Mark M. Smith: The tactility of Abraham Lincoln
[Mark M. Smith is a professor of history at the University of South Carolina at Columbia and author of Sensing the Past: Seeing, Hearing, Smelling, Tasting, and Touching in History, to be published this month by the University of California Press/Berg Publishers.]
To say that Abraham Lincoln is one of America's most iconographic presidents is to say something important about the way we sense him. As an icon, we see him, visualize him, process him through the eye — and with good reason. His body was visually arresting, he was the first president photographed at his inauguration, and his image was widely disseminated. It lingers, seemingly ubiquitous, on pennies and $5 bills, in marble, on statues, and in photographs. As we approach the bicentennial of Lincoln's birth next year, we'll be inundated with images of the man.
But there was more to Lincoln than meets the eye. There was also his skin, a rarely considered sensory feature of America's most famous president. Taking Lincoln's skin seriously, reading images (and texts) depicting Lincoln's tactility can prick our appreciation of how he understood touch and how his touch was perceived by contemporaries, as well as deepen our understanding of antebellum American democracy, Lincoln's attitude toward slavery, and how Americans came to contest the meaning of Lincoln's skin long after his assassination.
Lorenz Oken, an early-19th-century natural historian, elaborated a hierarchy of the senses indexed explicitly to race, giving pride of place to sight and sound and relegating the putatively lower, proximate senses of smell, taste, and touch. For Oken, the refined man of reason was the "eye-man," a European. Just below him, also "civilized," was the Asian "ear-man." The Native American "nose-man" came next, followed by the Australian "tongue-man." At the bottom, associated with the lowest, primal, least intellectual of the senses — touch — was the African, the "skin-man." Implicit in a good deal of historical biography is a way of understanding the past that privileges the European eye-men, as much of it is written, literally, from their own point of view. We possess almost no biographical work that inquires how those "eye-men" sensed the world or how the world perceived them in nonvisual terms.
Whatever historians' sensory inclinations, it is clear that Lincoln's skin was important to contemporaries. It was perceived as rough, flinty, leathery, even hidelike, a product of outside labor, accentuated by the wart on his right cheek and scar over his right eye. The wiry beard grown in 1861 and his hands — strong and big, his thumb scarred — only added to the perception. Moreover, Marfan syndrome possibly played a role in texturing Lincoln's skin. The syndrome, while most obviously manifested in accentuated height and enlarged hands and feet, also affects the skin. Many people with Marfan syndrome develop stretch marks on their skin, giving it a leathery look. While we do not know with any certainty that Lincoln had the Marfan gene, experts think it likely he had a mild variation of the condition as well as an unusually asymmetrical face....
Read entire article at Chronicle of Higher Ed
To say that Abraham Lincoln is one of America's most iconographic presidents is to say something important about the way we sense him. As an icon, we see him, visualize him, process him through the eye — and with good reason. His body was visually arresting, he was the first president photographed at his inauguration, and his image was widely disseminated. It lingers, seemingly ubiquitous, on pennies and $5 bills, in marble, on statues, and in photographs. As we approach the bicentennial of Lincoln's birth next year, we'll be inundated with images of the man.
But there was more to Lincoln than meets the eye. There was also his skin, a rarely considered sensory feature of America's most famous president. Taking Lincoln's skin seriously, reading images (and texts) depicting Lincoln's tactility can prick our appreciation of how he understood touch and how his touch was perceived by contemporaries, as well as deepen our understanding of antebellum American democracy, Lincoln's attitude toward slavery, and how Americans came to contest the meaning of Lincoln's skin long after his assassination.
Lorenz Oken, an early-19th-century natural historian, elaborated a hierarchy of the senses indexed explicitly to race, giving pride of place to sight and sound and relegating the putatively lower, proximate senses of smell, taste, and touch. For Oken, the refined man of reason was the "eye-man," a European. Just below him, also "civilized," was the Asian "ear-man." The Native American "nose-man" came next, followed by the Australian "tongue-man." At the bottom, associated with the lowest, primal, least intellectual of the senses — touch — was the African, the "skin-man." Implicit in a good deal of historical biography is a way of understanding the past that privileges the European eye-men, as much of it is written, literally, from their own point of view. We possess almost no biographical work that inquires how those "eye-men" sensed the world or how the world perceived them in nonvisual terms.
Whatever historians' sensory inclinations, it is clear that Lincoln's skin was important to contemporaries. It was perceived as rough, flinty, leathery, even hidelike, a product of outside labor, accentuated by the wart on his right cheek and scar over his right eye. The wiry beard grown in 1861 and his hands — strong and big, his thumb scarred — only added to the perception. Moreover, Marfan syndrome possibly played a role in texturing Lincoln's skin. The syndrome, while most obviously manifested in accentuated height and enlarged hands and feet, also affects the skin. Many people with Marfan syndrome develop stretch marks on their skin, giving it a leathery look. While we do not know with any certainty that Lincoln had the Marfan gene, experts think it likely he had a mild variation of the condition as well as an unusually asymmetrical face....