"The Heavens are Hung in Black": Abraham Lincoln and Death

From multiple personal tragedies to the Civil War’s terrible carnage, death might stand alongside emancipation and saving the Union as one of the great central truths of Abraham Lincoln’s life. This was so even during his early days in Indiana and Illinois, and continued into the war with the deaths of several close friends and (most wrenchingly of all) his young son Willie in 1862. What exactly did he think of death and the afterlife? How did he approach grief and mourning? When confronted with the unprecedented number of battlefield casualties generated by the war, how did he react? I will explore the various political dimensions of Lincoln’s approach to death during the war, how he tried to explain the meaning of the war dead to the American people, and how he ultimately came to explain the war’s awful human toll in his own personal, psychological, and spiritual terms.
Brian Dirck is a Professor of History at Anderson University in Anderson, Indiana. He received his B.A. in history at the University of Central Arkansas, an M.A. in history at Rice University, and a Ph.D. in history at the University of Kansas. His scholarship has focused on the American Civil War era, in particular the life and career of Abraham Lincoln. His first book, Lincoln and Davis: Imagining America, 1809-1865 offered a comparative analysis of the two Civil War presidents. He has since published Lincoln the Lawyer, a study of Lincoln’s legal career which received the Barondess Award from the New York Civil War Roundtable as the best book on Abraham Lincoln published in 2007, and he has edited Lincoln Emancipated: The President and the Politics of Race. In 2012 he released two books, Lincoln and the Constitution, and Abraham Lincoln and White America. He recently released Lincoln and Indiana, a study of Lincoln’s childhood years, which was given an Award of Achievement from the Illinois State Historical Society; and in February 2019 he released The Black Heavens: Abraham Lincoln and Death, which examines the various ways in which Lincoln encountered death and mourning throughout his life and career. He has also written numerous articles, and spoken at Harvard University, the National Archives in Washington DC, the Lincoln Forum and the Lincoln Colloquium in Springfield, Illinois, and Gettysburg’s Civil War Institute. He is the recipient of a Fulbright Scholarship, and has taught courses in U.S. history at the University of Tokyo and Kyoritsu Women’s University.