Mourning Lincoln by Martha Hodes Read Free Book Online Page B

freedpeople’s schools, already closed for victory celebrations, now remained shuttered for the rituals of mourning. In Nashville, Unionists changed the city from its “
gala
appearance” into a cheerless scene, cannons now booming in sorrow instead of jubilation. Yankee soldiers there had been strutting in a parade when the news came “like a crash,” prompting the musicians to switch from quicksteps to death marches. In New Bern, North Carolina, Mary Ann Starkey looked around her contraband camp, filled with fellow former slaves. Had she written only a few days earlier, she confessed in a dictated letter, “I should only have rejoiced over the
glorious
news”; among the war refugees she assisted as head of the Colored Women’s Union Relief Association, Starkey now saw “little heart left.” In Charleston, the men of the black Fifty-Fifth Massachusetts had just enjoyed the company of Henry Ward Beecher and William Lloyd Garrison. Soon they lowered flags, fired guns,tolled bells, and draped headquarters, all their actions “feeble expressions of feeling, for so great a loss.” It was, wrote a northern teacher in Virginia, the “
most Joyous
, yet saddest month our country has ever known.” 22
    A group of two hundred prominent New Yorkers had chartered a steamer to take them to the flag-raising at Fort Sumter and as yet knew nothing as they sailed toward Fortress Monroe, Virginia, one of the stops on their post-celebration tour of Civil War sites. Early on Tuesday, April 18, the passengers were breakfasting when a pilot boat with a lowered flag came into view.
    “What’s the news?” someone called out.
    “President Lincoln is dead!” came the response, prompting the diners to drop their silverware. Had the president “at last worn himself out,” they wondered? Soon other passing ships conveyed the facts, and the New York, Baltimore, and Richmond papers waiting at Fortress Monroe contained the details. The New York revelers canceled their itinerary and headed straight home. 23
    Up north, with fireworks and victory parades barely over, the outpourings of joy abruptly ceased and reversed course, some victory parties quite literally interrupted. In Chicago, happy shouts and the noise of tin horns subsided into solemnity. In a Maine town, the bells kept ringing, one moment “chiming merrily,” the next “tolling a requiem.” It was “more dreadful by the contrast,” wrote an Ohio man; “all the darker for the previous light,” wrote a woman in Massachusetts. All in the same day, Caroline White recorded in her diary, “the sun rose upon a nation jubilant with victory” and set “upon one plunged in deepest sorrow.” Over and over, people tried to articulate the nature of the change. Edward Everett Hale could not believe he was “in the same world, and in the same week.” A Connecticut soldier in Virginia thought back to his regiment’s victory observances, only to realize that “while we were having such a fine time here, the President was being murdered.” How sad the timing was too for President Lincoln himself, another soldier wrote to his parents, “to be shot just as he was about to see the war closed,” when peace was just about to “crown his honest and earnest efforts.” 24
    If passing on the news was one way to make sense of the senseless, another was to make a record of the deed. Michael Shiner, a former slave and laborer in the Washington navy yard, noted in his journal a set of detailsthat a great many would write down: the day, date, and place of the shooting, and the date of Lincoln’s death. Connecting himself personally to the event, Shiner added that the Lincolns had visited the navy yard on the very day of the assassination. The white Washington minister James Ward embellished his own record with underlinings and exclamation points. “
We have the saddest tidings this morning that ever shocked our Country
,” he wrote. Then, like Shiner, he recorded the main fact: