On April 4, 1865, the day after the Confederate capital had fallen to Union troops, President Lincoln, accompanied by a military contingent and his son Tad, took a walk through the fallen capital.
This month’s talk will focus on that trip, and some of the dynamics surrounding the visit. It's a perennial problem confronting students of Lincoln . We want to know what he was “thinking” about his political decisions and his personal choices at the time he made them. Yet Lincoln kept no diary, and said little about himself in his correspondence. We're often stuck with only the recollections of other people about those decisions and choices.
In the case of Richmond , we are forced to rely on recollections as we speculate about why Lincoln tossed caution aside and strode through a massive southern crowd on his way to the former Confederate White House. He did so against the advice of his Secretary of War Edwin Stanton, who feared for his safety. Many other northerners did too; and his safe return to Washington on April 9 – the day of Lee's surrender at Appomattox – convinced them that the threat to his well-being had passed.
Our speaker, Dr. Richard Fox, has been a professor of History at USC since 1999. He earned his BA, MA and Ph.D in History from Stanford University . He has been teaching American History at various colleges and universities since 1975.
As a cultural and intellectual historian, he turned to the serious study of Lincoln 's life – and death – only after finishing his book “Jesus in America ” in 2004. Since then he has been researching the three-week funeral extravaganza that took Lincoln's body from Washington to Springfield in the spring of 1865, and trying to assess how that outpouring of grief contributed to the building of the iconic Lincoln image that exerts such monumental power over northern Americans to this day. Dr. Fox will also discuss the parallels between Christ and Christ-like image of Lincoln .
Come join us as we learn about the legacy of Lincoln ’s walk through Richmond .
Janet Whaley
Program Chair