Death & Mourning for Lincoln

Reading Penna April 18. 1865. 2 Oclock A.M. (Extract of transcription)

Dear Cousin,

As I cannot sleep I have got up to pass away the time in putting my sad thoughts upon paper & sending them to you.

I told you in my last letter that we had been in a constantly great excitement for some time. And I tried to describe it to you as well as I could. But we have now an awful whirl in the wild drama of our great war. I can only tell you something about it. Something of what I see and feel.

Last Saturday morning I was preparing to go to the rope walk, when an acquaintance came and said it was reported that the President of the United States was shot. I hurried up to the one of our telegraph offices. It wanted 15 minutes of the time the operator should be there. I found about fifty men talking about the report and waiting to have it confirmed or contradicted. The report had come by the coal line telegraph about midnight. This is the rail road Co’s telegraph line. It is always in operation for the night and day to regulate the numerous coal & goods trains by, and it was by this line we got the first news of the surrender of Lee & his rebel army.

Well, the anxiety was most intense. The suspense between hope and fear was oppressive in the extreme. The operator came. adjusted his instrument, and in a few minutes told us it was true. Abm Lincoln was shot and died about 7 Oclock that morning. (It was then 8 Oclock, so he had been dead only one hour when the sad news was confirmed here.) I am now verging on three score years of age, and have passed through some trying times during my life, but I never before felt as I did then. It is utterly impossible to describe my feelings. Wonder what next. appalled at the past and the present, good men stood aghast at the future.

Abm Lincoln, the good, the kind hearted, the generous, the patient, the long suffering, the ever forgiving, the noble and humane Abm Lincoln, President of these United States and victorious defender of freedom, justice and the right, was publicly murdered, and the daring demon who had done the develish deed, with the falsehood of hell on his tongue had shouted “Sic Semper tyrannis” and escaped on the instant, in the horror and amazement of at such a bold and daring and awful crime. Yes “Sic semper tyrannis” was the motto of the villainous and lying murderer.

And I then stood within a hundred feet of where I had seen northern proslavery demagogues stand, only six months before, and boldly declare that Abm Lincoln was a usurper and a tyrant, worse than Charles 1st of England and as richly deserved to die the death he died.

I had heard others assert that he ought to be hanged in the same rope that hung John Brown, and now these teachings have been acted out. These vilely false inculcations have been carried out to the bloody end, and there lays Abm Lincoln, the most tried and the best proved president we ever had, with a rebel bullet hole in his head and his brains blown out. What an awful crime is this. The president of these United States most foully murdered in the full presence of his family and thousands of his people, crowds of his fellow citizens witness the escape of the murderer , and he really has escaped and is not captured yet, and it is now over three days since he did it.

What a shocking event. And it has been a great shock to us all. The President, Abm Lincoln, was at the theatre, in a second tier stage box. Mrs Lincoln and several others were with him, including 3 or 4 gentlemen. He was sitting in a high backed rocking chair. The assassin came into the box, went behind his chair and shot him, in the back of the head, dropped the pistol, drew a long knife, rushed to the front and jumped down onto the stage, shouted “Sic semper tyrannis” and escaped out of the back of the theatre, mounted a horse an accomplice had in waiting for him and rode off.

President Lincoln on his deathbed. Surrounded by his wife, son and members of his cabinet. Source: Library of Congress, Photographs and Documents Division. http://hdl.loc.gov/loc.pnp/chp.3a43876

About the same time, another of these dark devils rode to the residence of the secretary of state, our prime minister Mr Seward and asked to see him, saying that he had a prescription for him from his physician which he was to deliver to him and also some directions about it and he must see him. Pushing past the servant he rushed up into Mr Seward’s room Mr Seward had been thrown from his carriage and broke his arm about a fortnight before, and was laying sick in bed. The villain pushed past the servant, rushed up into the sick room and attempted to stab Mr Seward as he lay in bed. In the room was a grown up son of Mr Seward and a man nurse. Through their interference he missed the first blow and only inflicted a slight wound. He then drew a heavy billy, and, being a large powerful man, knocked them both down and then cut Mr Seward’s throat. He then knocked down the nurse a second time, and also another son of Mr Sewards, ran out, mounted his horse, and escaped. Mr Seward’s throat was badly gashed, one of his sons was very seriously hurt. But it is thought now that they are both out of danger & will recover.

But poor Mr Lincoln never spoke or was conscious of any thing, and died in about 10 hours after he was shot. The ball passed through his brain and lodged behind the eyes. And thus has Abm Lincoln, the well tried and triumphantly reelected president of this great republic been most foully murdered by a proslavery assassin just as we were fully and fairly victorious over the cursed slave power after 4 years of bloody and deadly war.

The city of Mobile was taken, the last rebel sea port. The rebel General Johnson had surrendered the last rebel army they had east of the Mississippi river. Their force west of the Mississipi is of small account and will surrender or disperse when they learn what disasters they have had. The guerrillas were coming in and surrendering.

Jeff Davis is in some small southern town raving out proclamations. But his power is all gone for ever, and he had better be gone too. For if he is caught now, he is as sure to be hanged as he has a neck to put a rope around. It is well known beyond all doubt that Davis and his rebel cabinet are at the bottom of this infernal plot by which our good man, our best man has fallen.

It was a widespread conspiracy to slay at least half a dozen of our leading men. But it has been successful with only one, and that one the most powerful & the most merciful leading man in America. The kind hearted Lincoln loved mercy So much more than justice that he has, as it were, stood between these bloody rebels and northern vengeance.

