Including one from the new york civil war roundtable. He recently had the opportunity to travel to seoul, korea were he addressed the korean Abraham Lincoln society. I know i would like to hear more about that. [laughter] how can i get on the gravy train question mark [laughter] today, he will talk to us about his new book, Abraham Lincoln and death which was published earlier this year. A review at civil war monitor states students of the 16th president will want to add this concise, sensitively written volume to their bookshelves created please join me in welcoming brian dirck. [laughter] [applause] it is good to be here. Dirck its good to see old friends. Fred i know you are here somewhere. Meeting lots of wonderful people. You are heroes. You are all heroes to a group of students at Anderson University who are getting tomorrow off because i am here. [laughter] they love the lincoln form. No, dr. Dark, have fun. We will struggle through without you. Any of thenvolved in lincoln form scholarship programs that need donations, if you would contact the 42 students who would normally be in my 9 00 a. M. Class who nobody sleeping, i would imagine you would get some money out of those kids. Thank you very much for inviting me. My latest book is called the black heavens, Abraham Lincoln and death. The usual reaction when i named that is to get a raised eyebrow because, death well. As the death to it book. Dad, how is the death book coming along . Say how i got to the point of writing about that. My hello authors in the room will probably relate that there are occasions where you begin to write one book and end up writing a totally different book. The book was originally going to be a study of the summer of 1864. I was going to call it lincolns hardest summer and a look at his leadership during this very difficult summer of 1864 when he was up for reelection, did not think he was going to get reelected and the body count is going through the roof. With the with this Wilderness Campaign and all of that. Then i started looking at questions regarding that summer and there was very little written about how lincoln understood death and dying. There were a few things scattered here and there but nobody tried to follow that thread. Editorcted my wonderful at Southern Illinois press. I said to you might if i write a totally different book . She was nice about it. Im going to speak a little bit about the things i wrote about in that book but i will not have time for questions because there are so many things i will not be able to address. I hope we have some good questions. Evening in december of 1862, the governor of pennsylvania arrived at the white house to meet with president lincoln. The time was very late at night. Someone said the president was already in bed. He left word that he wanted to see the governor no matter the hour thread the governor was escorted into lincolns bedroom where the president was sitting at is my shirt on the edge of the bed. Returnednor had just from fredericksburg and lincoln asked what he had seen of the battlefield. At governor was a skeptic times and he immediately retorted, battlefield . It was not a battlefield it was a slaughter. I was sorry the moment i said that he later recalled. Handsn groaned, rose his and other exclamations of grief. It was only with considerable difficulty he later remembered that he was able to get lincoln called down to get back into bed. As he was getting back into bed, he told him if there is a worse place than hell, i am in it or it. Later it was summer not winter, the campaign season. Ulysses s. Grant was locked in a struggle to destroy once and for all robert e. Lees army of virginia. His Relentless Campaign and eventual stage of petersburg was driving the casualty rates to ungodly numbers. Many northerners believed the depth of so many soldiers deaths of so may soldiers were unbelievable. Mary lincoln told her husband to fire grant because he was a butcher. Thet who was aware of public pressure to fall back from the front lines expressed his desire to keep pressing the enemy. I have senior dispatch senior dispatch. Neither am i willing. Hold on with a bulldog grip and chew and choque as much as possible. There were two different sides of lincoln. The lincoln sitting on the edge of his bed it his nightshirt, horrified at the body count. A man and a place that is worse than hell. We also have grimly determined iron john lincoln defying anyone who tells him the cumin cost is unacceptable including his own wife. Here was a man who could order thousands upon thousands of soldiers to their death but at the same time arise in agony at the humid cost of war. We have long celebrated both lincoln. Historians admire him for his understanding that the war was essentially about killing enemy soldiers and relentlessly pursuing the union to victory. We all believe he was right when he told mcclellan he should pursue the enemy after antietam. Horribly upset he was. At the same time, we celebrate his essential humanity. His ability to appreciate and empathize with the humans suffering that was the american civil war. He seems to have been able to do both things at once. To be a man of empathy and of hard action. A president who could order meant to their deaths yet genuinely rude the dying. It is this quality of lincoln that we dont often appreciate. We dont often remark upon it. His ability to balance things. He was able in so many aspects of his life to find a proper balance point between extremes. Whether it be the