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Books (The New Yorker)
Set in Stone
Abraham Lincoln and the politics of memory.
by Thomas Mallon
The Lincoln Memorial, dedicated in 1922, aimed to enshrine the man who saved the Union, not the man who freed the slaves.
At the dedication of the Lincoln Memorial, in Washington, D.C., on May 30, 1922, remarks by Robert Moton, the principal of the Tuskegee Institute, received special attention from the “colored” section of the audience. The federal commission responsible for the memorial’s construction were loath to have Moton participate at all, let alone emphasize how Lincoln had given “freedom to a race and vindicated the honor of a Nation conceived in liberty.” The commissioners preferred to concentrate on Lincoln as the Savior of the Union, rather than as its Great Emancipator.
William Howard Taft, the Chief Justice and former President, who headed the memorial commission, spoke of sectional reunion and “the restoration of . . . brotherly love” between North and South, as if the two were now morally equivalent entities in a long-ago blue-and-gray pageant. One foray by Taft into the hypothetical went beyond standard historical supposition and amounted to an apology to the nation’s white Southerners: had Lincoln not been killed, Taft declared, “the consequences of the war would not have been as hard for them to bear, the wounds would have been more easily healed, the trying days of reconstruction would have been softened.”
Taft presented the memorial to Warren Harding, the sitting President, and both Republicans took proprietary pleasure in the presence at the ceremony of Lincoln’s only surviving child, the seventy-eight-year-old Robert Todd Lincoln. Robert had spent his early life seeking, and never truly winning, his father’s approval; after his father’s murder, six decades of mass sympathy and deference left him equally unsatisfied. He knew that he would never have been made Secretary of War or Ambassador to Great Britain without the Lincoln name, and his weird accidental presence at the assassinations of Garfield and McKinley, in 1881 and 1901, must have seemed a fateful punishment for refusing his father’s invitation to Ford’s Theatre on April 14, 1865. That night, Robert stayed home to study Spanish, just as he had chosen to remain upstairs in the White House the day his parents took lowbrow delight in an East Room reception for the newly wed Mr. and Mrs. Tom Thumb.
After the assassination, Robert was left to regulate the grief-driven hysterics of his mother and the swift mythologizing of his father, a man who had thought him no more than “very well, considering.” He pursued both tasks with rigor, committing Mary Lincoln to an insane asylum in 1875 and strictly limiting historians’ access to Abraham Lincoln’s papers, whose shipment back to Illinois he was arranging even before the capture of John Wilkes Booth. Over the course of a half century, Robert fastidiously sought to prove his father’s legitimate birth against contrary suggestions; protested the commercialization of Lincoln’s Springfield home by the relic-collecting Osborn Oldroyd; rejected the log cabin as a symbol of “degradation and uncleanliness”; and helped prevent George Barnard’s statue of a scruffy-looking Lincoln from being displayed in London.
Between 1898 and 1911, again because of the Lincoln name, Robert served as president of the Pullman Company, the biggest employer of African-Americans in the United States. But he was hardly a progressive force, going so far as to refuse a meeting that Booker T. Washington and W. E. B. Du Bois sought in order to discuss bias in the company’s policies. In the spring of 1922, as he sat on the platform before the segregated audience, Lincoln’s son felt satisfied with both the new memorial’s grandeur and the way its architecture set in stone the secondary nature of Lincoln’s racial revolution. Like the structure’s thirty-six columns (the number of states, including those of the Confederacy, in 1865), the inscription above a statue by Daniel Chester French and the engravings of the Second Inaugural Address and the Gettysburg Address all emphasize the reconnection of North and South. The massive seated Lincoln is even made from Georgia marble. One painted mural above the Gettysburg Address shows the Angel of Truth unshackling a slave, but it is scarcely noticed by most visitors.
The memorial’s designers were at odds with the man they were enshrining. For all his mystical, even bloody-minded, devotion to the Union’s preservation, Lincoln, the reluctant and strategic abolitionist, came to understand emancipation as his chief claim to immortality. A mental breakdown, in 1841, witnessed by his friend Joshua Speed, might have ended in suicide but for Lincoln’s realization, confided to Speed at the time, that if he were to die now he “had done nothing to make any human being remember that he had lived.” When Speed visited the White House in 1863, Lincoln went out of his way to recall this confidence and to declare, “with earnest emphasis,” according to his reliable friend, that the Emancipation Proclamation had fulfilled his long-ago self-willed resurrection from depression.
