He recently had the opportunity to travel to seoul where he addressed the korean Abraham Lincoln society. I know id like to hear more about that. How can i get on that gravy train . Today he will talk to us about his new book, the black heavens. Abraham lincoln and death which was published earlier this year by Southern Illinois university press. A review at civil war monitors states, students of the 16th president will want to add this concise thoughtprovoking and sensitively written volume to their bookshelves. Please welcome me in joining please join me in welcoming brian dark. Hello everybody its great to be here. I want to thank you for the invitation. Ive gotten to see some old friends, among many my come pinion in korea, fred. We had fun. Meaning lots of wonderful people. You are heroes, 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 form. They are like doctor dirk. How fun, take your time. If you want to tour the battlefield, do it. Do it twice. We will struggle without you. The Lincoln Forum scholarship programs, if you would contact the 42 students who would normally be in my 9 am morning class not get to sleep in i would imagine you would get some money out of those kids if you really work at it a little bit. 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. My usual reaction when i say that is to get a raised eyebrow. Death . My kids refer to it as the death book. That house the death book coming along . Its a little weird. I should say a couple of things about how i got to writing about that. My fellow authors in the room will probably relate to this. There are occasions where you begin to write one book and end up writing a totally different book. I see everyone nodding over there. The book was originally going to be a study of the summer of 1864. I was going to call it lincolns hardest summer. Look at his leadership during this difficult summer of 1864. As we know hes up for reelection, he does not think hes going to get reelected and the body count is going through the roof. Then i started looking at questions surrounding that summer. I discovered that there was very little written about how lincoln understood death and dying. There are a couple of things. Dont get me wrong. Scattered here in there. But no one ever try to follow that particular thread. I was on contract for the hardest summer. It was like sylvia do you mind if i write a totally different book . She was so nice about it. It actually turned up rather well. I will speak a little bit about some of the things i wrote about in that book. Leave some time for questions because there will be so many things i will not be able to address during this brief period. I hope we get some questions. On a frigid evening in december of 1860 to, governor andrew curtain from pennsylvania arrived at the white house to meet with president lincoln. It was late at night. So much so that lincoln was already in bed when the governors arrived. But he left word that he wanted to see curtain no matter what the our. So the governor was escorted into lincolns bedroom where the president was sitting on the edge of the bed in his night shirt. Curtain had just returned from fredericksburg and lincoln asked what he had seen of the battlefield. Curtain was rather despicable at times and immediately retorted battlefield . It was not a battlefield it was a slaughter pen. I was sorry the moment i said that curtain later recalled for lincoln groaned, run his hands and uttered exclamations of grief. It was only with considerable difficulty that he was able to get lincoln calmed down enough to get back into bed. As he was getting back 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. The height of the bloody 1864 campaign season. Ulysses as grant was locked in a titanic struggle to destroy it once and for all robert easily of northern virginia. And his army. His grinding campaign and eventually siege of petersburg was driving the casualty rates to ungodly numbers. Many northerners believed the deaths of so many soldiers were not acceptable. Even mary lincoln believed this to be so asking her husband to fire grant because he was a butcher. Lincoln received a letter in august from his commanding general, grant, who was aware of the casualty rate. He expressed his desire to keep pressing the enemy. I have seen your dispatch expressing your unwillingness to break your hold where you are lincoln replied. Neither am i willing. Hold on with a bulldog grip and true and choke as much as possible. Those are the two sides of Abraham Lincoln and his relationship with the war. Two different images. They lincoln sitting on the edge of his bed in his night short, horrified at the body count. A man in a place that is worse than how. But we also have the grim lead determined iron jawed lincoln defying everyone who tells him the human cost of grants strategy is unacceptable including his own wife. He ignores all of this and urges grant to chew and choke. He must have known this would lead to more casualties and an ever higher body count. Here was a man who could ordered thousands upon thousands of soldiers to their deaths and at the very same time right in agony over the wars human cost. Weve long celebrated both of these lincolns. Historians and celebrated his hard but clear eyed understanding of killing enemy soldiers and relentlessly pursuing the enemy to victory. We all believe he was right when he told mcclelland that he should have pursued the enemy. We all know the agony he went through when george mead did not pursue him from gettysburg. And how horribly upset he was. At the same time we also celebrated