Gettysburg National Military Park Receives Lock of Lincoln's Hair

There is an interesting story in today's Washington Post about a donation to the museum at the Gettysburg National Military Park - a lock of Abraham Lincoln's hair cut after his assassination.

Several such clippings of the late president's hair were taken after he died, included one requested by his widow, Mary Lincoln.  

Studying Lincoln's Boots

Physical items associated with the assassination of Abraham Lincoln are among the most sacred artifacts of Lincolniana.  The contents of Lincoln's pockets are owned by the Library of Congress (and are included in their fantastic bicentennial exposition "With Malice Toward None").  The bedroom furniture of the room in which Lincoln died is owned by the Chicago Historical Museum (formerly the Chicago Historical Society).  Ford's Theatre (part of the National Park Service) has the assassination weapon, a .44 derringer, but the bullet that killed Lincoln is owned by the National Museum of Health and Medicine.  The rocker in which Lincoln was seated at the theater, though, is owned by the Henry Ford Museum.

Interestingly, most of the clothes that Lincoln wore to Ford's Theatre that fateful night are owned by Ford's Theatre, including his frock coat and his boots.  While Ford's Theatre has been undergoing a massive renovation over the past 18 months (the theatre reopened in February, while the basement museum is now scheduled to reopen in July), its collection has been has been in storage.  The police-escorted process of moving the collection was described in The Washington Post in 2007.

Last week, a bootmaker was given permission to examine Lincoln's boots in the storage facility.  Evidently, this is a rare occurence.  A Washington Post article quotes the Park Service saying that this is the first time in almost 20 years that such an examination has been allowed.

There are interesting aspects to the article, especially at the end.  The bootmaker, Michael Anthony Carnacchi, describes the boots as the height of men's fashion at the time.  In fact, a notice of decorative cross-hatching on the heel, along with the description of Moroccan goatskin, make them seem like designer artifacts.  Such an item does not match popular conceptions of Lincoln, the homespun frontier lawyer become homespun president.  While more attention is usually paid to Mary Lincoln's expensive fashion tastes, there are bits of evidence that Lincoln himself occasionally purchased fine clothing.

More intriguing, at least to me, is the final observation in the article, in which the bootmaker describes the heels of the boot.  His last quotation is fascinating -- and also runs counter to the common perception of the meditative, low-key Lincoln.  "When Lincoln walked on a wooden floor, the sound would have been commanding.  'You would have known when the president walked in the room,' he said."  Maybe there is more to the appellation Nicolay and Hay gave Lincoln -- The Tycoon.

TV Review: "Stealing Lincoln's Body" (History Channel)

"Stealing Lincoln's Body," a new 2-hour documentary by The History Channel, tells the almost unbelievable story of the over 35 year odyssey of Lincoln's body following his assassination. Following the story most clearly laid out in the 2007 book of the same name by Thomas Craughwell, the film by Trey Nelson precisely narrates the bizarre tale of how Lincoln's body was first prepared for burial following his death and how it was moved ten times after reaching its final resting place in Oak Ridge Cemetery.

The most dramatic event during these years, and the source of the title, is an improbable attempt in 1876 to steal Lincoln's body and hold it for ransom. However, this story only accounts for the middle third of the documentary; it took nearly eight years for Lincoln's body finally be permanently buried after his death and then a quarter-century to permanently rebury the body after the failed attempt to steal the body. Certainly the entire story is stranger than fiction.

The film does a strong job clearly telling this story, with a strong guiding narrative and interviews from several experts, including Craughwell, noted Lincoln scholars Michael Burlingame and Harold Holzer, as well as up-and-coming Lincoln scholar Jason Emerson, Jon Austin, Director of the Museum of Funeral Customs (located just outside Oak Ridge Cemetery), James Cornelius, curator of the Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library, and Nan Wynn, the current manager of the Lincoln Tomb.

Perhaps the oddest thing about the film is the decision to show a "virtual Abraham Lincoln." In addition to some standard modern recreations of events for the film, there are also scenes of Abraham Lincoln that are graphically created from Lincoln images and life masks -- including, most notably, the assassination itself. The effect is odd, to say the least; the rendering, by a production company called Studio Macbeth, looks more like Lincoln than any actor could. At times it was charming; frankly, though, the moment of assassination was eerie. (The company has a blog about the development of this technology.) Odder still, though, is the fact that this technology seems wasted on a documentary that focuses exclusively on Lincoln's body after he was dead.

Regardless, the story itself demands attention. Perhaps it starts of slow, with a description of Lincoln's autopsy, and then a more detailed description of the embalming of Lincoln's body -- a relatively new procedure that had flourished during the Civil War. After tracing the long funeral train journey, featuring ceremonies in a dozen cities, the documentary tells of the various stops for Lincoln's body (and his son Willie's body) while the memorial tomb was being constructed.

Then the action really begins, as a Chicago counterfeiter hatches a plan to grave-rob the Lincoln tomb in hopes of gaining a pardon for his jailed accomplice and $200,000 cash. The plan has notable problems -- none of the criminals involved has experience with this type of crime, and they plan to hide the coffin in the Indiana Dunes, roughly a two-week journey. Still, they might have succeeded if the plan hadn't been discovered by the US Secret Service -- then an agency solely focused on fighting counterfeiting. While the planned theft is bizarre, without this discovery the terrifying thought is that the criminals likely would have stolen the body.

