When I got back to New York, I called Harold Holzer, an old friend, whom I had known as a spokesman for the Metropolitan Museum of Art but who is also one of the country’s leading independent Lincoln scholars. Now the two seemed to be at war for his epitaph. A Lincoln for the ages and a Lincoln for the angels already existed. Does he belong to the angels or the ages? This small implicit dispute echoed, in turn, a genuine historical debate: between those historians who insist on a tough Lincoln, the Lincoln whom Edmund Wilson, in “Patriotic Gore,” saw as an essentially Bismarckian figure-a cold-blooded nationalist who guaranteed the unity of the North American nation, a stoic emperor in a stovepipe hat whose essential drive was for power, his own and his country’s-and those who, like Goodwin, see a tender, soulful Lincoln, a figure of almost saintly probity and patience who ended slavery, deepened in faith as the war went on, and fought hard without once succumbing to hatred. And Stanton’s words as they are normally quoted are (like the Lincoln Memorial) a form of American neoclassicism, at odds with the figure of Christian nobility prized by the right: Lincoln’s afterlife lies not in Heaven but in his vindication by history. Unlike Goodwin, a famous liberal, Swanson is a conservative legal scholar at the Heritage Foundation. Even without having read Jay Winik, though, one could glimpse, just visible beneath the diaphanous middle of that endnote, the tracings of an ideological difference. In the endnotes, Swanson explained that his rendering was deliberately at variance with the scholarly consensus: “In my view, shared by Jay Winik, the most persuasive interpretation supports ‘angels’ and is also more consistent with Stanton’s character and faith.” Now he belongs to the angels? Where had that come from? There was a Monty Python element here (“What was that? I think it was ‘Blessed are the cheesemakers,’ ” the annoyed listeners too far from the Mount say to each other in “Life of Brian”), but was there something more going on? I flipped to the back of the book. Gurley finished and everyone murmured ‘Amen.’ Then, no one dared to speak. Gurley, the Lincoln family minister, said, “ ‘Let us pray.’ He summoned up . . . Once again, I came to the deathbed scene, the vigil, the gathering. Swanson’s “Manhunt,” a vivid account of the assassination and the twelve-day search for John Wilkes Booth that followed. For the flight home, I picked up James L. It seemed to be multiplying by fission, as amoebas do, on the airport bookstore shelves. Overcome again by Lincoln’s example-by the idea of a President who was at once an interesting mind, a tough customer, and a good writer-I decided to start reading the new Lincoln literature. They seem perfectly chosen, in their bare and stoical evocation of a Lincoln who belongs to history alone, their invocation not of an assumption to an afterlife but of a long reign in the corridors of time, a man now part of eternity. It’s probably the most famous epitaph in American biography, and still perhaps the best reading the words again, I felt a shiver. Stanton stood still, sobbing, and then said, simply, “Now he belongs to the ages.” Pickwick but was actually the iron man in the Cabinet, and who, after a difficult beginning, had come to revere Lincoln as a man and a writer and a politician-had even played something like watchful Horatio to his tragic Hamlet. Stanton is the one with the long comic beard and the spinster’s spectacles, who in the photographs looks a bit like Mr. At 7:22 A.M., as Lincoln drew his last breath, all the worthies who had crowded into a little back bedroom in a boarding house across the street from Ford’s Theatre turned to Edwin Stanton, Lincoln’s formidable Secretary of War, for a final word. It is a well-told, many-sided story, which attempts to give context to Lincoln without diminishing him, to place him among his peers and place him above them, too.Ĭoming to the end of the book, to the night of April 14, 1865, and Lincoln’s assassination, I reached the words that were once engraved in every American mind. This all began on a very long plane ride, East Coast to West, when I was reading Doris Kearns Goodwin’s “Team of Rivals,” her book about Abraham Lincoln and his political competitors, and how, in the course of the Civil War, he turned them into a collegial Cabinet.
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