Commander Abraham "Frustrated by McClellan" Lincoln

Travel has once again stolen my blogging time, though that situation should ease up by mid-July, after which point I plan to sit little anywhere other than my porch or my piano bench for the rest of the summer. Which means blogging should be a tad more reliably from that point. I hope.

My travel reading for this trip is the first volume of Shelby Foote's The Civil War. Though a trusted colleague swears by it--going so far as to say he envies my getting to read it for the first time--I had stayed away from it for years because I was worried that Foote might be too much of a Southern apologist for my Northern blood. I'm glad I gave it a try: thus far, though Foote clearly appreciates the South and damns their cause only gently, I'm finding it spectacularly good, full of well-drawn characters and dramatic set pieces. (Oh, and it took but a single quote on Twitter--a line from Sam Houston calling Jefferson Davis "ambitious as Lucifer and cold as a lizard"--to bring someone on Twitter to call me "scum" for insufficiently censuring Foote as a Davis apologist.)

Today I'll share an incident that I must surely have encountered before in reading on the Civil War and Lincoln but had completely forgotten: the President's first and only experience of field command. It came at the point of Lincoln's maximal frustration with General McClellan's self-important dilatory caution: McClellan had finally embarked on his complicated water-borne sweep around the Confederate army protecting Richmond, and Lincoln and Secretary of War Stanton had headed out to Fort Monroe to see what they could see. From here, I'll let Foote tell the story:

Amazed to find that McClellan had made no provision for the capture of Norfolk [across the river inlet], outflanked by the drive up the opposite bank of the James, the President decided to undertake the operation himself, employing the fortress garrison under Major General John E. Wool. . . . The first trouble came with the navy: Goldsborough thought it would be dangerous to ferry men across the Roads with the Merrimac still on the loose. But Lincoln not only overruled him, he and Chase got in separate tugs and reconnoitered the opposite shore for a suitable landing place. When they returned, however, they found that Wool had already chosen one from the chart and was embarking with the troops who were to seize it. Chase went along, but Lincoln and Stanton stayed behind to maintain a command post at the fort and question various colonels and generals who, the President thought, were to follow in support.

"Where is you command?" he asked one, and got the answer: "I am awaiting orders." To another he said, "Why are you here? Why not on the other side?" and was told, "I am ordered to the fort." Experiencing for the first time some of the vexations likely to plague a field commander, Lincoln lost his temper. He took off his tall hat and slammed it on the floor. "Send me someone who can write," he said, exasperated. When the someone came forward--a colonel on Wool's staff--the President dictated an order for the advance to be pushed and supported.

It turned out that "no push or support was needed," as the Confederates had secretly evacuated Norfolk the previous day. Alas, perhaps, for presidential glory, but better, surely, for the fate of America: imagine the chaos of a Lincoln-less Union in late 1862 had he fallen in battle, thrusting the nonentity Hannibal Hamlin (who spent most of the war years in Maine) into command of a fractious nation and tentative army. It's worth a shudder or two.

Birthday wishes

{Photos by rocketlass.}

I suspect that the fact of my being an American is a lot like the fact of my being male: it affords me almost incalculable unearned privilege, and, while I can (and do try to) think about it and analyze the way that it plays, subconsciously and overtly, into my thoughts and feelings and assumptions--most likely into all of them--and thereby gain some distance from and knowledge of the essence of that identity, at the same time the distance will never be such that I can say, definitively, "This is what it is like to be an American," or still less, "This is what it would be like not to be an American."

Anglophilia and analysis only take you so far, the former because, really?, the latter because rational analysis cannot always chase out such deeply woven currents of being.

So for my nation's birthday, I offer some disjointed recent gleanings to accompany the delightfully ridiculous weeklong orgy of explosives in which my neighborhood annually indulges.

First, I'll draw on a letter sent by John Keats in October 1818 to his brother and sister-in-law, George and Georgiana Keats, then resident in Louisville, Kentucky:

Dilke, whom you know to be a Godwin perfectibility man, pleases himself with the idea that America will be the country to take up the human intellect where England leaves off--I differ with him greatly. A country like the United States, whose greatest Men are Franklins and Washingtons, will never do that. They are great Men, doubtless, but how are they to be compared to those our countrymen Milton and the two Sydneys? The one is a philosophical Quaker full of mean and thrifty maxims, the other sold the very Charger who had taken him through all his battles. Those Americans are great, but they are not the sublime Man--the humanity of the United States can never reach the sublime.

Oh, how much one could disagree with Keats about Franklin! Washington, fine: impressive, great, a man for whose sense of duty it's impossible not to be grateful--but at the same time always coming across as emotionally and intellectually a bit flat. Jefferson you can wrangle with, Hamilton you can joust with, Lincoln--well, it's best we not derail this with my love of Lincoln. Washington you are stuck simply admiring.

But Franklin? All the smallness and greatness of humanity in one package, endlessly inventive and endlessly humane, beguiled by the ladies, in love with France, distracted almost in almost exactly inverse proportion to the direct discipline of his maxims, embodying in his pot-bellied person the linchpin of American democracy. Oh, how not to love Franklin?

As for the sublime . . is it wrong of me to think that, at a minimum, the late Donna Summer achieved it around minute ten of a couple of her greatest disco anthems?

But in general one can't quite trust the English on the subject, can one? George III would be proud of what Jessica Mitford reports in this letter, sent on August 8, 1959 from London to civil rights activist Marge Franz:

One rather noticeable thing is the solid anti-Americanism of all sections of the population, rich & poor, right & left. I've yet to meet one person who has the least desire to go to America, or one who has been there & liked it. It is a queer mixture of ordinary English chauvinism, snobbishness, intellectual snobbishness, & disapproval of American policies. Rather well worth analyzing & cataloguing, it might make a good article. . . . Madeau Stewart, 35 year old executive at BBC, no doubt solid conservative: "Aren't Americans awfully ignorant on the whole? Don't you find it depressing not having anyone to talk to?"

Mitford's take on the attitude of the English in the Eisenhower years is corroborated by this passage from a letter sent by George Lyttelton to Rupert Hart-Davis on May 15, 1957:

It is all wrong, I know, but I cannot ever take Americans quite seriously--I mean their tastes and judgments and values, though now and then one strikes an absolutely Class I man, e. g. the late Judge Wendell Holmes. But either I always have bad luck with their novelists, or I just don't know my way about. I remember liking Steinbeck's first best-seller, but last week, seeing his name, I wasted half-a-crown on his The Wayward Bus to read in the train. Not a single character who was not either loathsome or silly.

As someone who works in publishing--and buys a ridiculous number of books--I can't help but apply Keats's epithet for Franklin's maxims, "mean," to anyone well-situated who laments the cost of a disappointing book. The time wasted, certainly, but the cost?

That said, the marketing person in me can't help but be amused by what follows:

The blurb calls it a ruthless picture, showing what people are really like, i.e. all in need of an ounce of civet. Is the whole of U.S.A. thinking of nothing but the female bosom?

An understandable question, but the answer is no: even then, there was Ray Bradbury, among the least sex-obsessed of novelists, who in his Paris Review interview said,

I like to think of myself going across America at midnight, conversing with my favorite authors.

And then there's the sublimity--unquestionable, I say--of this exchange, overheard at Mineta San Jose International Airport (ah, Mineta, a Japanese-American reminder of America's gloriously diverse essence) on Monday:

TODDLER
Making gestures representing an explosion
Boom! Boom!

DAD
Stop it.

TODDLER
Boom! Boom! BOOM!

And finally . . . well, you didn't believe me earlier when I said I would leave Lincoln out of this, did you? From the glory that is the First Inaugural:

I am loath to close. We are not enemies, but friends. We must not be enemies. Though passion may have strained it must not break our bonds of affection. The mystic chords of memory, stretching from every battlefield and patriot grave to every living heart and hearthstone all over this broad land, will yet swell the chorus of the Union, when again touched, as surely they will be, by the better angels of our nature.

