• Welcome to Tamil Brahmins forums.

    You are currently viewing our boards as a guest which gives you limited access to view most discussions and access our other features. By joining our Free Brahmin Community you will have access to post topics, communicate privately with other members (PM), respond to polls, upload content and access many other special features. Registration is fast, simple and absolutely free so please, join our community today!

    If you have any problems with the registration process or your account login, please contact contact us.

Mourning Lincoln and Lincoln's body

Status
Not open for further replies.
[h=1]‘Mourning Lincoln’ and ‘Lincoln’s Body’[/h] By JILL LEPORE FEB. 4, 2015


Abraham Lincoln died on April 15, 1865, of a gunshot wound to the head. He was 56 years old and 6 feet 4 inches tall: a giant, felled. He was the 16th president of the United States and the first one killed in office. (A madman once tried to shoot Andrew Jackson, but both of his pistols misfired.) An assassination is treason by way of murder. Lincoln’s assassination was more — an act of war. Lee surrendered to Grant on April 9. Lincoln was the last of the Union dead. His death had another meaning, too. It founded a civic religion, dedicated to the memory of Lincoln’s sacrifice and to the proposition that emancipation is redemption.


What became of Lincoln began with an act of hatred. On April 11, John Wilkes Booth said, while listening to Lincoln deliver a speech about the terms of the victory, “That means nigger citizenship.” Booth shot Lincoln with a derringer at about 10:15 p.m. on April 14 — Good Friday — in Ford’s Theater, six blocks from the White House. A 23-year-old Army surgeon named Charles Leale, who had been sitting near the president’s box, found Lincoln slumped in his walnut rocking chair, unconscious but still breathing. Leale laid the president out on the carpeted floor, removed his shirt (at first it appeared that Lincoln had been stabbed in the chest), located the bullet’s entry point (behind the left ear) and, sticking his pinkie into the hole, determined that the wound was fatal.


The surgeon and two other doctors then carried the president’s half-naked body down a narrow staircase, across the street and into a first-floor room in a boardinghouse on 10th Street. No one expected him to live, but Leale, who was used to treating patients with severe head wounds, hoped the president might wake and speak before he died. Anticipating that moment, 20 or 30 people stayed in that room all night and another 30 or more came and went — Lincoln’s family, his cabinet and members of Congress, mainly. They crowded around a bed in which the president’s body did not fit, in order to watch by gaslight as he struggled to breathe, and to wait in vain for his last words. At 2:15 a.m., Edwin Stanton, the secretary of war, sent a cable to The Associated Press: “It is not probable that the president will live throughout the night.” Lincoln never woke. He died, quietly, in the morning. His death was reported by telegraph on Saturday and mourned passionately in churches across the country on Sunday, Easter morning. “We gain a national martyr,” said one preacher, in New York. “May we not have needed this loss.”


Americans began draping themselves in black only moments after word spread that the president was dead, as Martha Hodes writes in her lyrical and important new study, “Mourning Lincoln.” (After four years of a war that took the lives of up to 700,000 Americans, most people had black bands and black ribbons ready to hand.) It was a very particular loss, the loss of this particular man: As Richard Wightman Fox argues in his fascinating book, “Lincoln’s Body,” much sentiment about Lincoln dwelt on his physical size and ungainliness: the cast of his brow, the length of his stride, the fate of his corpse.


On Saturday morning, at the White House, doctors conducted an autopsy. They removed Lincoln’s brain and cut it open; the bullet fell into a metal bowl, clattering like a coin. Residents at the boardinghouse had collected objects that included Lincoln’s bloodstained pillow and “a piece of linen with a portion of his brain.” The doctors kept relics, too. One surgeon carefully wrapped in paper “a splinter of bone from the skull”; he mailed it to his mother. They could not save Lincoln, but they were determined to keep him. The embalmers arrived at 3 o’clock that afternoon, promising, “The body of the president will never know decay.” Photo
08LEPORE-articleLarge-v2.jpg


Our nation’s martyr: The death of President Lincoln in Washington on April 15, 1865. Credit Lithograph From Currier & Ives, via Library of Congress By Tuesday, April 18, the casket was put on public view. Mementos were sold on street corners. For 50 cents, mourners could buy a satin badge featuring a likeness and inscribed “In Memory of Abraham Lincoln, April 15, 1865.” Frederick Douglass liked to tell a story about a Baptist minister who met an old woman, an ex-slave, weeping while waiting in the line of mourners assembled along the fence outside the White House. He asked her why she wept. She told him, “We have lost our Moses.”


