He is the author of numerous books on Abraham Lincoln including lincoln and davis, imagining america, lincoln the lawyer, lincoln and the constitution, lincoln and america and lincoln. He probes some of the most interesting topics of lincoln including winning awards from the baroness award group in 2007. He recently had the opportunity to travel to seoul where he addressed the korean Abraham Lincoln society. [ laughter ] i know i would like to hear more about that. How can i get on that gravy train . Today, he is going to talk to us about the new book the black heavens, Abraham Lincoln and death published earlier this year by Southern Illinois press. A review at silver monitor states that students of the 17th century will want to add this concise written volume to their bookshelves. Please welcome me in joining brian dirck. It is good to be here. It really is. I wanted to thank you for the invitation. I have gotten to see some old friends among many of my south korean friend, fred. And so meeting lots of wonderful people. But you are heroes. No, everybody in this room is a hero to a group of students at Anderson University who are going to get tomorrow off, because i am here. They love the Lincoln Forum. They are like, no, dr. Dirck, go have fun and take time, and if you want to tour the battlefield, go do it and do it twice, and we will struggle through. As a matter of fact, if you are involved in any of to Lincoln Forum scholarship programs and need donations, if you would contact the 42 students that would normally be in my 9 00 a. M. Morning class who now get the sleep in, i would imagine that you would get some money out of the kids if you really work at it a little bit. So, really, thank you very much for inviting me. This has been a wonderful experience. As john was pointing out, my latest book is called the black heavens, Abraham Lincoln and death. Which my, and the usual reaction when i name that is to get kind of the raised spockian eyebrow, because death. My kids refer to it as the death book. Gee, dad, how is the death book coming along which is a little bit odd. I should say a couple of things of how i wrote about that. My fellow authors in the room will probably relate to this that there are occasions where you begin to write one book, and end up writing a totally different book. I see everybody nodding there. The and the book is originally going to be a study of the summer of 1864. I was going to call it lincolns hardest summer and look at his leadership in the difficult summer of 1864 when as you all know he is up for reelection and he does not think that he is going to be reelected and the body count is going through the roof with the Wilderness Campaign and all of that, and then i started looking at questions surrounding that summer and discovered that there was very little written about how lincoln understood death and dying. There are a couple of things and dont get me wrong scattered here or there, but nobody tried to follow that particular thread. So i tried to contact my wonderful editor at the illinois Southern Press who i was under contract and i said, sylvia, do you mind if i write a totally different book . And so she was so nice and turned out rather well. So i will speak about some of the things that i wrote about in that book and plenty of time for question, because there is so many things that i will not be able to address in this brief period so i hope that we have great questions. On a frigid evening in december of 1862, the governor curtain arrived to meet with president lincoln. The time was late at night and so much so that lincoln was already in bed when the governors arrived, but h left word that he wanted to see him no matter the hour. So the governor was escorted into the president s bedroom where the president was sitting on the edge of his bed in a night shirt. Curtin had just returned from fredericksburg, and lincoln asked what he had seen of the battlefield. Curtain was dispeptic at times and he immediately retorted battlefield . Battledfield, mr. President , it was a slaughter pen. I was sorry the moment i said that, the because lincoln groaned and wrung his hands and uttered exclamations of grief. It was only with moments of difficulty that he was able to get lincoln calmed down enough to get back into bed. As he was getting into bed, he told curtain, quote, if there is a worse place than hell, i am in it. A year and a half later, it was summer and not winter, and the height of the bloody 1864 campaign season. Ulysses s. Grant was locked in a titanic struggle to disarm robert e. Lees army of virginia and he was grinding the campaign into a virtual siege of petersburg was driving the casualty rates to ungodly numbers, and many northerners believed that the deaths were unacceptable, and even mary said so to fire grant, because grant was a butcher unquote. Lincoln received a message in august from his commanding general grant who was well aware of the public pressure to fall back from the front lines and regroup expressed his desire