intellectual realm, his balancing the constitutions pragmatism with the declarations idealism or the political realm, his ability to steer the course between the radical and conservative aspects of his party. Or the personal realm with his lifelong balancing of humor and sadness, fatalism and idealism. Abraham lincoln was many things but he was a man of his group exquisite balance oriented how did he do it . What of this balancing act . Where did this come from . The capacity to be hard as nails and exquisitely empathetic. To mourn the dead yet except the death of the worst tragic price . I think the ability that he showed to maintain his balance stems back to his very earliest days. To before the war stretching back to his childhood. He knew death from an early age. His first encounters stemmed from the same source as any other young boy in early kentucky and indiana. Hunting. His father, thomas was an enthusiastic hunter as was his cousin. With him he spent a great deal of time. We all hunted for the much all the time dennis remembered. The country was wild full of wild game. We could track a bear, dear old world for miles through the matted vines trade we depended upon hunting for a living. This included Young Abraham. Dennis recalled an incident after they arrived at Little Pigeon Creek, abraham spotted a flock of turkeys. They were away from the camp at the time and abraham was too small to load and prime a gun himself so his mother had to do it. He poked the gun through the crack of the cant and accidentally killed one. Is, lincoln disliked hunting. He later and rather proudly wrote of the turkey shooting that he had never since pulled a traitor on any larger game. He did not might like cut killing. The torturing of animals that were everywhere in the woods. One neighbor required recalled him writing essays about being kind to animals. Crushed atepbrother turtle, he preached against cruelty to animals. His indiana friends and neighbors referred constantly to his tenderhearted this. Ore was a far from calais unfeeling extra, quite the contrary. If anything, he seems to have been notable in his capacity to feel be suffering and loss of others around him even turtles. Soon after the family arrived in indiana, abraham was forced to come confront death in a more profound and painful way. Sometime in the early fall of 1818, several neighbors of the lincolns fell seriously ill. First with an uncontrollable shaking than a severe thirst, a loss of appetite and general fatigue then with severe stomach cramps and vomiting that grew steadily worse. They were suffering from what was known as the milk is. Ingested a cows local plant called whitesnake it contained a chemical that turned the cows milk into a deadly poison. Milk sickness was a much feared, usually fatal scourge among settlers. Abrahams mother, nancy, came to the aid of her sick neighbors and at some point, she ingested the poison herself. She lingered for quite a while after initially falling ill, struggling on day by day. It must have been excruciating pain. The vomiting and resting produced by milk sickness being so violent that some refer to it as the puking disease. The fatigue and pain soon had her bedridden in their small cabin. By the time a week had passed, she knew she was 20. According to dennis. He remembered her calling abraham and her sister to her bedside and telling them to be kind to their father. She expressed a hope that they might live as they have been taught by her to love men and with love, reference reverence and to worship god. Thus passed away one of the better very best women of the entire race. Her body was hauled on a shed sled and buried under a group of persimmon trees were at rest to this day. What did abraham feel and experience . A nineyearold boy watching with growing alarm, signs of her eminent death . There are characteristics from which we can generalize among women and Children Place in similar circumstances. Children who lose a parent at an early age often wrestle with conflicting emotions. They are illequipped to control. And anger at what seems an unfair loss is common as is a general sense of helplessness and foreboding about the future. Children of a dying parent experience loss of security and comfort. Parents typically offer their Young Children a sense of permanence. Mother whos case, a was always present and supplying his daily needs as he grew up. No one recorded how abraham reacted to the surely immense stress of his mothers illness and death. Whether he lashed out in frustration, kept his turmoil buried deep inside, or perhaps exhibited some other form of behavior or it the very silence of the historical record is perhaps itself telling. Friends and relatives who later recalled in great detail the circumstances surrounding her illness and death had nothing to say good or bad about her young sons reaction. Dennis remembered at the time, both abraham and his sister did some work, little jobs, errands and lifework of that sort but neither dennis nor anyone else recorded how abraham reacted emotionally during the ordeal. He seems to have faded into the background. Nursing a private grief while his father and other friends were preoccupied. Some historians later theorized that lincolns adult melancholy and depression stemmed from this experience. It is striking that the various accounts we have liked like direct testimony of what he was doing as his mother lay dying and how he reacted. I dont want to be misunderstood. I am not suggesting that lincoln was cold and