This Republic of Suffering (23 page)

From the Capitol, Lincoln's body was taken to the railroad station to begin the seventeen-hundred-mile journey to Springfield, Illinois, and his grave. At each stop—Baltimore, Harrisburg, Philadelphia, New York, Albany, Buffalo, Cleveland, Columbus, Indianapolis, Chicago—mourners paid homage to the slain president. In Philadelphia his coffin lay in Independence Hall, while a column of people three miles long waited to view his remains. In New York the
Herald
estimated that 75,000 marched with his cortege while ten times that number watched from sidewalks and rooftops. Everywhere black Americans seemed to manifest particular sorrow—weeping along the routes of his cortege, marching in proud units of U.S. Colored Troops in processions that accompanied his hearse, writing poems and essays in the African American press, and proclaiming from the pulpit. “We, as a people,” declared the pastor of the African Methodist Episcopal Church in Troy, New York, “feel more than all others that we are bereaved. We had learned to love Mr. Lincoln…We looked up to him as our saviour, our deliverer.”
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By the time Lincoln reached Springfield on May 3, the shortcomings of contemporary embalming technology had become apparent, and his face took on a distorted, almost grotesque appearance. But the pageantry did not abate until May 4, when he was laid to rest in Oak Ridge Cemetery on the outskirts of the town he had left for Washington just a little more than four years earlier. A hymn composed for this final ceremony implored:

Grant that the cause, for which he died,

May live forever more.

“President Lincoln's Funeral—Citizens Viewing the Body at the City Hall, New York.”
Harper's Weekly,
May 6, 1865
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Lincoln's death contained the redemptive promise of national immortality. But like Jackson's death, Lincoln's passing was marked by an irony that underscored the limitation and even futility of human powers. Jackson died close to the high-water mark of the Confederacy; Lincoln was assassinated just as victory proved firmly in Union grasp.

In the weeks after Lincoln's assassination, Walt Whitman composed three poems of mourning, meditations on the nation's grief. In “Hush'd Be the Camps To-day,” written the very day of Lincoln's funeral, Whitman speaks as one of the people, leading the soldiers in mourning and urging the common men to whom he is so devoted to join him in tribute to “our dear commander.”

Sing of the love we bore him—because you, dwellers in camps, know it truly.

As they invault the coffin there,

Sing…

For the heavy hearts of soldiers.
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“O Captain! My Captain,” composed several months later during the summer of 1865, again invokes popular grief. It is, as literary scholar Helen Vendler explains, “a designedly democratic and populist poem,” with a meter and refrain designed for public tastes. The regular rhythm and rhyme are uncharacteristic of Whitman's work, and “O Captain!” is probably the easiest of his poems to memorize and recite. In the voice of a young sailor, Whitman composed an elegy in “democratic style,” speaking this time not for the collectivity of soldiers or for generalized sorrow but for the searing grief of a single man, in a representation of the individual pain of which the cumulative loss is constituted.
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Here Captain! Dear father

The arm beneath your head!

It is some dream that on the deck,

You've fallen cold and dead.
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In the third of these 1865 poems, “When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom'd,” Whitman speaks as himself, of his own efforts to grapple with Lincoln's loss. The president's assassination is not explicitly mentioned; it is as if there is no need to specify the tragedy that occurred when lilacs last bloomed, for it is both known and common to all. The experiences of mourning have been shared as the coffin has journeyed “night and day” across the land. Like a series of photographs, the poem captures this experience, rendering the seventeen-hundred-mile funeral procession in scenes of lingering visual power.

Coffin that passes through lanes and streets,

Through day and night with the great cloud darkening the land,

…….….….….….….…..

With processions long and winding and the flambeaus of the night,

With the countless torches lit, with the silent sea of faces and the unbared heads,

With the waiting depot, the arriving coffin, and the somber faces,

With the dirges through the night, with the thousand voices rising strong and solemn…
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The poem invokes no consoling Christian doctrines of immortality, and Whitman makes no reference to the pervasive contemporary imagery of Good Friday and the crucifixion. “Lilacs” suggests no promise of an afterlife beyond that of nature's own renewal. For Whitman, immortality rested, as he wrote in another poem, in mother earth's absorption of bodies and blood rendered “in unseen essence and odor of surface and grass, centuries hence.” Dissenting from the comforting Christian redefinition of death into life, “Lilacs” embraces, in Vendler's words, “the value of acceptance, rather than denial, of the full stop of death.” Yet for those who remain alive to mourn, death provides no full stop.

