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