indifferent to his mothers passing. How could this be so . , i do wish to suggest that he found ways to internalize his grief. Dealing with it quietly and calling upon reserves of inner strength. One imagines a silent Young Abraham watching his mothers body being dragged up a hill on a wooden sled saying so little and doing so little that no one then or since remarked upon his behavior or even where he was at. He may have been compelled to help push the sled up the hill. Perhaps a stoic reserve. Certainly he did not sentimentalized her death. This itself was remarkable. Living as he did in a sentimental age where death or dying or concerned. Unlike dennis who described her passing with his vignette of the dying mother telling her children to be kind to their father, abraham never remain to size his mothers passing. If he saw any thing and her death, he never recorded the fact. Later recounting, he observed that it was as unpolitical as any spot on earth. Otherwise, he barely mentioned her death at all. Just a brief, dry reverence in one Campaign Autobiography he wrote in the third person in the autumn of 1818, his mother died. Otherd he, much on the major family loss he endured in indiana, the death of his older sister, sarah, who died in 1828 from complications related to childbirth. Described as did humored, industrious, and quick minded. Fatheras except like her with dark hair and complexion like her mother. Her death was apparently a dreadful ordeal. Perhaps even more so than abrahams mother read she had married a local man named aaron grigsby. She became quickly pregnant. She went into labor one bitterly cold february night with an identified unidentified complications sinking her into the depths of unendurable pain. A neighbor woman recalled her calling in agony for her father who called her screams heard her screams and said something is the matter. Thomas went after a doctor but he was too late. They let her leg too long. Sarah gave birth to a stillborn son then died herself either during the birth or shortly afterwards. Surrounding else Abraham Lincolns life, we have little solid information regarding precisely what happened to sarah and her baby. There seems to have been a midwife present. Aaron was nearby the typically, fathers did not attend childbirth. One account has thomas sending for a doctor but another has aaron himself growing alarmed and hitching a team of oxen to a sleigh, driving her to his Fathers House records of a mile away. A panicky decision to did his wife no good. The rig careening over snacks and rough ground with every jolt sharpening her labor pains. Arriving at his familys house, he then sent for a doctor but when the doctor arrived, he was so drunk they were forced to go find a second doctor who lived so far away that he did not arrive before it was too late. Which of these stories is accurate . What exactly went wrong it is impossible to determine. Stillbirth could result from any number of possible causes rated congenital birth defects, the stress of the baby prior to label labor, the umbilical cord wrapped around the babys neck or possibly a blockage in the babys oxygen supply causing it to suffocate. Letting sarah sarah lacy long suggests there was an issue with extracting the baby that eventually proved fatal the we do not know what laying too long meant. Probably goryd ordeal on a hard indiana winter noht was labeled by sentimental scenes or soft rituals rooted she and her child were buried together in the church cemetery. The sons body wrapped in the mothers arms read according to several accounts, abraham greek for the death of his sister. Record we have of him openly displaying grief at a death. He sat down on a log and hit his face in his hands while the tears rolled down. Local tradition has it that abraham felt not only grief but anger toward aaron and his family, holding them responsible for allowing sarah to suffer too long. There may be some truth to this for abraham had a grudge toward them fed by aarons cruel treatment of his wife. All of which is to suggest that abraham felt sarahs passing. Felt it probably is deeply as his mothers passing. At times, those feelings showed themselves. In a bout of sobbing, a sense of anger toward sarahs husband and family. We should note the limits of his open displays of emotion free of he did not break down into a lengthy or uncontrolled outburst of great. Nor does he seem to have acted upon his rage with any act of outright violence. One wonders if this provides a bit of context to the biting and funny problem he wrote about two of the brothers which caused a good deal of animosity between the group rigsbys and himself. What we see of lincoln is a child and young men who learns to feel and control those feelings. Of course he was sensitive. The suffering and loss, even down to that of animals read he seems to have found ways to deal with the sensitivity by internalizing it. By quieting his own emotions are you i hesitate to use the word suppress because it might imply something unhealthy. I believe that his reticence and selfcontrol were on the positive attributes allowing him to both feel and function. He grew into a young man who felt deeply rooted yet created for himself and emotional toolbox to control and hide those emotions. It was an ability that would serve him well later in life. He was 19 when his sister died. Restlessggling and young man who wanted badly to leave the pigeon creek. He made his escape in 1831 after the entire family had left indiana and relocated to