Free Mourning Lincoln by Martha Hodes

serpent long enough now,” he wrote; “let us kill the monster and all its infernal brood.” If Sarah thought he had spewed enough bile, Albert assured her there was “a heap left.” 2
    FOR RODNEY DORMAN, GLEE WAS fleeting and anger enduring. As far as Dorman was concerned, John Wilkes Booth alone was responsible for the murder of Abraham Lincoln, but of course the Yankees would “molest a great many people” who had nothing to do with the deed, acting with revenge, “against all law” and with “total disregard of all rights.” Unlawful power exercised by the conquerors infuriated Dorman no end—how the Yankees did “beshit & befoul” all they touched in their “fraudulent, forceable, unwarranted, contemptible manner,” he wrote in his diary. As for Booth, he should be honored for his manly bravery, just as in ancient Greece, Harmodius and Aristogeiton were honored for saving Athens by murdering a tyrant. 3
    The Yankees said that slavery had killed Lincoln, but in Rodney Dorman’s view, slavery was a force of good: a benevolent institution in which masters loved and provided for their “servants,” who in turn loved and needed their subjugators. “In some instances,” Dorman conceded, slaves had “not been treated as they ought,” but those instances were exceptional. In his version of American history, wicked white northerners had stolen Africans from their native lands (here he called the victims “slaves,” rather than “servants”), sold them to white southerners, then stole them back by “force & fraud” during the Civil War, making for a “double crime, aggravated!” Indeed, at times Dorman reserved greater hostility for white northerners than he did for the freedpeople, for without white instigators, he felt sure, black people would have remained content with enslavement. It was those blasted abolitionists who had awakened the desire for liberty, and the black soldiers he saw in Jacksonville—the literal embodiment of that liberation—were thus intolerable or, in Dorman’s words, “beyond the powers of endurance of man.” All during the spring and summer of 1865,Rodney Dorman seethed at the Yankees. “The only remedy,” he confided to his journal, would be “a general extermination of the whole of them.” 4
    LINCOLN’S MOURNERS WERE ANGRY , very angry. Reconciliation to the will of God and acceptance of the assassination as part of a divine plan for the nation’s glorious future did not exempt the guilty parties from facing justice.
    Anger was a complicated emotion for nineteenth-century Americans. Long associated with a deplorable lack of self-control, anger, particularly men’s anger, had been likened to barbarism, unbecoming to civilized people. These cultural assumptions had recently begun to change, with the idea that well-moderated fury could be put to good use, and even savage rage like Albert Browne’s was understandable in particularly abominable circumstances. That permission extended almost exclusively to white men of the middling and upper classes, while women were meant never to be angry, under any circumstances. But with Lincoln’s murder, these social rules evaporated, just as had the dictates against men weeping, and mourners embraced their fury without compunction. As one man wrote in his diary, describing a pervasive state, “Wrath flashes through the gloom.” 5
    A vitriol of stunning intensity runs through the record of personal responses to Lincoln’s assassination.
Indignation
. That was one way mourners described their feelings, as if they had personally been victims of an unjust act (recall that Sarah Browne had pictured Albert’s initial feelings as “honor and indignation”). At a meeting of black San Franciscans, poet and plasterer James Madison Bell spoke of pain “mixed with indignation.” A white woman in Boston juggled “amazement, horror, indignation, and a feeling of personal bereavement.”
Rage
. That word was even more commonly