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Authors: Martha Hodes
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old plantations as free-labor experiments would now depart, prompting their former masters to return. Others wondered if, with Lincoln gone, the whole Union government was dead too. Like those outside the gates of the White House on Saturday morning, adults and children in the South articulated the terrible question: Would they be slaves again? 37
Free African Americans up north meanwhile felt the loss of hope they had built so high: hope built on the escape of slaves to Union lines, on the Emancipation Proclamation affirming those actions, and on Confederate surrender affirming it decisively. Writing to the black-owned
Christian Recorder
, correspondents relayed the mood around them. In Chicago, “We felt as if all our hopes were lost.” In Indiana, “The hope of our people is again stricken down.” White mourners expressed fear as well, though theirs was more amorphous, less concrete: “visions of disaster and desolation, & national ruin,” in the words of a Pennsylvania man. Or as Anna Ferris wrote from Delaware, “We seem groping in thick blackness & look at each other in fear & dread.” Others wrote of a future filled with evil and anarchy. But for Lincoln’s black mourners alone was shock accompanied by the most raw anxiety. 38
In the days afterward, it felt to Sarah Browne that everyone shared her sense of horror, grief, and outrage. The crime, she wrote, “froze the blood of the nation, which now flows in one current.” Sarah didn’t count the Confederates—those “aiders and abettors of treason”—as part of that single current. Nor did she count those in her own New England city who defied the solemnity. She’d heard of a dissenter thrown off a Salem streetcar, another “compelled to salute the Flag,” people even tarred and feathered for their refusal to mourn for Lincoln. Without hesitation, Sarah endorsed these violent actions against the enemies in her midst. “All this is right,” she wrote to Albert. 39
Sarah Browne wrote in her diary and letters about universal shock, butacross the Confederacy and across the Union, the reaction to Lincoln’s assassination was not all horrific disbelief, excitement and gloom, mourning drapery and badges, fear and dread. For some, Lincoln’s murder was an occasion for celebration. The Yankee president murdered! It was almost too good to be true.
INTERLUDE
Men Weeping
PLENTY OF MEN KEPT THEIR feelings in check, conserving their words or remaining silent in grief and anger. Extreme circumstances, however, could snap codes of conduct, and the end of the Civil War was just such an occasion: when Garland White and his fellow black soldiers entered the fallen city Richmond, White found himself “overcome with tears.” The higher a man’s social status, the more constricted he felt in displaying emotion, but now it barely mattered. For Union men, black and white, rich and poor, victory had been worthy of weeping with joy, and news of the assassination likewise brought tears of sorrow. Just as Confederate men had wept openly in the shock and bitterness of defeat, it was now the turn of Union men to break the rules of masculine deportment. 1
That grown men cried—a staple of news reports and memoirs—is proven in the leaves of private journals. Some, like George Templeton Strong, swallowed hard, as his eyes kept filling, and the corners of his mouth kept twitching, “in spite of all I could do,” he wrote in his diary. Walking through the Broadway throngs in New York, one woman saw that her husband could “scarcely keep back the tears.” Others didn’t bother to try. As black soldiers in camp in Pennsylvania listened to a sermon on Lincoln’s death, many wept freely, the same as on city and village streets, where white menwere “sobbing and crying bitterly.” In Philadelphia, weeping men grasped hands, while in Saco, Maine, men talked in groups, “wiping their eyes.” At a church service for Americans in Paris, the minister got through the
Free African Americans up north meanwhile felt the loss of hope they had built so high: hope built on the escape of slaves to Union lines, on the Emancipation Proclamation affirming those actions, and on Confederate surrender affirming it decisively. Writing to the black-owned
Christian Recorder
, correspondents relayed the mood around them. In Chicago, “We felt as if all our hopes were lost.” In Indiana, “The hope of our people is again stricken down.” White mourners expressed fear as well, though theirs was more amorphous, less concrete: “visions of disaster and desolation, & national ruin,” in the words of a Pennsylvania man. Or as Anna Ferris wrote from Delaware, “We seem groping in thick blackness & look at each other in fear & dread.” Others wrote of a future filled with evil and anarchy. But for Lincoln’s black mourners alone was shock accompanied by the most raw anxiety. 38
In the days afterward, it felt to Sarah Browne that everyone shared her sense of horror, grief, and outrage. The crime, she wrote, “froze the blood of the nation, which now flows in one current.” Sarah didn’t count the Confederates—those “aiders and abettors of treason”—as part of that single current. Nor did she count those in her own New England city who defied the solemnity. She’d heard of a dissenter thrown off a Salem streetcar, another “compelled to salute the Flag,” people even tarred and feathered for their refusal to mourn for Lincoln. Without hesitation, Sarah endorsed these violent actions against the enemies in her midst. “All this is right,” she wrote to Albert. 39
Sarah Browne wrote in her diary and letters about universal shock, butacross the Confederacy and across the Union, the reaction to Lincoln’s assassination was not all horrific disbelief, excitement and gloom, mourning drapery and badges, fear and dread. For some, Lincoln’s murder was an occasion for celebration. The Yankee president murdered! It was almost too good to be true.
INTERLUDE
Men Weeping
PLENTY OF MEN KEPT THEIR feelings in check, conserving their words or remaining silent in grief and anger. Extreme circumstances, however, could snap codes of conduct, and the end of the Civil War was just such an occasion: when Garland White and his fellow black soldiers entered the fallen city Richmond, White found himself “overcome with tears.” The higher a man’s social status, the more constricted he felt in displaying emotion, but now it barely mattered. For Union men, black and white, rich and poor, victory had been worthy of weeping with joy, and news of the assassination likewise brought tears of sorrow. Just as Confederate men had wept openly in the shock and bitterness of defeat, it was now the turn of Union men to break the rules of masculine deportment. 1
That grown men cried—a staple of news reports and memoirs—is proven in the leaves of private journals. Some, like George Templeton Strong, swallowed hard, as his eyes kept filling, and the corners of his mouth kept twitching, “in spite of all I could do,” he wrote in his diary. Walking through the Broadway throngs in New York, one woman saw that her husband could “scarcely keep back the tears.” Others didn’t bother to try. As black soldiers in camp in Pennsylvania listened to a sermon on Lincoln’s death, many wept freely, the same as on city and village streets, where white menwere “sobbing and crying bitterly.” In Philadelphia, weeping men grasped hands, while in Saco, Maine, men talked in groups, “wiping their eyes.” At a church service for Americans in Paris, the minister got through the
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