Angels and Ages Read online

  This is a study in a new kind of eloquence, and a new kind of life the new eloquence spoke to. The subject is liberal civilization and its language—the way we live now and the way we talk at home and in public. These are essays without an agenda, but this is not a book without a thesis. The thesis is that literary eloquence is essential to liberal civilization; our heroes should be men and women possessed by the urgency of utterance, obsessed by the need to see for themselves and to speak for us all. Authoritarian societies can rely on an educated elite; mere mass society, on shared dumb show. Liberal cities can't. A commitment to persuasion is in itself a central liberal principle. New ways of thinking demand new kinds of eloquence. Our world rests on science and democracy, on seeing and saying; it rests on thinking new thoughts and getting them heard by a lot of people. Oratory, as Pericles knew, was what mattered crucially to the first democracy, in fifth- century B.C. Athens, but that was a small affair of few citizens (and many slaves) compared with our own, which needs words of all kinds, written and spoken and shouted, coming at you from all directions.

  The point is not that writing well is a proof of thinking clearly. Orwell was wrong about that, sadly The truth is that plenty of men who have written very well have thought horrible thoughts, and the thoughts have been made to seem less horrible by being well written. No, the point is that when we do come across those who write well and see clearly, we're right to make them heroes.

  Or even more. These two princes—call them prophets, why not?—of liberal civilization, of a world without a present God but with providential purposes, of justifying ages more than ministering angels, may shine light on the kind of place we've made, and the way we can make it better. By disputing with the angels, they helped to begin our age—but by the judgment of the ages, were they really on the side of the angels all along?

  CHAPTER ONE

  LINCOLN'S MIND

  A DEATHBED MYSTERY

  A HISTORICAL DISPUTE, A DEEPER PLAY FROM LAST WORDS TO FIRST WORDS

  A BOY BORN TO READ—AND WRITE

  THE FRONTIER, LAND OF A THOUSAND RHETORICAL STYLES WHY HE CHOSE THE LAW

  his rise to the bar, his marriage, and his house

  a general practitioner of law

  legal styles of argument, law and language

  1838 lyceum speech: reason alone

  ONE-SYLLABLE REDUCTIONS; SAY IT FANCY, SAY IT PLAIN

  A SOURCE IN SHAKESPEARE

  LINCOLN AND RACE • FOR LAW, AGAINST HONOR JOHN BROWN, THE ANTI-LINCOLN

  THE CODE OF HONOR, NORTH AND SOUTH

  AN APPARENT DEFICIT • LINCOLN'S ONE SAD DUEL

  WEAK TEA AND STRONG WHISKEY

  LEGAL ARGUMENT AS LIBERAL ELOQUENCE

  Begin, then, with the angels, and the ages, and the argument. On the morning of April 15, 1865, Abraham Lincoln, president and victor, lay dying from a bullet that had lodged in his skull just behind his right eye. At 7:22 a.m., as Lincoln drew his last breath, all the worthies who had crowded into a little back bedroom in a boardinghouse across the street from Ford's Theatre turned to Edwin Stanton, Lincoln's formidable secretary of war, for a final word.

  Stanton is the one with the long comic beard and the spinster's spectacles, who in the photographs looks a bit like Mr. Pickwick but was actually the iron man in the cabinet and who, after a difficult beginning, had come to revere Lincoln as a man and a writer and a politician—had even played something like watchful Horatio to his tragic Hamlet. Stanton stood still, sobbing, and then—according to every biography of Lincoln from Nicolay and Hay's to Doris Kearns Goodwin's—said, simply, “Now he belongs to the ages.”

  It's probably the most famous epitaph in American biography, and still perhaps the best. The words seem perfectly chosen in their bare and stoic evocation of a Lincoln who belongs to history alone, their invocation not of an assumption to an afterlife but of a long reign in the corridors of time, of a man now part of eternity.