It is Lincoln the liberator, not the conqueror or conciliator, that has turned the memorial into anything but the stately place envisioned by its planners. The memorial has been the most volatile symbolic locale in Washington, the only one that will do as a backdrop for sea-changing dissent. Marian Anderson’s 1939 concert and Martin Luther King, Jr.,’s 1963 speech would have lost considerable voltage had they been carried out beneath, say, the blandly indifferent obelisk honoring George Washington. Filmmakers and writers from Frank Capra to Philip Roth have sent their characters to the memorial at crucial moments, and it was to the memorial’s steps that Richard Nixon travelled in the middle of the night, thinking that he might find a way of connecting with Vietnam protesters who had already connected with Lincoln. The temple dedicated by Taft and Harding is not a foursquare symbol of unity; it is the seat of every American government in exile.
Robert Lincoln is the unhappy central presence in “Looking for Lincoln: The Making of an American Icon” (Knopf; $50), a highly particularized inquiry that travels from the weekend of the President’s assassination past the dedication of his memorial. The book’s authors—Philip B. Kunhardt III, Peter W. Kunhardt, and Peter W. Kunhardt, Jr., members of a family involved in Lincoln collecting and scholarship for five generations—proceed here along two chronological tracks, examining the progress of Lincoln biography and the corresponding betrayal of Lincoln’s moral legacy. Among the nearly fifteen thousand books published on Lincoln since his death, this one, which will appear next month, is an oddly magnificent downer, lavish and pictorial, but more wince-inducing than anything else, covering a post-Reconstruction era that prompted Frederick Douglass to pronounce emancipation, in its actual practice, “a stupendous fraud” against Southern blacks and Lincoln himself.
Lincoln’s name was invoked by each side of nearly every national debate in the half century after his death, beginning with the impeachment trial of Andrew Johnson, the hapless successor who continued to carry Lincoln’s anointment amid dark whisperings, taken seriously by Mary, that he had also been part of the conspiracy to shed Lincoln’s blood. Less than a decade later, as Grant’s corrupt Presidency oozed into its second term, Harper’s Weekly marvelled, “How strong is [Lincoln’s] hold on the American people. Everybody feels that he understands him and has property in him.”
The property’s value seemed ever-increasing and transferrable. The Cold Water men of the temperance movement claimed that Lincoln had taken the pledge; the opposing Wets produced the liquor license that he had applied for as a storekeeper in New Salem, Illinois. President William McKinley publicly argued in October, 1898, that freeing Cuba from Spain was an effort comparable to the emancipation of the slaves, even as the Spanish-American War was chiefly celebrated as one more triumph of reunion, with Southern soldiers donning the blue uniform their fathers had shot at. Theodore Roosevelt, who as a boy had watched Lincoln’s New York funeral procession, pronounced the sixteenth President a “tempered radical” who would have embraced the progressive reforms of the Square Deal. While employing Lincoln’s secretary John Hay as his own Secretary of State, Roosevelt wore a ring with a lock of Lincoln’s hair inside, and insisted he’d had multiple sightings of Lincoln’s ghost in the halls and rooms of the White House.
As the Kunhardts make clear, the more Lincoln’s presumed approval became the political gold standard the worse race relations in America got. In 1908, a year before the centennial of Lincoln’s birth, a black bootmaker he had known named William Donnegan was lynched in the course of an especially grisly race riot in Springfield, Illinois. No blacks were invited to attend the town’s birthday-dinner celebration the following year. During the centennial, Woodrow Wilson, soon to become the nation’s first Southern President since Reconstruction, described the characters of Abraham Lincoln and Robert E. Lee as equally sterling. In his first term, Wilson ordered the Treasury Department to segregate its employee bathrooms and chose the Klan-hymning “Birth of a Nation” to be the first movie ever screened at the White House. His Administration later used Lincoln’s image to sell the Liberty Bonds that financed a war on behalf of global democracy. Out of office and still suffering the effects of the stroke he had had during his second term, Wilson did not attend the dedication of the memorial in 1922, an altogether less democratic ceremony than the one in which the Freedmen’s Memorial—a statue of Lincoln urging a kneeling slave to stand—had been dedicated, near the Capitol, in 1876.