circumstances in Eastern Illinois read he wandered into the village of new salem and settled into a rambling life pursuing jobs, manual labor, postman, surveyor. Which at best, procured bread and kept body and soul together as he later put it. Sometime soon after he arrived, he met and rutledge, the teenage. Best daughter of the innkeeper. She was described as amiable, a goodlooking smart lively girl according to neighbors with fair hair and eyes and a cheerful disposition. She was also a good housekeeper with a moderate education having had a bit of schooling. At some point, they apparently struck up a romantic relationship. This entire affair is shrouded in mystery and a lack of solid primary source of evidence. According to be best available accounts, and was engaged to marry in the best another man but he had left for a prolonged absence and she was uncertain whether he would return. She seems to have subsequently agreed to marry lincoln but before they could do so, typhoid fever swept the area. She died in august, 1835. Some people later claimed that abraham went nearly insane with great over this death. The effect upon mr. Lincolns mind was terrible recalled her brother robert. He became plunged in despair and many of his friends feared the reason would desert him. Others say he became temporarily deranged to the point that his friends felt compelled to remove sharp objects from his presence. One said he was locked up by his friends to prevent derangement or suicide. Some thought he was ever thereafter changed and sad. These stories of his lifelong lifelong grief extended to his later years as president. According to a new salem friend who later visited the white house, lincoln still more to his lost love even during the war. You fell in love with and courted her . It is true, true indeed. He is alleged to have replied. I did honestly and truly love the girl and i think often of her now. Aside from such reminiscences recorded after his death, and many years after he left new salem, there is no direct evidence to record lincolns reaction to her death. He never mentioned her or alluded to her or even hinted at any relationship with her in any letter or speech. The absence of direct evidence along with the various biases and idiosyncrasies of william herndon, his former law partner who gathered all of the information regarding her and broached the idea of a romance between them has led some historians to serious seriously doubt whether the romance existed. As for myself, it seems quite a stretch to suggest that they were not involved at all. Following this, it is reasonable to conclude that, when she died, lincoln was distraught with great. Those two simple hardened nuggets of truth, the nugget romance and the grief have been heavily swapped in multiple layers of sentimentality. Tales of her flawless character and duty abound and his bottomless sorrow have been piled upon more tales to the point that friends, phoning biographers and even hollywood added in later years improbable details of the real cause of her death being her conflicted heart over lincoln and his rival. Of his never having carried a pocket knife after her death for fear of the southern sudden impulse to injure himself if he recalled her demise which we all know is a bunch of cracked because they found a pocketknife on him after he was shot. [laughter] of his grieving being triggered by violent weather, we watched during storms, fog and did gloomy weather mr. Lincoln for fear of an accident. The and rutledge myth is just another iteration of the good death sentimentality with which death and dying was wrapped during his time. Where nancy was a pious christian mother imparting last with the words of wisdom to her children. And was the starcrossed lover. Her man of his chance at eternal bliss and giving him thoughts of gloom and triggered by the detail of a thunderstorm. I can never be reconciled to have the snow and the rain and storms the upon our great he supposedly declared. Refusedfriend said he using the word love after she died. Anne could not have had a good death. Any more than nancys endless puking or sarahs group risley stillbirth. Typhoid or brain fever was a horrible way to die. Symptoms not that much different from milk sickness rate caused by a bacterial infection resulting from the contamination of Drinking Water and humid victimsyphoid gave its diarrhea, stomach cramps and headaches and a crushing fever. One reason why it was often referred to as brain fever in his day. Much assaw her suffer he shut saw his mothers pain and suffering from the milk sickness. She lingered for four or five days and we know that he lit visited her at least once before she died. It was evident he was much distressed remembered a friend. What is telling here is not the secondhand accounts of his distress or his supposedly suicidal behavior. What i find interesting is his silence. His failure to even once mention his relationship with her or his reaction to her death. One year after she died, he began a brief courtship with a woman named mary owens. She said later i do not recall hearing annes name. It is a curious matter but then perhaps not. It would be entirely in keeping with lincolns reactions to the death of his mother and sister. Died suddenly cut short other time. The people believed that deaths of nancy, sarah and anne fostered in him a lifetime of melancholy and loneliness. Perhaps. Level,a more observable the deaths of these women were cruel contest contrasts with the good death that respectable