mourners exempted themselves from their own paternalism and prejudices.
GRIEVING CLERGYMEN CALLED FOR VENGEANCE , but they also helped diffuse anger with concurrent calls for mercy. Some mourners may have come home from church on Easter Sunday with their initial fury fanned, yet many found greater comfort in commands to forgive. For Anna Ferris, “the feeling of indignation & rage melted away” after Sunday services, replaced by an understanding of Jesus’s prayer “Father forgive them for they know not what they do.” On each successive Sunday after Easter, the assassination-themed sermons became less harsh, and vengeful human feelings paled before the knowledge that God would serve as the final judge of the criminals. As the Washington minister James Ward wrote in his diary, “It is God, to whom alone vengeance belongeth,” and as Caroline Laing wrote to her daughter, paraphrasing Romans 12:19 (and likely a sermon she had heard), “Vengeance is mine saith the Lord.” 37
Wrestling with blame and forgiveness, people turned to President Lincoln’s second inaugural address. Drawn to the words “malice toward none” and “charity for all,” and to Lincoln’s directive to “bind up the nation’s wounds,” mourners came to two different conclusions. Some invoked these words to demonstrate that the president’s lenience would have made him unfit to reconstruct the nation, hence God had taken him away at just the right moment. Others invoked the same words to prove that mercy constituted the proper attitude toward their vanquished enemies, since that was what the slain president would have wanted (and some invoked both interpretations at the same time). Even though the very fact of the assassination only further complicated those words—if Lincoln had advocated for clemency when he was alive, did that still hold true after the Confederate system had murdered him?—many nonetheless focused on the message of forgiveness. Black minister Jacob Thomas told his Easter Sunday listeners that Lincoln had shown Christian grace by exercising mercy “even toward his foes,” and white minister J. G. Holland refrained from speaking aloud the vengeance he felt inside, for Lincoln’s kind spirit spoke of charity and “Christian forbearance.”
With malice toward none
and
with charity for all
were the words that mourners frequently chose to inscribe onto their signs and banners in the wake of Lincoln’s death. 38
Yet if President Lincoln appeared to have been encouraging clemency, he had closed the second inaugural with a more complicated imperative: “to do all which may achieve and cherish a just, and a lasting peace.” At the inauguration, Lincoln had reflected on divine judgment for the national sin of slavery, making clear that slavery was the cause of the conflict (“All knew,” he said, that slavery was “somehow, the cause of the war”). All hoped and prayed the war would soon end, Lincoln went on, but if God willed the war to continue “until every drop of blood drawn with the lash, shall be paid by another drawn with the sword,” so it must be. Lincoln was less clear about what, precisely, constituted the end of slavery—simply its legal demise or the fuller project of black citizenship and equality—and that was why his words were hard to interpret in light of the assassination.
Malice toward none
and
charity for all:
that was either why God had taken Lincoln (because of his lenience toward the enemy) or how Lincoln would have wanted the defeated enemies treated in his own absence (with mercy).
A just, and a lasting peace:
that implied that peace without enduring justice was not enough. Since these words followed Lincoln’s reflections on slavery as the cause of the war, the idea of a democratic and egalitarian peace seemed to pertain especially to the future of the freedpeople. 39
Many fewer mourners attended to this last point. Anna Lowell may have been thinking of the juxtaposition of the two
GRIEVING CLERGYMEN CALLED FOR VENGEANCE , but they also helped diffuse anger with concurrent calls for mercy. Some mourners may have come home from church on Easter Sunday with their initial fury fanned, yet many found greater comfort in commands to forgive. For Anna Ferris, “the feeling of indignation & rage melted away” after Sunday services, replaced by an understanding of Jesus’s prayer “Father forgive them for they know not what they do.” On each successive Sunday after Easter, the assassination-themed sermons became less harsh, and vengeful human feelings paled before the knowledge that God would serve as the final judge of the criminals. As the Washington minister James Ward wrote in his diary, “It is God, to whom alone vengeance belongeth,” and as Caroline Laing wrote to her daughter, paraphrasing Romans 12:19 (and likely a sermon she had heard), “Vengeance is mine saith the Lord.” 37
Wrestling with blame and forgiveness, people turned to President Lincoln’s second inaugural address. Drawn to the words “malice toward none” and “charity for all,” and to Lincoln’s directive to “bind up the nation’s wounds,” mourners came to two different conclusions. Some invoked these words to demonstrate that the president’s lenience would have made him unfit to reconstruct the nation, hence God had taken him away at just the right moment. Others invoked the same words to prove that mercy constituted the proper attitude toward their vanquished enemies, since that was what the slain president would have wanted (and some invoked both interpretations at the same time). Even though the very fact of the assassination only further complicated those words—if Lincoln had advocated for clemency when he was alive, did that still hold true after the Confederate system had murdered him?—many nonetheless focused on the message of forgiveness. Black minister Jacob Thomas told his Easter Sunday listeners that Lincoln had shown Christian grace by exercising mercy “even toward his foes,” and white minister J. G. Holland refrained from speaking aloud the vengeance he felt inside, for Lincoln’s kind spirit spoke of charity and “Christian forbearance.”
With malice toward none
and
with charity for all
were the words that mourners frequently chose to inscribe onto their signs and banners in the wake of Lincoln’s death. 38
Yet if President Lincoln appeared to have been encouraging clemency, he had closed the second inaugural with a more complicated imperative: “to do all which may achieve and cherish a just, and a lasting peace.” At the inauguration, Lincoln had reflected on divine judgment for the national sin of slavery, making clear that slavery was the cause of the conflict (“All knew,” he said, that slavery was “somehow, the cause of the war”). All hoped and prayed the war would soon end, Lincoln went on, but if God willed the war to continue “until every drop of blood drawn with the lash, shall be paid by another drawn with the sword,” so it must be. Lincoln was less clear about what, precisely, constituted the end of slavery—simply its legal demise or the fuller project of black citizenship and equality—and that was why his words were hard to interpret in light of the assassination.
Malice toward none
and
charity for all:
that was either why God had taken Lincoln (because of his lenience toward the enemy) or how Lincoln would have wanted the defeated enemies treated in his own absence (with mercy).
A just, and a lasting peace:
that implied that peace without enduring justice was not enough. Since these words followed Lincoln’s reflections on slavery as the cause of the war, the idea of a democratic and egalitarian peace seemed to pertain especially to the future of the freedpeople. 39
Many fewer mourners attended to this last point. Anna Lowell may have been thinking of the juxtaposition of the two
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