Final Departure

BRIAN: Abraham Lincoln died, according to press reports, with a smile on his face. “I had never seen upon the president’s face an expression more genial and pleasings,” wrote a New York Times reporter. In the following days, the public fascination with Lincoln’s physical appearance continued in death as it had life. Secretary of War, Edwin Stanton, was in charge of funeral arrangements.

Stanton knew that the people were clamoring to see the dearly departed president. And so after a one week public viewing period in the capital, Stanton organized an elaborate funeral procession that would take Lincoln’s body for public viewing in 11 other US cities. The casket traveled by train, winding up in Lincoln’s home town of Springfield, Illinois.

PETER: There would be an almost two week long journey, something made possible by new embalming practices introduced during the Civil War. As it turned out, those practices weren’t advanced enough to keep Lincoln’s body from noticeably deteriorating over the course of those two weeks. But still, Americans came out in droves. An estimated 1 million people saw the body, and 7 million saw the train pass by. That amounted to a third of the entire Northern population at the time.

RICHARD WIGHTMAN FOX: The population of the North would brook no opposition to the idea that they would get to see the body.

PETER: This is Richard Wightman Fox, author of a brand new book called Lincoln’s Body. I sat down with him to talk about the spectacle of the funeral train and its meanings to Americans in the spring of 1865.

RICHARD WIGHTMAN FOX: Everybody wanted their children to see all of this. They wanted to pass this event on through time. And by bringing their kids, making sure that they saw the body– also, this is true of blacks and whites in all of these Northern cities. And when they are interviewed by journalists at the time, they keep saying I want my children to see this.

PETER: You mentioned African Americans being part of those audiences, so that was something new too, wasn’t it? There’s new claim on public space, would you say?

RICHARD WIGHTMAN FOX: Yes. Yes and no. I think in East coast cities, Baltimore, Philadelphia, especially, there was already a well established black presence out in public. But in the Midwest, especially, one gets evidence in several places in which black people say at the time this is new and different. We have never been welcomed into public space as we have now been welcomed in these Lincoln funeral events.

That is such an important story. I think the fact that black men especially say in print in 1865, before this, we always felt we were just inviting a beating to go out in public. But here, in the funeral events, we have been welcomed. It’s a completely different atmosphere in those places.

And we have lots of evidence from the actual funeral episodes that black people were overrepresented, according to their numbers in the population, in the crowds walking by the body. And they also mourned differently. They mourn volubly. And white people who talk to reporters say, often, we wish we, white people, could show our emotions about this as easily as our black neighbors do.

PETER: And so when African Americans saw Lincoln, saw the train, participated in this mourning period, this was consolidating a position they thought they had earned with their lives, with their sacrifices, during the war.

RICHARD WIGHTMAN FOX: Completely right, yes. That brings up the idea of the body politic, which is that entity which includes all citizens. And Lincoln is the man who pushed hardest to defend his idea of a body politic in which there was no distinction between the leader and the led. He wanted everybody to feel they were equal.

And therefore, he called himself the representative man of this particular moment when he was chosen as the chief magistrate. He wasn’t better or superior, he was just temporarily the leader. And that body politic implicitly, by the end of his life, included African Americans. That’s what led John Wilkes Booth to kill him. It was that Lincoln was going to get rid of the hierarchy between monarch and people and he was going to get rid of the hierarchy between white and black.

PETER: So Richard, the train, which is a new mode of transportation, enables a trip like this. But what’s the point of the trip if he’s dead? Let’s just put him away. Why did Stanton think it was so important to pay so much attention to the body? Why is there this big– you have to call it a kind of spectacle, isn’t it?

RICHARD WIGHTMAN FOX: Oh, it’s certainly a spectacle. And it’s a spiritual as well as secular event, in the sense that people are still trying to figure out what this man meant to them. They realized that the assassination had catapulted him into a new stratosphere of importance for them. And he became, in effect, cosmically important, not just a national hero.

But he would have been that without the assassination. He would have been this Republican hero who gave up his body. He withered in office, beyond anything that anyone had witnessed before.

We had photography now recording his facial wrinkles, the famous Alexander Gardner image of him in February 1865, looking like he’s really ready to drop. And people of the time said that. They said he looks horrible. We are afraid he’s going to die in office just of fatigue.

PETER: Richard, how would Lincoln have considered, if he could have considered, the public display of his body after his death?

RICHARD WIGHTMAN FOX: I love that question. I love thinking about how Lincoln would have responded to this long funeral train. Would he have minded his body being put on display and deteriorating before the very eyes of the American people? And the more I think about it, the more I think he wouldn’t have minded at all.

If there was a one person in 19th century America who would not have minded his body deteriorating in public, I think it would’ve been Lincoln. His whole point, this zealous Republican wanted to be with the people always. He jumped into crowds. And I think myself that by the end of his life, he had demonstrated, especially with his walk through Richmond on April 4th, 1865, that he was not to be taken as a coward in any respect.

He would gladly give up his life if that’s what it took to protect the Republic. And for him, the Republic meant a place where leaders congregate openly with the led. And so, here, after death, he, I think, would have been very glad to be treated as a corpse in public and for his body to go right down into dust. I think for him that would have been almost the perfect denouement.

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PETER: Richard Wightman Fox is a historian at the University of Southern California. He’s the author of the new book Lincoln’s Body.

BRIAN: It’s time for another break. When we get back, a nation mourns, and in some cases, celebrates, even if it’s done very much in private.

PETER: You’re listening to BackStory. We’ll be right back.

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