Mourning Lincoln by Martha Hodes Read Free Book Online Page A

as he wondered if it could possibly be true. The news was later confirmed and corrected via ships from Malta and Italy, and in a batch of mail from Marseille that included letters from home, a copy of the official telegram from Edwin Stanton, and the April 15 editions of the New York and Boston newspapers. Hale stayed up most of the night and into the next day, poring over the “tale of horror,” making himself believe what everyone at home had known for weeks. 18
    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. It was “too horrible to be true” and “too terrible to believe.” It was simply impossible to “realize”—that was a favored nineteenth-century locution, meaning
to make real
, and over and over again people invoked that word; “I can scarcely realize it.” “I cannot realize it.” “But how can we realize it?” People could not and would not believe it. “I cannot have it so,” one woman wrote; “it must not be so.” 19
    Disbelief was most intense for African Americans, whose stake in the war’s outcome and promise was so tangible. Freedpeople in the tiny settlement of Frogmore on Saint Helena Island off the South Carolina coast refused to mourn until they were certain. As the black minister there explained, “They could not think that was the truth, and they would wait and see.” For the soldiers of the Fifty-Fourth Massachusetts, the news was “too overwhelming, too lamentable, too distressing” to comprehend. Many of the men of the Twenty-Fifth U.S. Colored Troops likewise “refused to believe the report” until absolutely confirmed. On Bienville Street in New Orleans, Elizabeth Clark felt very much “agitated,” while her neighbor Mary Jones felt “very much worried” as she sat outside her door so as not to miss any further information. Mattie Jackson, an escaped slave from Missouri, called the assassination “an electric shock to my soul.” Again, the reading of countenances commenced the process of turning the incredible into the credible, of validating feelings and expression of those feelings. In Louisville, “distress was visible in every colored person’s face.” 20
    For some, it took a long time to concede. Like Confederates who felt time distorted and reality displaced when they learned of defeat and surrender, Lincoln’s mourners thought it must be a lie or, as freedpeople in a Virginia classroom put it, “a secesh lie.” In Baltimore, Edward Greble, a white man, was riding an omnibus when he heard someone say that the president had been assassinated, which he quickly dismissed as “a canard.” Back at his hotel, the proprietor had just been to the telegraph office, and Greble watched as the other guests remained so incredulous as to think it a joke. To Boston merchant Charles French, it all seemed like a sensational getup. It felt like a “dreadful dream,” people said, a “horrible dream” or a play on a stage. To Elizabeth Agassiz, who got the news while traveling in Brazil, it felt like “the last scene in a five act tragedy,” then “a gigantic street rumor,” then a bad dream. “Stunning,” the women’s rights reformer Susan B. Anthony wrote from Leavenworth, Kansas. Walt Whitman would soon capture these feelings in a tribute poem to the president, casting Lincoln as a ship captain, writing, “It is some dream that on the deck, / You’ve fallen cold and dead.” A lie or a joke, a sham or mere gossip, a nightmare or a show: that was how it felt. A deception, an illusion, a performance—the words people invoked conveyed all manner of the unreal. Today we might say,
I felt like I was in a movie
. 21
    Magnifying the shock was the crime’s timing—Sarah Browne’s “frantic joy” turned into “frantic grief.” In Norfolk, the