A Day of Humiliation and Mourning

On this, the anniversary of Abraham Lincoln’s birth (and Charles Darwin’s), we’ll take a moment to look back at the nation’s (and Providence’s) response to his death.

As noted in the previous post, mourning over Lincoln’s assassination took place across the nation, and Andrew Johnson, Lincoln’s successor, declared 1 June 1865 a national day of “humiliation and mourning,” describing the country in the proclamation as “one great house of mourning.” (Text of the proclamation and a description of the activities in New York available through the New York Times website.)

It was a distinctly religious undertaking: Johnson declared the purpose of the event to be “humbling ourselves before Almighty God” and called for the nation to “assemble in their respective places of worship.” The service in Providence was held at the Beneficent Congregational Church, and the program (image of cover to the left—click to view enlargement) reprints the chorus of “Columbia Mourns,” which was sung during the service:

“Columbia, mourn! His course is o’er; the brave, the mighty is no more! Mourn Columbia! let all you streams of sorrow flow. We have sinned; we fell; we scorned our God! He died beneath the assassin’s rod. O day of bitterness! O day of woe! Mourn, Columbia! Mourn!”

In addition to displaying a marked fondness for the exclamation point, the author captures the biblical and apocalyptic element of the national response to Lincoln’s assassination.

The high point of the service was William Binney’s oration on Lincoln. The June 3rd issue of the Providence Journal provided the following assessment: “No higher praise can be awarded it than to say that it rises to the height of the great occasion and the great theme.” The text was printed in a limited edition of 25 copies (ours is no. 1) by Knowles and Anthony for George Taylor Paine, who would later become secretary of the Rhode Island Historical Society.

Lincoln and Rhode Island

In the spirit of the widespread celebrations of Abraham Lincoln’s 200th birthday, we’ll be highlighting a few of the Lincoln-related items in our collections over the next week or so. (Many of the items mentioned will be on display in an exhibition of Lincolniana at the Aldrich House. Also, be sure to attend “An Evening with Lincoln” on February 12th at the First Unitarian Church. See the RIHS website for more details.)

The first item is a broadside poem titled “Lincoln Lies Sleeping” by Nathan Upham. The poem is a quite melancholy dirge (a good deal of “bewailing” and “deep gloom”) that also manages to rise to a political crescendo in which Lincoln offers a posthumous prayer for the forgiveness of John Wilkes Booth and the nation rallies for unity. The somewhat maudlin text is matched by a melody taken from Stephen Foster’s “Under the Willow She’s Sleeping,” a song in which a mother laments the death of her child.

Broadsides of the poem seem to have been quite popular: Edwin Wolf’s American Song Sheets (entry #1263) lists five separate publications; Brown University’s Lincoln Broadsides (search for “Lincoln Lies Sleeping”) provides images of three of them and another two not listed in Wolf.  This is the only variation published in Providence, and the imprint credits “Theodore B. Stayner,” whose only other publication seems to be “Wake Nicodemus,” a widely-published song. Publishing may have been a temporary occupation for Stayner: the 1900 census includes a 59 year old “Theodore B. Stayner” who listed his occupation as “advertiser.”

Lincoln’s assassination prompted national mourning, so it comes as no surprise that “Lincoln Lies Sleeping” is just one example of printed Lincoln ephemera. In addition to Nathan Upham’s poem, a Louise Upham offered “The Nation is Weeping”, which set a similar poem to the same melody.

The Providence response to the Lincoln’s assassination will be the topic of a future post, as will another broadside—one that is also among Rhode Island’s earliest imprints.

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—Additional Resources—

For background information on broadsides, see The Encyclopedia of Ephemera.

To view more early broadsides, try:

• “An American Time Capsule: Three Centuries of Broadsides and Other Printed Ephemera” (Part of the Library of Congress’ American Memory project. Includes nearly 200 Rhode Island related broadsides.)
• “Dying Speeches & Bloody Murder” (The Harvard Law School Library’s collection of over 500 crime broadsides.)
• The English Broadside Ballad Archive & The Bodleian Library Broadside Ballads