Fox, a professor of history at the University of Southern California, writes, “For four years he had flung his door open to all who entered the White House, and here, at the very end, he was still welcoming the common people to his side.” Hodes, a professor of history at New York University, offers a darker account. “The Civil War was a revolutionary war, and Lincoln’s assassination complicated its ending,” she argues. Reading thousands of diaries and letters written by ordinary Americans in the days and weeks after Lincoln’s death, she finds little evidence of national unity in the face of tragedy; instead, she finds shock, jubilation, confusion and, above all, disagreement. In Washington, secessionists draped their houses in black crepe, not out of grief over Lincoln’s death, but out of fear. “Hurrah!” one 17-year-old South Carolina girl wrote in her diary. “Old Abe Lincoln has been assassinated!” In Virginia, a 5- or 6-year-old freed boy asked, when he heard the news, “Have I got to go back to massas?”
Lincoln’s casket was carried onto a funeral train for a 12-day journey across the country. “He was crucified for us,” a black mourner said in Pennsylvania, as the train passed through. During a single day in Philadelphia, 150,000 people peered at Lincoln’s remains. Finally, on May 4, 1865, Lincoln was placed in a vault in Springfield, Ill.


And what of his murder? “The blast of the derringer at Ford’s Theater on the night of April 14, 1865, was the first volley of the war that came after Appomattox — a war on black freedom and equality,” Hodes writes. That war isn’t over. But neither Hodes nor Fox covers it. “Mourning Lincoln” is a close and deeply disturbing study of how it seemed, to Americans who disagreed with one another, that “Lincoln’s assassination stopped the world.” “Lincoln’s Body” is an astonishingly interesting interpretation of the uses to which Lincoln has been put in the century and a half since, in speeches and statues, in plays and films, in poems and paintings. Fox is wonderfully shrewd and often dazzling when writing about the Lincoln Memorial, at whose dedication, in 1922, the seating was segregated; or Carl Sandburg’s best-selling 1926 biography of Lincoln’s early years (Sandburg said Lincoln’s body “looked like an original plan for an extra-long horse”); or the moment in 1957 when, on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial, Adam Clayton Powell lambasted Congress for failing to implement Brown v. Board of Education, saying, “We meet here in front of the Lincoln Memorial because we are getting more from a dead Republican than we are getting from a live Democrat or a live Republican.” But he’s strangely flat-footed and deferential when writing about Doris Kearns Goodwin’s 2005 book “Team of Rivals” or Steven Spielberg’s 2012 film “Lincoln” or Barack Obama’s infatuation with both, as if our own era’s 50-cent mourning badges and splinters of skull were somehow either less urgently in need of critical scrutiny or the current place of Lincoln’s body in American culture and politics was less troubling than in eras past. It is not.


Abraham Lincoln was the best president the United States has ever had. But we live inside his tomb. For a very long time now, too many Americans have found it easier to think about Lincoln’s body — that brawn, that bullet — than about the bodies of the millions of men, women and children who had been kept in slavery, bodies stolen, shackled, hunted, whipped, branded, raped, starved, murdered and buried in unmarked graves. The mourning of Lincoln has come at the expense of mourning them. And what of the grief on the streets of American cities where the cry rises (because, a century and a half after Booth shot Lincoln, the argument still needs making): Black lives matter. And still the bullets volley, and fall and clatter.
[h=4]MOURNING LINCOLN

[/h] By Martha Hodes
Illustrated. 396 pp. Yale University Press. $30.

[h=4]LINCOLN’S BODY
[/h] [h=5]A Cultural History
[/h] By Richard Wightman Fox
Illustrated. 416 pp. W. W. Norton & Company. $28.95.



http://www.nytimes.com/2015/02/08/b...n-and-lincolns-body.html?smid=tw-nytimes&_r=0
 
Status
Not open for further replies.

Latest ads

Back
Top