americans but they deserved and strove to attain. They discourage romantic ideas about the nature of living and dying. Had he been raised in different circumstances, say a comfortable middleclass home, he might well have learned to thickly coat death in the layers of sentiment and emotionalism that characterized the idea of the best way to die. Lincoln never seems to have thought this way. Instead, he learned early in life that death could be and often was raw and unforgiving. From the screams of his dying sister to the wretched wasting away from disease evident in his mother and fiance to the almost daily encounters, and with animals in the wilderness. I am not a very sentimental man, he would once remark. This was certainly true where death and dying were concerned. Years later, he would experience another death. This from the perspective not of a son or brother or lover but a parent. This death of his young son, eddie would not the eight frontier death. Instead, it would be a distinctly middleclass death with lincoln the respectable husband, father and lawyer in a town setting. He began to have persistent bouts of coughing. Slight at first but persistent. A little thing in a little boy. Abraham and mary might not have thought much about it not right away but the truth is he had always been rather sickly. Refers to any having recovered from his little spell of sickness in a letter but she offers no details. Eddie again summer, fell ill during a trip compelling married to devote most of her time and energy to nursing him. Cough that came a grew steadily worse. If his parents were initially inclined to downplay the significance, that is one more unfortunate but manageable trial for him, they were soon disabused as the coughing came withinrocious rate experiencing trouble catching his breath. They noticed the spots of blood on his lips and chin and the greenish yellow phlegm he began to expel. They called a consumption which was actually a catchall phrase in the scientifically imprecise times connoting any disease causing a consuming or wasting of the body. Scientific classification was so vague that some historians have since wondered what exactly caused to illness. Odds are it was tuberculosis. At the end of january, 18 50, everyone knew eddies condition was great. The wasting aspect of the disease would now have been evident. His skin would have had a white pallor. Hence the name white plague attached by some to the disease through his muscle tone would have been diminished from anemia and what was likely a prolonged time spent in bed. The difficult breathing and coughing spells continued punctuated by hoarseness and a diminishing ability to speak. Night sweats were also common. In some states, tuberculosis patients suffered diarrhea. Lived at a later age, he might have been taken to eight sanatorium with other patients. Places the segregated the dying process into its own institutionalized rules and routines. Instead, like nearly everyone else then, he spent his last days at home and lincoln would have been squarely in the middle of it all living day in and day out with the specter of his young boys imminent death growing ever more present. Lincoln reduces workload somewhat. He only litigated during the illness test cases. I went back and looked at the previous years. He normally litigated to her three times that many cases. It is the evidence that he cut back on his workload. He also did not go anywhere. Whereas he would routinely travel but he stayed at home. He made an effort to become more involved but, he also sustained in normal routine. He did go to work. He argued some cases and he wrote letters. You seeead the letters, no indication that there was anything unusual in his family life. He tried to bury his sons ordeal as a strong man. Hiswho had resolved to keep feelings under firms way. Shades of his quiet reaction to his mothers and sisters death. End of january, he would have undertaken the practical preparations for the funeral. He would have done most of this himself. There were no Funeral Directors or homes in springfield and the modern Funeral Service did not exist. He would have purchased a coffin. There were at least two businesses that sold coffins. He would have made the necessary arrangements for burial. In his case, he chose cemetery in springfield. Privately owned run by a cabinet maker who in all likelihood provided the hearse as well. There were rules about how this was all to be done. The exact trim of the hearse. Hearses always had white feathers sticking up. This data back to Medieval Times when the lit candles around bodies lying in state. The placing of a biblical saying on a headstone, the exact arrangements for where he would have the service which would be at home, what that would look like. Abraham lincoln could not afford to ignore these rules. He was a man from humble farming roots who strove to escape those roots and enter white respectability. He wanted and needed acceptance into polite springfield circles. The memories of Little Pigeon Creek with its wilderness, not to mention his mother, sister and their awful suffering could not have been pleasant and lincoln wanted to get as far away from that as possible. He was an ambitious man on the make. He had to do dying as well as living correctly. 