Thunderclap from a Clear Blue Sky

PETER: We’re back with BackStory. I’m Peter Onuf.

ED: I’m Ed Ayers.

BRIAN: And I’m Brian Balogh. Most weeks on our show, we trace the arc of a single theme through history. But today, we’re zeroing in on one particular event. And that’s the assassination of Abraham Lincoln, 150 years ago this week.

ED: In the days following Lincoln’s death, the country was overcome with grief. Buildings were draped in black crepe. Men, defying social convention, wept openly in the streets. On Easter Sunday, the day after Lincoln died, preachers spoke of him as the last casualty of the Civil War.

MARTHA HODES: Americans were used to mourning, but they had expected people to die in a war. Nobody had expected President Lincoln to be assassinated.

ED: This is Martha Hodes, author of a new book called Mourning Lincoln. Now there’s been a whole lot written over the years that draw on newspaper accounts of the assassination. But by pouring through diaries and letters from that period, Hodes has been able to paint a much more nuanced picture of how Americans all across the country responded to news of this shocking event.

MARTHA HODES: One of the phrases that people wrote over and over again in letters and diaries was a thunderbolt, and sometimes a thunder clap from a clear blue sky. No words could express horror.

ED: So did everyone share in these feelings?

MARTHA HODES: Not at all. And that was one of the most interesting findings of my book. Mourners, even though they knew it wasn’t true, they wrote in their diaries and letters that the whole world was grieving for Lincoln, the whole nation was grieving for Lincoln. Everybody, everywhere, they constantly wrote those words.

First of all, they knew that Confederates weren’t grieving for Lincoln. They also knew that the Copperheads, Lincoln’s Northern antagonists– they were members of the Northern Democratic Party who despised President Lincoln and didn’t want to be fighting a war for slavery, and they made very clear a certain kind of glee when he was assassinated. So even just in their immediate vicinity, there were people who were not mourning the fact that Lincoln had been assassinated, who were in fact quite gleeful.

ED: So would the Copperheads have really, really wanted Lincoln dead? I mean, that just contradicts so much of what we’ve heard about American history. And how do we make sense of that?

MARTHA HODES: Yeah, that’s a really good question. I mean, by the evidence, the answer is yes. The Copperheads were a minority of white Northerners, but they were a significant and vocal minority. So for example, you have an Irish immigrant servant saying to her mistress I’m, quote, “so glad Lincoln is dead.”

ED: That’s pretty unambiguous.

MARTHA HODES: That’s pretty unambiguous, right? So then the mistress gives her interpretation when she’s recounting this scene. And she says, you know, the Irish servants hate Lincoln for emancipating the Negroes. They’re afraid that we will employ them and reduce their wages. So there’s a nice economic analysis within a few sentences in a piece of personal writing.

You also have Union soldiers who are Copperheads. And that I found really fascinating. And their words and actions are recorded by fellow Union soldiers who are mourning and who are infuriated by what these men are doing. And many of these men are brought up on charges of treason as accessories after the fact. So you have–

ED: Wow.

MARTHA HODES: For example, you have a soldier from Maine who says the assassination was, here’s a quote, “too good to believe.” You have people saying they’re happy for the assassination because Lincoln was, here’s a quote, “for the Negro.” Now that’s a Copperhead sentiment, obviously.

They called Lincoln all kinds of things. Ed, I don’t know what I can say on the air here, but I’ll just say it. You can do what you want with it. They called Lincoln a son of a bitch, a damned son of a bitch, and a long slab sided Yankee son of a bitch.

[LAUGHTER] Slab sided Yankee. Don’t ask me what it is.

ED: So could people get away with saying these things? Now you talk about the soldiers could get brought up in trouble, by how about just citizens?

MARTHA HODES: Well, citizens, in fact, could not, for the most part, get away with it, because other mourners were so angry in their grief, that people who made their Copperhead sentiments and their anti-Lincoln sentiments known in public in the North were visited with considerable violence and venom. Sometimes they were warned out of town, sometimes there were actual tarrings and featherings. There were fistfights, there were people beaten to a pulp. It was a pretty violent scene, because Lincoln’s mourners wanted so much to believe that the nation was united in mourning.

Now, the Confederates, they could to some degree write off because they had seceded from the nation, but, gee, the Copperheads? White Northerners, who were living right in their own cities, right next door to them? It was pretty upsetting. So this moment Lincoln’s mourners want to be a moment of national unity and closure is anything but.

ED: And what if it had been? What if he not been assassinated and he’d had a chance to kind of live up to the words of the second inaugural and people would see what it really meant to bind up the nation’s wounds and all that? I mean–

MARTHA HODES: Right.

ED: Was any possibility of peace and hope ruined– or an African American progress ruined by this assassination?

MARTHA HODES: Well, the first thing I should say is that when Lincoln’s assassinated, his mourners struggle with this kind of paradox. So was– they’re asking was Lincoln so lenient that God decided to take him away, because he would have led the country in a way that would have been too merciful to the Confederates, to the former Confederates. Or was Lincoln’s lenience a model that they should be following?

So it’s really kind of a paradox and it’s part of this moment of confusion. But they decide– so these, the more radical black and white mourners decide, well, God probably took Lincoln away because he was too lenient. And then, it’s after that that they fashion him into a radical for kind of strategic purposes. Although, I do think they believe it.

So the question is had Lincoln not been assassinated, what would he have done. We don’t know. Obviously, that’s the most straightforward answer. But we do know– I think it’s fair to say, we do know that he would have listened to African Americans in a way that Andrew Johnson absolutely did not. Johnson totally dismissed the black petitioners who came to the White House and asked for his assistance and asked for political rights. He was completely uninterested and made that clear.

Lincoln would not have done that. Lincoln didn’t do that–

ED: That’s right.

MARTHA HODES: During four years of war, right?

ED: Right.

MARTHA HODES: My guess is he would have disappointed a lot of people at various junctures, just as he did during the Civil War. And then the question is would he have been able to do something that no one else would have been able to do and somehow bypass what came to pass, which was so clearly what I saw in these responses to the assassination, which were also responses to victory and defeat, just incredible antagonism and clashing visions of the future of the nation.

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ED: Martha Hodes is a historian at New York University. She’s the author of her brand new book, Mourning Lincoln. She’s also one of the people who helped Ford’s Theater put together a terrific website featuring the range of reactions to Lincoln’s death. We’ll link to that from our own site, backstoryradio.org.

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