Good god, I love that man. Enjoy the holiday, fellow patriots. Watch out for explosions, ye better angels.

The methodical mind of Lincoln

{Photo by rocketlass.}

The sesquicentennial of the Civil War, which begins next week with the anniversary of the firing on Fort Sumter, has sent me back once again to that inexhaustibly fascinating conflict. This time, I'm reading Bruce Catton's three-volume history that was published on the war's centennial, which I'd recommend to any general reader. James M. McPherson's one-volume Battle Cry of Freedom may be a better introduction to the subject--his descriptions and explanations of battles are as good as any I've encountered, offering just as much detail and assistance as a nonspecialist needs--but Catton bests him in prose style and, more important, in analysis of character.

This passage, from near the end of the second volume, Terrible Swift Sword (1963), just after Lincoln has made the Emancipation Proclamation public, combines both qualities:

[T]he President had committed himself to an idea rather than to a specific program. The war would be a revolution from now on, and if revolutionary means were needed to win it they would be used. This, to be sure, had been inherent in the situation from the beginning. The overshadowing fact now was that when he issued his proclamation Mr. Lincoln did in his field exactly what General Lee did in his when he struck the Army of the Potomac at Mechanicsville: he took the initiative, and he would never give it up. All of the Americans who followed this hard road of war would sooner or later have to keep step with him: both those who went with him and those who went against him.

Which is fitting, because, for me at least, it all comes back to Lincoln. I don't think I'll ever tire of trying to fathom his mind, so agile and complicated and, for the most part, admirable.

The months leading up to the above passage from Terrible Swift Sword offer the clearest, most straightforward example I know of just what I find so fascinating about Lincoln as a thinker, politician, and leader. In the summer of 1862, having just written the Emancipation Proclamation he called a meeting of his cabinet and said, in the words of Treasury Secretary Samuel P. Chase, from a postwar letter,

I have considered every thing that has been said to me about the expediency of Emancipation & have made up my mind to issue THIS PROCLAMATION: and I have invited you together to discuss not what is to be done; but to have you hear what I have written & to get your suggestions about form & style. . . . I have thought it all over & have made a promise that this thing shall be done--to myself & to God.

The Cabinet took him at his word, but ultimately they urged him to table the proclamation until the Union Army should win a victory, lest it seem like an act of desperation rather than a call to freedom. Lincoln took their advice, and the proclamation went into a drawer.

A month later, Horace Greeley took to the pages of his New York Tribune to lambaste Lincoln for having neither direction nor resolve in his prosecution of the war or his handling of the issue of slavery. Lincoln replied:

Executive Mansion,
Washington, August 22, 1862.

Hon. Horace Greeley:
Dear Sir.

I have just read yours of the 19th. addressed to myself through the New-York Tribune. If there be in it any statements, or assumptions of fact, which I may know to be erroneous, I do not, now and here, controvert them. If there be in it any inferences which I may believe to be falsely drawn, I do not now and here, argue against them. If there be perceptable in it an impatient and dictatorial tone, I waive it in deference to an old friend, whose heart I have always supposed to be right.

As to the policy I "seem to be pursuing" as you say, I have not meant to leave any one in doubt.

I would save the Union. I would save it the shortest way under the Constitution. The sooner the national authority can be restored; the nearer the Union will be "the Union as it was." If there be those who would not save the Union, unless they could at the same time save slavery, I do not agree with them. If there be those who would not save the Union unless they could at the same time destroy slavery, I do not agree with them. My paramount object in this struggle is to save the Union, and is not either to save or to destroy slavery. If I could save the Union without freeing any slave I would do it, and if I could save it by freeing all the slaves I would do it; and if I could save it by freeing some and leaving others alone I would also do that. What I do about slavery, and the colored race, I do because I believe it helps to save the Union; and what I forbear, I forbear because I do not believe it would help to save the Union. I shall do less whenever I shall believe what I am doing hurts the cause, and I shall do more whenever I shall believe doing more will help the cause. I shall try to correct errors when shown to be errors; and I shall adopt new views so fast as they shall appear to be true views.

I have here stated my purpose according to my view of official duty; and I intend no modification of my oft-expressed personal wish that all men every where could be free.

Yours,
A. Lincoln.

There, displayed, is the mind that I find so fascinating: methodical, even mathematical in its laying out of an argument, fitting every piece into its place while making sure that no permutation of the argument is left to be assumed or ignored. Lincoln, as always seemed to be the case, knew exactly what his foremost goal was--and, unlike many involved in the war, never deluded himself about what it might take to get there. At the same time, even as he's deadly serious, I see a glimmer of his trademark gentle sarcasm there, too, as if the very act of being so elaborately explicit is a way of saying, "Good god, Horace, haven't you listened to a word I've said this past year?"

Looking back, it's hard not to be uncomfortable about Lincoln's willingness to countenance the continuation of slavery should that be necessary. The abolitionists, for all their frequent impracticality, unquestionably had honor (and justice) on their side. But at the same time, Lincoln knew better than anyone the constrictions under which he labored--and the earthshaking change he was about to introduce. Eric Foner, in The Fiery Trial: Abraham Lincoln and American Slavery (2010) argues that we shouldn't read that last line about Lincoln's "personal wish that all men everywhere could be free" as weasely or self-protecting, or even as a statement of his long-standing position that the personal and the official should be distinct. Rather, we should read the whole letter

as a way of preparing Northern public opinion for a change in policy on which he had already decided. Certainly, it suggested that freeing all the slaves was now a real option, something that had not been the case a year or even six months earlier. But perhaps the most telling comment came from the Springfield Republican. The editors praised Lincoln's position but pointed out that the very notion of "saving" the Union required rethinking: the prewar Union was gone forever.

No one knew that better than Lincoln; even as he methodically protested otherwise, he was leading the way to the new Union--and, as Catton put it, everyone was going to have to keep step.

"A continuity of labour deadens the soul," or, Thoughts for a Friday night

{Photo by rocketlass.}

At the end of what has, for me at least, been a long and busy week, tonight I offer you some thoughts on the importance of leisure, from an entry titled "Amusements of the Learned" in Isaac D'Israeli's inexhaustible Curiosities of Literature (1791):

Among the Jesuits it was a standing rule of the order, that after an application to study for two hours, the mind of the student should be unbent by some relaxation, however trifling. When Petavius was employed in his Dogmata Theologica, a work of the most profound and extensive erudition, the great recreation of the learned father was, at the end of every second hour, to twirl his chair for five minutes. After protracted studies Spinosa would mix with the family-party where he lodged, and join in the most trivial conversations, or unbend his mind by setting spiders to fight each other; he observed their combats with so much interest, that he was often seized with immoderate fits of laughter. A continuity of labour deadens the soul, observes Seneca, in closing his treatise on "The Tranquillity of the Soul," and the mind must unbend itself by certain amusements. Socrates did not blush to play with children. Cato, over his bottle, found an alleviation from the fatigues of government; a circumstance, Seneca says in his manner, which rather gives honour to this defect, than the defect dishonours Cato.

Seneca's take on Cato reminds me of the quip attributed to today's birthday boy, Abraham Lincoln, when people were nattering at him about Ulysses Grant's drinking:

I wish some of you would tell me the brand of whiskey that Grant drinks. I would like to send a barrel of it to my other generals.

D'Israeli, as is his wont, continues in that vein for a couple of pages, laying example after entertaining example before the reader, and thereby demonstrating the very pleasures of leisure he describes. One other account that's worth pointing out, if only because it presents such a striking contrast to the stern, dangerous character established for the ages by Dumas in The Three Musketeers, is this picture of Cardinal Richelieu unbending a bit:

Cardinal de Richelieu, amongst all his great occupations, found a recreation in violent exercises; and he was once discovered jumping with his servant, to try who could reach the highest side of a wall.