  Yet in recent years, it has become possible to find an entirely different version of that sentence. In Jay Winik's April 1865 and in James L. Swanson's Manhunt, for instance, the reader once again comes to the deathbed scene, the vigil, the gathering. Swanson writes that the Reverend Dr. Gurley the Lincoln family minister, said,

  “Let us pray.” He summoned up… a stirring prayer…

  Gurley finished and everyone murmured “Amen.” Then, no one dared to speak.

  Again Stanton broke the silence. “Now he belongs to the angels.”

  Now he belongs to the angels? Where has that come from? you wonder. There is a Monty Python element here (“What was that?” “I think it was ‘Blessed are the cheese makers,’ ” the annoyed listeners too far from the Mount say to each other in Life of Brian), but is there something more going on as well? Certainly one can glimpse, just visible beneath the diaphanous middle of the references, the tracings of an ideological difference. Stanton's words as they are normally quoted are (like the Lincoln Memorial) a form of American neoclassicism, typical of the American liberal estimation of Lincoln as an essentially secular hero and at odds with the figure of Christian nobility prized by the right: Lincoln's afterlife lies not in heaven but in his vindication by history.

  Does he belong to the angels or to the ages? This small implicit dispute echoes, in turn, a genuine historical debate: between those historians who insist on a tough Lincoln, the Lincoln whom Edmund Wilson, in Patriotic Gore, saw as an essentially Bismarck-ian figure—a cold- blooded nationalist who guaranteed the unity of the American nation, a stoic emperor in a stovepipe hat whose essential drive was for power, his own and his country's—and those who, like Sandburg and Goodwin, see a tender, soulful Lincoln, a figure of almost saintly probity and patience, who ended slavery, deepened in faith as the war went on, and fought hard without once succumbing to hatred. A Lincoln for the ages and a Lincoln for the angels already exists. Now the two seem to be at war for his epitaph.

  We have to go deep into the odd corners of Lincoln literature to find out what really was said at that pregnant moment. There is an answer out there—or as close to an answer as you can find. Yet even to guess at what was said then, and to have a larger sense of what was meant by Stanton and understood by his listeners—and all those distant, vicarious listeners who have read the words since—we need to understand what words were right for Lincoln. We need to know something about Lincoln's language and its legacy—where the words came from, how he used them, what they meant and, sometimes, didn't mean. Lincoln was a man of strong sentences and strategic silences; looking within them can help to locate him.

  Let's postpone the pursuit of the small specific mystery, for a little while at least, to pursue the larger related question, mysterious in its own way, of how a backwoods lawyer became one of the great American writers, how Lincoln made words, and used them, in the years that led to what the Lincoln scholar Harold Holzer has called that “rubber room”—because it seems to expand and contract according to the number of people who claimed to be there—that last sad bed, with angels hovering symbolically above, or ages waiting solemnly beyond.

  All wars over Lincoln become wars over his words. In books published in the past two years alone, you can read about Lincoln's “sword” (his writing) and his “sanctuary” (the Soldiers’ Home, just outside Washington, where he spent summers throughout the war). There have long been debates, natural in an age before sound recording, over what had actually been said at any given moment by Lincoln or someone in his circle and what people thought they had heard. Even with the Gettysburg Address, despite our possession of what seem to be two drafts and what are certainly several later copies in Lincoln's own hand, there are many arguments about exactly what Lincoln said. Gabor Boritt, in his book The Gettysburg Gospel, has a thirty- page appendix that compares what Lincoln (probably) read at the memorial with what people heard and reported. Most of the differences are small and due to understandable confusions—“the world will little note, nor long remember what we say here” became in some re
ports “the world will little heed what we say here”—or to impatience on the part of a reporter—the Centralia Sentinel, of Lincoln's home state, wanting nothing to do with fancy talk, had the speech begin simply “ninety years ago.”