What the authors call the “safeguarding” of Lincoln’s emancipation legacy fell to African-Americans themselves. If any figure rivals Robert for centrality in “Looking for Lincoln,” it is Frederick Douglass, who until his death, in 1895, continued to tell the story of how Lincoln had sought his reaction to the Second Inaugural Address during a White House reception from which policemen had tried to hustle him away. More significant, Douglass offered active rhetorical resistance to the chess-set version of the Civil War that was becoming ever more favored by sentimentalists and reënactors. “There was a right side and a wrong side,” Douglass insisted, a plain truth that could not be smothered by placing flowers “alike and lovingly, on rebel and on loyal graves.”
The authors draw attention to W. E. B. Du Bois as Douglass’s even more aggressive heir, but they don’t seem fully to recognize the way in which Du Bois’s controversial assessment of Lincoln in 1922 is a kind of linchpin for their own enterprise: “I revere him the more because up out of his contradictions and inconsistencies he fought his way to the pinnacle of earth,” Du Bois wrote. “I care more for Lincoln’s great toe than for the whole body of the perfect George Washington, of spotless ancestry, who ‘never told a lie’ and never did anything else interesting.” Du Bois grasped the instinctive appeal of Lincoln’s wounded interior, entry to which seemed visible in the crags of his much photographed face. If Andrew Jackson was the first President with a personality, one that was recognizable to the electorate of his own day, Lincoln can be considered the first with a psychology, a delicate mental makeup that suggested itself to anyone who saw his picture in a newspaper, let alone heard him on a platform. (His sometimes high, even squeaky, voice is the one physical attribute our modern imagination still wants to deny.) Jackson may have been ready to fight any number of duels defending his wife’s honor, but, in the long run, how much more compelling is Lincoln’s patient handling of his wife’s mental fluctuations.
“It is a great relief to get away from Washington and the politicians,” Lincoln told his journalist friend Noah Brooks while reviewing troops before the battle of Chancellorsville, in May of 1863. “But nothing touches the tired spot.” It’s this elusive place that the student of Lincoln is always seeking to reach, attempting to understand and even somehow minister to it. The effort seems, even now, condoned and encouraged by Lincoln, who willingly sat for an array of painters and sculptors and photographers before and during his time in the White House. He is said to have remarked that Mathew Brady’s 1860 picture, taken at the time of the Cooper Union speech, had helped make him President. His steady coöperation with visual artists sprang from the same immortal longings he had once expressed to Joshua Speed.
The authors’ six-decade time line occasionally turns into a necrological grind. Along with the appearance of every major book, they note the passing of each Lincoln intimate and associate, whether it’s William Florville, Lincoln’s Springfield barber, in 1868, or, five years later, Salmon P. Chase, “the sixth of Lincoln’s thirteen cabinet members to join him in death.” The prose in “Looking for Lincoln” often has this kind of pedantic fortissimo, but the sustained raking and display of anecdotes and artifacts—an effort that feels almost archeological—has a peculiar cumulative force. As we witness the suppression of Lincoln’s largest political meaning, we watch, on alternating pages, the gradual reassembly of him as a creature.
The first significant Lincoln biographies were memoirs, amalgamations of research and reminiscence produced by, among others, his law partner, William Herndon, and his secretaries John Hay and John Nicolay. In lectures about his work in progress, Herndon mixed in crowd-pleasing half-truths—an early tragic romance with Ann Rutledge seemed to explain so much of Lincoln’s evident sorrow—but he also gathered up an enormous amount of recollection (not all of it reliable) that would otherwise have perished with Lincoln’s earliest Illinois acquaintances. Judge David Davis, for instance, gave Herndon evidence of an impersonal magnetism that makes Lincoln sound oddly like Franklin Roosevelt or Ronald Reagan, decidedly remote for all the apparent warmth: “His Stories—jokes &c. which were done to whistle off sadness are no evidences of sociality. . . . His was a peculiar nature . . . no Strong Emotional feelings for any person—Mankind or thing.” Herndon himself recalled that “the whole man—body & mind worked slowly—creekingly, as if it wanted oiling.”
Beset with financial problems, as well as competition and counterattack from Lincoln loyalists and family, Herndon did not get his book out until 1889, and then only with the aid of a ghostwriter who at the last insisted on credit. In the interim, Hay and Nicolay serialized their dry and overlong opus, eventually dedicated to Robert; and Ward Hill Lamon, Lincoln’s lawyer-confidant and bodyguard—who had bought up Herndon’s research—surprised the public with a biography so unflattering that it was well reviewed in the South. But in the end victory was Herndon’s: “No biography of Lincoln did more to shape how Americans came to see him,” the Kunhardts accurately argue.
