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