For communities of freedpeople across the South, grief washed through like a tidal wave. From Norfolk and Portsmouth, Beaufort and Charleston came the most heartfelt sorrow, troubled countenances, and very great grief. Everywhere children cried audibly and grown-ups wept bitterly. Some cried all night, others just felt numb. One woman described herself as nearly deranged with grief. Black soldiers were utterly bereft. Edgar Dinsmore of the 54th Massachusetts felt a loss irreparable. One man compared the circumstances to a horrific scene he had witnessed as a slave: a mother whipped forty lashes for weeping when white people took away her children. The violence had traumatized him, but not half so much as the death of President Lincoln, he confessed. Some white officers in black regiments felt the sense of loss magnified. Oh how Sad, How Melancholy, James Moore wrote to his wife. Such intense sorrow overcame him that it seemed an impossibility to rally from it. In Petersburg, Thomas Morris Chester saw both unfeigned grief and an undisguised feeling of horror, for the question hadnt gone away: Would they have to be slaves again? African Americans claimed for themselves a special place in the outpouring of sorrow, and the prayers and sermons of Easter Sunday magnified Lincolns role as the Great Emancipator. A New Orleans minister asserted that his people felt deeper sorrow for the friend of the colored man, and black clergymen in the North allowed that their people felt the loss more keenly and more than all others. Journalists singled out the dusky-skinned men of our own race as the chiefthe truest mourners, and black soldiers maintained that as a people none could deplore his loss more than we. Frederick Douglass, speaking extemporaneously in Rochester on Saturday, told the overflowing crowd that he felt the loss as a personal as well as national calamity because of the race to which I belong. Even the most stricken white mourners conceded the point. Secretary of the Navy Gideon Welles thought the colored people to be the truer mourners. In the words of one minister, We who are white know little of the emotions which thrill the black mans heart to-day, and as another told his congregation, intense as is our grief, no white person could fathom the sorrow of black people. White mourners also pondered this difference in their personal writings. How I pity the poor colored people, wrote one, who share perhaps most deeply in our great calamity!
For communities of freedpeople across the South, grief washed through like a tidal wave. From Norfolk and Portsmouth, Beaufort and Charleston came the most heartfelt sorrow, troubled countenances, and very great grief. Everywhere children cried audibly and grown-ups wept bitterly. Some cried all night, others just felt numb. One woman described herself as nearly deranged with grief. Black soldiers were utterly bereft. Edgar Dinsmore of the 54th Massachusetts felt a loss irreparable. One man compared the circumstances to a horrific scene he had witnessed as a slave: a mother whipped forty lashes for weeping when white people took away her children. The violence had traumatized him, but not half so much as the death of President Lincoln, he confessed. Some white officers in black regiments felt the sense of loss magnified. Oh how Sad, How Melancholy, James Moore wrote to his wife. Such intense sorrow overcame him that it seemed an impossibility to rally from it. In Petersburg, Thomas Morris Chester saw both unfeigned grief and an undisguised feeling of horror, for the question hadnt gone away: Would they have to be slaves again?
African Americans claimed for themselves a special place in the outpouring of sorrow, and the prayers and sermons of Easter Sunday magnified Lincolns role as the Great Emancipator. A New Orleans minister asserted that his people felt deeper sorrow for the friend of the colored man, and black clergymen in the North allowed that their people felt the loss more keenly and more than all others. Journalists singled out the dusky-skinned men of our own race as the chiefthe truest mourners, and black soldiers maintained that as a people none could deplore his loss more than we. Frederick Douglass, speaking extemporaneously in Rochester on Saturday, told the overflowing crowd that he felt the loss as a personal as well as national calamity because of the race to which I belong. Even the most stricken white mourners conceded the point. Secretary of the Navy Gideon Welles thought the colored people to be the truer mourners. In the words of one minister, We who are white know little of the emotions which thrill the black mans heart to-day, and as another told his congregation, intense as is our grief, no white person could fathom the sorrow of black people. White mourners also pondered this difference in their personal writings. How I pity the poor colored people, wrote one, who share perhaps most deeply in our great calamity!
As for central_va, I don't want to reconstruct him. I think he's just fine the way he is. In fact, I like him. Several times, I've seen some flashes of humor, even though he probably thinks that interferes with this rebel image that he's been working on. I know he likes "Dixie" and I'll just bet he likes some other music, too. We'd get along. In my book, he's okay.