And the very next sentence, too, is worth sharing, for it offers a reminder that we must ever be aware that even as we're playing, we can be sure that someone is working:

De Grammont, observing the cardinal to be jealous of his powers, offered to jump with him; and, in the true spirit of a courtier, having made some efforts which nearly reached the cardinal's, confessed the cardinal surpassed him This was jumping like a politician; and by this means he is said to have ingratiated himself with the minister.

But it is Friday night, and while we may have left the office behind for another brief spell, and leisure may thus appropriately beckon I'll let Seneca have the last word--a reminder that our jobs don't represent the only work to which we should attend, or its paycheck the only rewards on offer:

Seneca concludes admirably, "whatever be the amusements you choose, return not slowly from those of the body to the mind; exercise the latter night and day. The mind is nourished at a cheap rate; neither cold nor heat, nor age itself, can interrupt this exercise; give therefore all your cares to a possession which ameliorates even in its old age!"

And with that, I'll take Seneca's advice--halfway, that is--and twirl in my chair for a while with a book . . . and a martini.

Honest Abe and marginalia

This evening was spent away from the computer, out in Grant Park watching Henry Fonda in Young Mr. Lincoln (1939)--which, though it could charitably be said to be based on Lincoln's life, could not under even the most generous of readings be said to evince a familiarity with the law: the film's climactic courtroom scene is among the most preposterous ever filmed. Still, Henry Fonda gives a surprisingly convincing portrayal of the popular pre-war conception of Honest Abe as folksy savant, and no evening spent thinking about Lincoln is ever wasted.

That does mean, however, that I've got no proper post for you tonight. Instead, I suggest you take a look at the title page of the copy of Henry W. and Frank G. Fowler's The King's English (1906) that Google Book Search scanned from the University of Michigan Library. The marginalia on that page won't disappoint, I promise.

I should be back with a proper post tomorrow.

Ah, imagine having a president who was "a constant and voracious reader"!

For your Presidents' Day enjoyment, where better to turn than to Abraham Lincoln?

In his account of Abraham Lincoln's early manhood, Honor's Voice: The Transformation of Abraham Lincoln (1998) (which I wrote about briefly in January), Douglas L. Wilson pieces together a narrative from carefully weighed and vetted first- and second-generation accounts of Lincoln's life after he left his family in Indiana and struck out on his own. Wilson's approach is effective, seemingly getting us yet another bit closer to the historical Lincoln, but the primary sources themselves are the real attraction: his well-chosen selections provide a fascinating glimpse of the life and pastimes of the frontier, delivered in the rough-hewn dialect of its inhabitants.

The language of this account of a prank Lincoln pulled in New Salem--featuring ghosts and drinking, two I've Been Reading Lately favorites--is so spare that it could serve as myth, were it not for the goofy way in which the moral lesson is driven home:

Lincoln is reported to have improvised a prank while in New Salem that sounds as though it were inspired by Burns's poems. As Row Herndon told it,

there was a man that use to come to salem and get tight and stay untell dark he was fraid of Gosts and some one had to goe home with him well Lincoln Perswaded a fellow to take a Sheet and goe in the Rod and perform Gost he then Sent an other gost and the man and Lincoln started home the Gost made his appearence and the man Became much fritened But the Second gost made his appear[ance] and frightend the first Gost half to Deth that Broke the fellow from staying untell Dark anymore.

But while young Lincoln's wit and bawdy humor entertained--and, where unearthed, still do--it was his ability to deploy a similar ease and quick-wittedness as a speaker on more serious points that helped convince his fellow Illinoisans of his leadership potential. Many components went into his ascendance as a politician--including, in a reminder that looks, of a sort, have always mattered in politics, his height and strength--but this list from his Springfield acquaintance William Butler is a nice, brief summary:

Asked why Lincoln was regarded as a good candidate for political office at this time (1832), William Butler replied: " . . . the prominence given him by his captaincy in the Black Hawk War--because he was a good fellow--because he told good stories, and remembered good jokes,--because he was genial, kind, sympathetic, open-hearted--because when he was asked a question and gave an answer it was always characteristic, brief, pointed, a propos, out of the common way and manner, and yet exactly suited to the time place and thing."

I really don't mean to continue making this comparison, because I know it's a real stretch, and of limited utility anyway . . . but I will anyway just this one last time: Wisconsinites and Hawaiians heading to the polls tomorrow, I think you know which of your Democratic candidates gives answers that are "pointed" and "a propos, out of the common way and manner, yet exactly suited to the time place and thing."


{Photo and LOL Obama by rocketlass.}

Edmund Wilson on Abraham Lincoln

Having indirectly slagged Edmund Wilson the other night when writing about Viktor Shklovsky, I think it's only fair to point out how good Wilson is in his book Patriotic Gore: Studies in the Literature of the Civil War (1962) when writing about another regular preoccupation of this blog, Abraham Lincoln.

Wilson doesn't really break new ground in his study of Lincoln, and he gets Reconstruction wrong (which I suppose can partially be excused by the fact that Wilson was writing before historians in the 1960s and after began arguing for Reconstruction's value--and its eventual, necessary continuation in the Civil Rights movement). But as usual, when Wilson pays close attention to texts--in this case Lincoln's writings and speeches--his responses are insightful and compelling.

He's also good on Lincoln's dreams and visions, one of my favorite aspects of Lincoln history and folklore, which, he notes,

add an element of imagery and tragic foreshadowing that one finds sometimes in the lives of poets--Dante's visions or Byron's last poem--but that one does not expect to encounter in the career of a political figure.

Later, in tying Lincoln's fatalism with his sense of his public role as the suffering but stalwart face of the nation--and therefore of democracy--Wilson writes,

The night before Lincoln was murdered, he dreamed again of the ship approaching its dark destination. He had foreseen and accepted his doom; he knew it was part of the drama. He had in some sense imagined this drama himself--had even prefigured Booth and the aspect he would wear for Booth when the latter would leap down from the Presidential box crying, "Sic semper tyrannis!" Had he not once told Herndon that Brutus was created to murder Caesar and Caesar to be murdered by Brutus?

So far as I remember, Borges never wrote about Lincoln, but that last line makes me think he would have found a rich subject in Abe's morbid fatalism.

But the most fun in Wilson's essay is found early on, when he's doing the work that all writers on Lincoln seem to have to do before setting sail: clearing the deck of a century of accumulated nonsense.

There has undoubtedly been written about him more romantic and sentimental rubbish than about any other American figure, with the possible exception of Edgar Allan Poe.

Before I let Wilson go any farther: I doubt anyone's surpassed Lincoln since 1962, but surely someone's surpassed Poe? Ernest Hemingway, maybe? Jack Kerouac? Okay, back to it:

[T]here are moments when one is tempted to feel that the cruelest thing that has happened to Lincoln since he was shot by Booth has been to fall into the hands of Carl Sandburg. Yet Carl Sandburg's biography of Lincoln, insufferable though it sometimes is, is by no means the worst of these tributes. It is useless if one tries to consult it for the source of some reported incident, but it does have its unselective value as an album of Lincoln clippings. It would, however, be more easily acceptable as a repository of Lincoln folk-lore if the compiler had not gone so far in contributing to this folk-lore himself. Here is Sandburg's intimate account of the behavior of Lincoln's mother, about whom almost nothing is known: "She could croon in the moist evening twilight to the shining face in the sweet bundle, 'Hush thee, hush thee, thy father's a gentleman!' She could toss the bundle into the air against a far, hazy line of blue mountains, catch it in her two hands as it came down, let it snuggle close to her breast and feed, while she asked, 'Here we come--where from?' And after they had both sunken in the depths of forgetful sleep, in the early dark and past midnight, the tug of a mouth at her nipples in the grey dawn matched in its freshness the first warblings of birds and the morning stars leaving the earth to the sun and dew."

Lincoln's mother's nipples! Sandburg imagined Lincoln's mother's nipples! And he compared baby Abe's chewing on them to the singing of birds! I can picture a writer--especially one who is a folksy poet at heart--getting caught up in a rush of words and penning that line. But how on earth does he read it over later without deciding to put the whole manuscript to the match?

