vault to the stage. How he cried out, “Sic semper tyrannis!”—the motto of the state of Virginia—as he leapt, or maybe he said, “The South is avenged.” How the president was conveyed across the street to the Petersen boardinghouse. How another conspirator attacked the Sewards. That the president expired at twenty-two minutes past seven o’clock the next morning.
In his diary on April 15, 1865, Bostonian Francis Brooks drew an upside-down American flag at half-mast, decorated with a mourning ribbon, flying over a grave with a skull and crossbones signaling the assassination’s danger to the nation.
Francis Brooks Journal, April 15, 1865. Courtesy of the Massachusetts Historical Society
.
Every detail recorded and absorbed made it less a hallucinated nightmare or a theatrical drama, less a lie or a hoax. After eleven-year-old Gren-ville Norcross wrote in his diary that President Lincoln was “shot through the head by J. W. Booth,” the boy used up four pages transcribing every word of a newspaper article. Anna Lowell selected particular facts: that Lincoln laughed at the play yet looked sad; that Mrs. Lincoln tried to rouse her husband after Booth pulled the trigger. A woman in New Hampshiredescribed the bullet’s entrance, “three inches back of the left ear.” A man in Washington recorded that Lincoln had entered Ford’s Theatre “from the
dress circle
through a narrow corridor some three feet wide and eight or ten long” and that the room at Petersen’s was “about 9 feet by 15, with two windows and three doors.” In the two days following, Charles French wrote down all the specifics, from Lincoln’s decision to attend the theater that night to a description of the suit the president would wear inside his casket. Every fact made it more possible that it had truly come to pass. 28
Just as the victors had imagined their exultation as universal less than a week earlier, as mourners they now envisioned their grief the same way. If recording the facts helped them cope with their shock, so too did observing and preserving the public scenes of reaction. Many noted not only the desolation etched onto every face, but also the pervasive mood of despondency, thereby fitting their own despair into something larger: a whole village, an entire city. Just as Sarah Browne imagined the feelings of her husband down south, mourners everywhere imagined—and newspapers confirmed—that their own feelings were multiplied across the nation and around the globe. White people who lived or worked near black people tended to record those emotions, like Gideon Welles in Washington who documented the grief of the capital’s large wartime African American population. Some who didn’t know any black people but who associated Lincoln with emancipation conjured those feelings, like the northern New England woman who envisioned “how the poor Freedmen will mourn over the dreadful calamity so suddenly fallen upon us!” 29
Newspaper reports, from which mourners gathered so much of their information, also helped the bereaved put unspeakable feelings into words. When a Pennsylvania soldier wrote of the “greatest National calamity that ever befell the American people,” he likely borrowed that description from a journalist. When sixteen-year-old Margaret Howell recorded that she was awakened with the “startling news of the assassination of our noble and beloved President,” she no doubt meant every word, even if the adjectives she chose—
startling, noble, beloved
—were ubiquitous in the papers. When she wrote, “Tis the saddest day in our History,” she was also likely echoing the papers, invoking a reporter’s words in order to give voice to her own emotions. 30
Excitement
and
gloom
. Those were the two words people wrote downagain and again, the first emanating from within, the second seeming to descend from the atmosphere. In the nineteenth century, to
excite
meant to elicit strong emotions of any sort. At
In his diary on April 15, 1865, Bostonian Francis Brooks drew an upside-down American flag at half-mast, decorated with a mourning ribbon, flying over a grave with a skull and crossbones signaling the assassination’s danger to the nation.
Francis Brooks Journal, April 15, 1865. Courtesy of the Massachusetts Historical Society
.
Every detail recorded and absorbed made it less a hallucinated nightmare or a theatrical drama, less a lie or a hoax. After eleven-year-old Gren-ville Norcross wrote in his diary that President Lincoln was “shot through the head by J. W. Booth,” the boy used up four pages transcribing every word of a newspaper article. Anna Lowell selected particular facts: that Lincoln laughed at the play yet looked sad; that Mrs. Lincoln tried to rouse her husband after Booth pulled the trigger. A woman in New Hampshiredescribed the bullet’s entrance, “three inches back of the left ear.” A man in Washington recorded that Lincoln had entered Ford’s Theatre “from the
dress circle
through a narrow corridor some three feet wide and eight or ten long” and that the room at Petersen’s was “about 9 feet by 15, with two windows and three doors.” In the two days following, Charles French wrote down all the specifics, from Lincoln’s decision to attend the theater that night to a description of the suit the president would wear inside his casket. Every fact made it more possible that it had truly come to pass. 28
Just as the victors had imagined their exultation as universal less than a week earlier, as mourners they now envisioned their grief the same way. If recording the facts helped them cope with their shock, so too did observing and preserving the public scenes of reaction. Many noted not only the desolation etched onto every face, but also the pervasive mood of despondency, thereby fitting their own despair into something larger: a whole village, an entire city. Just as Sarah Browne imagined the feelings of her husband down south, mourners everywhere imagined—and newspapers confirmed—that their own feelings were multiplied across the nation and around the globe. White people who lived or worked near black people tended to record those emotions, like Gideon Welles in Washington who documented the grief of the capital’s large wartime African American population. Some who didn’t know any black people but who associated Lincoln with emancipation conjured those feelings, like the northern New England woman who envisioned “how the poor Freedmen will mourn over the dreadful calamity so suddenly fallen upon us!” 29
Newspaper reports, from which mourners gathered so much of their information, also helped the bereaved put unspeakable feelings into words. When a Pennsylvania soldier wrote of the “greatest National calamity that ever befell the American people,” he likely borrowed that description from a journalist. When sixteen-year-old Margaret Howell recorded that she was awakened with the “startling news of the assassination of our noble and beloved President,” she no doubt meant every word, even if the adjectives she chose—
startling, noble, beloved
—were ubiquitous in the papers. When she wrote, “Tis the saddest day in our History,” she was also likely echoing the papers, invoking a reporter’s words in order to give voice to her own emotions. 30
Excitement
and
gloom
. Those were the two words people wrote downagain and again, the first emanating from within, the second seeming to descend from the atmosphere. In the nineteenth century, to
excite
meant to elicit strong emotions of any sort. At
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