6 00 in thet morning on friday, february 1, 1850. Just weeks shy of his fourth birthday. We lost our little boy, he later wrote his stepbrother. He was sick 52 days. The funeral followed the custom of the day and occurred in the parlor of the home. His body would have been prepared for viewing in the front room. He was probably not involved. Dressed,shed and usually tasks performed by the mother in addition to other women. In some communities, ladies advertised those services that in all likelihood mary performed at herself assisted by one or more of her sisters or possibly a neighbor. After the service, the coffin was carried to the hearse which carried eddie to the grave site along with lincoln, the men who performed the service and others. Following the burial, the family entered a time of mourning. Men and women were subjected to different rules. As the father of a dead child, lincoln wore black clothing and perhaps a black armband or have rep. Hat wrapped. Herwere to suppress feelings during the process of dying and so too did they submerge the great afterwards. Had Abraham Lincoln worn mourning clothing for an inordinately long. Of time, he would have risked gossip that he had become excessively feminized in his grave. He was expected to be a man who obtained the outward appearance of keeping his emotions in firm, masculine control. He seems to have done so. The people closest to him noticed a deepseated sadness in the days following the burial. I found him very much depressed and downcast at the death of his son a neighbor later remembered who visited him to further console him on his lost. This is hardly surprising. Lincoln reserved those feelings of depression for private encounters behind closed doors. There is reliable evidence of only one open outburst when immediately after the funeral, he saw a card with eddies last medical prescription on a table in the home. He pick it up, threw it away, and rushed out of the room crying. He seems to have firmly maintained the selfcontrol expected of him. Even this slight loss of control occurred in a domestic setting. His professional behavior in the office and elsewhere was normal. Norher his law partner anyone else remarked otherwise in his correspondence during that time was entirely businesslike and ordinary grid is only mention of his sons death came in a brief letter responding to his stepbrother he wrote, as you make no mention of it, i suppose you have not learned that we lost our little boy. We miss him very much. Whatever turmoil he felt upon his son cap, death, he kept to himself. Dying and the aftermath was one of antebellum america has most rigidly prescribed and emotionally sensitive social rituals rated lincoln was given a set of guidelines. Cultural tools from which to navigate the dying process for his son. These tools were partly designed to ease personal grief that they also allow the community to properly assess the distressed parents respective characters. People believed they could tell a lot about their neighbors values, beliefs, the state of their soul by watching how they handle death. Thatg these four deaths lincoln experienced before the war, his mother, his sister, and and noteand his son strong echoes of lincoln and his careful balancing act during the war. There is every indication that, prior to the war, abraham ascoln was an emotionally emotionally sensitive toward the death and dying as anyone. He felt all these things things himself keenly so as he watched his love ones suffering and dying but he learned to function within the loss. Learned to balance grief with acceptance. Emotion with reason. Feeling the loss of the present with the act of moving forward into the future. He followed his mothers body on the slide, watched her burial, descended into the unpolitical place in Southern Indiana and he moved on. ,e watched his sisters burial his dead nephew wrapped her arms. He sobbed, then he moved on. Urned yet laterr married. Getting on with life following these losses, he would extrapolate getting on with life. Getting on with the job during the war. There would be more personal loss during the war. Particularly and most grievously the death of his favorite son willie from typhoid in 1862 rated a death though emotionally racking that it seems to have nearly incapacitated him. I never saw a man so down with grief, marries seamstress recalled. He came to the bed where willys body was dying after lying after he died, gazed at it longingly and earnestly murmuring my poor boy. He was too good for this earth. God has called him home. I know he is much more better off in heaven but we loved him so. It is so hard, hard to have him die. He burst into what was described as great solving. Later, the president walked into his private secretarys office. My boys gone he said. He is actually gone. Lincoln then burst into tears again and left. He very nearly shut down for several days afterwards created one newspaper claimed he was in a stupor of grief and seemed to care little for even Great National events for several days. Celebrateble to victories because he was grieving his son. His funeral was on a friday but i sunday evening, sunday evening he was beginning to pull himself together. Another newspaper recorded he had begun to recover from shock. He moved on. He moved forward. The grief of the death never entirely subsided. He was wearing a bit of black bunting on his hat for willy when he was assassinated. He balanced the grave with the need to win the war to get on with the job to make the death means something. The balancing act seek into his speeches as well. Including his greatest words as a president. When here in gettysburg, he told the nation that while it was fitting to mourn the battlefield dead, it is for us the