Mourning Lincoln

Before the past becomes history, it is lived in real-time by real people striving to understand it. From an avalanche of firsthand accounts, Hodes relates how Americans still reeling from civil war made sense of an unprecedented assassination. (Hint: they did so in a variety of ways, from expressions of grief and glee, from feelings of rage and resignation, from the margins of scrapbook pages to homespun mourning garb.) Hodes’ close and clever reading of sources recovers the anarchy and confusion of the Civil War’s aftermath.  

As are all my choices, Hodes’s study is the result of voluminous research into hundreds of diaries, letters, newspapers, and memoirs, and like my other selections, her book is gracefully written. Hodes reveals the vast range of opinions on Lincoln’s assassination, which rarely broke down along neat sectional lines. Many northern Democrats expressed “glee”—one of Hodes’s chapter titles—over Lincoln’s murder, while a good number of Confederates, even as they regarded Lincoln as a tyrant, worried that his assassination might guarantee northern vengeance.

Lay readers who today instinctively venerate Lincoln will be surprised at how divided many Americans were about his… show more.