reprinted by permission from The Urban Times
Is the sesquicentennial of the Civil War is
coming to a close with more of a whimper than a bang?
A few years ago there was a flurry of all things
Civil War and Abraham Lincoln, starting with two major new scholarly AND
popular Lincoln biographies by Michael Burlingame and Doris Kearns Goodwin, and
including a Spielberg film starring Daniel Day Lewis, all timed to coincide
with the 200th anniversary of Lincoln's birth and the 150th anniversary of his
election and the outbreak of the War Between the States. Are we burned out?
“Yes and no,” says
Indiana State Museum Curator of American History and Fall Creek Place resident
Dale Ogden. “Re-enactments are as big
as ever. The books keep coming. Civil War history has almost taken on a
Lord-of-the-Rings life of its own. I do think
it will ebb a little here, though.”
Indiana played no small part in that opening
whirlwind of historical attention, largely because the Lincoln Financial
Corporation, headquartered now in Philadelphia but once based in Fort Wayne,
decided to get out of the business of maintaining a Lincoln museum in
northeastern Indiana and to get some exposure out of donating its substantial
collection to more high-profile and high-traffic institutions. The State of Indiana ended up participating
in a rather spirited "bidding" war, and the collection ended up
staying in the state that was Lincoln's Boyhood Home -- in an arrangement
whereby the massive collection of Lincoln books and papers went to the Allen
County Public Library, one of the premiere public genealogical and research
libraries in the country; and the smaller collection of artifacts found a home
at the Indiana State Museum in Indianapolis.
A handful of Lincoln items are on constant
rotation through the State Museum's permanent history galleries, but a key to
Indiana's success in maintaining the collection was the commitment to mount periodic
special exhibitions based on the collection.
Right now, the fourth such exhibit is on display -- and while "So Costly a Sacrifice: Lincoln and Loss" won't be the last
Lincoln special exhibition to come to White River State Park, it is the most
fitting coda to the national observance of the 150th anniversary of the Civil
War that I've seen.
The responsibility for this exhibition, like two
major shows and one two-dimensional exhibit that proceeded it, fell to Ogden.
The role of curator can vary depending on the
size, priorities, and program of the museum.
Some curators -- particularly paleontologists and archeologists -- can
spend most of their careers building and documenting a collection, and
publishing the knowledge they create in professional journals. Ogden has always been a curator with a
special gift for pulling together a room full of artifacts, arranging them in a
particular order, and then telling stories about them in a way that conveys his
own sense of wonder -- "this particular object was actually used by this
particular person to do this remarkable thing right here -- in spite of the
challenges posed by that last thing we looked at -- and now here it is right in
front of us! Isn't that
amazing?"
Ogden started working in what has become his
milieu 31 years ago, when the museum was in the Old City Hall Building on
Alabama Street. In a six-year span he
was curator of three of the most artifact-intensive exhibitions the museum has
still done to date -- a military history exhibit based on the institution's own
collection, and then two popular culture exhibits, on broadcasting history and
sports history, based on collections that he and his colleagues built from
scratch in two-year campaigns.
Ogden's early exhibits were as colorful and
riotous and sometimes uneven as the overly-ambitious production schedules and
culture of the museum itself under its director in those days, Lee Scott
Theisen. The series of Lincoln
exhibitions -- and especially "So Costly a Sacrifice," are the work
of a mature craftsman.
The challenge to the museum staff of mounting
biennial Lincoln exhibits has been that the number of three-dimensional objects
in this collection is relatively small.
The inaugural installation in 2010 essentially showcased it all -- and,
when coupled with a traveling exhibit from the National Archives in the
adjoining gallery, was almost overwhelming in the sense of connection it gave
to modern viewers of the life and legacy of the great President. “We
had an obligation to prove ourselves, to show that it was not a mistake that
the collection stayed here,” Ogden says.
“There are some really
iconic things in the collection,” Ogden shares, and cites the ambertypes of
Lincoln’s sons Willy and Tad that are being displayed again for the first time
in five years. “The thought of Lincoln
sitting on his bed, in the midst of the Civil War, mourning his son – if that
image doesn’t move you, you shouldn’t be a curator.
“It still moves me
every time I talk about it. But you have to use them judiciously or they can
lose their power.”
