Steele Henderson diary, July 23, 1865, ts., Henderson Papers, ser. J, part 13, reel 25, SHC-RSP.
19. fighting: Zillah Brandon diary, July 5, 1865, reel 13, ADAH-AWD-South.
20. talking: William Fitzhugh Carter to Hill Carter, Petersburg, Va., Aug. 12, 1865, Shirley Plantation Collection, ser. K, reel 10, CWF-RSP.
21. old father: “Memphis Riots and Massacres,” 39th Cong., 1st sess., House of Representatives, Report No. 101, July 25, 1866, p. 7.
22. Sarah Browne diary, Apr. 1 (odious), 7 (Kuklux), 1868, BFP; pardons: Andrew Johnson, “Fourth Amnesty Proclamation,” Dec. 25, 1868, in The Papers of Andrew Johnson, vol. 15: September 1868–April 1869, ed. Paul H. Bergeron (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1998), 332; Klan: Testimony Taken by the Joint Select Committee to Inquire into the Condition of Affairs in the Late Insurrectionary States: Miscellaneous and Florida (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1872); Dorman: Dorman diary, vol. 5, [ca. 1866], p. 5 (outrages); vol. 7, [ca. 1875–76], p. 311 (new order); vol. 6, [ca. 1873], p. 4 (go away).
23. Dorman diary, vol. 7, Sept. 10–21 (Centennial), 28 (what), Oct. 7 (return), 1876.
24. Dorman diary, vol. 7, Dec. [n.d.], 1877, pp. 435, 451 (lost, imbecility); Sarah Browne diary, Nov. 13 (fear), Dec. 5, 1876 (peace), Feb. 17, 1877 (Hayes), BFP.
25. Albert Browne to Sarah Browne, New York, Feb. 17 (vilest), 24 (showing), 1877, BFP.
26. second: Cloe (Whittle) Greene diary, Apr. 19, 1865, reel 4, WM-AWD-South; renew: Emma F. LeConte diary, “Thursday” [May 18], 1865, reel 22, SHC-AWD-South; Jacksonville: Thomas Wentworth Higginson, “Some War Scenes Revisited,” Atlantic Monthly 42 (July 1878), 1, 3; Brenda Stevenson, ed., The Journals of Charlotte Forten Grimké (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988), 515–37 (November 1885–January 1889 entries).
27. Dorman diary, vol. 8, May 30, 1883, p. 173 (warfare, worse), and [ca. March 1885], p. 279 (slaves); U.S. federal census, Jacksonville, Duval County, Fla., 1800; Jacksonville City Directories, 1876–77 (p. 76), 1878–79 (p. 99), 1882 (p. 79), 1884 (p. 94), 1886 (p. 108), 1887 (p. 87); 1885 Florida state census.
28. stunned, two, time: Martha E. Foster Crawford diary, Aug. 22, June 17, 1865, ser. H, part 2, reel 21, Duke-SWF; negro, cruel: Lucy Muse (Walton) Fletcher diary, Apr. 25, 1865, and note at back of diary, Fletcher Papers, Duke; giving: Ida B. Wells, “Southern Horrors: Lynch Law in All Its Phases” (1892), in Southern Horrors and Other Writings: The Anti-Lynching Campaign of Ida B. Wells, 1892–1900, ed. Jacqueline Jones Royster (Boston: Bedford, 1997), 60; prayed, sincere: John Johnston, “Personal Reminiscence of the Civil War, 1861–1865,” diary transcriptions, Apr. 28, 1865, with 1905 annotation, Johnston Papers, SHC.
29. Sarah Browne diary, Apr. 9, 1866 (God; this was the anniversary of the family’s departure for the south), June 2, 1869 (agony), June 2, 1870 (closing), June 2, 1881 (agony); Albert Browne to “Dear Ones,” Brooklyn, N.Y., June 2, 1870 (hour). See also Sarah Browne diary, July 9, 1875; July 9, 1876; June 2, July 9, 1877; July 2, July 9, 1878; July 9, 1879; June 2, 1880, all BFP.
30. Sarah Browne diary, Feb. 12, 1878 (Lincoln), Nov. 3, 1880 (anxieties), July 9 (40th), Sept. 19 (sad), 27 (never), 1881, BFP.