  A few disputes seem more significant. The Cincinnati Daily Gazette, a Republican paper, made the famous first sentence end “that all mankind are created free and equal by a good God,” though it's hard to know whether its reporter had deliberately italicized the point or was simply hearing it with his heart. Also in the first sentence, Lincoln's remark that the nation was “conceived in Liberty” was reported in some newspapers as “consecrated to liberty,” a more religious reading of the intended message, and there are those who believe that Lincoln made an impromptu alteration. Many reporters heard Lincoln say “this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom,” though the phrase “under God” occurs in neither draft of the text; Lincoln may have spontaneously inserted it—a sign of his growing religious consciousness during the last year of the war. In Lincoln's Sword, Doug las L. Wilson worries his way through the possibility, preserved in one of the drafts, that Lincoln referred not to “government of the people, by the people,” and so on, but to “this government of the people, by the people,” deliberately circumscribing the meaning.

  It is not hard to see, in this exegetical exactitude, something that recalls the attention that scholars give to fine- point disputes about the words and tales of Jesus and his apostles. This attention to verbal minutiae extends to the secondary figures in the Lincoln gospel, as it does to those in Jesus's gospel, even to Lincoln's Judas-Herod figure, John Wilkes Booth. Booth either did or did not say right before, just as, or shortly after he murdered the president,“Sic semper tyrannis,” the motto on the state flag of Virginia. Possibly he cried,“The South is avenged!” or“Revenge for the South,” and he cried this in the box, or on the stage, or paired with another cry. Of the forty or so reliable witnesses to the assassination whose accounts are collected in Timothy S. Good's We Saw Lincoln Shot, some sixteen heard the Latin or the English, only four heard both, and many said that they didn't hear the assassin say anything at all. Two witnesses heard Booth say, “I have done it!” Well, which was it? It is possible that he said only “Sic semper tyrannis,” onstage or off, and that the words were easily misheard by a stunned audience as “The South is avenged.” On the other hand, he may have cried out both and then added the gloating remark as he fled. But then why hadn't more people heard him?

  Booth himself, for whom the assassination was, as Swanson says, a kind of diabolical work of performance art, insisted on the “right” reading. “I shouted Sic semper before I fired,” he wrote a few days later in his own note, which he intended to be sent to the newspapers. One of the more pathetic- horrific aspects of the assassination was how desperate Booth was to read his notices in the next day's papers. Having tailored his performance to what he believed would be a shrewd public appeal—even Northerners would have doubts about Lincoln's absolutist claims to power— he was shocked to find that he had canonized a saint and been cast as a villain. (One of the odd things in American history is that we are inclined to “psychologize” acts of assassination that, whatever dark corner of the psyche they are torn from, are clearly and explicitly political in motive. Oswald shot Kennedy in an act of terrorism on behalf of Castro; Sirhan Sirhan killed Bobby Kennedy because he believed him to be pro- Israel; Booth killed Lincoln because Booth was a violent racist who thought that Lincoln would enfranchise blacks and that if he was dead this would be less likely to happen—as, indeed, it turned out to be.)

  And then there are the larger, less word- quibbling arguments over Lincoln's language. What did he mean by “disenthrall”? How angelic are “the better angels of our nature”? Who strikes those mystic chords of memory? What is the sense of “And the war came”? Did he say “this nation under God,” and if he did, was he being conventional or pointed? And how does one reconcile his 1862 statement “If I could save the Union without freeing any slave I would do it” with his later “if slavery is not wrong, nothing is wrong”?

  The tendency to obsess over single words and phrases reflects, in part, the semi- divine status of Lincoln in American history. It also reflects the strange shape of his public life. As it was for Jesus, the frame of action is limited, and its climax tragic—scarcely four years at the center of things and then a martyr's death. With long-lived figures, enough evidence, argument, apology, autobiography, memoir, and frail old- age memories usually emerge to blur an image into being—like a television picture, most of our visions of big men and women are made up of countless tiny lines and points of information and utterance emitted over a lifetime, shimmering and flickering together to give us at least the illusion of a fixed image. But with Lincoln, as with Jesus, the time frame is so short, and the words so concise, that we can master nearly the whole of the body of speeches and parables. Yet for all the brevity and lucidity we can't master the meaning of it all— there is something cryptic, still insufficiently explained, about the arc of the life. The lives are lucid and mysterious at the same time.