After the break-in, the custodian was fearful of the potential for the body to be stolen in the future. In order to prevent this, he hid the body in the tomb's basement, where it was eventually buried. Indeed, Robert Lincoln, who was aware of these security tactics, privately shed his staunch Victorian image when he instructed that his mother, following her death, was to be buried in the basement beside her husband's temporary shallow grave. A more permanent solution was possible only when it became clear that the entire memorial needed to be rebuilt. This was done and Lincoln was finally buried in a deep, cement vault beneath the tomb in 1901 -- following Robert's instructions, likely cribbed from the burial of Robert's previous (and publicly vilified) employer George Pullman.

The story is fascinating, and this film tells it well. Perhaps the buildups to each commercial break are a little overly dramatic, but aside from this, the documentary is both accurate and accessible. The subject matter is a bit macabre, but otherwise the film is highly recommended.

"Stealing Lincoln's Body" premiered on Monday, February 16, 2009.

TV Review: "The Assassination of Abraham Lincoln" (PBS)

The stalwart PBS American documentary series "American Experience" returns to the subject of the sixteenth president with a new 90-minute documentary that offers a fairly straight-forward, and surprisingly straight-laced (even by PBS standards), look at "The Assassination of Abraham Lincoln." Having previously done a three-part, six-hour, dual biography of Abraham and Mary Todd Lincoln in 2001, this film on Lincoln's death serves as the series bicentennial year contribution.

Like all of the American Experience films, this documentary by writer/director Barak Goodman has high-quality technical elements, features a clear narration (by Oscar-winning actor Chris Cooper), and lots of good interviews. For anyone with a limited knowledge of the assassination, this film offers a basic introduction to the events surrounding the crime. It is especially strong in establishing the fundamental timeline of the night of the assassination and the days following.

The challenge for anybody tackling this particular aspect of the Lincoln biography is that the assassination has become quite a cottage industry, with significant numbers of books written over the years and, incredibly, multiple "assassination tours" offered by guides in the DC area of associated sites. Moreover, some of the information in many of these books, when carefully studied, is suspect when put under a historical microscope.

Happily, the documentary carefully wades through the material and stays, almost entirely, on solid evidential ground, except for a fleeting unsupported assertion of Mary Surratt's innocence at the film's end. And the interviews, liberally used, feature several good scholars and experts; alongside such strong general experts like Harold Holzer, Doris Kearns Goodwin, James McPherson, and Allen Guelzo are specific assassination experts: Terry Alford, editor of John Wilkes Booth's sister's memoir, Gene Smith, author of a book about the Booth family, James L. Swanson, author of the popular Manhunt about the chase for Lincoln's killer, and Edward Steers, Jr., who has published multiple books on Lincoln's assassination, including probably the best single volume, Blood on the Moon.

Early on, it becomes clear that the filmmakers are intent on exploring the assassin's motive for the crime, and there is a consistent focus on Booth's rationale for his actions before and after Lincoln's assassination. This focus leaves less time for other interesting and sizable pieces of the story, such as the public reaction and displays of grief during the elaborate two week funeral journey of Lincoln's body from Washington to Springfield. Unfortunately, the film only makes clear that Booth was not insane; the rest of the portrait is incomplete. This highlighted an omission in the film that surprised me; Michael Kauffman, author of the recent book on Booth American Brutus, was not interviewed, nor was there evidence that his careful (if sometimes unbelievable) study of this issue of motivation was consulted.

Aside from that, though, part of the problem dealing with Booth's motive is that the film devotes very little time to the kidnapping conspiracy from which the assassination eventually hatched. The kidnapping conspiracy is mentioned, as is the most particularly far-fetched plan that Booth tried to develop -- abducting Lincoln from Ford's Theater. But the very plausible plan to kidnap Lincoln riding alone between the White House and the Soldier's Home, which the conspirators testified was attempted, is never mentioned.

The reason for this, I suspect, is that the filmmakers don't want to touch the myriad conspiracy theories of who was behind this conspiracy, which have attempted to implicate everyone from Confederate leaders (notably Jefferson Davis) to Union government officials (including Edwin Stanton) to Northern businessmen. However, there is strong circumstantial evidence that Booth was somehow connected with the Confederate Secret Service, perhaps receiving funding and certainly receiving assistance during his escape from known Confederate operatives. Steers is convinced that parts of this conspiracy are highly plausible and incorporated them into his book. If he mentioned them during his interviews, those comments were not used. And I find Steers' logic persuasive.

This criticism aside, the documentary is a solid and steady retelling of Lincoln's assassination. Experts and Lincolnophiles will find almost nothing of note here -- though I was intrigued by Alford's colorful explanation of why Dr. Samuel Mudd evicted the injured fugitive Booth from his house: with his wife and children there, "Mudd simply could not afford a shootout in the family parlor." But it is a serviceable and informative film for others.

"The Assassination of Abraham Lincoln" premiered on Monday, February 9, 2009.