May 1865 was starting out like many before it in Cambridge. The city was emerging from a long winter and awakening to spring. But Cantabrigians were still reeling from the assassination of their president and pursuit and capture of those who conspired to kill him and members of his administration. On April 14, Abraham Lincoln had been shot by the actor and Confederate sympathizer John Wilkes Booth during a performance at Ford’s Theater. Booth escaped, and Lincoln expired the next morning, leaving the nation in disbelief and either deep grief or celebration.
Like local papers across the country, the Cambridge Chronicle carried the news of Lincoln’s killing, the hunt for Booth and his associates and the president’s funeral and its accompanying mourning rituals. In its April 22 issue, the Chronicle described the ways in which Boston, Cambridge and the surrounding towns were marking this solemn occasion, asserting that these expressions of grief served as means of uniting local residents with mourners throughout the nation: “It was a solemn thought, that all over our land, funeral peals were wailing forth from every spire, swelling in one mighty ocean of sound, the paean of a good man departed; rolling through space, like the deep sob of anguish from the lacerated heart of a nation, the combined grief of millions, finding vent in wailing.”
The Chronicle reporter went on to describe Cambridge’s reaction to Lincoln’s death, stating that, on April 19, the day of his funeral, “by no community in our afflicted country, was the solemn day more appropriately kept than in Cambridge. Almost every building, whether dwelling house or store, added its share to the great aggregate of mourning, and every citizen lent his aid to the solemn tribute of the day.” A large crowd assembled at City Hall to hear local leaders speak about Lincoln’s life, his legacy and the future of the country at this crucial moment. Lincoln’s death had occurred just as the end seemed to be drawing near for the Confederacy; would the assassination help to secure an ultimate Union victory, or would the South be buoyed by this act of political violence and rally to extend the fighting still further?
Speaking to the public at that City Hall gathering, local political, religious and educational leaders grappled with the assassination itself, as well as its implications for the nation’s future. One minister told the assembled crowd that, although they could not imagine themselves led through the nightmare of war into peace and national reconciliation by anyone other than Lincoln, “God has a lesson not only for us, but for other nations, not to place their hopes too much upon one poor single mortal.” As much as Lincoln had personified the Union cause, the mission to eliminate slavery and preserve the Union was larger than one person, and would continue despite the loss of the late president. Comparing Lincoln to the figure of Moses in the Exodus story, the speaker drew on an image that would have been very familiar to his Cambridge audience; throughout the war, Lincoln had been portrayed as a modern-day Moses leading his people (Americans both Black and white) to safety and prosperity in the promised land. Just as Moses had been able to glimpse that land God had promised to his people, he died just before the Israelites had entered it. After his death, God had provided continued leadership under Joshua, who completed Moses’s mission; so, too, would Andrew Johnson assume the presidency and continue the work of restoration and repair that Lincoln had already begun to plan even before the end of the war.
As Cantabrigians struggled to come to terms with the assassination, the impending end to the Civil War and the future of the country, they looked to their own history to guide them. A sizable column in the May 6, 1865, Chronicle summarizes the history of the city in establishing, maintaining and defending liberty and justice, from the establishment of a Puritan settlement in 1630 to the creation of the 1st Massachusetts Volunteer Infantry in 1861 – the first three-year regiment to reach Washington, D.C. to aid the Union cause. In this way, the writer sought to portray Cambridge as a place that had always embodied the values of freedom and opportunity, and that the city had just an important role to play in the nation’s future as it had in its past.
One crucial way in which Cambridge could emerge as a leader in upholding the values of the Union in this challenging time was to espouse a peaceful and lawful resolution to the assassination trial and the broader end to the war. The Chronicle article on Cambridge’s long-standing role in the struggle for freedom reports residents asking, “‘Who did this deed?’ ‘Was it Booth?’ ‘Will they catch him?’ I don’t know whether they will or not. Slavery did it; we have got slavery, and slavery must suffer. It is time to stop conciliation and remember justice.” Cantabrigians, like Americans everywhere, had channeled their anger toward Booth and his co-conspirators, but these were just individuals symbolizing the larger struggle between what many saw as the forces of good and evil.
The root cause of the war, and the force that had torn the Union asunder, was slavery. There was no room for that institution to continue, and its ideology must be completely stamped out for the country to begin the long and difficult process of repair. But even as local leaders called for the extermination of the slave system, they took pains to emphasize that this transition must be accomplished without violence, which they argued would only further entrench the Confederacy and defeat the goal of reunification. There should be no refuge for proslavery ideology in a post-Civil War America, but political violence in the vein of the Lincoln assassination was not the answer to the country’s struggles. As the nation embarked on the herculean task of rebuilding itself, it would undoubtedly look to Cambridge as one of the historical beacons of liberty and enlightenment, and the city must be ready to continue its legacy of peaceful leadership in this realm.
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