It's fun to contrast that silly romantic picture with one of the few things we actually do know about the real Mrs. Lincoln: that she may have been the source of her son's youthful prowess as a wrestler. In Honor's Voice, Douglas L. Wilson quotes testimony from Usher Linder, a neighbor of the Lincolns in Indiana:

His mother, whose maiden name was Nancy Hanks, was said to be a very strong-minded woman, and one of the most athletic women in Kentucky. In a fair wrestle, she could throw most of the men who ever put her powers to the test. A reliable gentleman told me he heard the late Jack Thomas, clerk of the Grayson Court, say he had frequently wrestled with her, and she invariably laid him on his back.

Occasionally I enjoy suspending my disbelief in an afterlife long enough that I can picture unlikely meetings between the dead. Tonight, I'm picturing that day in 1967 when Carl Sandburg joined the heavenly host:

Greeted just inside the gates by Nancy Hanks Lincoln, Sandburg was surprised to quickly find himself being seized by the wings and wrestled to the ground. Confused, he accepted the victorious Mrs. Lincoln's offer of a hand getting up, and as she pulled him to his feet, she introduced herself in her Hoosier drawl and said, "You shouldn't ought to have written that about my nipples."

Dusting off the speechless Sandburg's robes, Mrs. Lincoln smiled and continued, "But you did like my boy, and I have to admit I did enjoy that whole 'hog butcher of the world' bit, so maybe we can be friends after all."

"If Abe don't fool away all his time on his books, he may make something yet."

Some days, you write a long, organized post that builds towards a point; other days you just hop in your boat and troll your trot line to see what’s turned up. Today what’s turned up is a bit of Honest Abe Lincoln, with a late appearance by Barack Obama.

1 A reminder last week, from the great new history blog the Edge of the American West, of the anniversary of the Emancipation Proclamation put me in the mood to read about Abraham Lincoln, so as I headed off on my travels I packed Douglas L. Wilson’s account of Lincoln’s early years, Honor’s Voice: The Transformation of Abraham Lincoln (1998).

In chronicling the transformation of Abraham Lincoln from a sharp-witted but uncultured and uneducated rube in 1831 to a young congressman and frontier leader in 1842, Wilson must rely on the testimony of Lincoln’s friends and neighbors of that period—testimony that, because it was collected during and after Lincoln’s presidency, is notoriously unreliable, suffering as it does not only from the natural defects of decades-old memory but also from elisions caused by a Victorian delicacy bordering on hagiography. Wilson therefore makes the smart decision to open the book with a chapter demonstrating the process by which he has sifted overlapping or conflicting accounts; it serves both as a marker of the rigor of his method and as a reminder of the basic fallibility of memory.

The incident Wilson chooses for his demonstration is a well-known wrestling match between the young Lincoln, newly arrived in the frontier town of New Salem, and local tough Jack Armstrong. To Lincoln’s nineteenth-century biographers, the incident—in which, to the best that Wilson can determine, Lincoln, who abided by the strict (and boring) rules of scientific wrestling, is thrown by his opponent’s use of an illegal move, which Lincoln takes in good spirits while still demonstrating his willingness to fight for his honor if necessary—was the turning point in Lincoln's life. From our perspective, that seems a stretch, but regardless it seems indisputable that Lincoln emerged from the match in a stronger position—no longer a stranger, but one of the guys, worthy of respect and forbearance.

This is all by way of leading up to the fun of a firsthand account of the bout from Jack Armstrong’s brother-in-law Henry McHenry, as reported later to Lincoln's law partner and eventual biographer William H. Herndon:

I was present at the wrestle of Lincoln & Armstrong--: We tried to get Lincoln to tussel & scuffle with Armstrong. L refused—saying—I never tussled & scuffled & will not—don’t like this wooling--& pulling--. Jack Armstrong was a powerful twister. At last we got them to wrestle: they took side holts.

I just love the phrasing there: wooling and pulling, tussled and scuffled, powerful twister. That's some good backwoods dialect.

2 Given that I've always taken joy in the proper name of the Christian Scientists—the First Church of Christ, Scientist—do you think I would get anywhere trying to start a church along the lines of the First Church of Lincoln, Scientific Wrestler?

3 Having written about the late George MacDonald Fraser yesterday, I can't help but note that he does a good job of depicting a fictional Lincoln (rendering him far more alive and believable than Gore Vidal does, for example). Flashman encounters Lincoln twice, first as a young Congressman in 1849 and later during the Civil War. His first meeting with Lincoln, in Flash for Freedom (1971) prompts Flashman to deliver the following description:

He was an unusually tall man, with the ugliest face you ever saw, deep dark eye sockets and a chin like a coffin, and ab lack cow's lick of hair smeared across his forehead. When he spoke it was with the slow, deliberate drawl of the American back-countryman.

Flash goes on to say,

I liked Abe Lincoln from the moment I first noticed him, leaning back in his chair with that hidden smile at the back of his eyes, gently cracking his knuckles. Just why I liked him I can't say; I suppose in his way he had the makings of as big a scoundrel as I am myself, but his appetites were different, and his talents infinitely greater. I can't think of him as good man, yet as history measures these things I suppose he did great good. Not that that excites my admiration unduly, nor do I put my liking down to the fact that he had a sardonic humour akin to my own. I think I liked him because, for some reason which God alone knows, he liked me. And not many men who knew me as well as he did, have done that.

Fraser presents Lincoln as sharply perceptive--a trait he shares in Fraser's account with Disraeli (whom Flashman, in his infinite genius for offensiveness, insists on calling "D'Israeli"). Lincoln is the only one in America who instantly sees through Flashman's lies, yet his appreciation of a scoundrel and good story causes him to let Flashman slide a bit, which allows Flashman to sneak away, only to encounter Lincoln once again months later when being chased by a backwoods Kentucky slave-hunter. Fraser presents Lincoln--angered as much by the slave hunter's Kentucky-style bullying as his horrible occupation--stopping the man cold with a strongly legalistic argument; for a Lincoln fan, it's a fully convincing scene.

4 All of which leads me, a few days after the stunning results of the Iowa Caucuses, to Barack Obama. Though Obama has been relatively subtle in his invocations of Abraham Lincoln, at the same time he hasn't exactly shied away from comparisons. (He has, however, sensibly, avoided mentioning such failed Illinois presidential aspirants as Adlai Stevenson and Paul Simon.) And while Lincoln's views on race were complicated--and discussing them is still a good way to find yourself in an argument--it's hard to imagine that Lincoln wouldn't take some joy in the fact that, 145 years after the Emancipation Proclamation, a black man has a very real chance to assume the office he once held.

Lincoln of course wouldn't be the only one; as Brad DeLong puts it:

This is also a day which makes Thaddeus Stevens and Frederick Douglass kiss the sky and shout hosannas—a day for which they worked but did not believe would ever come. A day when the corn-fed white voters of a state—or at least the Democratic Party's enthusiastic faithful of a state—choose a Black man, Barack Obama, as the one whom they think is most qualified to be President of the United States of America.

This is a sign that our longest and deepest national nightmare may finally be coming to an end.

To be honest, I think DeLong's being a bit too sanguine about our progress as a nation. He's not yet reckoning with the campaign we're sure to see should Obama secure the nomination, a campaign whose breathtaking racism is liable to make the Willie Horton ads look as decorous and proper as, well, scientific wrestling. But it's a start—and if there's a candidate who can deftly show the sickness of those brutal appeals while rising above them, it's Obama.

5 Having worked for years in Hyde Park, the neighborhood that Obama represented in the Illinois legislature, I knew he was impressive. But what fully won me to his bandwagon was hearing my parents tell about a town meeting he held in Carmi, their tiny southern Illinois town, as a sitting senator.

That part of the state is culturally Republican; it was one of the few counties in Illinois to plump for the reliably bat-shit insane Alan Keyes in 2004. Yet for more than an hour, Obama spoke and took questions from a crowd consisting largely of farmers and miners, actually answering questions rather than rattling off prepared positions—and, according to my parents—frequently telling the audience not what he thought they wanted to hear, but what he thought was right.