  The obsessive attention given to each utterance also reflects a desire to show that what he said was as essential to the meaning of his life (as again with Jesus) as were his orders and actions. Lincoln is less a figure made up of blended lines than one made up of a few key statements; he is, almost literally, a man of words. The Lincoln literature, bigger than any other, is also more literary in its focus on what academics call “rhetoric”—not just what someone says but the style with which he says it. In the past twenty- five years, and particularly since the publication of Garry Wills's Lincoln at Gettysburg, language and its uses have become a central Lincoln subject. (Wills, preceded by, among others, Van WyckBrooks, has been followed by, among others, Alfred Kazin and Douglas Wilson.)

  Lincoln was a man of his words. The first thing from his hand was a bit of doggerel verse, which he wrote, neatly, in a school-book when he was about eleven:

  Abraham Lincoln

  his hand and pen

  he will be good but

  god knows When

  Those words are, the scholars tell us, probably not original, one of those bits of schoolboy doggerel that nobody teaches and everyone learns (although no one has found any just like it, and Lincoln, young and old, loved to write rhymes, verse—so maybe the joke was his own). But more to the matter, they are a reminder of the single most important thing about the young Lincoln that we know: he loved to read and write.

  There is no greater divide in life than the one between kids for whom the experience of learning to read is a painful or tedious one, whose rewards are remote if real, and those for whom the experiences of reading and writing are addictive, entrancing, overwhelming, and so intense as to offer a new life of their own— those for whom the moment of learning to read begins a second life of letters as rich as the primary life of experience. Lincoln was as clear a case of that kind of child, and man, as anyone who has ever lived. His hand and pen were the axis of his existence even as he made his living, and his reputation, first from his body and later with his mouth. He lived to read, and the distaste that still shocks us a little in his attitude toward his father—that Tom wrote his name “bunglingly” still offended his steady- handed son years later—surely has its root in this simple cause. It w asn't that his father could barely read or write; it was that Tom failed to see the point of it for his son, couldn't see that it not only had what then was called “pecuniary value” but also had life purpose. “His hand and pen”—more than his mind and voice, more even than his heart and soul—are Lincoln, the reading mind turning the page, the writing fingers adding to the sum of the world's words. The irony, arresting and in a way poignant, is that Lincoln, a man of action—often murderous, uniquely decisive—was first of all a man of books and thoughts and a rueful humorist of their inability to mend men's ways, including his own. He would be good, though, and God, or Providence, or fate, or mere
ly the contingencies of history—it took him a lifetime to make up his mind which it was to be, and perhaps he never did—alone knew when.

  Lincoln, all his biographers agree, felt most alive as a boy when he was reading. Growing up in rural Indiana, in a society still largely illiterate, he fell on words as other boys fell on sweets. “Abe read all the books he could lay his hands on,” his beloved stepmother, Sarah Lincoln, who raised him after the death of his mother, recalled after his martyrdom, “and when he came across a passage that struck him he would write it down on boards if he had no paper and keep it there till he did get paper.” Most lists of what he read then fall on the obvious candidates, the schoolroom texts that his relatively well educated stepmother had brought with her to her marriage: The Pilgrim's Progress and Aesop's Fables and Benjamin Franklin's autobiography. But he absorbed as well a great deal of poetry, and he loved to repeat lugubrious bits of it for his friends. He even seems to have written and published a lugubrious poem in the Sangamo Journal and later sent a friend some samples of the kind of verse he liked to write, which, though not exactly Emily Dickinson, have a certain surprising sadness and a feel for the power of monosyllables that would later help him in his speechmaking. (“My child-hood home I see again, / And gladden with the view; / And still as mem'ries crowd my brain, / There's sadness in it too—”)