Lincoln’s Body

NATHAN: Today on the show, in honor of President’s Day, we’ll explore the afterlives of presidents, what they do when they’re out of office, and the way we think about them through the ages.

BRIAN: We’ll hear from a collector of presidential memorabilia about what campaign tchotchkes can tell us about a presidency. We’ll look at how Ulysses S. Grant’s reputation has changed over time. Plus, the three of us will make our arguments for when post-presidencies became a thing, and who’s had the best second act.

But first, let’s go back to 1865. One of the most extraordinary stories of how a president’s reputation changed after the White House starts with the final journey of Abraham Lincoln. Lincoln had been a divisive figure in life. He’d been unpopular enough that he worried he would lose the presidency in the election of 1864. It wasn’t an unfounded fear. Even as the war began to turn decisively in the North’s favor, nearly half of white Northerners voted against him.

NATHAN: But after his death, those feelings changed. Lincoln’s Secretary of War Edwin Stanton took charge of funeral arrangements in Washington, DC, but Stanton also knew that people around the country were clamoring to visit the departed president. There was a week of public viewing in the capitol. Then, an elaborate funeral procession took Lincoln’s body for public viewing in 11 other US cities. The casket traveled by train all the way back to Lincoln’s hometown of Springfield, Illinois.

Lincoln’s last journey lasted nearly two weeks, something made possible by new embalming practices introduced during the Civil War. All along the route, Americans lined up to pay tribute in an unprecedented spectacle of public mourning. 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.

A few years ago, BackStory host emeritus Peter Onuf sat down with historian Richard Wightman Fox to discuss the very public final journey of President Lincoln.

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 ONUF: You mentioned African-Americans being part of those audiences.

RICHARD WIGHTMAN FOX: Yes.

PETER ONUF: So that was something new too, wasn’t it? It was a 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 in public.

PETER ONUF: Right.

RICHARD WIGHTMAN FOX: Right. 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 a public space as we have now been welcomed in the 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 mourned volubly. And white people who talked to reporters say often, we wish we white people could show our emotions about this as easily as our black neighbors do.

PETER ONUF: 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 get rid of the hierarchy between white and black.

PETER ONUF: 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 realize 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 at the time said that. They said, he looks horrible. We are afraid he’s going to die in office just of fatigue.

PETER ONUF: Richard, how would Lincoln had 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 one person in 19th century America who would not have minded his body deteriorating in public, I think it would have 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 4, 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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NATHAN: Richard Wightman Fox is a Professor of History at the University of Southern California, and author of Lincoln’s Body– a Cultural History. BackStory host Peter Onuf interviewed him for our episode on Lincoln’s assassination. Earlier in the show, we also heard from Richard Bernstein of the City College of New York. He’s the author of The Founding Fathers Reconsidered.