Reactions
February 27, 2009, 8:11 am
Posted by Robert P. Imbelli
The Times of London:
The ceremony was rendered ludicrous by some of the sallies of that poor President.
The Harrisburg Patriot and Union:
We pass over the silly remarks of the President; for the credit of the nation, we are willing that the veil of oblivion shall be dropped over them and that they shall no more be repeated or thought of.
The former President of Harvard University:
I should be glad if I could flatter myself that I came as near to the central idea of the occasion in two hours, as you did in two minutes.
All commenting on Lincoln’s “Gettysburg Address.”
As I move to the end of Ronald C. White’s magnificent new biography, A. Lincoln, one reads on in awe and dread.
I plead guilty to being a Lincolnophile. It’s not that he didn’t have faults–he did–but he and Washington are our only presidents who have had to endure the high stakes test of whether the U.S. would survive as a nation. In addition, given Lincoln’s excellent political skills and the beauty of much of his oratory (from an individual who had a total of two years of formal education), it’s not surprising that he was recently (again) picked as our best president.
At Gettysburg, Lincoln followed Edward Everett, who as noted spoke for two hours in an erudite style befitting a former Harvard president, U,S. Senator, U.S. congressman, governor, and U.S. secretary of state. Everett’s 13,000+ word oration, now largely forgotten, was immediately followed by Lincoln’s two-minute, 200+ word masterpiece, though as Fr. Imbelli recounts, many failed to recognize Lincoln’s speech at the time as anything more than an afterthought. In addition, newspapers in the 1860′s were often political pulpits, as they sometimes are today. The two primary Chicago papers, for example, reacted to the speech along political fault lines:
Chicago Tribune: “The dedicatory remarks by President Lincoln will live among the annals of man.”
Chicago Times: “The cheeks of every American must tingle with shame as he reads the silly, flat, and dishwatery utterances.”
In addition, Everett looked the part of the very famous orator he was. Lincoln, though president of the U.S., appeared gangly and somewhat disheveled, and he spoke in a high-pitched voice.
Garry Wills’s Pulitzer-winning book, “Lincoln at Gettysburg: The Words That Remade America,” thoroughly dispels the notion that Lincoln crafted his speech in short order while riding the train from Washington to Gettysburg. Wills demonstrates that the speech was instead very carefully drafted, and that it has a complex internal structure that draws from several sources, including Greek funereal orations and the substance and rhythms of the King James Bible, a book that the largely self-taught Lincoln had completely internalized.
I first visited Gettysburg as a child, and it left a lasting impression. Perhaps others have seen the exhibit there with the four or five wooden chairs that were on the dais on the day of Lincoln’s speech in November 1863. I remember a museum employee relating that though historians weren’t sure which of the chairs Lincoln used that day, he did sit on one of the chairs in the exhibit. I recall feeling as if I’d been given an electric shock when I heard that. On Fr. Imbelli’s glowing recommendation, I’m looking forward to reading the new Lincoln biography.
William,
thanks for your reflections.
One of the merits of White’s biography is that most chapters feature a different photograph of Lincoln. The cumulative effect is somewhat akin to the impression created by the series of Rembrandt self-portraits: a growing transfiguration through suffering.
Thank you for the recommendation, Fr. Imbelli – while I am not in William Collier’s class, I am also a lover of Lincoln. As it happens, my old Sandburg single-volume biography literally fell apart the third time through, and so I am in need of a replacement volume. The White sounds like just the ticket.
Thanks to Fr. Imbelli and Mr. Collier for their insights on this speech.
It was carved into the cornerstone of the high school I attended many years ago. Because of that, we studiously ignored it as one of those anodyne preachments that adults are constantly asking us to pay homage to but don’t believe themselves.
To us, it was like the copy of the Ten Commandments that the city burghers saw fit to have carved in stone at great expense and placed in the public park in the vain hope that the standard of morality would improve thereby.
I have been buying almost every Lincoln book published recently and have to decide which one to begin with from the following:
Team of Rivals: The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln by Doris Kearns Goodwin
A. Lincoln: A Biography by Ronald C. White Jr.
Lincoln: The Biography of a Writer by Fred Kaplan
Abraham Lincoln by James M. McPherson
Tried by War: Abraham Lincoln as Commander in Chief by James M. McPherson
Lincoln President-Elect: Abraham Lincoln and the Great Secession Winter 1860-1861 by Harold Holzer
James McPherson’s Battle Cry of Freedom (which I am amazed to see is out of print) is probably the best book I have read on the Civil War, and his Lincoln biography is the shortest, so I may begin with that.