to keep pressing the enemy. I have seen your dispatch expressing your unwillingness to break the hold where you are, lincoln replied and neither am i willing, and hold on with a bulldog grip and chew and choke as much as possible. Now, there are two sides of Abraham Lincoln and his relationship with the war dead. Two very different images. The lincoln sitting on the edge of his bed in his night shirt horrified at the body count. A man in the place that is worse than hell, but we also have grimly determined the iron jawed lincoln saying that the strategies of grant are unacceptable, including his own wife, and he urges him to chew and choke and exhortation that he must have known would lead to still more casualties and ever higher body count. Here was a man who could order thousands upon thousands of soldiers to their deaths and at the very same time writhe in agony over the wars human cost. And we have long celebrated both of the lincolns. Historians admire him for the hard and cleareyed understanding that the war was essentially about killing enemy soldiers and relentlessly pursuing the enemy to victory. We all believed that he was right when he told mcclellan that he should have pursued the enemy after antietam, and how horribly upset he was and then we also celebrate the essential humanity and the ability to appreciate and empathize with the unprecedented human suffering that was the american civil war. He seems to have been able to do both things at once and both a man of empathy and a man of hard action, a president who could order men to their deaths and yet genuinely rue the dying. And you know, it is this quality of lincoln that i think that we dont often appreciate, and we dont often remark upon 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 and the idealism or the political realm and his ability to steer a middle course between the more radical and the more conservative elements of his own party or the personal realm with this lifelong balancing of humor and sadness, fatalism and ide idealism. Abraham lincoln was many thing, but he was a man of exquisite balance. So how did he do it . What of this balancing act for the wars dead . Where did this come from the capacity to be once both hard as nails and exquisitely empathetic to both mourn the dead and yet accept the death as the wars tragic price . Well, i think that the ability that lincoln showed to maintain this particular balance stems back to the very earliest days to before the war and indeed stretching back all of the way back to his childhood. Abraham lincoln knew death from an early age. His first encounters have stemmed from much the same source as any other young boy growing up in kentucky and indiana, hunting. His father thomas was an enthusiastic hunter as was his cousin dennis hanks with whom he spent a great deal of time. We all hunted pretty much all of the time, dennis remembered, the country was full of wild game and dense with vegetation and swam swampy. We could track a bear, deer or wolf for miles through the matted vines and we more or less depended on hunting for living. And dennis remembered an incident in the familys first days of indiana after they arrived at pigeon creek, and abraham spotted a flock of turkeys. And he was too little to load and prime a gun himself, so his mother nancy did it. Abe cracked the hole through the camp, and accidentally killed one. Dennis musingly remembered. But Abraham Lincoln didnt like hunting and he wrote about the turkey shooting that he had since not killed any game. He did not torture any more animals in the indiana woods. And once he wrote an essay about him being kind to animals an insects. When his brother crushed a turtle at a near by tree, he once said that an ants life is as sweet as us. His indiana neighbors referred constantly to the tender heartedness, and so this is far from the callous and unfeeling youngster, and quite to the contrary, and if anything, he seemed to be noble in the capacity to feel the suffering and the loss of others around him, even turtles. Soon after the family arrived in india indiana, the Young Lincoln was found to face death in a more profound way. In the fall of 1818 several of the lincolns fell seriously ill, first with the uncontrollable shaking and then a severe thirst, a loss of appetite and general fatigue and then with severe stomach stomach cramps a vomiting and then it grew worse. They were suffering from the milk sickness caused when cows injesed a local plant that was the white snake root. It resembled a daisy, but it contained a chemical that turned the cows milk into a deadly poison. Milk sickness was a fatal scourge among the settlers in indiana and other parts of the region. Abrahams mother nancy came to the aid of their ill neighbors and at some point she ingested the poison herself. She lingered for quite a while after initially falling ill, and struggling on day by day as dennis hanks recalled. It must have been excruciating pain. The vomiting and the wretching produced by milk sickness being