Posted on 09/14/2025 1:11:21 PM PDT by CondoleezzaProtege
The crowds were phenomenal. Pews always filled to capacity on Easter, but no one had ever seen anything like April 16, 1865…
Shot on Good Friday and dead on Saturday: The timing of the assassination made Easter Sunday 1865 a particularly important—and confusing—occasion, as shocked mourners came to church for what should have been a day of rejoicing over both the resurrection of Christ and military victory.
The reversal of fortunes was manifested materially, as churchwomen rearranged the colorful springtime displays they had readied. Easter decoration had become something of a commercial enterprise by the mid nineteenth century…As a congregant in Boston recorded, grappling with the juxtaposition of joy and sorrow, “This glorious Easter morn our Church put on the garb of mourning.”
African Americans claimed for themselves a special place in the outpouring of sorrow, and the prayers and sermons of Easter Sunday magnified Lincoln’s role as the Great Emancipator…Would they “have to be slaves again”?
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.
“Do not feel like doing anything,” wrote sixteen-year-old Margaret Howell in Philadelphia…
Grief affected people’s physical well-being too, in all kinds of ways: lightheadedness or debilitating headaches, prolonged trembling, “prostration of the nervous system,” even days of indefinable sickness. The declaration of victory had enabled Moses Cleveland, serving outside Mobile, to bear his poor health more easily, but the assassination brought him back to the army surgeon, who dispensed medicine and orders to rest.
(Excerpt) Read more at neh.gov ...
I really don’t care what you think. You are a child at an adult table.
Shh child.
Nothing worth while to say so you just mouth off.
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