# 8 Response to Sophie Milner

            As Sophie takes on a Northerners perspective to reread the poem The Death of Lincoln and the diary A Diary From Dixie, I wish to expand upon the ideas she brought up in her analysis. In the poem about Lincoln’s death, it is very apparent to see the great sorrow that it brought upon the people of the north, the loss of their great leader. In a northerner’s perspective, it appears that Lincoln was like a martyr to their cause for the abolition of slavery. Just the way that John Brown was depicted as a martyr when he was executed for his actions at the Harper Ferry Raid. Lincoln had just dealt the south a big blow with the Thirteenth Amendment and Gen. Lee’s surrender was giving the Union increasing hope that they had gained the upper hand, when suddenly possibly the most devastating type of blow came to the north with Lincoln’s death.  The poem later expresses that even in Lincoln’s death, he will still be regarded as being “ among  the noble host of those who perished in the cause of Right.” On a side note, I personally thought it interesting that although there were a staggering amount of deaths in the Civil War, 600,000, totaling greater than any other previous war's deaths combined, that fact didn’t seemed nearly as heart breaking to northerners when compared to Lincoln’s death. Thousands and thousands of their young men and boys even  were being slaughtered in the south, and no great emotional sentiments were expressed or mentioned along with Lincoln’s death. Now, in reference to the diary of Mary Boykin Chestnut, as Sophie’s northern perspectives portrays, great offense must have been taken by the remarks expressed in the diary. Not only were the Northerner’s seen as “red ants, like the locusts and frogs which were the plagues of Egypt”, getting at their claims to be such good Christians, but they were furthere demeaned when Mary Darby stated that “now [they] belonged to negroes and Yankees!”, at the news of Lee’s surrender. I feel like as a northerner, although they were pro-antislavery, to have the comparison to a slave would have been very perturbing in their minds. I suspect that people of the north already had a low minded impression of people of the south due to the fact that they engaged in the brute act of slavery; once Lincoln was assassinated and the conspiracy to revenge the Confederacy defeat was proposed as the purpose for his death, I imagine that the already low view of southerners decreased even more in the eyes of the Yankees. At Mary Chestnut’s claim that the Yankees “murdered him themselves”, a person of the north would have been very outraged to be charged with the death of their great, Christ-like leader and President. Likewise, at the remarks of President Lincoln “not [being] the last … put to death in the capital”, I think the north may have felt like they, the south, had already taken their greatest hope, what/ who is left for them to take that could leave as equally a painful scar as did Lincoln’s death.