Three years later, in the midst of the Civil War
sesquicentennial, Ogden zigged when the rest of the museum world was
zagging. While everyone else was
borrowing and lending military artifacts and images to tell the story of the
war, Ogden negotiated with institutions around the country to borrow objects
that they weren't using, to supplement a smaller number of Indiana's own
artifacts to tell the story of four generations of the Lincoln family. It was an exhibit that engaged in some
"log cabin" myth-busting -- pointing out with three-dimensional
evidence that while Lincoln came from humble roots, he, his wife, and his
surviving descendants were ambitious and successful far beyond the norm for
nineteenth-century America.
"So Costly a Sacrifice" is built around
a subtext of mortality in the way that Peter Sellers' last movies and Warren
Zevon's last albums were. The exhibit
is not morbid, but it is about morbidity.
For this exhibit, Ogden supplemented the Lincoln collection objects with
an abundance of materials from the museum's own collection -- and fully the
first third of the gallery deals with ante-bellum American's familiarity with
death.
 |
| A child's coffin, a death mask, and memorial "hair wreaths" from a time when death was a frequent visitor. |
The exhibit sets the stage with reminders that
unexpected death was a frequent visitor in those days: a child's coffin, a Victorian hair wreath
woven from the locks of deceased relatives, and death masks that were created,
in the years before photography, for portrait artists to use as models after
the fact. One compelling object is a
portable, perforated “cooling table” for displaying the deceased. “Most funerals were at home,” Ogden
explains. “People would put chunks of
ice under these tables to keep the body from decomposing too quickly.”
“You died in bed, you were viewed in the parlor,
you were buried in the churchyard. It
was kind of the ideal of the ‘good death,’ which the Civil War shattered. But the Civil War also was the beginning of
the modern funeral industry. ”
A label makes the point that three in ten Americans
born in the early 19th century died before adulthood, which led to a sobering
math equation for my 14-year-old son to consider about his 35 classmates.
The carnage of the Civil War is depicted with
some of the earliest objects in the museum's collection -- battlefield
souvenirs of whole trunks of trees riddled with shrapnel, and shells retrieved
by soldiers who were able to describe the deaths of companions that they
caused.
Still, Lincoln was the first American president
to be assassinated. Between the
circumstances of his death just days after Lee's surrender, and the new
technology of the telegraph allowing the nation to experience the news
simultaneously, it was an unprecedented shock to the body politic. One of Ogden's favorite components of the
exhibit is a display of published versions of Easter Sunday sermons delivered
two days after the assassination, from all over the country -- all of them
drawing liberally on the parallels between Lincoln's death and that of Christ.
“From an intellectual standpoint, this is the
most fun I’ve had in all the years I’ve been here,” Ogden confides. “Part of it was an epiphany on my part –
things that I knew, but that came together for me in doing this show. I knew Lincoln was shot on Good Friday, and
so the next Sunday was Easter. But the
fact that by the afternoon of the day he died, people in San Francisco knew it
– it amplified the tragedy, made it more universal. What a huge shift in the human condition.”
And by the next morning, Americans were pouring
into churches for Easter services to hear the President eulogized in Messianic
terms.
Nearby, one print shows George Washington
welcoming Lincoln into heaven. Another
is a death-bed scene in which Washington himself, not God, is the face in the
clouds, surrounded by angels, who is looking down on the martyred 16th
President.
My family and I toured this exhibit two days
after the 150th anniversary of Lincoln's death, and two weeks after a visit to
Washington, DC, which included a trip to the Lincoln Memorial. Inscribed on the north wall of that monument
is Lincoln's Second Inaugural Address, also delivered 150 years ago this
spring. It's the one containing the
words, "with charity for all, with malice toward none." But it also contains the haunting admonition
that, "Fondly do we hope, fervently do we pray, that this mighty scourge
of war may speedily pass away. Yet, if God wills that it continue until all the
wealth piled by the bondsman's two hundred and fifty years of unrequited toil
shall be sunk, and until every drop of blood drawn with the lash shall be paid
by another drawn with the sword, as was said three thousand years ago, so still
it must be said 'the judgments of the Lord are true and righteous
altogether.'"
The six-year national commemoration of Lincoln
and the Civil War is drawing to a close, but Lincoln would no doubt agree that
the work of reconciliation is on-going.
His modern-day Indiana curator is no doubt willing to engage you in a
conversation on the subject. "So
Costly a Sacrifice" continues at the Indiana State Museum through July
5. It is worth another trip.