The American craving for Lincoln soon led to the use of his likeness and name to sell life insurance, cholera remedies, and lead (“By Its Purity & Excellent Qualities This Lead Deserves The Name Bestowed Upon It”). Children began playing with Lincoln Logs, invented by Frank Lloyd Wright’s son, and, in a telling trivialization, during the 1909 centennial the Waterman Company’s new no-dip Lincoln Fountain Pen guaranteed “the emancipation of millions of slaves to the ink bottle.” If the likeness of any other President had been chosen for the penny, another token of the centennial, it seems probable that that annoying denomination would have been abolished by now.
Authentic Lincoln relics acquired ever-greater imaginative and monetary power. On Election Night in 1876, robbers attempting to make off with Lincoln’s body were thwarted inside his tomb. In 1901, at Robert’s strenuous urging, the remains were reburied under concrete. Visitors to the Springfield home and to the Petersen House, where Lincoln died, across the street from Ford’s Theatre, felt the temptation to nick bits of furniture and wallpaper. The contents of the President’s pockets on the night of the assassination—favorable press clippings, eyeglasses repaired with string—came to repose in a container made for them at the Library of Congress; the blood-soaked pillow on which Lincoln died, displayed at the Petersen House into the nineteen-nineties, has since been taken away for conservation.
The assassination, perpetrated on Good Friday, took on religious dimensions within forty-eight hours, when Easter Sunday sermons made explicit parallels to the Crucifixion. Even before that, the authors tell us, Lincoln may have become “the first non-Jew over whom Kaddish prayers were chanted in the synagogue.” Before long, the survivors and biographers were warring over the degree to which Lincoln himself had, or had not, been a believer. Mary Lincoln came to insist that he was; Herndon felt certain of the opposite, and the son of Lincoln’s friend Samuel Hill went so far as to claim that his father had burned a short, politically inexpedient book in which the young Lincoln had questioned the authority of the Bible and the existence of a hereafter. Even so, Frederick Douglass saw both saintliness and prophecy in Lincoln, and Theodore Roosevelt, Lincoln’s florid opposite, was given to ask himself—in something like the current, braceleted evangelical way—“what Lincoln would have done.”
Hay, who worked for both Presidents, wrote that Lincoln had moved “in a flash of blinding light . . . full panoplied into the religion of the people.” The process was slower than that, a gradual and disorderly canonization, furthered by the biographers’ presentation of a hundred little mercies and miracles performed by Lincoln. All of them eventually made his earthly existence seem, even to Southerners, less a life than an incarnation. As the memorial itself took on an unexpected vitality, Lincoln became fully and mystically available to the citizenry, a figure beyond ownership by any faction.
In the nineteen-twenties, despite the crush of Republicans on the speakers’ platform at the memorial, Lincoln was slipping from the grasp of the party he had helped to establish. New Dealers, thirties radicals (the Abraham Lincoln Brigade), and marchers in the postwar civil-rights movement all soon had their time with him, but while specific moments of counterintuitive convenience have permitted, say, Reagan to appropriate Franklin Roosevelt—or even Bill Clinton to praise Reagan—Lincoln now presides over the Republic inside such a diffuse and deified glow that political invocations of him usually feel meaningless. Even as Americans annex the memorial to big causes, they seem mostly to need Lincoln—and respond to him—in a psychological and spiritual way. If we are indeed a Christian nation, he is the Christ, and politicians risk looking silly when they mention him in connection with their little quadrennial concerns.
In 1909, the Reverend L. H. Magee, the pastor of the African Methodist Episcopal Church in Springfield, Illinois, voiced his disgust at the exclusion of blacks from the town’s centennial dinner, but he imagined that by the time of the bicentennial, in 2009, racial prejudice would be “relegated to the dark days of ‘Salem witchcraft.’ ” Next year’s Lincoln commemorations in Washington will include the reopening of Ford’s Theatre, restored for performances for the second time since 1893, when its interior collapsed, killing twenty-two people. Congress will convene in a joint session on February 12th, and on May 30th the still new President will rededicate the Lincoln Memorial. The look and the emphasis of the occasion will have changed—measurably, for certain; astoundingly, perhaps—in the fourscore and seven years since 1922. ♦