Review

Martha Hodes. Mourning Lincoln. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2015. Pp. 408.

 
As Abraham Lincoln traveled toward Washington, D.C., in 1861 to assume the presidency and face unprecedented problems and enemies, the president-elect stopped in Philadelphia, where he gave an emotional speech at Independence Hall, where the Declaration of Independence was adopted in 1776:

In a sense Lincoln got his wish, for the United States was saved so that all Americans, including African Americans, should have an “equal chance,” or at the very least some chance, at a decent life. But four years after his Philadelphia speech, when the president was assassinated by John Wilkes Booth for suggesting that some black men should have the right to vote, thereby implying that the United States should begin making a more concerted attempt to fulfill the ideals of equality laid out in the Declaration, it was the first shot in a new conflict. “The blast of the derringer at Ford’s Theatre on the night of April 14, 1865,” concludes Martha Hodes in her magnificent book Mourning Lincoln, “was the first volley of the war that came after Appomattox—a war on black freedom and equality. That war still ebbs and flows in American history, a century and a half after the assassination of President Abraham Lincoln” (274).

Ever since that ghastly day one hundred fifty-five years ago, most Americans have lamented Lincoln’s death and wondered whether the tragedies of the postwar Reconstruction might have been avoided had he lived. Of course, how Americans interpreted these tragedies has changed considerably since 1865, as the country moved from believing white people suffered because Reconstruction went too far, too fast, in attempting to advance the freedom and equality of the ex-slave to seeing that black people, in W. E. B. Du Bois’s words, eventually moved “back toward slavery” because federal attempts to enlarge and ensure their rights did not go far enough. It is in this context that Hodes situates Lincoln’s death. Like the events of September 11, 2001, an attack that she, as a professor of history at New York University, experienced first-hand, Lincoln’s murder was a turning point in American history.

Historians, to be sure, have been affected by such debates, but for a long time they were preoccupied with other matters, ranging from whether Booth acted alone or was financed by the Confederate government and whether he was crazy when he fired the fatal shot to whether government officials such as Secretary of War Edwin Stanton conspired to have the president murdered so that a harsher reconstruction policy could be imposed on the defeated Confederacy.[2]

Mourning Lincoln, however, is concerned with problems different from and more substantive than the feverish imaginings of conspiracy theorists. It is a deeply researched and beautifully rendered account of how Americans reacted to Lincoln’s death and what their responses tell us not only about Lincoln but also about how the president’s contemporaries grappled with the meaning of the entire war. As such, and because of Hodes’s skilled effort, Mourning Lincoln is one of the best books on the assassination ever published and one of the finest works ever written about Abraham Lincoln and the Civil War.

Utilizing an enormous number of wide-ranging contemporary accounts of the assassination, Mourning Lincoln chronicles the aftermath of Lincoln’s murder while never losing sight of the long-term impact of the president’s death. Hodes traces how Americans reacted to the president’s assassination by using the responses of abolitionists Sarah and Albert Browne of Salem, Massachusetts, and Confederate attorney Rodney Dorman of Jacksonville, Florida, as microcosms of the larger experience of Americans in the tumultuous year following Lincoln’s death. “For Sarah and Albert Browne and for Rodney Dorman—just as for so many others—thinking about, articulating, and documenting their responses to the assassination of President Abraham Lincoln became part of working out an understanding of the war” (21).

Hodes begins her narrative by setting the context of Lincoln’s murder, one that must be acknowledged for any serious understanding of why the first assassination of an American president resonated so strongly with Americans. Ecstatic over the fall of Richmond and Lee’s surrender to Grant, Sarah Browne was less delighted with Lincoln’s speech from the White House on April 11, an address she thought too timid in its approach to reconstruction. Still, her disappointment did not erase her joy, or that of millions of Americans, over the victory of the United States in the war. Confederates, in stark contrast, were inconsolable: “Nature weeps over Liberty’s death,” said one North Carolina soldier without, it seems, any sense of irony (32). Hodes aptly summarizes the country’s mood on the morning of April 14, 1865, the fourth anniversary of Fort Sumter’s surrender: “Union supporters spoke the language of gratitude and jubilation, white southerners the language of incredulity and misery” (41).