so persistent and violent that some referred to it as the puking disease. The fatigue and the racking pain soon had nancy bedridden in the little cabin. By the time a week had passed she knew she was going to die according to dennis. He remembered her calling abraham and his sister sarah to her bedside wanting them to be kind to their father, and to express hope of what she had taught them to love men with reverence and loving god. Thus passed away as dennis recalled, one of the best women of the whole race. Her body was hauled on a makeshift sled to a knoll and buried under a sea of per simmon trees where it rested to this day. What did abraham feel and experience as a 9yearold boy watching with growing alarm the science of nancys immine the of nancys imminent death. There are characteristics of women and children placed in early circumstances of parents who lose a parent in early age are often faced with emotions they are ill equipped to mold. They have a general sense of helplessness and foreboding of the future, and most of all, the children of a dying parent experience loss of secure and comfort, and parents typically offer their Young Children a sense of permanence and in lincolns case a mother always present and supplying his daily needs as he grew up in kentucky and indiana that death would now sever. Nobody recorded though 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, but the very silence of these historical record is perhaps selftelling. Friends and relatives who later recall in great detail the circumstances surrounding nancys illness and death have nothing to say good or bad about her young sons reaction. Dennis remembered at the time both abraham and his sister sarah did some work, little jobs, errands and light work of that sort, but neither dennis or anyone else reacted how abraham reacted emotionally during the ordeal. He seems to have faded in the background and nursing a private grief while his father and other family and friends were preoccupied with easing nancys final days. Lincoln later himself remembered this time as an exceedingly lonely episode in his life and some historians theorized that his bouts of melancholy and sense came from this time. But there is little testimony of how lincoln reacted when his mother lay dying. I dont want to be is many understood suggesting that lincoln was cold and indifferent to his mothers passing. How could this be so in a child who felt the suffering of turtles, but i do suggest that he found ways to internalize the grief, and dealing with it quietly and calling upon r reserves of inner strength. One recalls a silent lincoln watching his mother dragged up a hill on a makeshift sled and saying so little and doing little that no one remarked on his behavior or even where he was at. He may have been compelled to push the sled up the hill, doing so perhaps with a silent stoic reserve. Certainly he did not sentimentalize his mothers death. This in itself is remarkable. Living as he did in a sentimental age, and particularly where death and dying were concerned. Unlike dennis who described nancys passing with his vignette of the dying mother telling her children to be kind to her father, abraham never romanticized his mothers passing. If he saw any meaning in nancys death, hener recorded the fact and referring briefly many years later to his mothers final resting place, he observed that it is unpoetical as in. And in one autobiography he wrote that in 1818, his mother died. Nor did he comment on the other major family loss that he encountered growing up in indiana, the death of his sister sarah in 1828 who died from complications of childbirth. And various described as good humored, industrious and quick minded and sarah was quickset with like her father with dark hair and complexion like her mother. Her death was apparently a dreadful ordeal and perhaps even more so than abrahams mother. She had married a local man named aaron griggsby, part of the large family that lived in nearby new salem, little pigeon creek, and she had quickly become pregnant and went into labor one bitterly cold february night with complications sinking her into the depths of undurable pain. One woman recalls her calling for her father and the screams awoke abraham haand his cousin, but then they went got there, it was too late. They waited too long. Sarah gave birth to a stillborn son and died shortly afterwards or during. And now surrounding lincolns early life, with have little solid information regarding precisely what happened to sarah and her baby. There seems to have been a midwife present the aforementioned neighbors aunt, and though fathers did not attend childbirths, he was nearby. Though one was sent for the doctor, aaron was alarmed at his wifes pain and hitched a oxen to go to his Fathers House and a antic that did not help his wife with every jolt sharpening sarahs labor pains. Arriving at his familys house, aaron sent for the doctor, but when the doctor arrived he was so drunk they were forced to find a second doctor who