Mourning Lincoln Read Free

policemen owing to “fears and concerns” for the president.
    THESE EXPERIENCES, ENCOMPASSING ONLY A fraction of the range of reactions to transformative events, led me to wonder what stories we might find if we listened for immediate personal responses to Lincoln’s assassination: of northerners and southerners, Yankees and Confederates, African Americans and whites, soldiers and civilians, men and women, rich and poor, the well known and the unknown. What would we find by reading extensively through the diaries people kept and the letters they wrote during the momentous hours, days, weeks, and months that followed the crime at Ford’s Theatre? Here was a key moment of confusion and conflict that has been left out of the story or glossed over with generalities. The record of personal responses overlaps with public pronouncements, but the two are not the same, as individual writings reveal experiences thatcannot be recovered elsewhere. Drawing on evidence from hundreds of letters, diaries, and other sources that disclose personal responses,
Mourning Lincoln
delves into the moment of Lincoln’s assassination to uncover a profusion of real-time sentiments, creating a multivocal narrative history that takes us far beyond the headlines to tell the story, and illuminate its meanings, on a human scale.
    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.