Where Were Douglass and Melville on April 15, 1865?

Where Were Douglass and Melville on April 15, 1865? SCOTT PEEPLES College of Charleston M y title refers to the question that people often ask each other in a discussion of historic events: Where were you when you heard about . . . ? Anticipated events—Neil Armstrong’s first steps on the moon, the unscheduled but not unexpected resignation of Richard Nixon— sometimes evoke the “where were you” question, but shocking, violent acts— the attack on Pearl Harbor, JFK’s assassination, the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001—raise the question in a way that demands a fuller explanation, one less likely to be nostalgic, more likely to reveal the personal in the political response, and vice versa. Without question, Abraham Lincoln’s assassination, which occurred on April 14 but became known to the public the following day, was such an event, described at the time in terms similar to those of more recent time-stopping national tragedies. Ralph Waldo Emerson, speaking in Concord on April 19, remarked that “[i]n this country, on Saturday, every one was struck dumb, and saw at first only deep below deep, as he meditated on the ghastly blow.”1 Henry Lyman Morehouse, a minister in East Saginaw, Michigan, described the reaction to the news from “over the wires”: “Business stopped; hearts throbbed almost audibly; knots of men congregated on the streets; telegraph offices were thronged by anxious faces; and all were incredulous that such a stupendous, nefarious transaction had occurred in America. . . . America mourns as she never mourned before.”2 My question, then, is how did Herman Melville and Frederick Douglass, two of the most perceptive and thoughtful civilian observers of the war and its causes, react to this event that, even then, nearly everyone recognized as epochal, the event C
2008 The Authors Journal compilation C
2008 The Melville Society and Wiley Periodicals, Inc. 1 Ralph Waldo Emerson, “A Plain Man of the People,” in Building the Myth: Selected Speeches Memorializing Abraham Lincoln, ed. Waldo W. Braden (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1990), 30. 2 As qtd. in David E. Chesebrough, “No Sorrow like Our Sorrow”: Northern Protestant Ministers and the Assassination of Lincoln (Kent, OH, and London: Kent State University Press, 1994), 3. L E V I A T H A N A J O U R N A L O F M E L V I L L E S T U D I E S 37 S C O T T P E E P L E S that would redefine the war and divide Part One of American history from Part Two?3 The response of the nation to Lincoln’s assassination was complex because “the nation” at that moment included former slave owners, freedmen, Southern whites who had not owned slaves, “Copperheads,” abolitionists, white Northerners who had rioted against the draft, men who had burned Lincoln in effigy upon his election, and others who had supported him all along or had come around to him in the course of the war. But throughout the North, Lincoln’s death had a unifying effect; it was hard to separate the intense mourning from the sanctification—even deification—of Lincoln and the calls for vengeance against the Confederacy. On April 15, slogans such as “Our Father” and “Our Savior” adorned portraits of Lincoln displayed outside people’s homes.4 Other public displays proclaimed him the Redeemer: “A martyr to the cause of man / His blood is freedom’s eucharist / And in the world’s great hero list, / His name shall lead the van.”5 In a sermon delivered the week after the assassination, Henry Ward Beecher likened Lincoln to Moses, who saw but could not enter the promised land of a post-war, post-slavery America; Lincoln “wrestled ceaselessly, through four black and dreadful purgatorial years, wherein God was cleansing the sins of His people as by fire.”6 The fact that Lincoln was shot on Good Friday enforced such providential interpretations of the assassination, many of which were delivered by Northern ministers on what came to be known as “Black Easter,” April 16. “Heaven rejoices this Easter morning in the resurrection of our lost leader,” the Melville family’s pastor...