Mourning Lincoln by Martha Hodes

capital shouted to burn down the military prisons as armed guards watched over the enemy inmates. A federal official had never witnessed “so earnest and determined a cry for vengeance,” including one group who wanted to lynch all incarcerated Confederate officers. Calls for reprisal were directed at southern civilians too. The San Francisco poet James Madison Bell rhymed the line “Exterminate! shall be our cry” with “Rebellion’s hated brood shall die!” and included “Fathers and sons, and wives anddaughters” as the targets of his decree. George Comfort, though a Quaker, found himself filled with “a feeling of bitter and unrelenting hatred” that would be satisfied only by the “speedy and utter extermination” of the enemy population. As an Illinois man admitted to his own Confederate relative, “I actually thirst for blood and vengeance.” Women joined the chorus, if again more obliquely and in more spiritual guises. Trusting in God’s providence, Anne Neafie told her husband at the front that she wouldn’t object if the soldiers exchanged “ill judged clemency” for greater punishment. Just as Sarah Browne wished for the guilty parties to be crushed, some women expressed their anger more directly, even if they could not enact the vengeance themselves. When Mary Butler cried “
death to all traitors
,” she included her Confederate beau, Frank, whom she decided then and there never to see again. “I hope he will meet the fate he deserves,” she told her mother, careful to repeat exactly what she meant: “death to the traitors.” 13
    Anger rang out from the pens and pulpits of mourning ministers as well. Sharing and reflecting the ire of their congregants, these men intertwined pleas to accept God’s will with calls for reprisal. Churchgoing mourners thus heard confusing messages, an inconsistent brew of mercy and vengeance. Invoking the wrathful God of the Old Testament, clergymen made clear that only retribution, albeit always guided by reason, would pave the way toward justice. “Traitors beware! Vengeance fills the air,” wrote the black minister Thomas Ward in California. A white Congregationalist minister in the Union army made the same point in different words: “Mercy is dead now: justice rules alone.” The fact was, messages of submission to God’s will could be understood in contradictory ways. On the one hand, Union supporters could find comfort in God’s ultimate plans for the nation, even if those plans were impossible to discern. On the other hand, God had intended the assassination precisely to forestall lenience by rousing Union wrath against the enemy. One seemed to cancel out the other, making for a thorny tangle of imperatives. 14
    FOR ALL THE RAGE, AND for all the contradictory directives from clergymen, whom exactly did the grieving blame for Lincoln’s murder? When a mourner wrote to her daughter that “the feeling against all those implicated in the assassination of the President was deep & vengeful,” what did shemean by
all those implicated?
When a missionary among the freedpeople hoped that “those who merit punishment receive their deserts,” who exactly were
those who merit punishment?
When a barely literate New Hampshire laborer wrote of “the Presdants death” and his wish to “dam” those who carried it out, whom exactly did he include? Who or what had killed Abraham Lincoln? 15
    Within hours of the crime at Ford’s Theatre, and continuing for two weeks afterward, federal authorities made hundreds of arrests, eventually charging seven men and one woman with taking part in the conspiracy. The eight suspects were held in a Washington penitentiary, awaiting a trial that would begin in early May. There was George Atzerodt, who failed in his assignment to murder Vice President Andrew Johnson, and there was Lewis Powell, who succeeded in wounding Secretary of State William Seward and one of his sons. There was David Herold, Powell’s accomplice