lived so far away that he did not arrive before it was too late. Which of the stories is accurate and what exactly went wrong is impossible to determine. Stillbirths could result from any number of possible causes, various congenital birth defects that fatally distressed the baby prior to labor, an issue with the umbilical cord wrapped around the baby or possibly a blockage of the oxygen supply causing it to suffocate. And allowing sarah to lay too long as it was described may have been a problem extracting the baby though we dont know what laying too long meant. Sarahs painful and probably gory ordeal on a hard indiana night was leavened by no sentimental scenes of last rituals or soft words. She and her child were buried together in the little pigeon creeks Baptist Cemetery and the sons body wrapped in his mothers arms. According to several accounts, abraham grieved for the death of his sister. The first record of him openly displaying emotion at a death. He quote sat down on a log and hid his face in his hands while the tears rolled down remembered one observer. Local tradition has it that abraham felt not only grief, but anger towards aaron and his family, holding them responsible for allowing sarah to suffer too long. Now, there may well be some truth for this, for abraham did nurture a grudge towards the griggsby fed by what he perceived as aarons cruel treatment of his wife, and all of this is to suggest that abraham felts sarahs passing and felt it as deeply as his mothers passing years before and at times the feelings shown themselves in a but of sobbing and anger towards sarah hes husband and family and maybe we should also note the limits of his open displays of emotion. For he did not break down into a lengthy or uncontrolled outburst of grief. Nor does he seem to have acted upon his rage at aaron with any acts of outright violence though one won wonders if it provides a little bit of the context to the biting and the nastily funny poem he wrote about two of the griggsby brothers the chronicles of rubin which caused animosity between the griggsbys and himself. What we see then with lincoln is a child and young man who learns to both feel and yet control the feelings. Of course he was sensitive to suffering and loss even down to that of animal, but he also seems to have found ways to deal with that sensitivity by internalizing it, by quieting his own emotions. Now, i hesitate to use the word suppress, because it might imply repressive or unhealthy, but rather i believe that lincolns resonance and selfcontrol were on the whole positive attributes to allow him to both feel and to function. He grew into a young man who felt deeply and yet created for himself an emotional tool box 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 a big gangly and restless man who wanted badly to leave pigeon creek. He finally made the escape in 1831 after the entire family had left indiana and relocated to equally primitive circumstances on a farm in eastern illinois. He wandered into the village of new salem and settled into a rambling life pursuing odd jobs, manual laborer, postman, surveyor at best quote procured bread and kept body and soul together unquote as lincoln himself put it later. Soon after he arrived lincoln met a young woman Anne Rutledge, the teenaged daughter of a new salem man with whom lincoln boarded. She was a smart and lively young girl with fair hair and eyes and a cheerful disposition. She was also a good housekeeper with a moderate education having had a little bit of schooling in nearby jacksonville. At some point abraham and anne apparently struck up a romantic relationship. This entire affair is shrouded in mystery and a lack of solid primary source evidence. According to best available accounts, anne was engaged to marry another man john mcna mar, because he had left new salem for a prolonged absence and anne was unsure if he would return. And she had agreed to marry lincoln, but before they could do so typhoid fever came through the area, and claimed the life of anne and her father. And some say that lincoln almost went insane over this death. The effect on Young Lincolns mind was terrible said young robert, and many of the friends believed that reason would desert him. Others said that he would become temporarily deranged to the point that the friends felt compelled to remove sharp objects from his presence. One said that lincoln was locked up to prevent derangement or suicide. Some thought that lincoln was thereafter change and sad. These stories of lincolns lifelong grief extended into the later years as president , and according to isaac, a new salem friend who later visited the white house, lincoln still mourned his lost love even during the war. Abe, it is true that you fell in love with and courted Anne Rutledge, coctell said. It is true i have. I have loved the name rutledge to this name, and i have honestly and truly loved the girl and i think often, often of her now, but aside from the such reminisces recorded after lincolns death and in