31. Sarah Browne diary, Nov. 15, 1884, BFP.
32. ominous: Frederick Douglass, “Abraham Lincoln, a Speech,” late December 1865, Douglass Papers, LC, available at hdl.loc.gov/loc.mss/mfd.22015. Douglass’s wording of Lincoln’s second inaugural is slightly different from that preserved in CWL, 8:333.
33. lived: Frederick Douglass, “Abraham Lincoln, a Speech,” late December 1865, Douglass Papers, LC, available at hdl.loc.gov/loc.mss/mfd.22015. For Douglass’s 1866 meeting with Andrew Johnson, see “The Claims of Our Race: An Interview with President Andrew Johnson in Washington, D.C., on 7 February 1866,” FDP, ser. 1, 4:96–106. That month, Douglass said that “had Mr. Lincoln been living to-day, he would have stood with those who stand foremost, and gone with those who go farthest, in the cause of equal and universal suffrage”; see “The Assassination and Its Lessons: An Address Delivered in Washington, D.C., on 13 February 1866,” FDP, ser. 1, 4:111.
34. colored: Douglass, “Abraham Lincoln, a Speech,” late December 1865, Douglass Papers, available at LC, hdl.loc.gov/loc.mss/mfd.22015; thought back: George P. Rawick, ed., The American Slave: A Composite Autobiography, 18 vols.; supplement ser. 1, 12 vols.; supplement ser. 2, 10 vols. (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood, 1972–79): wouldn’t miss: vol. 7:114; can’t describe: suppl. 2, vol. 4, part 3:1271; fears: suppl. 1, vol. 8, part 3:1345; vowing: suppl. 1, vol. 1:257.
35. Lincoln lived: Rawick, American Slave: hurt: suppl. 1, vol. 1:257; lots: vol. 16, part 4:72; easier: suppl. 2, vol. 5, part 4:1874; work: vol. 7:44; murdered: vol. 8:113.
Note on Method
1. index: Amos A. Lawrence diary, vol. 8, MHS; cross-outs, rewordings: Anna Cabot Lowell diaries, MHS, vols. 195–97.
2. heard, funeral: William M. Beauchamp diary, Apr. 15, 19, 1865, Beauchamp Papers, NYSL.
On sentimentality in Civil War–era writings, Drew Glipin Faust writes, “The predominant response to the unexpected carnage was in fact a resolute sentimentality that verged at times on pathos”; see This Republic of Suffering: Death and the American Civil War (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2008), 194. James M. McPherson writes, “What seems like bathos or platitudes to us were real pathos and convictions for them”; see What They Fought For, 1861–1865 (1994; reprint, New York: Doubleday, 1995), 13.
3. Flora M. Gardner to Ernest Cushing Richardson, Evanston, Ill., Oct. 27, 1936, administrative file, Orloff M. Dorman Papers, LC; the Library of Congress commented that “the work has doubtful value. … It is worth preserving here but belongs far down on the lower shelf” (Thomas P. Martin to “Dr. Jameson,” Washington, D.C., July 20, 1937). “The Ruins of Jacksonville, (Fla.),” National Intelligencer, Apr. 27, 1863. Because the collection was named for Orloff Dorman, scholars have reasonably taken him to be the diarist; see Richard A. Martin and Daniel L. Schafer, Jacksonville’s Ordeal by Fire: A Civil War History (Jacksonville: Florida Publishing, 1984), and Schafer, Thunder on the River: The Civil War in Northeast Florida (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2010). For Dorman’s claim, see “Statement and Schedule of Losses” and “Schedule of property of Rodney Dorman at Jacksonville Florida stolen & destroyed & burned by the enemy in March 1863,” July 3, 1863, Rodney Dorman, Citizens File, Confederate Papers Relating to Citizens or Business Firms, RG109-NARA, available at Fold3.com.
Essay on Sources
The secondary sources on the Civil War era, Lincoln’s assassination, and related topics are voluminous. The sources here represent a sampling of recent and influential works.