It wasn't clear that Obama won a lot of new votes that night, but he did seem to win a lot of respect. He didn't stay overnight in Carmi like Lincoln did in the 1840s; whether he left as indelible an impression remains to be seen.

6 Finally, to bring this full circle: since last summer I created, with rocketlass's help, a LOL Lincoln, here, just in time for New Hampshire, is a LOL Obama:


{Photo and LOL Obama by rocketlass.}

Mark Twain and the Civil War

I'm about a third of the way through Ron Powers's Mark Twain (2005), which has given me my first real acquaintance with Samuel Clemens's early years. Previously, all I'd known of his life was his riveting account of his brief career as a river pilot in Life on the Mississippi (1883) and bits and pieces of his later years, when he was famous and palling around with people like William Dean Howells and Ulysses S. Grant. It's been fun to get to know Clemens as an ambitious young man, fired with the joy that comes from transforming the heterogeneous stuff of the world into words.

What has struck me most forcefully so far, however, has been learning that Clemens pretty much sat out the Civil War. I assume that's commonly known, but I somehow hadn't realized it before. Clemens was twenty-five when the war began, and, despite (or perhaps because of?) growing up in Missouri, an area of sharply divided loyalties and great strategic importance, he seems not just to have avoided service, but to have as much as possible avoided even taking a position on the conflict.

To the extent that his loyalties can be reconstructed, they seem to have lain with the South, which I suppose makes some sense: though Lincoln was able through a combination of deft management and brute force to keep Missouri in the Union, it was a slave state that was culturally more Southern than Northern. It's also easy to imagine the high-toned moralizing of the abolitionist movement causing someone with Clemens's temperament to get his back up a bit; add in the casual racism that shows up in his youthful writings (and which he would spend a lifetime attempting to outgrow and overcome), and Clemens as a Confederate sympathizer is fairly easy to picture.

His only military service in the war was brief and essentially comic. Here's Powers's description of the homegrown, anti-Union militia that Clemens volunteered for in 1861:

The Green Berets, they were not. No two dressed alike. Weapons ranged from hunting knives to shotguns to squirrel rifles. . . . [Clemens's friend Absalom] Grimes recalls that Sam showed up for war on a four-foot-high yellow mule, clutching a valise, a homemade quilt, a frying pan, a squirrel rifle, twenty yards of seagrass rope, and an umbrella. . . . The outfit called itself the Ralls County Rangers. Sam was elected second lieutenant, and gave a speech standing on a log. Then they all went haring around the country, cadging meals at farmhouses, sleeping in the rain, and laughing at nay passing officer who dared give them an order.

The closest the unit came to combat was a late-night scare sparked by imaginary Union pickets and another false alarm that led to one of the men accidentally shooting his own horse. Clemens quickly fled the unit, and the war entirely, decamping to the Nevada territory, where he began writing the Western sketches that would first make his name. Even out there, though he got into a few arguments over the question, his occasional pro-secession remarks appear to have been at least as much the product of a needling contrarianism as of deeply held beliefs.

To be honest, I'm not entirely sure what I would have had him do differently. While I'd obviously rather he had seen the evils of slavery and the rightness of the Union cause, given his background that's difficult to imagine. And after all, it's not as if even all northerners were jumping at the chance to serve; the draft riots and the practice of paying for substitutes testify otherwise. Similarly, I'm not willing to take him to task for perceived cowardice: five minutes of reading about the carnage at Cold Harbor or the Battle of the Wilderness is enough to make anyone understand why a person would hope to avoid serving. Clemens wasn't yet a public figure, so it's not as if he had even an implied responsibility to be or do something larger than himself. Would I have been on the right side of the issue had I been in his shoes? I'd sure as hell like to think so, but it's impossible to know.

I guess I'm just surprised that when it came to the defining question of his age--an age for which he himself would end up as a defining figure--it appears that Clemens didn't even give it much thought. In a time when the fate of the nation was at stake in a war that with each passing year was being more clearly defined as an essential moral struggle, Clemens blithely stayed away. Am I wrong to expect more? Does it even matter? It doesn't seem to have mattered to his public as he rocketed to fame in the postwar years. (One wonders whether, like John Wayne, who also became a symbol of his nation despite avoiding service, Clemens in later years ever found himself in fights with those who had served. Did the question occur, for example, to Grant?)

But given that Clemens the writer still matters these days largely because of his ability to perceive and convey, however fitfully, the humanity of an escaping slave named Jim, his absence on the larger question of the fate of Jim and his brethren in the years before Huckleberry Finn does seem important. It's yet another inescapable complicating factor in our attempts to understand the man, his work, and his times.

Unintentional and undeclared, American History Week continues

My reading shifts a bit with the seasons, and with the arrival of summer I tend to find myself digging through the various histories I've accumulated during the year. Perhaps I'm driven to reading history in the summer by the memory of childhood vacations with my family when I was a kid, the five of us crammed into a compact car and wandering all over America, stopping off at historical sites along the way. So in acknowledgment of my summer tendencies, I'll continue what's turned into a history week by taking a look at a couple of strong American histories I've read recently, The Lincoln Nobody Knows (1958), by Richard N. Current, and Almost a Miracle: The American Victory in the War of Independence (2007) by John Ferling. Both authors seem to fit Montaigne's description of great historians in "On Books":

The truly outstanding historians have the capacity to pick out what is worth being known, they can select of the two accounts the one that is more likely to be rue. From the character of princes and their humors they infer their intentions and attribute to them suitable words. They are right to assume the authority of regulating our belief by their own; but certainly this privilege belongs to very few.

Current's book, which I picked up after Eric Foner recommended it in the New York Times Book Review, is set up explicitly along the lines that Montaigne suggests, weighing various bits of evidence, assessing veracity and pertinacity, and making judgments. As Current explains in the foreword, even fifty years ago when he was writing, the number of books on Lincoln was already almost unmanageable, presenting almost as many different Lincolns--many of them irreconcilable. So instead of attempting to write a definitive book on Lincoln or stake out new territory, Current decided to return to Lincoln's own words, and the words of his contemporaries, and sort through them for what they reveal about several specific facets of the man, including his military leadership, his handling of the South's initial provocations, his family life, and his religion.

The brief book that results could serve as an introductory course in writing history: for each topic, Current presents the evidence for each possible position, then, by taking into account the trustworthiness and reliability of each source, their distance (in both time and relationship) from Lincoln, and, ultimately, the inherent plausibility of each possible explanation for Lincoln's behavior, he makes a judgment. The Lincoln who emerges from Current's trial is by no means clear or open--the man played his cards too close to his vest for that ever to be the case--but I do feel that I know him a bit better and am more comfortable in my impressions.

John Ferling's aim in Almost a Miracle is much bigger; he's written a full history of the military side of the American Revolution to accompany his earlier account of its political and social aspects, A Leap in the Dark. But he, too, has taken Montaigne's dictum to heart and is not afraid to render judgments when appropriate. And while the British generals--dithering and uncertain where not positively incompetent--come off the worst, General Washington's reputation also takes some hits. Whereas other Revolutionary histories I've read--Benson Bobrick's Angel in the Whirlwind, for example--give Washington enormous credit for selecting and adhering to the Fabian strategy appropriate to his outnumbered force, Ferling presents a Washington whose attitude towards his situation is far more complicated.

Forced by circumstance to embrace the proto-guerrilla tactics of Fabianism, Ferling's Washington at the same time chafed against them, looking again and again for opportunities to discard his strategy of evasion in favor of a decisive, European-style battle. That desire, argues Ferling, led Washington to make a number of strategic blunders--blunders that, had the British had the creativity and ambition to exploit them, could have been fatal to the American cause. That's not to say that he dismisses Washington. Indeed, when Ferling presents the full picture of the conditions under which Washington labored--from being forced to create and train an army on the fly to having to perpetually reassure or cajole the weak and recalcitrant colonial government--the very fact that he remained in command throughout the war, let alone won it, remains impressive.

