Position

Cope Evans Student Assistant, 2008

Haverford College Quaker and Special Collections, Haverford, Pennsylvania

Summary of Project

Digitize and transcribe letters of the Cope Evans Family and upload digital images and metadata to Triptych, Haverford's version of contentDM.

Culmination

Panel presentation & booklet, The Accustomed Message

Links

• Triptych link to digitized letters

• Later created: Project Website

Transcript of The Accustomed Message, Page 38

Presidential Assassinations

The story of President Lincoln’s assassination is well known. The American Civil War drew to a close when Lee surrendered on April 9, 1865, but tensions between the former secessionists and confederates were no less strained, when on April 14,

Lincoln was shot while enjoying a theater performance with his wife. He died the next day.

On April 11, Clementine Cope (1835-1903) had started to write a letter to her mother and sisters informing them that she planned to go with a friend to Washington, D.C.; on April 18 she picked up the letter again to finish it, but this time with a heavy pen. She wrote:

“I have laid aside my letter for two or three </em><em>days, - for we have all felt so sad since hearing the dreadful news that I cld. not feel like writing abt. ordinary things & there seemed little to say on the one great subject - the presidents dreadful death, wh. seemed dreadful enough to strike every one dumb with horror & astonishment” (April 11, 1865 to Susan L. Newbold Cope, Annette Cope, and Caroline Elizabeth Cope).

She confided in her recipients that the secessionists had been partying in the streets at the news, and schools had been let out while everyone mourned. On April 25, Clementine wrote to someone else that she was able to watch the funeral procession of the President and it was the most mournful funeral she’d ever seen. She wrote, 

“It will take a long time to forget the grief and horror of this sad event—but work must go on” (April 25, 1864 to Annette Cope). 

She had no idea how true her words would be a hundred years later.

In 1901 a second presidential assassination befell the nation—this time that of President William McKinley. Anna Stewardson Brown Cope (1822-1916) wrote to her daughter on September 16, 1901, two days after McKinley’s death. She, like Clementine Cope, said that schools had been closed down for a mourning period. She expressed sadness and wondered what would happen next, hoping that the Vice President would be a good leader. Finally, from one woman to another, Anna wrote of the President’s widow, “His wife must be a wonder-fully calm temperament to have borne up so well, in her delicate state of health” (September 16, 1901 to Rachel Reeve Cope Evans), thus expressing one way in which women of Anna’s time could relate to politics, through the position of wife and mother.

Sara Bornstein ’09

Cope Evans Student Assistant, 2008