President Abraham Lincoln’s assassination occurred at a delicate time in American history. The war had just ended, the plight of African Americans was up in the air, and Reconstruction was falling into place. The end of the President’s life threw the country into even more of an upheaval. The introduction to the book The Lincoln Assassination discusses how the assassination is treated by historians as a sequel to the war, seen as an epilogue that few have sought to explain or understand.
So this is, in two ways, very like and unlike the death of John F. Kennedy. In one way, Kennedy’s assassination occurred at a delicate time in history, what with the civil rights movement, the Cold War, and immigration reform occurring. Lincoln’s death bewildered America, and Kennedy’s broke the American public’s heart. The country mourned Kennedy as though he had been a member of their own families, but as a chapter title in The Lincoln Assassination says: “Not Everybody Mourned Lincoln’s Death”.
The chapter describes how soldiers in the North as well as the South were noted to have “exclaimed” upon hearing of Lincoln’s assassination. The men in the North were usually punished for such talk, which ranged from hate comments about Lincoln’s politics to absurd and inappropriate outbursts, such as when “bosun’s mate Thomas Smith was… ungenerous: ‘If I could find his grave, I’d shit on it.’ Smith went to prison for one year.”
There are dozens of examples of such talk in this chapter. The men were disenchanted by the war and upset with where the country was going, and enough so that they were a vocal enough minority to be noticed.
I have seen none such reactions in reading about what occurred after JFK’s death. Was JFK a better President, or was the nation simply more attached to the charismatic man who had saved them from nuclear war? Was his image at the time of his death just so much better than Lincoln’s at the time of his, that it created this disparity between the reactions of the two assassinations?
Holzer, Harold, Craig L. Symonds, and Frank J. Williams. The Lincoln Assassination: Crime and Punishment, Myth and Memory. New York: Fordham UP, 2010. Print.