Ferling writes extremely well of battles, and he's particularly good at explaining the infighting that plagued the military leadership of both sides. Though I'm sure it wouldn't surprise anyone who's seen military service, I'm always astonished when I read military history by the amount of self-dealing and politicking that goes on among officers. While nominally dedicated above all else to a successful prosecution of the war, generals throughout history have undercut their leaders, secretly appealed to their elected representatives, and put themselves and their ambitions above the goals of the overall force; Washington's ability to navigate those waters--which reached their most treacherous with the betrayal of Benedict Arnold--is another testament to his leadership; the one quality that seemingly all writers on Washington assign him is a razor-sharp ability to assess people.

But fascinating as all this is, and as thoughtful as Ferling's presentation, I'm not ashamed to admit that ultimately my interest in history, like my interest in fiction, comes down to people. As Montaigne says elsewhere in "On Books":

I would rather choose to be truly informed of the conversation [Brutus] had in his tent with some of his particular friends the night before a battle than of the harangue he made the next day to his army; and of what he did in his study and his chamber than what he did in the public square and in the Senate.

Fortunately, Ferling is also extremely good at that sort of detail, as evidenced by the following brief character sketch that introduces General Charles Lee, pictured here in a caricature by Barham Rushbrooke.

Tall and wafer-thin, with a pinched and homely face, Lee was given to quirky behavior. He was habitually unkempt, slovenly even, and voluble. Opinionated and prone to ceaseless monologues, he also never learned to curb his penchant for delivering a searing riposte. Lee had never married and insisted that he preferred dogs to most people. He spoke "the language of doggism," Lee said, adding that he found canines attractive because, unlike many people, they were neither bigoted nor inclined to put their "convenience, pleasure, and dignity" ahead of his. He traveled everywhere with his pack of hounds and seldom hesitated to foist them on others. "He is a queer creature," John Adams said of him, and Lee would have been the first to agree. He once confessed to his sister that in his "cooler candid moments" he understood that "my deportment must disgust and shock."

My only real complaint about Almost a Miracle is that it's one of the worst-edited books I've ever read. There are almost no typos, but other errors abound, from dangling modifiers to misplaced words to subject/verb disagreements. It's as if the only editing the book underwent was by a particularly good spell-checking program. Sloppy editing in and of itself is grating, but far more important--and frustrating--is the unshakable worry that an editor who isn't catching grammatical mistakes is unlikely to be catching mistakes of content. A serious book deserves far better.

But I hate to end on a negative note, so back to the positive: that's two books removed from the mess of histories ranged about on our spare bed, making my task of selecting books to carry on vacation later this month that much easier. Unless, that is, I make the mistake of going to the bookstore again before I leave . . .

A return to Abraham Lincoln, about whom one can never read enough

From "When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloomed" (1865), by Walt Whitman:

O how shall I warble myself for the dead one there I loved?
And how shall I deck my soul for the large sweet soul that has gone?
And what shall my perfume be for the grave of him I love?

Sea-winds blown from the east and west,
Blown from the Eastern sea and blown from the Western sea, till there on the prairies meeting,
These and with these and the breath of my chant,
I'll perfume the grave of him I love.

My post last week on dreams featured a pair of dreams attributed to Abraham Lincoln that supposedly foretold his death, which led a friend to admit to having been obsessed with Lincoln as a girl. In particular, she was fascinated with the better-known of the dreams I wrote about, the one known as Lincoln's Dream. She says:

i came to lincoln's dream when i was about six and a half--very shortly after i could read books with chapters--my precocious childhood obsession was politics, elections, and presidents, paired with the moody irish catholic fascination with the supernatural. i used to drape a comforter over my head (and body) to leave my room at night so that lincoln wouldn't recognize me as one of the living. the neighborhood kids and i would stage plays in our garage and yell out, "who is dead in the white house?" this lent itself, of course, to a healthy adult fascination with spiritualism as the product of the hybrid forms of 'experimental' 'feminine' consciousness available in the 19th century & many attempted postmodern sonnet sequences on the life of mary todd lincoln.

Yes, I suppose that is where an obsession with Lincoln's dream is likely to lead a smart and book-loving young woman, isn't it?

Meanwhile, in searching out accounts of Lincoln's Dream, I came across a poem called "Lincoln's Dream" by Dan Chiasson that in the New Yorker this spring, 142 years to the week after Lincoln's assassination. It jumbles Lincoln and Chiasson and all of us up in a vertiginous reminder of mortality--while simultaneously replicating the air of the uncanny that the dreaming Lincoln seemingly felt as he wandered the mourning White House. It's worth a trip to the New Yorker's site.

And then there's Walt Whitman, whose pen was busy in the weeks following Lincoln's death:

This Dust Was Once the Man

This dust was once the Man,
Gentle, plain, just and resolute--under whose cautious hand,
Against the foulest crime in history known in any land or age,
Was saved the Union of These States.

It's easy (especially living in Illinois) to get overly wrapped up in and impressed by Lincoln, to allow oneself to be gobsmacked by his moral seriousnes, his dedication, his determination, and his preternatural deftness at reading people and situations. As Ulysses Grant, no mean leader of men himself (his presidency aside), said, "I have no doubt that Lincoln will be seen as the conspicuous figure of the war. He was indisputably the greatest man I ever knew."

Yet much as I admire him, I know of course that Lincoln was far from perfect--and I know that remembering that no person or leader can or will be perfect is essential to avoiding the short-circuiting of thought that is a first step on the road to totalitarianism. Analyses of Lincoln's shortcomings--his questionable stances on civil liberties and the prospects of America's freed slaves, for example--are worthy and important.

But for today, as we approach yet another Independence Day with that dishonest, callous, dismal wreck of a man battened down in the White House, I need a reminder that real leaders, truly good men, once walked those same halls. So for today I'll stay with the Lincoln of grade school, the Lincoln who saved the Union, the Lincoln who in his Second Inaugural had the temerity--unthinkable in our current political climate--to suggest that our view of right may be clouded.

We may not know, in his construction, that we understand the will of God, that we do the right thing or are on the right side. But that by no means lessens our responsibility to hew to what we believe to be the correct path, no matter the obstacles, at the same time as it increases our awareness of our responsibility to always recall the humanity that we share with even our fiercest opponents. Bush's blustering attempts to claim the mantle of such stalwart leaders as Lincoln and Churchill are perpetually belied by the complete absence of any of the compassion, humanity, or humility that ring through Lincoln's words:

With malice toward none, with charity for all, with firmness in the right as God gives us to see the right, let us strive on to finish the work we are in, to bind up the nation's wounds, to care for him who shall have borne the battle and for his widow and his orphan, to do all which may achieve and cherish a just and lasting peace among ourselves and with all nations.

In the realm of the Oneiroi

{Albrecht Durer, Traumgesicht (Dream Vision), 1525}

From Christopher Dewdney's Acquainted with the Night (2004):

Night comes when you least expect it. You are making dinner or working late, you look out the window and the sky is already dark. The arrival of night can be elusive, mysterious, and in the city we don't often see it, though we always know when it has fallen. In the country night takes its time. A glorious sunset might flag its approach, yet it seems we can never pinpoint its exact arrival. Nightfall is a subtle process.

On the longest day of the year, it seems good to return, however haphazardly, to dreams; with the night losing, for now, its perpetual battle against the day, the powers of the Oneiroi, sons of Hypnos who serve as the rulers of dreaming, are surely at low ebb.

Besides, I'm going away for a few days to the country on a camping trip, and what better inducement to memorable dreams can there be than a night under stars and true, velvety darkness, the distractions of the city left behind?

From Three Poems (1972), by John Ashbery:

it needs pronouncing. To formulate oneself around this hollow, empty sphere . . . To be your breath as it is taken in and shoved out. Then, quietly, it would be as objects placed along the top of a wall: a battery jar, a rusted pulley, shapeless wooden boxes, an open can of axle grease, two lengths of pipe. . . . We see this moment from outside as within. There is no need to offer proof.