many years after he left new salem, there is no direct evidence to record lincolns reaction to Anne Rutledges death. He never mentioned her or alluded to her or even hinted at any relationship with her in any later speech. The absence of the evidence along with the various biases and idiosyncrasies by william herndon, his former law partner who gathered the information of anne and broeshed the idea of the relationship with aep, some historians doubt if any relationship existed. As for myself, given the multiple accounts, it is a stretch to suggest that abraham and anne were not involved at all and following this, it is reasonable to conclude that when she died he was stricken with grief. But the two nuggets the romance and the grief have long been heavily swathed in multiple levels of syrupy sentimentality. Annes flawless character abound and lincolns grief is exaggerated where hollywood even said that improbable details of belief that the death caused the heart to John Mclemore and that lincoln never carried a pocket knife after the sudden impulse to injure himself to recall the demise, but we all know that is crap because they found a pocket knife after he was shot. And so this grieving triggered by violent weather and we watched in fogs and storms and weather that claimed Anne Rutledge. This is yet another iteration of another sentiment of death and dying was rapt. And where nancy was the christian mother imparting the words of wisdom to the children, and anne was the star crossed lover and the flower cut short before the full bloom and robbing the beau of the marital bliss and triggered by the gothic detail of a thunderstorm. I cannot be reconciled to have the snow and the rains and the storms to beat upon her grave he is supposed to have declared. Another friend said that he even even avoided using the word love after she died being so sad and heart broken. In fact, anne could not have had a good death just like nancys endless puking in that cabin or sarahs grisly stillbirth on that night, and typhoid brain fever was a horrible way to die and the symptoms are not that different from milk sickness caused by bacterial infection caused by the infection of Drinking Water with human feces and typhoid caused victims stomach cramps and headaches and a crushing fever. One reason why it was often referred to as brain fever in lincolns day. Lincoln saw anne suffer the throes of brain fever much as he saw his mothers pain and suffering from the milk sickness years earlier. Anne lingered for four or five days and we know that he visited her at least once right before she died. It is very evident that he was much distressed, remembered a friend, who saw him after a visit. But you know, what is telling here is not so much the secondhand accounts of lincolns distress or the supposedly suicidal behavior, but what i find interesting is his silence, his failure to even once mention the relationship to anne or the reaction to her death. A year after he dshe died, he b a brief courtship with mary o n owens and she later recollected that i dont recall him mentionings annes name, and others said that it was business as usual after anne died. It is a curious matter on the face and then again perhaps not for entirely keeping with lincolns reactions to the deaths of his mother and sister. Anne died much as nancy and sarah in a sudden, ugly way. Cut short before their time by yet another form of death that stalked the prune of areas in which he lived. Some peoplethe theette deaths of nancy, sarah and anne fostered him to a life of mel lancholy and deep seeded misery. But on an observerable measure, the deaths of these three women were raw and contrasted with the gentile death that americans of his day thought they deserved and strove to maintain. Their deaths discouraged romantic ideas of the nature of living and dying. Had lincoln been born and raised in different circumstances in early 19th Century America and say a comfortable middleclass home in a more settled area, he might have well learned to thickly coat death in the layers of sentiment and unctuous abilities that led to the best way to die. But lincoln never thought this way. Instead he learned early on in life that death could be and often was raw and unforgiving and from the screams of his dying sister to the wretched waisti i waisting away of disease from his mother, and the almost daily feral encounters with the animals in the indiana wilderness. I am not a sentimental man, lincoln once remarked, and this is true as far as death and dying is concerned. And years later he would experience another death not from a son and mother or lover or parent, but this death of his young son eddie would not be in a raw and undeveloped rural area, but instead, it is a middleclass death by lincoln, a professional attorney in a town setting. Eddie lincoln was 3 years old in early december of 1849 when he began to have persistent bout s of coughing. Slighted first, and persistent, a little thing in a little boy. Mary and anne might not have thought