living to be dedicated here to finish the rather for us to be here dedicated to the great past remaining before us. That we take increased devotion to the cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion. Exquisite act the of balance. Where he again moved on, he balanced sadness and hope. He balanced death and life itself. I believe it was a balancing act that he learned at a very early age. Thank you very much. [applause] we have time for maybe two questions. My name is jeff from connecticut. Subject. Ed on a good obviously, he suffered through this stuff and handled grief hurried do you suppose this had any correlation to how he handled the dreams of his own assassination . Wow. I tend to be a bit of a minimalist when it comes to evidence. I like to stick to the collected works and little else. There was an account that he had a dream about his own assassination. Im not saying he didnt have a dream. He might have but i am skeptical about it. I say he didnt have it. Dr. Dirck i dont mean to disparage the people that say that. It could have happened. Stated comes to anything about lincoln after 1865 about things like this, you better take them with a big grain of salt. Im not so sure he did. He did believe in the power of dreams because there is a collective works letter he wrote to mary when she was off traveling and he said to tell dad to put the toy pistol away because i had a dream about it. I am just not sure he have the dream so i dont know if i want to comment but that is a great question. I am from washington dc. I am a doctor so what i know about death and dying i learned a lot from a book. I am wondering in your research, did you, was your premise that they believed in a good death back then . Did lincoln subscribe to that or was he involved in his thinking about if it was a good death than he could move on . Let me preface this i saying i love that book. It is a high nearing work. I strongly believe that lincoln scholarship should take into account without arguing with professor faust, i was just looking at lincoln. There is very little indication that he thought about a good death. You hardly ever see him sentimentalized in any death or dying. He very rarely, even mentioned heaven. He believes in the afterlife. He is certainly a christian but he is a vague belief. I have a chapter on this grid. I talk about he has eight fatalism read he thinks. Has a plantnd people die for a but hes not speculating why and you never see him pursuing the good death tropes of dying exhortations. The sentimental romanticized grief its not him its not his personality. [applause] learn more about the people and events that shaped the civil war and reconstruction every saturday at six clark p. M. Eastern only on American History tv here on cspan3. Sunday night on q a, we will discuss notable speakers of the house. From have come a long way sam rayburn and dwight eisenhower. Saying you Work Together even if you are in separate elected institutions. This idea that the speaker in potential particular should be preferential to the president. There is a way in which that is a sign of a healthy, vigorous partisan differences raid if you disagree with the president or the speaker you should not be afraid to say so. This is what troubles me read there are certain ways in which our elected officials expect to share some common agreement or at least they have important roles to play. That should rise above their policy differences. On cspanay night q a. This sunday on the presidency, historians on Abraham Lincoln and Frederick Douglass views on emancipation. Heres a preview. How does douglas advocate for towardas we move emancipation in 1862 or the pressure is building . You go first. Thats pressure. He wants a war against slavery rated he wants a sanctioned war against slavery and therefore the south. In theing of fremont fall of 61, he hated it. Whatever fremont really was, he seemed to be in abolitionist general. Douglas bought thats pretty good. Point, policy, what bothered douglas most in 61 and 62 was the stated policy of the federal government which was to return fugitive slaves. They called it technically denial of asylum which means its a fugitive slave entered, they were supposed to be returned if possible to their owners if the owner was loyal to the union. A lying captain was to deliver determine if a slaveholder was loyal are not god knows. 61,ne time in the fall of douglas called lincoln the most powerful slave catcher in america. Whats more on sunday at 8 00 p. M. And midnight eastern here on American History tv. Easterny night at 9 00 on afterwards read a pulitzer prizewinning journalists report on the issues of the workingclass and world america in their book, tight rope. They are interviewed. Many of the people in the small towns and the world areas, people are walking on a tightrope. One miss and they fall. There is no safety net. We have become kind of obsessed with personal responsibility narrative blaming the people who fault fall off the tightrope for the catastrophes that follow. Watch sunday night at 9 00 eastern on book tv on cspan2. A political scientist and author of a century of votes for women, american elections since suffrage discusses how politicians in the media have tried to classify women as voters. The passage of the 19th amendment. She also analyzes the assumptions about women voters in the 2016 election. The first to feature a female president ial candidate from a major party. Good evening. I think theres a few more people in here. We