Interspersed throughout Mourning Lincoln are some wonderful photographs, and short “interludes” provide smooth transitions from one chapter to another. Thus “Rumors,” which tells of the early communications about Lincoln’s death and the fervent wishes that they are false, moves the reader to “Shock,” a chapter that explores how Americans reacted to finding out the rumors of assassination were indeed true. Unsurprisingly, the Brownes—like many northerners, especially those who were in Ford’s Theatre when Booth leapt onto the stage—were horrified at the president’s death. “O horror, horror, horror! Tongue nor heart / Cannot conceive nor name thee!” wrote Benjamin Brown French in quoting a scene from Macbeth, ironically, Lincoln’s favorite play (52). Most northerners, Hodes writes, were indeed shocked. “Astonished. Astounded. Startled. Stupefied. Thunderstruck. A calamity. A catastrophe. A dagger to the heart. A thunderbolt. A thunderclap from a clear blue sky. The feelings that had engulfed the Confederates less than a week earlier now overtook their conquerors” (56).

But not all Americans shared such sentiments. Although most southerners were startled at news of the assassination, whites across the region found themselves overjoyed, if not emboldened, by the murder. Hodes shows that these emotions only temporarily overshadowed the brutal reality of Confederate defeat. In fact, “many white southerners seemed barely to register the assassination,” coming as it did on the heels of Richmond’s fall and Lee’s surrender, not to mention their worries over what the future portended with Lincoln dead and their dastardly enemy Andrew Johnson as president (73). “This foul murder will bring down worse miseries on us,” said the diarist Mary Chesnut, and a few radical northerners would have been happy to supply those miseries (75). Still, mulling their predicament did not preclude rejoicing over Lincoln’s death in private or public, although there could be costs to undisguised cheerfulness in both the North and the South if Union troops were nearby.

Like their ideological brethren below the Mason-Dixon Line, Lincoln’s most vociferous northern opponents of the war, the Copperheads, found themselves pleased by the murder but chose to remain relatively mute. Nevertheless, some expressed their glee, not a little of which was tinged with racial anxieties. Hodes notes, for example, one soldier’s joy over the president’s death “because Lincoln was ‘for the Negro,’” while another felt Johnson should “put the niggers where they ought to be” (84). Downhearted African Americans, of course, disagreed sharply with such sentiments even as they had a vastly more optimistic and generous vision for the future of freedom and equality within the new American nation. “It may be,” surmised Frederick Douglass, “that the blood of our beloved martyred President will be the salvation of our country” (105).

As Easter Sunday dawned, a mere twenty-four hours after Lincoln’s death, Christian ministers across the United States had to decide what to say about the murder in their sermons. Of course, there was deep sadness in the churches, but it was the job of the clergy to explain to their congregations that this all meant something, and here, Hodes argues, they were talking about not just Lincoln’s demise but also the previous four years. “Lincoln’s death had to be the design of God,” Hodes queries, “but how could it be? How could a good God be the source of such a terrible deed? The bereaved came to church with faith and doubt. Some came to wrestle with the meaning of the war and death, maybe even the meaning of life itself” (103). More than anything else, Hodes correctly asserts that no one had an adequate explanation for the assassination, so the key was “remaining steadfast in one’s faith” or having optimistic trust in the future (105).

But what about those who had little or no faith in God? Perhaps Hodes could have explored more thoroughly how Americans skeptical of religious certitude—as Lincoln had been—grappled with news of the assassination. During the war, Sarah and Albert Browne lost their daughter Nellie to typhoid fever, a misfortune that, for Albert at least, signified a diminished faith in God: “I am past all that” (191). Such disconsolation conveys how millions of Americans may have felt as the war drew to a close and they faced the future without the companionship of at least one deeply loved member of their family: “personal sorrows both accompanied and competed with grief for the slain president” (193).