I saw the debris and debris of all the slain soldiers of the war
….….….….….….……

They themselves were fully at rest, they suffer'd not,

The living remain'd and suffer'd, the mother suffer'd,

And the wife and the child and the musing comrade suffer'd,

And the armies that remain'd suffer'd.
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In his 1865 Lincoln poems Walt Whitman served, as he had throughout the war, as the poet not just of death but of survival, of the suffering of the not-dead. Whitman's was the cultural work of mourning—on behalf of the nation and, in this instance, for its beloved leader. Yet he mourned, as he wrote in “Lilacs,” “not for you, for one alone.” He mourned for all the war's slain—for the “ashes of all dead soldiers South or North,” for the “phantoms of countless lost” who “follow me ever—desert me not while I live.” Lost yet not lost, absent yet ever present, these dead, these immortal phantoms with their unrelenting demands on mourners and survivors, became in Whitman's eyes the meaning and legacy of the war. Lincoln was but their finest exemplar.
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Perhaps the extravaganza of mourning that greeted the public commemorations of Jackson and Lincoln served in some way as a surrogate for all the funerals that citizens could not attend as their loved ones died unattended and far away. The many soldiers buried on the field received only the attention a chaplain and their harried comrades might afford, and as we have seen, tens of thousands of men were interred without either identities or ritual observances. Families fortunate enough to retrieve bodies and bring them home, however, honored their dead with services that varied according to status, circumstance, and religious affiliation. Mary Chesnut remarked that the sound of the funeral march seemed almost constant in South Carolina. Many small communities on the other side of the Mason-Dixon line found the same. In Dorset, Vermont, home of a quarry that provided thousands of tombstones for Gettysburg, 144 men volunteered and 28 died. Funerals in Dorset seemed never-ending and sometimes occurred in bunches when a unit with numbers of local men suffered heavy losses. In Worcester, Massachusetts, 4,227 men out of a total city population of 25,000 went to war, and 398 died. Nantucket received communications from the mainland only three times a week, when a steamer would arrive with its flag at half-mast if it brought news of casualties. Residents watching for the boat would be weeping before it even arrived at the dock. Seventy-three Nantucketers out of a population of about 6,000 died in the war, with 8 killed and 13 wounded at the Battle of Fredericksburg alone. When Lieutenant Leander Alley's body arrived home almost two weeks after the battle, “hundreds of people” called at his mother's house to view the body, which one of his commanding officers had paid to have embalmed before its shipment north. Schools and stores closed in his honor, and family and neighbors gathered for “impressive funeral services” and a lengthy procession to the Unitarian cemetery.
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In the Confederacy, Clark Stewart, a Presbyterian clergyman, divided his time between Virginia hospitals and his South Carolina home, where he traveled about visiting bereaved families and presiding over funerals of soldiers returned from the battlefield. In his journal he noted the biblical verse he selected for each occasion. “Funeral sermon for Robt Hellams who fell at Fburg John 14:18,” his diary entry for January 18, 1863, read. “I will not leave you comfortless; I will come to you” was an especially appropriate text for this itinerant clergyman.
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The proffering of comfort was a key function of the sermons that served as the heart of almost every funeral service, however modest or extravagant. But the oration was intended to assist mourners in understanding as well as alleviating their grief. Funeral sermons usually attempted to define the meaning of the deceased's life and death, an effort that almost inevitably involved speculating on the nature of death itself. In both North and South many of these wartime sermons, as well as funeral biographies and memorials that grew out of them, appeared in print, ranging in size from a pamphlet of a few pages to full-sized octavos designed to serve as monuments to the dead and exhortations to the living. Almost without exception they drew explicitly upon details in the condolence letters that had announced the soldier's death in order to fashion a more formalized and self-conscious story of a life and its significance. In his funeral sermon for John W. Griffin, a young Confederate chaplain who died in 1864, for example, L. H. Blanton referred to reports of the deceased's last words and offered the consoling judgment that Griffin's “dying testimony was all that Christian friends or the Church of God could desire.”
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The Good Death was the foundation for the process of mourning carried on by survivors who used the last words and moments of the dead soldier as the basis for broader evaluation of his entire life. More considered, more polished than condolence letters written from the front, the published funeral sermon was intended for distribution to a wider audience than simply next of kin or even those who might be able to attend a funeral service. The lost life, the soldier's death no longer belonged just to that individual and his family but was also to be understood and possessed by the community—even the nation—at large. The funeral sermon, like the ritual that surrounded it, was a memorial, not in granite, but in words; it sought, like the Good Death itself, to ensure that dying was not an end, not an isolated act, itself undertaken in isolation, but a foundation for both spiritual and social immortality—for eternal life and lasting memory.
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Dabney Carr Harrison of Virginia, shot through the lungs at Fort Donelson, reportedly murmured, “It is all right! I am perfectly willing to die.” For Reverend William James Hoge, composing a sketch of Dabney's life, this phrase became the all-important message of Christian sacrifice, an emulation of the Savior himself: however bitter the cup of pain and grief put into his hands by his heavenly Father, he would still say as he drank, “It is all right.” The entire life that Hoge recounted became a prelude to this final defining moment. Born on the Sabbath, Harrison died on the Sabbath, “his life bounded on either hand by the Day of God.”
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Into the feelings of waste and futility represented by so many fore-shortened young lives, funeral sermons injected the consolation of narrative, of a story with a purposeful trajectory and an ending that showed death was never premature but always came at exactly the right time in accordance with God's design. “The child of scarce unfolded piety, and the veteran Christian, alike yield up to God in death a mortality mysteriously compact,” a New York sermon proclaimed, “the work both had to do on earth being as completely done, as if each had been assigned the longest period known to man.” Reverend Philip Slaughter found in the life of Randolph Fairfax narrative continuities that might not have been evident before his heroic death. Slaughter noted that the dead Confederate always played fairly as a boy and obeyed his mother, had requested a Bible for his fourteenth birthday, and carried a New Testament in battle. When he was killed instantly by a shell at Fredericksburg, the testimony of his life served, in Slaughter's view, to provide the certainty of salvation that Fairfax himself had been unable to articulate. As Reverend Robert Dabney explained in a memorial to Lieutenant Colonel John Thornton, “he being dead, yet speaketh,” through the “narrative of…[his] religious life.” The dead carried a message from God, and in some sense were themselves that message, as Dabney made clear in another sermon, this one to honor Stonewall Jackson: “Our dead hero is God's sermon to us. His embodied admonition, His incorporate discourse.”
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