I notice that Bruce Catton’s trilogy The Coming Fury, Terrible Swift Sword, and Never Call Retreat (which I read long ago) is also out of print. I saw the books from Shelby Foote’s trilogy (which I didn’t read) being sold very cheaply in Barnes & Noble some months ago, and I thought it was being remaindered, but it seems to be in print still, since Amazon is selling new copies. One of the great things about the Internet is that it is so easy to locate and buy out-of-print books.
I have declared a book-buying moratorium during Lent, and if I stick to it, I am going to buy a Kindle II after Easter. My apartment is full.
David–
You have some good reading ahead of you. :)
FWIW, I recommend anything by James McPherson as a good place to start on Lincoln, and on the Civil War in general. He’s a fine writer and he’s eminently fair. I enjoyed “Battle Cry of Freedom,” too. Shelby Foote’s trilogy on the Civil War is also very good. He goes into more detail that McPherson does, and I remember seeing him on TV once explaining his writing routine. He would steep himself in a particular aspect of the Civil War, and he would then go to the area of his home set aside for his writing. He worked in long hand, and he would craft 400 to 500 words a day until he was completely satisfied with them. He would then put the final version of that day’s work into a bin, and he would not revise them again. His method worked well for him. I think he was great at weaving together the military and the human interest threads of Civil War history. I much more enjoy the human interest aspects than the details of military strategy, but even those with a non-military bent will know what such terms as “redoubt” and “enfillade” mean after reading a couple of the books you mentioned.
The good–and the bad–thing about Lincoln and Civil War reading is that there are so many books to choose from. I recently heard on NPR that there have been about 20,000 books written about Lincoln, and there are probably at least that many about the Civil War.
I hope I’m not being presumptuous in recommending another two books about Lincoln: David Herbert Donald’s “Lincoln” and William Lee Miller’s “Lincoln’s Virtues: An Ethical Biography.”
Donald’s book is very well-written, and for those interested in Lincoln’s life as a lawyer, Donald reveals many details about Lincoln’s profession that came to light only as a result of efforts in the 1980′s and 90′s to recover pleadings and other court documents, from the basements of old courthouses, that had been filed by Lincoln as he rode a circuit in the area around Springfield, Illinois.
Miller’s book is also excellent. He traces the underpinnings for Lincoln’s moral and ethical development, stripping away a lot of the hagiography about Lincoln and discovering the flesh and bone man and his character formation.
Ken Burns’s multi-part “The Civil War” is also a good way to get some visual images that will complement the books by McPherson and others about the Civil War.
I read Donald’s biography some years back and remember enjoying it a good deal. I’ve also read McPherson’s recent “Tried by War” and greatly appreciated it, though it is, as the subtitle suggests, narrowly focused.
One of the things I found interesting in White is his tracing of Lincoln’s developing religious sense. Apropos of Lincoln’s reflection found after his death and given the title “Meditation on the Divine Will” by his secretary John Hay, White makes this observation:
“For Lincoln, this God was not the original first cause of Jefferson. Lincoln’s meditation is about a God who acts in history.”
With regard hagiography, “it is precisely “the flesh and bone man and his character formation” that I find truly hagiographic.
I hope I’m not being presumptuous in recommending another two books about Lincoln: David Herbert Donald’s “Lincoln” and William Lee Miller’s “Lincoln’s Virtues: An Ethical Biography.”
William,
I love getting book recommendations, and I am almost certain to buy anything someone on dotCommonweal recommends. Unfortunately, as I mentioned above, I have a book-buying moratorium going on during Lent. Fortunately, I already have the David Herbert Donald book!
On the topic of Civil War books, has anyone read any of Owen Parry’s Abel Jones mysteries? They are not great literature, but they are very enjoyable if you like reading mystery novels.
David Nickol: I fully endorse William Collier’s recommendation of David Herbert Donald’s biography of Lincoln. It’s hefty but also worth the time spent. The main virtue, I think, is that it presents a Lincoln rather different from most other biographies: brooding and mostly controlled by circumstances. If there is an “anti-great-man” biography of Lincoln, this is it. But its judgments are judicious, not out-of-whack.