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  • Writing Lincoln’s Death and Life at 150 Years
  • K. Stephen Prince (bio)
Martha Hodes. Mourning Lincoln. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2015. viii + 396 pp. Figures, notes, and index. $30.00.
Richard Wightman Fox. Lincoln’s Body: A Cultural History. New York: W. W. Norton, 2015. xvi + 416 pp. Figures, notes, and index. $28.95.

In 2012, the Ford’s Theatre Center for Education and Leadership in Washington, D.C., unveiled a 34-foot tall tower constructed out of books written on Abraham Lincoln. The titles included in the book tower represent only a small sample of the estimated 15,000 books that have been published about the nation’s sixteenth president. Given its symbolic significance as the sesquicentennial of Lincoln’s assassination, 2015 will almost certainly prove to have been another banner year in Lincoln publishing. In this context, it is not unreasonable to ask what—if anything—is left to say about Abraham Lincoln. Even in this extraordinarily crowded literary marketplace, two new works on Lincoln manage to offer approaches that are fresh and surprising. In Mourning Lincoln, Martha Hodes explores the ways that average Americans grappled with a wholly unprecedented experience: the murder of a sitting president. In Lincoln’s Body: A Cultural History, Richard Wightman Fox argues that Lincoln’s physical appearance—gangly, awkward, even ugly—has indelibly shaped the nation’s relationship with its favorite president since the 1860s. Though other authors, notably Merrill Peterson (Lincoln in American Memory, 1994) and Barry Schwartz (Abraham Lincoln and the Forge of National Memory, 2000), have written about Lincoln in popular memory, Hodes and Fox offer important perspectives on the processes of memorialization and mythmaking, helping readers to understand how Lincoln became Lincoln in the days, weeks, months, and years after his death.

As its title suggests, Martha Hodes’ Mourning Lincoln is not interested in the life, deeds, or presidency of Abraham Lincoln. Indeed, the book’s title character is killed on page two, allowing Hodes to immediately pick up her true topic: the way that Americans found meaning in Lincoln’s death in the immediate aftermath of the assassination. Mourning Lincoln explores a relatively short chronological span. Opening with the assassination on April 14–15, 1865, [End Page 634] the book’s main analytical chapters only carry the reader as far as July 1865, though a concluding chapter briefly surveys the remainder of Reconstruction. This structure allows Hodes to survey, in remarkable detail, the variety of responses offered to Lincoln’s death. The book offers a ground-level view of the mourning process: the initial shock of the news, anger at the perpetrators (real or imagined), the search for meaning, acceptance, and rationalization. This is a powerful story, and at times deeply emotional.

Citing her own experiences in the aftermath of 9/11 and the JFK assassination, Hodes explores the ways that average Americans responded to Lincoln’s death. She draws a distinction between public, official commemorations and more informal, personal memorial activities. “The record of personal responses overlaps with public pronouncements,” Hodes argues, “but the two are not the same, as individual writings reveal experiences that cannot be recovered elsewhere” (pp. 8–9). The nation mourned Lincoln collectively, Hodes reminds us, but people also grieved individually. To this end, Mourning Lincoln draws extensively from unpublished diaries and personal correspondence in an attempt to create what might be termed a social history of mourning. The result is an entirely unique approach to an iconic moment in U.S. history. As Hodes explains, “Mourning Lincoln delves into the moment of Lincoln’s assassination to uncover a profusion of real-time sentiments, creating a multivocal narrative history that takes us far beyond the headlines to tell the story, and illuminate its meanings, on a human scale” (p. 9). In this, the book succeeds admirably.

Perhaps the greatest strength of Mourning Lincoln is its remarkable research in private letters and diaries. In preparing the book, Hodes states, she “read through perhaps a thousand diaries, collections of letters, and other relevant writings from the spring and summer of 1865” (p. 275). This source base allows Hodes to recover the way that regular Americans responded to an unprecedented national crisis...

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