John R. Neff, associate professor of history at the University of Mississippi, quoted Walt Whitman’s essay “The Death of Abraham Lincoln” to open his talk dealing with Lincoln’s assassination and its affect on the man’s legacy.
“... The final use of the greatest men of a nation is, after all, not with reference to their deeds in themselves, or their direct bearing on their times or lands. The final use of a heroic-eminent life — especially of a heroic-eminent death — is its indirect filtering into the nation and the race. ...”
Neff’s speech, “The Beginning at the End: The Lasting Significance of Lincoln’s ‘Heroic Eminent Death,’” was the second event of the Abraham Lincoln Bicentennial Symposium Wednesday night at the Granada Theatre.
Why should we focus on Lincoln’s death on the eve of the bicentennial of his birth? Neff asked.
“Because everything we think about Lincoln is influenced and colored by his death,” Neff said. “We see his life and legacy only through the lens of how that life came to an end. The manner of his death and the timing of it. The enormous void left in national leadership at such a critical time.”
Neff’s talk focused on how Lincoln’s death informed and gave weight to the nation’s collective memory of him, and gave rise to a popularity he may not otherwise have had.
One problem for historians, Neff said, is that not much is known about Lincoln before age 30, and much of what is known cannot be corroborated. His political life is well-known and well-documented, but much of our knowledge of his life came only after his death.
“No objectivity, no neutrality was possible after that death,” Neff said. “The elegiac impulse was overwhelming. Death shaped every attempt to appraise him.”
Neff explained how easy it is to forget how difficult Lincoln’s presidency had been, and how unpopular Lincoln was with many of his constituents.
But after his death, the public’s attitude changed. Neff quoted Frederick Douglass, noted this fact eleven years after the assassination.
“Few public men have ever been the victims of fiercer denunciation than Abraham Lincoln was during his administration,” Douglass wrote. “... But in the wake of his death, all contention was put away, overwhelmed with the need to eulogize. ...”
Neff described the outpouring of grief from the public in the wake of Lincoln’s assassination and how his funeral train’s slow procession to Illinois drew millions of mourners throughout its route.
Lincoln was shot on Good Friday, and the sermons that came following his death were filled with biblical allusions.
“The biblical analogies that had the most impact were those that paralleled Lincoln not in any aspect of his personality or character, but in the terms of his death,” Neff said.
Many compared Lincoln to Moses. “In the first place, Lincoln had delivered a persecuted people from a generation of bondage with the Emancipation Proclamation,” Neff said. “And secondly, like Moses, he had died after leading his people through the trials of the war, but before entering fully into the promised land of peace and national restoration.”
Lincoln also was compared to Christ in a number of ways. Lincoln, like Christ, liked to speak in parables, and his violent death was the result of treason and rebellion.
Neff said Lincoln’s funeral procession remains unmatched in American history.
“This is a small and inadequate description of the oceanic grief which engulfed much of this nation,” he said. “In those days Lincoln became something other than he had been. Elevated to the pantheon of national heroes, he became the popular truism that, while George Washington was the father of our country, Abraham Lincoln is the father of our nation.”