He was for pardoning every one of the guilty rascals & restoring them all their property (except slaves) all their franchises and privileges and putting them in power again all through the south same as they were before. Never, since the creation, was a more insane, mad act done by man than this devilish murder of Abm Lincoln by rebel emissaries. The effect through out all the north is awful, terrible in the extreme.

Strong men stood weeping in the streets, and women shrieked with horror at the heinous crime. The poor blacks take it very hard and seem entirely inconsolable. They worshipped the slavery destroying president as more than a man, and should the negro troops ever have a chance at the vile rebels again they will take a terrible revenge. But, as to that, the whole of the union soldiers are stung almost to madness, and if all resistance by the south does not immediately cease, God help all taken in battle after this.

The whole north cries for vengeance. “Justice without mercy, dig graves and stretch hemp” is preached from the pulpits. And there lays the cruel, bloody handed murderous south utterly defeated and powerless at our feet. There are no southern sympathizers now. It is “more than any ones life is worth now to say a word against Abm Lincoln or in favor of the rebels.

In several places rank copperheads have been beaten to death for expressing satisfaction at this most foul assassination. Those who slandered Mr Lincoln so last election, now hang their heads in shame and are humbly silent. All works of every kind stopped, and all business was suspended on Saturday at at dinner time. only a few hours after the sad news came.

And every day is almost as silent as a sabbath. The only difference is that there are many people on the streets, around the telegraph offices and railway stations, discussing the melancholy event & anxious to get news, especially of the arrest of the assassin.

Lincoln’s Funeral Procession. Huge crowds looked on and black drapers were evident everywhere on building and all around the hearse. The guard of honor all wore black fabric around their arms and marched with their rifles pointed down. The black horses and their attendants all added to the dignity of the occasion. Source: Library of Congress. Photos and Documents Division http://hdl.loc.gov/loc.rbc/lprbscsm0413

April 19th. Wednesday.

This is the day of our first murdered president’s funeral. It is far more strictly kept than any Sunday I have ever seen in America. All Nearly every dwelling house, all the churches and public buildings, are hung with the dark emblems of national sorrow. Many are very tastefully and profusely decorated with the dark habiliments of woe. All the churches are open and crowded full of people all array’d in their nicest and best apparel, and many of them mourning for loved ones lost in this cruel war, and nearly all with wearing badges, with the lamented Lincoln’s likeness, or some mark of respect for our departed president.

I said nearly every house is draped in mourning. a very few show no sign of respect at all. But they are few. Not over 6 or 7 in the whole city, and those few houses are known as the homes of the most ignorant, negro hating, brutal, depraved, proslavery copperheads we have even in this copperhead county. They are all democrats of course. Modern democrats, of the school that love slavery for others more than they do liberty for themselves. These stupidly obstinate enemies of their native north are marked men though, and the feeling even here, is very strongly and sharply expressed against them. And well it may be so.

Union flags bordered and tied with black are flying every where. Even the very smallest cottages fly them not a foot square from every window. And there stand the houses of these democrats. with not a mark of mourning any where visible about them. They seem to express a sullen satisfaction at the assassination of the president of the united states, a marked approval of the murder of a great and good man, because, when the voice of a free people had made him the head of the nation, he refused to allow slaveholding rebels to dismember his country, destroy the government and trample its liberties under their feet. And still, after all we have suffered, and are now suffering under this dastardly cowardly blow, there is a most strange and unnaturally degrading delicacy (if I may use the term) on the subject of slavery.

All know and feel that this murder is a dark, a most damnable deed, yet many would much rather it had been done in any other interest than slavery. Had it been instigated by antislavery men, and an abolitionist fired the fatal shot, tens, perhaps hundreds of thousands who are now silent or say but little about it, would have been ramping, roaring crazy, for revenge, and ready at once to hang up the first outspoken antislavery man they could get hold of.

I have not the least doubt that if John Brown had taken revenge for his great wrongs by killing the vile betrayer of his country, James Buchanan, hundreds of abolitionists would have been murdered by bloodthirsty proslavery mobs of the kind that committed those cowardly crimes in New York not long since. And it would have been worse still because slaveholders had all the power then and government would have been slow to stop them, most likely looked on approvingly and done nothing to protect us.

We know this by their infamous course in the Kansas troubles 8 or 10 years ago. Many free state men were shot down publicly, in broad daylight, for trying to make Kansas a free state, and their daring murderers were rewarded with good fat offices under the government by James Buchanan, the traitor president of the united states, by and with the consent of the then proslavery cabinet and senate. It was indeed fortunate for us all that John Browns frenzy for freedom did not take the notion that this Booth’s frenzy for slavery has, and lead him to slaughter the then president.

If it had, very likely I should never have lived to become your correspondent. Several of these proslavery democrats have said to me, quite seriously, “Well, when I first heard that Lincoln was shot I was sure that some abolitionist had done it because Lincoln was not radical enough for you”. My reply has been “No No. you would no doubt have very glad it if had been so, but we are not the men to do a dark deed like that, although we are stigmatized as black abolitionists, and derided because we respect the rights and liberties of all men.

Yonder lays all that is mortal of your murdered president with a proslavery ball through his brain, and the same hand that sent it has also written down and signed the murderers creed of principles upon that point. He declares that he believes slavery is a divine and most beneficent institution, a great blessing both to master & slave”. And it is well that the assassin put his political faith on paper & left it to be published to the world. Before Booth’s letter came out many of the leading democrats solemnly declared (some swore) that the murderer was a northern Union antislavery man. And but for this letter, if Booth were never taken, they would stick to it, and make all their party stick to it also, that Abm Lincoln had been murdered by northern abolitionists & union men.

Remember me kindly to your parents.
Yours affectionately

Thomas Jackson.

Reading Penna April 18. 1865. 2 Oclock A.M. (Extract of transcription)