his essential humanity. His 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, to be both a man of empathy and a man of heart action. A president who can order meant to their deaths and yet genuinely route 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, this balancing the constitutions pragmatism with the declarations idealism or the political realm. His ability to steer the middle course between the radical and conservative elements of his own 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 exquisite balance. How did he do it . We have this balancing act before the war was dead . Where did this come from . The capacity to be once both 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 this particular balance stems back to his very earliest days. To before the war, stretching all the way back to his childhood. Abraham lincoln you death from an early age. His first encounters stemmed from much the same source as any other young boy growing up in early kentucky and indiana. Hunting. His father thomas was unenthusiastic hunter as was his cousin dennis hanks. They spent a great deal of time together. We all hunted pretty much all the time dennis remembered the country was full of wild game. Dense vegetation. We could track a bear, deer, or world will for miles through the matted feints we depended on hunting for a living. This included the Young Abraham. Dennis remembered an incident during the Families First days in Southern Indiana right after they arrived at kitchen creek. Abraham spotted a flock of turkeys nearby. Thomas lincoln and dennis were away from the camp at the time and abraham was too little to load and prima gotten himself, so his mother nancy had to do it. Abe poked the gun through the crack of the cannon and accidentally killed one. Dennis amusingly reset, you know what the truth is . Lincoln disliked hunting. He later and rather proudly wrote that the turkey shooting that he had quoted, never since pulled a trigger on any larger game. He did not much like killing. Killing or torturing the animals that were everywhere in the indiana woods. One neighborhood recalled him writing essays of being behind animals and crawling insects. When his stepfather crushed a turtle against a nearby tree, abraham preached against cruelty to animals contending that and aunts life was to it as sweet as ours to us. As indiana friends and neighbors referred constantly to his tendered heartedness. Here was a far from callous youngster quite the contrary. If anything he seems to have been notable in his capacity to feel the suffering and loss of others around him, even turtles. Soon after the family arrived in indiana, the Young Abraham was forced to confront death and a far more profound and painful way. Sometime in the early fall of 1818, several neighbors of lincolns fell seriously ill. First with an uncontrollable shaking, then 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 sickness cost when cows ingested a local plant called white sneak up. It resembles the daisy, the white snake room seemed to contain tramadol, a chemical chemical that turned cows milk into a deadly poison. Milk sick sickness was much feared, usually fatal scourge amongst settlers in indiana and other parts of the region. Abrahams mother nancy came to the aid of her ill neighbors and at some point, she and just at the this poison herself. She lingered for quite awhile after initially falling ill, struggling on day by day, as dennis hanks recalls. It must have been excruciating pain. The vomiting and retching produced by milk sickness being so persistent and violent that some even refer to it as quote, the puking disease. The fatigue and racking pain, soon had nancy bed ridden in their 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 and telling them to be good and kind to their father. She expressed a hope that they might live as they had been taught by her two love men and with love reverence and worship god. Thus passed away dennis later recalled, one of the very best women in the whole race. Her body was hauled on a makeshift sled to an old and buried under trees to the rest of the. Stay what did abraham feel and experience as a nine year old boy . He was watching with growing alarm the signs of nancys imminent death. This is unknown and an knowable. But there are characteristics from which we can generalize among women and children placed in similar circumstances. Children who lose a parent at an early age often wrestle with conflicting emotions. They are ill equipped to control and impotent sort of anger at what seems an unfair loss as common as is a general sense of helplessness and foreboding about the future. Most evoke, children of a dying parent experience loss of security and comfort. Parents typically offered their Young Children a sense of permanence. In lincolns case, a mother who was always present and supplying his daily needs as he grew up in kentucky and indiana. Death would now sever. No one recorded though, how abraham reacted to the surely imminent and 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 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 sarah, did some work, little jobs, errands and light work of that sort, that neither dentist or anyone else recorded exactly 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 and family were preoccupied. With easing nancys final days. Lincoln himself remembered an exceedingly lonely episode in his life. Some historians later theorized that lincolns adult melancholy and depression stemmed from this experience. It is striking that the various accounts we have on this time lack direct