about it, but in one of the few letters to the surviving husband, mary recalls to the recovery from the spell of sickness. And then mary and the boys accompanied lincoln to a speaking tour in upstate new england where eddie had fallen ill and compelled mary to devote most of the time and energy to nursing him. And now in 1849 came this cough which grew steadily worse. If the parents were initially inclined to down play its significance, one more unfortunate unmanageable trial for the little eddie, they were disabused because the coughing became ever more ferocious, and eddie experiencing greater trouble catching his breath. They might have also noticed the spots of blood on lips or chin or the greenish phlegm he had begun to expel. People in lincolns time called it consumption which is a catchall phrase in the scientific imprecise times connoting any disease causing a consuming or wasting of the body. The scientific classification was so vague that some historians have since wondered what caused the death of eddie and adds are tuberculosis. By the end of 1850, everybody knew that eddies condition was grave. The wasting aspect of the disease was evident. The skin would have been white pallor and hence the white plague attached to the disease and the muscle tone would have been diminished from the bloods oxygen content and what was likely at this point a prolonged period of time spent in bed. The difficult breathing and coughing spells continued pungs waited by hoarseness and a dimensioning ability to speak. Night sweats were another common symptom and in some stages the tuberculosis patients suffered bouts of diarrhea adding a further dimension to the misery. If eddie had lived in a later age, he might have been taken to a sanitorium with other consumptive patients and places that segregated the dying process into its own institutionalized rules and routines and instead like almost everyone else in that period he spent the last days at home and lincoln would have been squarely in the middle of it living day in, day out with the specter of his young boys imminent death growing ever more present. Now, lincoln did reduce the workload somewhat. He only litigated during eddies illness ten cases. I went back to look at the previous years going backward and forward and he only litigated two to three times that many cases so you can see evidence that he cut back on the workload. He also didnt go anywhere whereas he would routinely travel to different place, but he stayed at home. He made an effort to become more involved. But, he also sustained a more or less normal routine. He did go to work. He did argue some cases, and he wrote letters, and if you read the letters, you will see no indication that there was anything unusual in his family life. He tried to bear his sons ordeal as a strong man, remembered a friend, win who ond resolved to keep his resolve under a firm sway the same as anne and his mothers death. And now, with the funeral everyone knew was imminent, he would have done the planning himself, because there were no Funeral Homes in springfield and the modern Funeral Homes did not exist. He would have purchased the coffin and there were two businesses in springfield who made coffins and made the necessary arrangements for burial. In lincolns case he chose hutchinson, a privatelyrun cemetery run by a cabinet maker who had more than likely provided the hearse as well. There were rules regarding how this is to be done and the exact trim of the hearse for example. The hearses back then almost always had white feathers sticking up back to the medieval era when they lit candles around the bodies lying in state, and the appropriate biblical state of the headstone and the exact arrangements to where he would have the service which is home and what that would look like and all of that and lincoln could not afford to ignore these rules. He was a man of humble farming roots who wanted to escape those roots and get middleclass acceptability. He needed success into the polite circles. The wilderness of pigeon creek with the primitiveness and not the mention Anne Rutledge and his mothers suffering could not have been pleasant and lincoln wanted to get as far away as possible and he was a man on the make and he had to do dying as well as living right. Eddie died at 6 00 in the morning on friday february 1st, 1850, just four weeks shy of his fourth birthday. We lost our little boy, lincoln wrote to his stepbrother. He was sick 52 days. The funeral followed the custom of the day and occurred in the parlor of the lincoln home. Eddies body would have been prepared for viewing in the for ma formall front room and he was probably not embalmed with a process not widespread in america, and wash and dress and a task performed by the deceased mothers and they called it laying out, but more than likely mary performed the task herself and assisted by one or more of the sisters or possibly a neighbor. After the service, the coffin was taken to the waiting hearse which was taken to the grave site with