Mourning Lincoln by Martha Hodes Read Free Book Online

away, as people turned earnestly to the countenances around them, not simply to affirm the news but also for guidance about how to respond to such an unprecedented event.
    To authenticate the news further, people had to leave the house in order to engage with others. Out on Boston’s State Street, Caroline Dall saw the bare heads of men buried in newspapers and realized that they had rushed outside too quickly even to put on their hats.
    Anna Lowell ordered her driver to take her through the streets of Boston in her horse and buggy, from where she “could see people looking at me & at each other.”
    “Is it true what they say, that our president—” called out a man in a passing wagon.
    “Yes—murdered!” Lowell called back.
    “Oh dear, oh dear!” the man moaned, driving on.
    Boston businessmen headed to the Merchants’ Reading Room, where members gathered spontaneously to pray together, while women accepted guests at home and paid visits to neighbors. 15
    On that Saturday morning, news of the crime reached small towns in northern New England and the Mid-Atlantic, as well as Chicago, Kansas, and Salt Lake City. In Sacramento, the first mentions arrived at nine in the morning, local time. That afternoon, outside the telegraph office in a northernCalifornia mining town, a crowd gathered to listen to a public reading of the telegram, “word by word” as it arrived. By the next day, smaller cities in Ohio, Wisconsin, and Minnesota knew. Where no telegraph lines ran, people wouldn’t know until newspapers arrived by mail—Santa Fe and the remoter parts of Utah Territory didn’t hear until May. Speed of transmission to the South varied, what with rail lines cut by the Union army and newspaper offices abandoned by fleeing Confederates. Some small towns received telegrams that same Saturday. New Orleans got the news four days later, via newspaper. More than a week after the assassination, some Texans were just hearing rumors of the fall of Richmond, and Iowa soldiers in Alabama got word at the end of April. For some freedpeople, both adults and children, the first announcement came in the classroom, from Yankee teachers or school superintendents. Confederates might see the occupiers’ flags flying at half-mast. Verification then came in letters and newspapers arriving on steamships from the North. 16
    On the water, word passed from ship to ship, as U.S. vessels ordered other boats to lower their flags. Across the oceans, steamships arrived with bundles of telegrams and newspapers. On the day Lincoln died, William Gould, the Union navy runaway slave, was in Cádiz, Spain, just learning of the fall of Richmond. The timing was the same in London; as Lincoln’s funeral was under way in Washington, the legation there was crowded with elated Americans congratulating themselves on Richmond’s fall, and a week after Lincoln’s death, they had just begun to celebrate Lee’s surrender. In Jamaica, news of victory and the assassination arrived simultaneously at the end of April, obliging residents to “rejoice with trembling.” Gould and his fellow sailors were en route to Lisbon in early May when a U.S. vessel brought the “awful tidings,” he wrote in his diary. The news reached Sierra Leone and China in mid-June, Australia in late June. 17
    For Lincoln supporters who heard of the assassination long after, the feelings and rituals were the same. Charles Hale, U.S. consul in Egypt, had been enjoying himself in the diplomats’ stand at early May horse races in Alexandria, cooling off with ices, savoring bonbons, and accepting felicitations over Union victory, when a woman called out, “Come here, Mr. Hale, here’s some news for you.” She had just gotten word from Constantinople, where the telegraph connected with London, and as this particular dispatch had it, Lincoln had been shot in Richmond. Shaken, and thinking the interruption“thoughtlessly abrupt,” Hale returned to his seat, “very much overcome,” even