Lincoln Immortelles

[L Verge]

If you are not familiar with the term "immortelles," it refers to popular 19th- and early-20th century items of remembrance. I have been trekking the information highway trying to find a particular form of one for display at Surratt House. It is possible that, upon the death of Mr. Surratt in 1862, his family saved flowers from a funeral display (if he had any), had them preserved in wax, arranged, and placed under a glass dome for display. We have a center hall table that begs to exhibit one!

Immortelles came in other forms also. The standard ones were floral or evergreens, shaped into crosses or wreaths and placed on graves or mausoleum entrances. But they could also take the form of written text and tributes to the deceased. In my journey through the cloud, I found this mention of immortelles related to Abraham Lincoln:

In the United States, resignation [acceptance of death] was made much more difficult by the devastation of the Civil War and the assassination of U.S. President Abraham Lincoln (1809-65). In both countries [England being the other], immortelles, in the form of tribute poems, prose pieces, and even illustrations, were often written, compiled, and composed for fallen soldiers and national leaders. These were print counterparts to the wreaths of immortelles laid at soldiers’ tombs. A May 6, 1865 illustration in Punch entitled “Britannia Sympathises with Columbia,” for instance, shows a sorrowful Britannia laying a wreath of immortelles on the corpse of Lincoln, with the figures of Columbia and an unshackled, freed slave weeping beside his body. Nearly two decades after the assassination of Lincoln, a memorial album was compiled by Osborn Hamiline Oldroyd that solicited contributions from prominent Americans and Europeans regarding the deceased president. The Lincoln Memorial; Album Immortelles (1882) interwove these solicitations and Lincoln’s own speeches with the explicit purpose of preserving the president’s life and political influence for future generations. The album is a “who’s who” of nineteenth-century American and, to a lesser extent, European life. Tributes—from members of parliament and former U.S. governors to authors and poets such as Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, and farmers and inventors such as Thomas Edison—all express enduring admiration for the fallen statesman.

The text, dedicated to the American people, performs the necessary genealogical function of aligning Lincoln with great leaders of the past as well. Samuel Wells Williams, an important figure in U.S.-Chinese relations in the mid nineteenth century, wrote for the album that Lincoln’s “name is hereafter identified with the cause of Emancipation, while his patriotism, integrity, and other virtues, and his untimely death, render him not unworthy of mention with William of Orange and Washington.” And he suggested that the increased study of the president’s life would lead to an increased appreciation and admiration for his “character of mercy and firmness”. By linking the assassinated president to William III and George Washington, Wells Williams inserts the traditionally nationalist formula of war (or revolution) and reconciliation into the memorial process.