testimony, regarding just what lincoln was doing as his mother lay dying and how he reacted. I do not want to be misunderstood. I am not suggesting that linkedin was somehow cold and indifferent to his mothers passing, how could this be so . Any child who would feel the suffering of a turtle. But 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 rough wooden sled, think 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. Doing so perhaps with a silent, stoic reserve. Certainly he did not sentimentalize his mothers death. This in itself was remarkable. Living as he did in a sentimental age, particularly where death and dying were 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 romanticized his mothers passing if he saw any means in and sees that, he never recorded the fact. Referring briefly in a letter many years later to his mothers final resting place, he observed that it was quote, as an poetical as any spot on earth. Otherwise he barely mentions nancys death at all. Just a brief, dry reverence and one Campaign Autobiography he wrote in the third person in the autumn of 1818. His mother died. Nor did he comment much on the other major family lost he endured in indiana. The death of his older sister sarah, who died in 1828 from pump complications related to childbirth. Variously described as industrious, and quick minded sarah was a little bit thick set like her father with dark hair and complexion like her mother. Her death was apparently a dreadful ordeal. Perhaps even more so than abrahams mother. She had married a local man named aaron crispy. Griggs be. He had become quickly pregnant. She went into labor one cold february night with some unidentified complications sinking her into the depths of almost an endurable pain. And woman recalling her calling in agony for her father. A woke. Thomas went after a doctor but he was too late. They let her lay too long thought the neighbor. Sarah gave birth to a stillborn son and then died herself. Either during the birth or shortly afterwards. As with so much surrounding lincolns life we have little solid information regarding precisely what happened to sara and her baby. There seems to have been a midwife present and aaron was nearby. Typically fathers did not attend childbirth. One account has thomas sending for a doctor. Another has earned himself growing alarmed and his wife and her labor pains. Attacked seeing ox into a sleigh, carrying her to his Fathers House three quarters of a miles away. Arriving at his familys house, erin then sent for a doctor. 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 these stories is accurate and what exactly what went wrong is impossible to determine. Stillbirths can result from a number of possible causes. Congenital birth defects that stress the baby prior to labor, an issue with the umbilical cord wrapped around the 80s neck or possibly a blockage in the baby socks supply causing it to suffocate. There might have been an issue extracting the baby that proved fatal. We do not know what waiting too long meant. Sarah painful and probably gory ordeal on a hard winter indiana night was levant by no sentimental scenes of the last rituals. Or soft words. She and her child were buried together in the Little Pigeon Creek baptist cemetery. The suns body wrapped in the mothers arms. According to several accounts, abraham grieved for the death of his sister. The first record we possess of him openly displaying emotion and grief 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 toward errant and his family, holding him responsible for allowing sarah to suffer too long. There might be some truth because lincoln did bear a grudge towards them. All of this would suggest that abraham felt sarahs passing, probably as deeply as his mothers passing years before. At times those feelings show themselves in a bout of sobbing. In a sense of anger towards saras husband and family. Maybe we should also note limits of his open displays of emotion. Before he did not break down in a lengthy or uncontrollable outburst of grief. Nor does he seem to have acted upon his rage with any acts of outright violence. One wonders if this provides context to the nasty poem he wrote about the brothers which caused a great deal of animosity between them and himself. What we see through lincoln is a child and young man who learns both to feel and yet control those feelings. Of course he was sensitive. The suffering to suffering and loss. Even to that of animals. Hes also seemed to found ways to deal with that sensitivity by internalizing it. By quieting his own emotions. I hesitate to use the word suppress. This might imply something repressive and unhealthy. Rather i believe that lincolns reticence and his self control were on the whole positive attributes allowing him to both feel and to function. He grew into a young man who felt deeply. And yet created for himself and emotional tool box to control and hide those emotions. It was inability that would serve him well later in life. He was 19 when his sister died. A big jangling and reslate restless young man who wanted by this time to leave pigeon creek. In 1831, after the entire family left indiana and relocated to equally primitive circumstances in eastern illinois. He wandered into the village of new salem and settled in a life pursuing odd jobs. It brokered bread and kept body and soul together as lincoln said. Lincoln met and rod village, the daughter of a new salem innkeeper. She was a goodlooking smart lively girl with fair hair and eyes with a lively disposition. She was a housekeeper with a moderate education having had a bit o