From this point Hodes analyzes the importance of Lincoln’s funeral train journey, an almost pharaonic event. She speculates that nearly a million Americans watched the cortege traverse the American landscape as they reflected on the events of the past four years: “just as they read every detail of the ceremonies in the newspapers, just as they planned and participated in local observances, now again mourners were eager to make themselves part of the rituals that might answer the restless quest for meaning of Lincoln’s assassination. At the very least, they wanted to bid a formal good-bye and turn toward the future” (149). Hodes is undoubtedly correct here, but these events might have prematurely convinced northerners that the war was over rather than shifting into a different phase entirely. Diehard Confederates, such as Rodney Dorman, held tight to their faith in white supremacy coupled with a deep-seated hatred for the U.S. soldiers (many of them African American) who would occupy their land to protect the freedmen’s rights, if not their very lives. The assassination of and funeral for Abraham Lincoln possibly obscured the enormous difficulties that lay ahead for the country he had helped preserve.

As Lincoln was buried in his hometown of Springfield, Illinois, Americans were forced to decide what kind of country had been created out of “the fiery trial” of the recent war and what the status of the freedmen in that new nation would be. “In what new skin will the old snake come forth?” asked Frederick Douglass (218). The new skin, of course, was a guerilla war launched by the white population across the states of the former Confederacy against the idea that African Americans had any claim at all to equality in the new American nation. Some white southerners believed that Lincoln’s death, aided, in a sense, by President Andrew Johnson’s indifference to their plight, had created the conditions that allowed for “black suffrage and the disfranchisement of slaveholders” (251). Tragically, as Hodes points out, “revenge and its fruits came more readily, not to Lincoln’s mourners, but to his enemies” (253).

What precisely is new in Hodes’s narrative? To be sure, Americans, if not people all over the world, are relatively familiar with this material, but Hodes’s thorough research, stirring prose, and aptly placed quotations relate the era and its events in a new way. For example, she drily notes, fire-eater Edmund Ruffin, who killed himself after the war, “seceded in the most radical way possible” from the world he had unwittingly helped create (185). In addition, continuation of the story beyond Lincoln’s funeral ingeniously allows readers to reflect with Lincoln’s contemporaries on the meaning of the war in the midst of their “everyday life” (168). It is a virtuoso performance, one not to be missed by any serious student of Lincoln, the American Civil War, or what it means to struggle with some of the most serious questions of humanity, not least the meaning of the principles of equality and freedom laid out in the Declaration of Independence. Perhaps we can speculate that because the president did not surrender those ideals, which gave “hope to the world for all future time” and promised “that in due time the weights should be lifted from the shoulders of all men, and that all should have an equal chance,” we can surmise that when he died, this melancholy figure can be said in some sense to have died a happy man.

1. “Speech in Independence Hall, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania,” February 22, 1861, Roy P. Basler et al., eds., The Collected Works of Abraham Lincoln, 9 vols. (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1953), 4: 240.

2. The literature on the assassination is vast. For the various conspiracies surrounding Lincoln’s murder, see William Hanchett, The Lincoln Murder Conspiracies (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1983). For the idea that Stanton had Lincoln killed, see Otto Eisenschiml, Why Was Lincoln Murdered? (Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1937). The refutation of such speculation can be found not only in Hanchett’s work but also in George S. Bryan, The Great American Myth: The True Story of Lincoln’s Murder (New York: Carrick and Evans, 1940). See also Thomas Reed Turner, Beware the People Weeping: Public Opinion and the Assassination of Abraham Lincoln (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1982), and Edward Steers Jr., Blood on the Moon: The Assassination of Abraham Lincoln (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2001). For a recent popular history that does not dismiss theories that Stanton was involved in Lincoln’s assassination, see Bill O’Reilly and Martin Dugard, Killing Lincoln: The Shocking Assassination That Changed America Forever (New York: Henry Holt, 2011), 244–45. On John Wilkes Booth, see Terry Alford, Fortune’s Fool: The Life of John Wilkes Booth (New York: Oxford University Press, 2015).