Ford’s Theatre, “everybody was excited,” and then the capital had been “thrown into the most intense excitement.” Cities were in “a state of great excitement,” indeed the whole Union was in a state of the “most intense excitement ever known.” People also invoked the word to describe their own sense of being unnerved, like eyewitness Frederick Sawyer who pronounced himself “so excited by what has occurred to night.” 31
Gloom
, in counterpoint, implied melancholy, shadows, and darkness, all of which endured after the state of excitement died down. Among the freedpeople of Wilmington, North Carolina, wrote a white teacher, the news caused “a dreadful gloom to settle in our midst.” In Brookline, Massachusetts, white men stood together, talking in low voices, while “gloom & dismay were pictured upon every countenance”—again, the reading of faces worked to convince observers that they were not mistaken. John Nicolay, Lincoln’s private secretary, described the gloom in Washington as “heavy and ominous,” as if “some greater calamity still hung in the air, and was about to crush and overwhelm every one.” Soldiers in camp felt it keenly, many remaining quiet in keeping with masculine protocol. For the members of a black regiment that had entered Richmond, the news arrived on a lovely spring day, casting “a gloom over every thing.” When an officer gave word to an Illinois regiment in Virginia, “a silent gloom fell upon us like a pall,” wrote Daniel Chisolm. “No one,” he explained, “spoke or moved.” There was no drill or dress parade, “No Nothing, all quiet, Flags at half mast.” The next day, after the troops packed up to move across the railroad tracks, the men “lay around,” Chisolm wrote in his notebook, “mostly in our tents all quiet and lonesome,” a “Silent Gloom” hovering over the camp. 32
Mourners found confirmation of the catastrophic event and of the universal grief they imagined as they soaked up and participated in public rituals. Cities, towns, and villages seemed instantaneously drenched in black drapery, complemented by white, the two traditional colors of nineteenth-century mourning. Businesses that had opened early on Saturday soon began to close—stores, theaters, bars—with the exception of shops that carried anything that could be fashioned into a mourning decoration.By the end of the day on Saturday, A. T. Stewart’s department store in New York had sold a hundred thousand dollars’ worth of black goods. Sundown brought the rituals of illumination—now in sorrow instead of joy—combining burning candles in residential windows, kerosene and gas lamps all aglow, and bonfires lighting up the streets (always accompanied by the worry of spreading flames). The death of a statesman also warranted the donning of mourning emblems, some with likenesses or mottoes, others fashioned more plainly from the ubiquitous crinkly fabric called
crape
, pinned to bonnets, collars, or sleeves. Shopkeepers began selling the badges on the morning of April 15 and kept up a steady business all through the spring. 33
The near-immediate shrouding of public buildings, which to privileged observers seemed to have been accomplished by magic, in fact fell to workingmen, just as the draping of private homes fell to wives and servants (“If you have not already draped our flags with mourning, have it done,” a man told his wife, his words indicating that she should direct a domestic laborer). Washington was the first to be transformed, as workers followed orders to cloak the White House, the Capitol, the War Department, Treasury Department, Post Office, and Patent Office. Servants meanwhile created elaborate displays on the exteriors of the city’s poshest residences (“I had our house fixed early in the day,” Elizabeth Blair Lee wrote to her husband). African Americans, many of them poor, along with the city’s poorer whites, displayed their sentiments with as
Gloom
, in counterpoint, implied melancholy, shadows, and darkness, all of which endured after the state of excitement died down. Among the freedpeople of Wilmington, North Carolina, wrote a white teacher, the news caused “a dreadful gloom to settle in our midst.” In Brookline, Massachusetts, white men stood together, talking in low voices, while “gloom & dismay were pictured upon every countenance”—again, the reading of faces worked to convince observers that they were not mistaken. John Nicolay, Lincoln’s private secretary, described the gloom in Washington as “heavy and ominous,” as if “some greater calamity still hung in the air, and was about to crush and overwhelm every one.” Soldiers in camp felt it keenly, many remaining quiet in keeping with masculine protocol. For the members of a black regiment that had entered Richmond, the news arrived on a lovely spring day, casting “a gloom over every thing.” When an officer gave word to an Illinois regiment in Virginia, “a silent gloom fell upon us like a pall,” wrote Daniel Chisolm. “No one,” he explained, “spoke or moved.” There was no drill or dress parade, “No Nothing, all quiet, Flags at half mast.” The next day, after the troops packed up to move across the railroad tracks, the men “lay around,” Chisolm wrote in his notebook, “mostly in our tents all quiet and lonesome,” a “Silent Gloom” hovering over the camp. 32
Mourners found confirmation of the catastrophic event and of the universal grief they imagined as they soaked up and participated in public rituals. Cities, towns, and villages seemed instantaneously drenched in black drapery, complemented by white, the two traditional colors of nineteenth-century mourning. Businesses that had opened early on Saturday soon began to close—stores, theaters, bars—with the exception of shops that carried anything that could be fashioned into a mourning decoration.By the end of the day on Saturday, A. T. Stewart’s department store in New York had sold a hundred thousand dollars’ worth of black goods. Sundown brought the rituals of illumination—now in sorrow instead of joy—combining burning candles in residential windows, kerosene and gas lamps all aglow, and bonfires lighting up the streets (always accompanied by the worry of spreading flames). The death of a statesman also warranted the donning of mourning emblems, some with likenesses or mottoes, others fashioned more plainly from the ubiquitous crinkly fabric called
crape
, pinned to bonnets, collars, or sleeves. Shopkeepers began selling the badges on the morning of April 15 and kept up a steady business all through the spring. 33
The near-immediate shrouding of public buildings, which to privileged observers seemed to have been accomplished by magic, in fact fell to workingmen, just as the draping of private homes fell to wives and servants (“If you have not already draped our flags with mourning, have it done,” a man told his wife, his words indicating that she should direct a domestic laborer). Washington was the first to be transformed, as workers followed orders to cloak the White House, the Capitol, the War Department, Treasury Department, Post Office, and Patent Office. Servants meanwhile created elaborate displays on the exteriors of the city’s poshest residences (“I had our house fixed early in the day,” Elizabeth Blair Lee wrote to her husband). African Americans, many of them poor, along with the city’s poorer whites, displayed their sentiments with as
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