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We must despair of this generation; for this generation has handled the whips and sold human flesh in the market; and they are corrupt. Let them die in peace. But, for God and the country’s sake, do not make of them Governors, Lieutenant Governors, Judges, Mayors, Sheriffs, Senators and Ministers to foreign countries.… We have had enough of shame and humiliation. The nation has washed out the black spot on her escutcheon. Shall we honor and obey, now, the very men who made the blot?46

Since the policies of Presidents Lincoln and Johnson seemed calculated to produce precisely that result, the warning had been well grounded.

Despite the disappointment over Lincoln’s lenient amnesty program, his misplaced confidence in southern Unionists, and his “moderate” experiments in state reconstruction, the assassination of the President silenced his black critics and threw a stunned black community into deep mourning, as though it had lost its only white friend and protector. The President’s initial doubts about the wisdom of emancipation and the enlistment of blacks were now forgotten, his equivocations on civil rights ignored, his schemes of colonization, expatriation, and reconstruction forgiven. Even the cold language and forced nature of his Emancipation Proclamation no longer seemed relevant, giving way to the legend of the Great Emancipator. “Hereafter, through all time,” prophesied one black newspaper, “wherever the Black Race may be known in the world; whenever and wherever it shall lay the foundations of its power; build its cities and rear its temples, it will sacredly preserve if not deify the name of ‘Abraham, the Martyr.’ ” In heaping their praise on the fallen President, black clerics, editors, and common laborers tended to repeat the same themes and evoke the same images. He had completed the noble work begun by John Brown—“two martyrs, whose memories will live united in our bosoms.” He was “the only President who ever had the courage to acknowledge the true manhood of the negro.” He had been “the greatest earthly friend of the colored race,” “a Martyr to his cause, and a Sacrifice to his country.”47 In a church on St. Helena Island, South Carolina, freedmen prayed for Lincoln as they would have prayed only for the Saviour himself. Christ had saved them from sin, Lincoln had rescued them from slavery, and more than one freedman thought them indistinguishable: “Lincoln died for we, Christ died for we, and me believe him de same mans.” The manner of his death made him a logical black hero, victimized by the same spirit of malice and hatred that had brutalized black people for generations. For that very reason, the South could not escape responsibility by ascribing the act to “individual insanity,” at least not in the view of numerous black spokesmen. To treat the assassin as a madman, they argued, would be to ignore the record of deliberate and rational oppression from which four million black men and women had only begun to emerge.48

Among substantial numbers of freedmen, the initial shock of Lincoln’s death was compounded by apprehension over the future. If the President (“Massa Sam”) and the government were one and the same, as some blacks assumed, the results of the war, including emancipation, appeared to be jeopardized. “We going to be slaves again?” more than one freedman thought to ask. To Jack Flowers, who had made a spectacular wartime escape to the Union lines in South Carolina, the assassination threatened to undo his exploit. “I ’spect it’s no use to be here,” he said dejectedly. “I might as well stayed where I was. It ’pears we can’t be free, nohow. The rebs won’t let us alone. If they can’t kill us, they’ll kill all our friens’, sure.” Former slaveholders had seized upon the President’s death to taunt the freedmen about the suddenly dim prospects of freedom, a concerned missionary wrote from Florida, “and some of our people began to talk of going north to escape enslavement again, for as Massa Lincoln was gone they feared their hope was gone too.” More typical may have been the many whites who expressed