Antebellum United States
For Republican Party ideology, see the classic and enduring Eric Foner, Free Soil, Free Labor, Free Men: The Ideology of the Republican Party before the Civil War (1970; reprint, New York: Oxford University Press, 1995). On abolitionism, see Manisha Sinha, The Slave’s Cause: Abolition and the Origins of American Democracy (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2015); David Brion Davis, The Problem of Slavery in the Age of Emancipation (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2014); Andrew Delbanco, The Abolitionist Imagination (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2012), including responses by John Stauffer, Manisha Sinha, Darryl Pinckney, and Wilfred M. McClay; Stephen Kantrowitz, More Than Freedom: Fighting for Black Citizenship in a White Republic, 1829–1889 (New York: Penguin, 2012); Seymour Drescher, Abolition: A History of Slavery and Antislavery (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2009); Julie Roy Jeffrey, Abolitionists Remember: Antislavery Autobiographies and the Unfinished Work of Emancipation (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2008); Steven Mintz and John Stauffer, eds., The Problem of Evil: Slavery, Freedom, and the Ambiguities of American Reform (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2007); Manisha Sinha, “Coming of Age: The Historiography of Black Abolitionism,” in Prophets of Protest: Reconsidering the History of American Abolitionism, ed. Timothy Patrick McCarthy and John Stauffer (New York: New Press, 2006), 23–38; John Stauffer, The Black Hearts of Men: Radical Abolitionists and the Transformation of Race (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2002); Victor B. Howard, Religion and the Radical Republican Movement, 1860–1870 (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1990); James Brewer Stewart, Holy Warriors: The Abolitionists and American Slavery (1976; reprint, New York: Hill and Wang, 1997); James M. McPherson, The Abolitionist Legacy: From Reconstruction to the NAACP (1975; reprint, Prin
ceton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1995); and James M. McPherson, The Struggle for Equality: Abolitionists and the Negro in the Civil War and Reconstruction (1964; reprint, Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1992). On the song “John Brown’s Body,” see John Stauffer and Benjamin Soskis, The Battle Hymn of the Republic: A Biography of the Song That Marches On (New York: Oxford University Press, 2013); Franny Nudelman, John Brown’s Body: Slavery, Violence, and the Culture of War (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004); and Boyd B. Stutler, “John Brown’s Body,” Civil War History 4 (1958), 251–60. On proslavery ideology, see Lacy K. Ford, Deliver Us from Evil: The Slavery Question in the Old South (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009); and Manisha Sinha, The Counter-Revolution of Slavery: Politics and Ideology in Antebellum South Carolina (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2000). On the idea of slaves as incapable of rebellion, see Michel-Rolph Trouillot, “An Unthinkable History,” in Trouillot, Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History (Boston: Beacon Press, 1995), 70–107. On the toll of slavery, see Jim Downs, Sick from Freedom: African-American Illness and Suffering during the Civil War and Reconstruction (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012); Kidada E. Williams, They Left Great Marks on Me: African American Testimonies of Racial Violence from Emancipation to World War I (New York: New York University Press, 2012); and Nell Irvin Painter, “Soul Murder and Slavery: Toward a Fully Loaded Cost Accounting,” in U.S. History as Women’s History: New Feminist Essays, ed. Linda K. Kerber, Alice Kessler-Harris, and Kathryn Kish Sklar (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1995), 15–39. On dissemblance, see James C. Scott, Domination and the Arts of Resistance: Hidden Transcripts (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1990); and Darlene Clark Hine, “Rape and the Inner Lives of Black Women in the Middle West,” Signs 14 (1989), 912–20. On the coming of the Civil War, see James Oakes, The Scorpion’s Sting: Antislavery and the Coming of the Civil War (New York: W. W. Norton, 2014); Michael E. Woods, “What Twenty-First-Century Historians Have Said about the Causes of Disunion: A Civil War Sesquicentennial Review of the Recent Literature,” Journal of American History 99 (2012), 415–39; Adam Goodheart, 1861: The Civil War Awakening (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2011); Elizabeth R. Varon, Disunion! The Coming of the American Civil War, 1789–1859 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2008); and Charles B. Dew, Apostles of Disunion: Southern Secession Commissioners and the Causes of the Civil War (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 2001).