Mourning Lincoln Read Free Page A

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, andYankees 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