Mourning Lincoln by Martha Hodes (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: Mourning Lincoln by Martha Hodes Elizabeth D. Leonard (bio) Mourning Lincoln. By Martha Hodes. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2015. Pp. 396. Cloth, $30.00; paper, $20.00.) Although “the story of the nation’s first presidential assassination has been told many times over,” explains Martha Hodes early in her fine new book, Mourning Lincoln, previous accounts have failed to “capture the full range of responses” that contemporaries exhibited in the immediate aftermath of John Wilkes Booth’s terrible crime (5). Previous accounts have also failed to consider how vividly the diversity of “raw reactions” to the murder of Abraham Lincoln—in contrast with many individuals’ assumptions and claims about the universality of their experiences—reflected Americans’ varied “understandings of the war that had just ended” and their “different hopes and fears about what would come next” (9, 11). Mourning Lincoln seeks to fill both these gaps in the literature of the Civil War era and the Lincoln assassination, and it succeeds admirably. As Hodes clearly shows, “The blast of the derringer at Ford’s Theatre on the night of April 14, 1865, was the first volley of the war that came after Appomattox” (274). Eschewing memoirs and other retrospective—and therefore mediated—primary sources, Hodes has examined instead “perhaps a thousand diaries, collections of letters, and other relevant writings from the spring and summer of 1865” in order to decipher the thoughts and feelings of all sorts of Americans in that chaotic moment (275). Her subjects include [End Page 122] blacks and whites, women and men, children and adults, soldiers, laborers, servants, slaves, slaveholders, Confederates, Unionists, Copperheads, and abolitionists. To provide context for these Americans’ reactions to the assassination, Hodes has also carefully consulted a wealth of relevant secondary literature on a wide array of pertinent topics: nineteenth-century public funeral and mourning practices, embalming, middle-class manhood and grief, and women’s labor, to name a few. Because Hodes is not just a meticulous and imaginative scholar but also an unusually graceful and evocative writer, Mourning Lincoln does more than just present the results of her research. Rather, it effectively transports readers back to those tumultuous days between April 2, 1865, when Richmond fell, and July 7, 1865, when four of Booth’s convicted co-conspirators swung from the gallows. “Night watchmen, coal shovelers, and lamplighters,” she writes of the early morning hours on April 15, “passed the news along to one another, as cooks in kitchens, up at dawn preparing breakfast, and valets, building fires in their masters’ bedrooms, stepped outside to investigate the ruckus of shouting and hurried footsteps” (52). This is just one example of the eloquence and skill with which Hodes enlivens a story we wrongly thought that we already knew. When I was in graduate school, one of my professors routinely insisted that as students of history we must strive, as we read each monograph, to discern “the book behind the book.” By this he meant the historical events in the author’s own experience that had inspired and inevitably shaped his or her analysis of the past. I recalled my professor’s directive when reading Hodes’s poignant discussion of the “two personal experiences of collective catastrophe” that led her to this particular project: the assassination of President John F. Kennedy in November 1963 and the terrorist destruction of the World Trade Towers in September 2001 (5). I lived through both of these “collective catastrophes,” too, and I was struck in reading Mourning Lincoln that among the many things Hodes does well is demonstrate (and remind us) how crises on the order of the assassination of Lincoln, or 9/11, both “interrupt” and take place within the very “midst of” everyday life (171); they do not, however, bring it to a halt. In the wake of Lincoln’s assassination, “journalists and ministers claimed that all labor ceased in the aftermath of the tragic event,” she writes, “but women and girls,” whose labor never stopped, “knew that was patently untrue” (171). Similarly, despite our numb horror, Americans still packed our children’s lunch boxes and went to work on that bright September morning over a decade ago. By frequently interweaving the...