the lincolns and the reverend who performed the service. And then mourning for which society had a strict protocol. Men and women were subjected to different clothes. And Abraham Lincoln was to wear black clothing which he had a pr feeling for black clothing. And mep wen were to suppress th feelings for dying and so, too, submerge their feelings. And had lincoln worn mourning clothing for a long period of time, he would have risked gossip that he had been excessively feminized in the grief. He was to be a man to express the outward appearance of keeping his emotions in firm control. For the most part he seemed to have done so. The people close to him noticed a deep seeded sadness in days following eddies burial. I found him very much depressed and downcast at the death of his son, a Neighbor Lady remembered who visited him to further console him on the loss. I mean, this is hardly surprising. Lincoln reserved the feelings of depression for private encounters behind the closed doors of his home. There is reliable evidence of only one open outburst when immediately after the funeral, he saw a card with eddies last medical prescription lying on a table in the lincoln home. He picked it up and threw it away and rushed out of the room crying. Otherwise, lincoln seems to have firmly maintained the selfcontrol expected of him and even this slight loss of control occurred in a domestic setting. And neither his law partner or anybody else remarked otherwise, and the correspondence in that time period is entirely businesslike and ordinary. The only mention of eddies death at all came in a brief letter on february 23rd again responding to his stepbrother and he wrote, as you make no mention of it, i suppose you have not learned that we lost our little boy, lincoln wrote. We miss him very much. Whatever turmoil he felt upon eddies death, he contained within himself and out of the public eye. Now this is no insignificant matter. For dying and the aftermath is one of the antebellum americas rigidly described and social rituals. Lincoln was given a set of guidelines and cultural tools from which to navigate the dying process for his son. These tools were partly designed to help ease the personal grief, but they allowed the community to properly assess the distressed parents respective characters and people believed a lot about the values and the beliefs and the very souls of watching how they handled death. So, taking these four deaths that lincoln experienced before the war, his mother, his sister, Anne Rutledge and his son eddie and note the strong echos of lincoln in the careful balancing act during the war. There is every indication that prior to the war, Abraham Lincoln was emotionally sensitive and empathetic to the suffering of the dead as anyone and maybe more so, and he was not in any sense indifference to the pain and pathos of the death and dying and loss of the loved ones. He had felt all of these things keenly so as he watched the loved once suffer and die, but he learned to function within that loss and learned to balance grief with acceptance and emotion with reason and feeling the loss of the present with the act of moving forward into the future. He followed his mothers body on that sled, watched her burial, descended into the lonely quote unpo unpoe unpoetical knoll in indiana and moved on. He watched his sisters burial and his dead nephew wrapped in her arms. He sobbed and then he moved on. He mourned anne. And yet he eventually married mary todd. He mourned eddie, but he would raise three more boys. He moved on. From getting on with life following these private losses before the war, he would extrapolate getting on with life, getting on with the job during the war. Because there would be more personal loss during the war. Particularly, and most grieviously, the death of his favorite son willie from typhoid in february of 1862. A death so emotionally racking that it seems to have very nearly incapacitated him. I never saw a man so bowed down with grief, marys seamstress recalled. He came to the bed, mary recalled, and lifted the covers and gazed at him endlessly murmuring, my poor boy, he was too good for this earth, god has called him ohm,home, and he is better in heaven, but it is hard to not have him home. And then he escaped in sobs. Then later he went to his secretarys office. Well, nicolay, my body is gone. He is actually gone. Lincoln burst into tears and left. He nearly shutdown for several days afterwards. One newspaper claimed that he was quote in a stupor of grief and seemed to care little for even Great National events for several days. He was unable to celebrate the great victories at fort henry and mcdonald at these times the, because of grieving his son. And willies funeral was friday, but by sunday evening, sunday evening, he was beginning to pull himself together. Another newspaper quoted that he had begun to recover from the shock and though now he is bowed down with the great affliction and no wise xas tate e xas tate position. He moved on. And even