I don't actually know whether dream plays a role in Ashbery's writing process, but so often his poetry bears that half-submerged, almost . . . swamp-like quality of a dream, slowed and perhaps logically inexplicable yet organic and right. Proust might argue that it doesn't matter whether dream consciously plays a part. Samuel Beckett explains, in his Proust (1931):

There is no great difference, says Proust, between the memory of a dream and the memory of reality. When the sleeper awakes, this emissary of his habit assures him that his "personality" has not disappeared with his fatigue.

Dream memory, however, necessarily diverges from real memory when we get to the area of prophetic or warning dreams. My favorite of those is a dream from our only known presidential dreamer, Lincoln, a dream so famous that it's simply known as Lincoln's Dream. It comes to us from Lincoln's friend and bodyguard Ward Hill Lamon. In his Recollections of Abraham Lincoln, 1847-1865 (1895) he relates that a few days before his assassination Lincoln told him the following:

About ten days ago, I retired very late. I had been up waiting for important dispatches from the front. I could not have been long in bed when I fell into a slumber, for I was weary. I soon began to dream. There seemed to be a death-like stillness about me. Then I heard subdued sobs, as if a number of people were weeping. I thought I left my bed and wandered downstairs. There the silence was broken by the same pitiful sobbing, but the mourners were invisible. I went from room to room; no living person was in sight, but the same mournful sounds of distress met me as I passed along. I saw light in all the rooms; every object was familiar to me; but where were all the people who were grieving as if their hearts would break? I was puzzled and alarmed. What could be the meaning of all this? Determined to find the cause of a state of things so mysterious and so shocking, I kept on until I arrived at the East Room, which I entered. There I met with a sickening surprise. Before me was a catafalgue on which rested a corpse wrapped in funeral vestments. Around it were stationed soldiers who were acting as guards; and there was a throng of people, gazing mournfully upon the corpse, whose face was covered, others weeping pitifully. 'Who is dead in the White House?' I demanded of one of the soldiers, 'The President,' was his answer; 'he was killed by an assassin.' Then came a loud burst of grief from the crowd, which woke me from my dream. I slept no more that night; and although it was only a dream, I have been strangely annoyed by it ever since.

Even understanding as I do the reasonable questions about the story's veracity--let alone about the purported significance of a man in constant danger dreaming about his death--the chills induced by that dream take me right back to my childhood self, awake in the dark, scared by nightmares. But from Richard N. Current's The Lincoln Nobody Knows (1958), I recently learned of another allegedly prophetic dream ascribed to Lincoln, this one noted by Secretary of the Navy Gideon Welles in his diary:

It occurred on April 14, 1865. That morning Lincoln held a Cabinet meeting, and the occasion was especially dignified by the presence of General Grant, fresh from his victory at Appomattox. The President was hoping for news from General Sherman in North Carolina, where a Confederate army still was in the field. To the Cabinet conferees Lincoln remarked that he had no doubt news soon would come and would be good. For, he said, he had had a dream the previous night. It was a dream he had in advance of almost every important event of the war--always the same dream. In it he "seemed to be moving in some singular, indescribable vessel," and he "was moving with great rapidity towards an indefinite shore."

That night, Lincoln was shot.

I know I risk getting deep into the "And he had a secretary named Kennedy!"-style weeds here, but that dream, too, I find chilling. Yet whereas the first dream, when analyzed, seems a bit too pat, too perfect, this dream is the opposite: it spooks not so much because it seems prophetic as because it seems so vague--so deeply, utterly true to the texture of dream. I can feel the beat of the waves against the bow, see the wisps of cloud and fog obscuring the destination, imagine the odd patience that suffuses the lonely, quiet journey, the way the question of a final destination flits in and out of the dreamer's brain, strongly grasped one moment, lost and forgotten the next.

Imagine if Lincoln had been a lucid dreamer, like the Marquis Leon Hervey de Saint-Denys, who, as Christopher Dewdney explains in Acquainted with the Night, first brought lucid dreaming to widespread attention with his 1867 Dreams and How to Guide Them. Dewdney relates one of the Marquis' stories:

On coming out of a theater, I got into a hackney carriage, which moved off. I woke up almost immediately, without remembering this insignificant vision. I looked at the time on my watch. . . . and after having been completely awake for ten or fifteen minutes, I fell asleep again. It was here that the strange part of the dream began. I dreamed that I woke up in the carriage, which I remembered perfectly well having entered to go home (in the dream). I had the impression that I had dozed off for about a quarter of an hour, but without remembering what thoughts had passed through my mind during that time.

Surely the Oneiroi would be pleased to learn of the Marquis' confusion; at least they would know for sure which Marquis is dreaming and which Marquis is awake.

In looking up the Oneiroi, I learned that one of them, Phantasos, whose name means "apparition," appears in dreams as inanimate objects--which would help to explain those occasional dreams people have where ordinary, everyday items are infused with paralyzing horror. But I don't want to lead any readers to that sort of dream tonight, so I'll close with some more John Ashbery, a bit from Flow Chart (1991) wherein the vaguely ominous dream is held in abeyance:

But at times such as
These late ones, a moaning in copper beeches is heard, of regret,
not for what happened, or even for what could conceivably have happened, but
for what never happened and which therefore exists, as dark
and transparent as a dream. A dream from nowhere. A dream
with no place to go, all dressed up with no place to go, that an axe menaces, off and on, throughout eternity.

Sleep well. If you have good dreams, you might send them off to the proprietors of the Annandale Dream Gazette.

On why, having read only 59 pages of Gore Vidal's Lincoln, I returned it to my local library

On the scale of Abraham Lincoln fandom, my interest in the man wouldn't even register. A search on "Abraham Lincoln" at Amazon, for example, returns 44,402 results, of which I've read maybe four. But I am a native Illinoisan, and Lincoln is an endlessly compelling subject: despite those 44,000 volumes, his interior life remains almost completely obscure, and his achievements as a leader are so profound as to almost demand that we keep attempting to plumb that obscurity. What made him the man he was?

That sense of Lincoln's of essential mystery was what drove me to Gore Vidal's Lincoln (1983). How better to get into Lincoln's head than to be freed from strict accountability to history? Good historical novels, after all, can succeed as both history and fiction, illuminating and giving character to the bare facts of history; the fictional depictions of the Battle of Borodino in War and Peace and the Gordon Riots in Barnaby Rudge, for example, have a human weight and immediacy that few historical accounts can match.

But after slogging through 59 pages of Vidal's Lincoln, I closed the book with a sigh and returned it to the library, defeated. I could no longer stomach clunky chunks of exposition-rich, history-laden dialogue like this one:

"But you ain't Union, Mr. Thompson. You're from Virginia, like us."

"What I may be in my heart of hearts, Davie"--Mr. Thompson was now solemn--"I keep to my self, and I suggest you do the same because of our numerous distinguished customers."

"Mr. Davis was one of your customers?"

"One of my best customers, poor man. I've never known anyone to suffer so much from that eye condition of his. He'll be blind by the summer, I said to Dr. Hardinge, if you don't change the prescription. But you can't tell Dr. Hardinge anything. On my own, I gave Mr. Davis belladonna to stop the pain--"

"So then he is your President."

"If I were in business in Montgomery, Alabama, yes, he would be. But I am here--with my loved ones--in a shop at Fifteenth and Pennsylvania Avenue, and I am the official unofficial pharmacist for the presidents of the United States and as I looked after Mr. Buchanan and Miss Lane--she'll never make old bones, I fear--I intend to look after the Lincoln family, a large one, for a change, and sickly, I should think, wonderfully sickly, from the glimpse I had of them yesterday."

