Mourning Lincoln Read Online Free PDF

historical subjects, but the diaries also gave him a place to vent his fury, sheltering extended rants against the federal government, the enemy army, President Lincoln, northern politicians, and especially Yankee abolitionists—people just like Sarah and Albert Browne.
    LONG AFTER I SELECTED MY protagonists, I discovered that the Brownes and Rodney Dorman had crossed paths, if obliquely, during the Civil War. In the spring of 1864, Dorman wrote angrily about a “cow-stealing raid” up the Saint Johns River led by one General Birney. He mentioned a local newspaper account of the raid, written by the U.S. treasury agent, a man named Browne (spelled with an
e
, he noted), a tale Dorman found infuriatingly self-aggrandizing, not to mention self-incriminating. Indeed, Albert Browne had been part of that expedition. Moreover, Sarah, Eddie, Alice, and Nellie had left New England that April for an extended visit south, and while Albert was off on his raid, the rest of the family made an excursion to Jacksonville. Sarah found the city disappointing, wrecked as it was by the “havoc of war,” but they all nonetheless had a lovely time as guests of the Union commanders, touring the splendid mansion appropriated for army headquarters, enjoying teatime on the veranda, taking leisurely boat rides, and visiting the men of the U.S. Colored Troops. The family also visited with one Lyman Stickney, the U.S. tax collector to whom Rodney Dorman would later write an angry letter in reference to his destroyed property. When Albert Browne returned in soiled and tattered clothing, he regaled the family with accounts not only of captured cattle and cotton but also ofblack people whom he and his men had alerted to emancipation. A year later, Sarah sorted through a parlor closet in Salem during spring cleaning, arranging “little mementoes from Beaufort, St. Augustine—Jacksonville.” 12
    FOR SARAH AND ALBERT BROWNE and for Rodney Dorman—just as for so many others—thinking about, articulating, and documenting their responses to the assassination of President Abraham Lincoln became part of working out an understanding of the war. The polyphonic din that followed that night at Ford’s Theatre pointed toward long-lasting legacies that remain part of our world today.
    We begin as the battlefield war drew to a close, in early April 1865. At that moment, the call to find meaning had already taken on a new urgency. How would Union victory play out? What did Confederate defeat portend? What kind of nation would the people and their leaders create? Black freedom had been seized and delivered, but would it last? Peace would soon be declared, but could it endure? How could Confederates be brought back into the citizenry? Where and how would former slaves live and work? Could they become citizens too? The pages that follow explore the thoughts, feelings, beliefs, convictions, and questions of Lincoln’s mourners and his antagonists as they confronted an event that transformed both the Civil War and the nation’s history.

2

Shock
    LINCOLN HAD BEEN DEAD FOR little more than an hour when Sarah Browne heard. Over breakfast on Saturday morning, April 15, she and the children were talking about the anniversary at Fort Sumter and picturing the festivities Albert had attended when a neighbor came to the door. Thinking that he might have picked up letters for her at the post office, Sarah greeted him happily, then saw immediately, in the man’s face, that something was wrong. He said it all at once.
    “There is very bad news, Sarah, this morning. President Lincoln was shot at Ford’s Theatre last evening.” Perhaps Sarah pressed him to see if he were sure, and perhaps he offered proof in the form of a newspaper or telegraph dispatch, for right away she knew it was not a rumor.
    “What a shock!” Those were the words Sarah wrote in her diary—”like a thunder clap it came and no words could express enough of horror and grief at this unparalleled