though the grief did not subside. He balanced the grief with the need of the war to get on with the job, and to make all of that death mean something. The balancing act seeped into his speeches as well. Including his greatest words as a president. When here in gettysburg in 1863 he told the nation that while it is fitting to mourn the battlefield dead, it is for us the living to be dedicated to the great unfinished work that they so thus far had nobly advanced an it is for us to be dedicated to great task before us and from these honored dead we take increased devotion to the cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion. Here again was that exquisite act of balance where again he moved on. He ball laanced sadness and hopd balanced death and life, itself. I plooe believe it was a balanct that he had earned from a very young age. Thank you very much. We have time for about two questions. I am howie from connecticut. Touched on a very good subject they like about. And obviously, he suffered through all of the stuff and handled grief and so forth. Do you suppose that this had any correlation of the socalled dreams of his own assassination . Wow. Look, i tend to be a bit of a minimalist when it comes to lincoln evidence, and those who have read my books, i like to stick to the collected works and little else. There is an account that he had a dream preaging his own assassination. I am not saying that he did not have the dream and me may have, but i am skeptical about it, because it is an after 1865 account ]. Yeah, look, guys, i dont mean to disparage the people who say that. It could have happened. When it comes to anything stated about link after 1865, about things like this, you better take them with a big grain of salt, frankly. So im not so sure he did. Now he did believe in the power of dreams because there is a collective works letter he wrote to mary when shes off traveling and said, mary, tell tad to put that pistol away because i had an ugly dream about it. I do believe he did believe in some importance of dreams. I dont know in i want to comment. But that is a great question, it really is. Dr. John welling, washington, d. C. Well i know about im a doctor so im into this a little bit. But what i learned about dying was from dale fouss book and in your research did you her premise is that they believed in the good death back then. Did lincoln subscribe to that or was he involved in his thinking about if this was a good death he could then move on . Let me preface this by saying i love that book. If anybody has read the republic of suffering you know what im talking about. That is a pioneering work and i strongly believe that lincoln scholarships should take into account larger civil war scholarship. That said, without arguing with professor foust, i was looking at lincoln and i argue in my book that there is very little indication that he fought much about a good death. In the 19th century terms. You hardly ever see him sentimentalizing any death or dying. He very rarely, half a dozen times his whole life, mentioned heaven. He believes in the afterlife and is a christian. I have a buy the book. 6 . I do talk about that. He has a fatalism. He thinks god has a plan and people die for a plan but will not speculate as to why and you just never really see him pursuing good death tropes of dying exertations, the sentimental grief, it is just not him. It is not his personality. [ applause ] thanks. Were featuring American History tv programs as a preview of what is available every weekend on cspan 3. Tonight we show you reenactment as they row across the Delaware River with George Washington and the Continental Army crossed from pennsylvania to new jersey on christmas night in 1776. American history tv, tonight at 8 00 eastern on cspan 3. Every saturday night American History tv takes you to College Classrooms around the country for lectures in history. Why do you all know who lizzy borden is and raise your hand if ever heard of this gene harris murder trial before this class. A deepest cause where we find the true meaning of the revolution was in this transformation that took place in the minds of american people. So were going to talk about both of these sides of this story here, right. The tools, the techniques of slave owner power and well also talk about the tools and techniques of power that were practiced by enslaved people. Watch history professors lead discussions with students on topics ranging from the American Revolution to september 11th. Lectures in history on cspan 3 every saturday at 8 00 p. M. Eastern on American History tv and lectures in history is available as a podcast. Find it where you listen to podcasts. Next, a civil war scholar Edna Greene Medford talks about Abraham Lincolns approach to abolishing slavery and examines views of emancipation in the north and south. This is part of the Lincoln Forum symposium. It is a real honor introducing someone who is kind, classy, and a careful scholar and someone who has been the heart of the lincoln