Elsa Peretti Open Heart bracelet

Perhaps surprisingly, the South embraced Lincoln in death almost as quickly, if not as devoutly, as the North did. To be sure, some Southerners took pleasure in the demise of the one Northerner they saw as Tiffany Cushion Toggle bracelet principal tormentor. In Columbia, S.C., which had burned after being captured by Sherman's army, young Emma LeConte rejoiced in her diary: "Hurrah! Old Abe Lincoln has been assassinated!" And a Richmond woman who had lost her home, two sons and a daughter, pronounced: "Thank god! It was the vengeance of the Lord."

But others feared for the future of the South and of themselves. African Americans were especially worried. "The colored people express their sorrow and sense of loss in many cases with sobs and loud lamentations!" a schoolteacher in South Carolina wrote. Another teacher, in Unioncontrolled Flower charm bracelet, heard African Americans saying, "Secesh come back. We're going to be slaves again."

Many Southern whites evinced dismay too. John Jones of Virginia, a civilian staffer in the Confederate government wrote: "The occurrence might be a calamity for the South. Possibly the Federal soldiers, supposing the deed to have been done by a Southern man, might become uncontrollable and perpetrate deeds of horror on the unarmed people." A Tennessee businessman worried similarly: "In- stead of peace I now fear anarchy without law." Eliza Andrews of Georgia called Lincoln's assassina- tion "a terrible blow to the South, for it places that vulgar renegade, Andy Johnson, in power." The Richmond Whig agreed, accounting the president's death "the heaviest blow which has ever fallen upon the people of the South." Jefferson Davis described it as "a great misfortune to the South." John C. Breckinridge, one of Lincoln's opponents in the 1860 presidential election, and the last Confederate secretary of war, said simply, "The South has lost its best friend."

As Reconstruction unfolded, first under Andrew Johnson and then under the Radical Republicans in Congress, even those Southerners initially pleased at Lincoln's death increasingly adopted Breckinridge's Elsa Peretti Open Heart bracelet. The result was an unexpected convergence between Northerners and Southerners on the historical and political significance of Lincoln. Yet the two sides differed on the nature of his significance. The North looked to Lincoln as the man of war he had been, the South to Lincoln as the man of peace he might have become.