Though a friend tells me that Vidal's Burr is actually very good, I think Lincoln has probably turned me off Vidal's fiction for the foreseeable future. If you're looking to get your Lincoln fix, I recommend Adam Gopnik's article in this week's New Yorker instead. Nothing new there for true Lincoln afficionados, I'm sure, but for us casual fans it's a nice, brief look at recent scholarship on Lincoln's language. As for me, if I'm still in a Lincoln mood come the family vacation this summer, I may finally tackle Doris Kearns Goodwin's Team of Rivals (2005).

But on such a pleasant summer evening, it seems wrong to only criticize in this post, leaving you with nothing but another item for your unrecommended list. So instead, because I believe you can never remind people too many times or too loudly that, yes, the Civil War really was about slavery (and that those who try to say otherwise are usually pushing an unpleasant agenda)--and because I was inspired by the hilarious article on lolcats on Slate yesterday, I present to you an LOL Lincoln . . . the Lincloln:


(Original photo by chadh, used under Creative Commons license; Lincloln created by rocketlass.)

An unexpected postscript on libraries

Soon after I finished yesterday's post about libraries, I by chance came across two pieces of writing that seemed, together, to demand that I write a brief postscript. First, moments after I finished yesterday's post, I read the following in John Crowley's Aegypt:

Like many monkish libraries, San Domenico's was a midden of a thousand years' writing; no one knew all that the monastery contained, or what had become of all that the monks had copied, bought, written, commented on, given away, and collected over the centuries. The old librarian, Fra' Benedetto, had a long catalogue in his head, which he could remember because he had composed it in rhyme, but there were books that weren't in this catalogue because they didn't rhyme. There was a Memory Palace in which all the categories of books and all the subdivisions of those categories had places, but it had long ago filled up and been shuttered and abandoned. There was a written catalogue too, into which every book was entered as it was acquired, and if you happened to know when a book was acquired, you might find it there. Unless, that is, it had been bound with another, or several others; for usually only the incipit of the first would be put into the catalogue. The others were lost.

So within the library which Fra' Benedetto and the prior and the abbot knew about there had grown up another library, a library which those who read in it did not catalogue, and did not want catalogued.

The idea of a secret library within a library returned later in the evening when I showed some friends the following handwritten note that I had found in a copy of Gore Vidal's Lincoln (1984) that I had checked out from the Chicago Public Library's Bezazian Branch:

Lew Welch

Step out onto the Planet
Draw a circle 100 ft round

Inside the circle are
300 things nobody understands,
and, maybe
nobody's ever really seen.

How many can you find?

The Internet quickly revealed that Lew Welch was a beat and this one of his poems. But my initial search led me into some confusion, landing me on a site that, had, it seemed, the poem I was looking for. According to this site, it was called "Stepping Out," and it was ever-so-slightly different from the one in the book:

Step out onto the planet.

Draw a circle as big as you can throw a stone.

Inside that circle are
300 things that nobody understands, and, maybe
nobody's ever really seen.

How many can you find?

Pick one,
and protect it.

How, I thought, could someone who had taken the trouble to write this poem down and leave it in a book have left off the closing injunction, which the whole poem builds towards? And had they gone out and heaved a stone, discovering that they could throw it a hundred feet? Stacey quickly added the last two lines to the handwritten poem, her purple ink and distinct handwriting making them stand out even more than the poet intended.

But this morning as I was harvesting links for this post, I discovered that I had made a mistake: the longer poem is not a Lew Welch poem but a very close reworking by someone identified as tamo and noted as "After Lew Welch's 'Inside the Circle.'" The library's anonymous note-writer was correct in his transcription, and now, by combining Lew Welch's original and tamo's adaptation, we've created an ever-so-slightly different third poem.

I think this writing and rewriting, this doubling and mistaken identity, this anonymous communication would entertain John Crowley, would resonate with his fascination with the transmission of knowledge--passed through unknown hands and from mind to mind, altered by that sharing--down through the centuries. So I'll fold this note, tuck it in the pages of Aegypt, and return it to the library, helping the poem along in its travels and sowing further confusion for the next unsuspecting reader.

Lincoln or TR?

On the eve of this splendid, historic Election Day, I faced a reading choice, one that seems to confront me every couple of years: Lincoln or TR? I find both endlessly fascinating, but it’s hard to imagine men of more different temperaments. So which president should accompany me through this election week? So far, I’ve dithered, reading bits of some books about each, unable to choose.

Reading about Roosevelt is, it seems, a lot like being with Roosevelt: fascinating and fun, but draining. He was exactly who he seemed to be, a big, boisterous, energetic, smart, willful, needy man who, in the words of his children, “longed to be the bride at every wedding and the corpse at every funeral.” There are virtually no unplumbed depths there—as biographer Patricia O’Toole puts it, he “galloped away from introspection.” So the pleasures of reading about Roosevelt lie in a combination of the joys of reading about someone of such indomitable will and awe at the sheer number of his accomplishments, good and bad. O’Toole’s book, When Trumpets Call (2005), which is the one I have before me, promises to be of particular interest on both fronts, as it focuses on Roosevelt’s post-presidential years, when his will began to be thwarted and his own sense of accomplishment began to waver.

To read about Lincoln, on the other hand, is to yaw between shivering admiration (bordering, this life-long Illinoisan will admit, on reverence) and deeply felt sympathy for the obviously human, familiar man trying not to be crushed by the unimaginable pressures brought to bear on him in the last five years of his life. In his knowledge of himself, Lincoln seems to have been the opposite of Roosevelt. Doris Kearns Goodwin explains in her book about Lincoln and his cabinet, Team of Rivals (2005):

Lincoln possessed an uncanny understanding of his shifting moods, a profound self-awareness that enabled him to find constructive ways to alleviate sadness and stress. Indeed, when he is compared with his colleagues, it is clear that he possessed the most even-tempered disposition of them all. Time and again, he was the one who dispelled his colleagues’ anxiety and sustained their spirits with his gift for storytelling and his life-affirming sense of humor. When resentment and contention threatened to destroy his administration, he refused to be provoked by petty grievances, to submit to jealousy, or to brood over perceived slights. Through the appalling pressures he faced day after day, he retained an unflagging faith in his country’s cause.

Yet he remains somewhat mysterious; as Richard Carwardine relates in Lincoln (2003),

Lincoln had dignity, considerable reserve, few real intimates, and a proper sense of the private; as John G. Nicolay and John Milton Hay, his White House secretaries [both quite young men, who would go on to write the first major biography of Lincoln], later remarked, in personal relations with him, “there was a line beyond which no one ever thought of passing.” But he was hardly aloof. He cultivated no airs and graces. In the words of a fellow lawyer, “in the ordinary walks of life [he] did not appear the ‘great man’ that he really was.”

Yet, like TR, Lincoln got people to do what he wanted and needed them to do—including his star-studded, fractious cabinet. And he was clearly a shrewd judge of character (a characteristic he definitely shared with General Grant, though, not, sadly, with President Grant). My interest in that aspect of Lincoln, of his deep understanding of personal relations and how to work with people, may tip the balance this week in his favor, and in favor of Team of Rivals.

But on the other hand, When Trumpets Call, because it treats TR’s post-presidential years, necessarily delves into the many failures of President Taft and the vexed relationship between Roosevelt and his hand-picked successor:

[Taft biographers] have wondered in exasperation how Roosevelt ever could have considered him fit for the presidency. Taft was indolent, irresolute, dependent, and undone by opposition and criticism—a dooming combination. But the Taft that Roosevelt knew had distinguished himself as governor-general of the Philippines, problem-solver in Cuba and Panama, and secretary of war. Under Roosevelt’s energetic leadership, Taft kept his lassitude in check, and his other shortcomings easily could have manifested themselves as virtues. A dependent man makes an excellent lieutenant, for he is happiest when carrying out the orders of others. And a man who shies away from conflict can be an exceptionally agreeable colleague. TR thought his friend Will had “the most loveable personality” of anyone he had ever known.

If that’s not a recipe for a fascinating book, what is?

So TR or Lincoln? Taft and TR or Lincoln and his cabinet? How to choose?

Maybe I should change the name of this blog to too many books, too little time?