- Mourning Lincoln by Martha Hodes
In Mourning Lincoln, Martha Hodes immerses readers in the national trauma of President Abraham Lincoln’s assassination and its tumultuous aftermath. Prodigiously researched, Hodes’s riveting account focuses on everyday Americans’ personal reactions to the president’s shocking murder. Through her vivid close reading of how this shattering event was perceived, Hodes depicts an unsettled and deeply divided nation emerging from a grim civil war that would soon bleed into Reconstruction.
Moved by her experience of learning about the assassination of President John F. Kennedy as a child and witnessing the September 11, 2001, attack on the World Trade Center as an adult, Hodes investigates the raw responses to Lincoln’s assassination in the spring of 1865. Delving into diaries, letters, government records, missionary reports, scrapbooks, and African American newspapers, Hodes uncovers a cacophony of voices that complicate the comforting story of universal grief that has dominated public and historical interpretations of the country’s reaction to the president’s murder. Hodes is adept at incorporating material culture into her analysis and at fully integrating the voices of African Americans (such as the devastating accusation with which one former slave woman confronted her former mistress: “‘You are the slayer of my deliverer’” [p. 130]).
To illuminate the stunning range of reactions to Lincoln’s assassination, Hodes relies on three protagonists to open each chapter: white abolitionists Sarah and Albert Browne, a married couple from Salem, Massachusetts; and Rodney Dorman, a white lawyer and die-hard Confederate from Jacksonville, Florida. The Brownes exemplified the grief and anger felt by many Unionists over Lincoln’s murder, and they, like many of their contemporaries, struggled to reconcile his untimely death with their Christian beliefs. Dorman, however, was thrilled by Lincoln’s demise, never questioned that slavery was God-ordained, and expressed such unmitigated bitterness and racism that he seems more like a stock fictional character than a real person; Hodes’s exasperation with him is palpable and easily shared.
Hodes emphasizes that both Lincoln’s mourners and his detractors recognized that they were living through a momentous time. Unionists and Confederates experienced elation and sorrow—for opposite reasons—when Lincoln’s assassination came hard on the heels of General Robert E. Lee’s surrender. To console themselves, Lincoln’s mourners framed their grief as universal, even though many Americans did not feel the same grief, including Copperheads and some soldiers in the Union army. For white mourners, everyday concerns provided a distraction that reinvigorated their optimism for a world in which they had been victorious in war. African American mourners faced the future with much greater trepidation and created a vision of Lincoln as a more radical proponent of freedom and justice than he had ever been. Recalcitrant Confederates sought refuge in the past and openly rejected a world without black subjugation. These overarching themes of Mourning Lincoln are punctuated by such compelling insights as the fact that servants were often the first to learn about and spread the news of the president’s death, and the reality that Lincoln’s funeral train was a logistical [End Page 445] nightmare. The eleven crowded and rushed local viewings of his remains en route to Springfield, Illinois, left many participants unsatisfied.
Mourning Lincoln begins and ends with reproductions of popular Currier and Ives prints depicting the president’s assassination and death, which were key shapers of the public memory of this American tragedy. Hodes’s views on how the story of Lincoln’s death coalesced—how did the many voices become one?—would have been a welcome final chapter. Regardless, this is a fascinating book that recreates the chaos of April 1865 and sets the stage for the violent dissension of Reconstruction.