This is a fascinating excerpt from Martha Hodes' book, Mourning Lincoln, describing the unusual and uncommonly common sight of men crying over the assassinated president:  
                                                         "Men Weeping"
    Plenty of men kept their feelings in check, conserving their words or remaining silent in grief and anger.  Extreme circumstances, however, could snap codes of conduct, and the end of the Civil War was just such an occasion:  When Garland White and his fellow black soldiers entered the fallen city of Richmond, White found himself "overcome with tears."  The higher a man's social status, the more constricted he felt in displaying emotion, but now it barely mattered.  
    For Union men, black and white, rich and poor, victory had been worthy of weeping with joy, and news of the assassination likewise brought tears of sorrow.  Just as Confederate men had wept openly in the shock and bitterness of defeat, it was now the turn of the Union men to break the rules of masculine deportment.  
    That grown men cried -- a staple of news reports and memoirs -- is proven in the leaves of private journals.  Some, like George Templeton Strong, swallowed hard, as his eyes kept filling, and the corners of his mouth kept twitching, "in spite of all I could do," he wrote in his diary.  
     Walking through the Broadway throngs in New York, one woman saw that her husband could "scarcely keep back the tears."  Others didn't bother to try.  As black soldiers in camp in Pennsylvania listened to a sermon on Lincoln's death, many wept freely, the same as on city and village streets, where white men were "sobbing and crying bitterly."  In Philadelphia, weeping men grasped hands, while in Saco, Maine, men talked in groups, "wiping their eyes."  At a church service for Americans in Paris, the minister got through the service only with a "violent effort of self-control," his voice breaking at the closing prayer for the slain president.  
    Men, one woman wrote, were "not ashamed of their tears."  To be sure, many who recorded the sobs of their male companions made sure to call those men strong, in an effort to distinguish them from excusably weak women.  In the post office in New York, one woman found "the clerks and every one so sad -- strong men in tears," just as a minister in Buffalo spoke of the "unusual spectacle of strong men in tears."  
    Others portrayed the men as shedding tears of fury.  Inside Ford's Theater, one witness wrote, "strong men wept, and cursed, and tore the seats in the impotence of their anger."  Some men recorded their own emotions obliquely, bypassing the use of first-person singular.  "We think it no shame to weep here today," wrote a federal clerk in Washington.  Others put it more directly.  A man riding on the streetcars in New York found it "impossible to control my tears," then found himself face to face with another weeping gentleman, the reality of the terrible crime once again verified in an exchange of glances that revealed befitting emotions.  As a white officer in a black regiment told his mother, "I never wept so much over the death of any person."  
    Because the sight of men crying in public was far from common, some observers felt obliged to describe them as children, thereby casting their actions as something more familiar.  At a Quaker meeting in Philadelphia, a woman watched as a man cried out, "Oh, no!  No!  It cannot be!" and "wept as a child."  Aggrieved Union soldiers in Raleigh were subdued, some "weeping like children."  Of course those men were still strong.  
    On the street outside Ford's Theater, wrote one eyewitness to the murder, "strong men throw their arms around each other's necks and cry like children."  Anson Henry, Lincoln's physician and friend, had come to Washington immediately on hearing the news.  When he laid eyes on the president's lifeless body, "the fountain of tears was broken up," he wrote, "and I wept like a child refusing to be comforted, remaining riveted to the spot."  To his wife, he confided, "I had never before realized the luxury of tears."