"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.}

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.