Mourning Lincoln Read Free Page B

ahead, it was to a day when God would ultimately prove their cause right and righteous, or at least to a time when they could wreak vengeance upon their conquerors.
    Lincoln’s mourners, by contrast, wanted to believe that the assassination was part of God’s plan to render the outcome of the four-year conflict more meaningful and long-lasting. They had just experienced the exhilaration of victory, and for African Americans and white abolitionists, that triumph encompassed the remarkable achievement of black freedom. Withthe overthrow of secession and slavery, and now with a martyred chief, the victors looked optimistically toward a reconstructed nation, to God’s graces for themselves, and to divine punishment for their enemies, out of whose ranks had emerged the assassin. Yet catastrophe and crisis can breed contradiction, and in shaping visions for the future, Lincoln’s mourners portrayed their slain leader in two different ways. On the one hand, they pointed to evidence of the president’s moderation and lenience; on the other, they drew attention to hints of his political radicalism. If the lenient Lincoln was an ally of Confederates, the radical Lincoln was an ally to African Americans. Had Lincoln lived, he could hardly have been both, but while President Andrew Johnson recoiled from demands for equal rights, Lincoln’s martyrdom permitted black Americans and their white friends to invoke his name in the quest for post-emancipation equality. Amid fears for the future, they looked to Lincoln’s most admirable actions—and to what little he had said on the subject in his last days—to fortify their impassioned calls for justice.
    MOURNING LINCOLN
BEGINS WITH THE fall of the Confederate capital and the surrender of General Robert E. Lee in early April 1865. The story continues through the execution of four of the conspirators in early July, concluding with a brief look at the postwar decades. Each chapter tells a story, and together the chapters complicate the larger story of the assassination, charting the optimism evinced by the victors-turned-mourners and exposing the formidable challenges to visions of a unified nation, including fissures between black and white mourners.
    The experiences of three protagonists, for whom surviving records are particularly rich, open each chapter and serve as a template for broader investigations. The first two, husband and wife Sarah and Albert Browne, were white abolitionists from Salem, Massachusetts, who despaired mightily at Lincoln’s death. The third, Rodney Dorman, was a Confederate lawyer living in Jacksonville, Florida, who delighted in Lincoln’s murder. The Brownes and Dorman represent two ends of the ideological spectrum and two of the most powerful ideologies of the Civil War era—abolitionism on the one hand and diehard rebeldom on the other—and thus together serve as excellent conduits through which to understand the conflicts that raged on after Union victory and Lincoln’s death. Although the Brownes andDorman never met, at times they seem to be talking directly to each other. Here I introduce them more fully.

    Albert Browne Sr. and Sarah Browne, about 1865.
Browne Family Papers, The Schlesinger Library, Radcliffe Institute, Harvard University
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    The Brownes lived within a passionate ideological universe of abolitionist Protestant ethics. Though not radicals like the followers of William Lloyd Garrison—the man who publicly burned a copy of the U.S. Constitution for its complicity with slavery—they were liberal Christians (first Congregationalists, then Unitarians) who prayed for black freedom and demanded suffrage for black men. Steeped in convictions about the virtues of individual striving in a burgeoning capitalist nation, Sarah and Albert dedicated themselves to the moral superiority of free labor, a central tenet of the new Republican Party that had risen from the ashes of the antebellum Whigs. In this promising view, work was an inherently