Dissent Magazine reviews without reviewing Harold Holzer’s book on the Lincoln Monument sculptor, Daniel Chester French. No complaints here – they’ve offered an interesting article.

It was within this neoclassical setting, inspired by the Parthenon, that French had to place his Lincoln. For a brief time, there was talk of installing an enlarged version of Saint-Gaudens’s Standing Lincoln, inside Bacon’s Memorial, and French himself entertained the idea of sculpting a version of the Lincoln he had done for the Nebraska Capitol. But soon it became clear to Bacon and French that only an original statue of Lincoln would be suitable for the Lincoln Memorial rising on the National Mall.

What French arrived at was a concept entirely different from the Lincolns that he and Saint-Gaudens had already done. French’s Lincoln was no longer a politician pondering the future. He was a president sure of the future. “What I wanted to convey was the mental and physical strength of the great war President and his confidence in his ability to carry the thing through to a successful finish,” French would say. His decision to portray a transcendent Lincoln gazing at the capitol at the other end of the mall reflected this view, and so did the scale of his statue, which stood nineteen feet high and weighed over two hundred tons. Had French’s Lincoln risen from his chair, he would have been thirty feet tall.

Source: Making the Monument | Dissent Magazine

I try to avoid Fox “News” stories, but this one is intriguing and well-presented. West Virginia has made a push to connect Civil War veterans’ descendants with their ancestors medals.

A year after the Civil War ended, West Virginia authorized the minting of more than 26,000 medals to honor the state’s soldiers that served in the Union Army. More than 150 years later, however, thousands of those medals are still unclaimed.

Randy Marcum, a historian at the West Virginia State Archives, told Fox News that 3,392 medals remain in the state’s possession. A large number of Civil War veterans, he explained, were simply unaware of their existence, as were generations of their descendants.

“A lot of these folks, straight after the war, they went out West,” he said, noting that the newly created state of West of Virginia was a turbulent place in the immediate aftermath of the Civil War. While more than 26,0000 West Virginians served in the Union ranks, it is estimated that over 10,000 served in the Confederacy’s forces.

Source: Civil War puzzle: West Virginia urges veterans’ descendants to collect thousands of unclaimed medals | Fox News

A brief but interesting article about the history of handshaking, with particular emphasis on Lincoln’s use of it as a political tool. Amazing to think that something as commonplace as handshaking has a history!

Lincoln was a prodigious handshaker, and it added to his reputation as an egalitarian, common man, one literally and figuratively in touch with the people.

A marathon handshaking session in New York in February 1861 as president-elect left him with hurt hands. Just after his election as president, according to J. G. Holland in 1866, Lincoln met with crowds whose “hand-shaking … was something fearful” with “Every man in the crowd … anxious to wrench the hand of Abraham Lincoln. He finally gave both hands to the work, with great good nature.”

Source: Abraham Lincoln, Joe Biden and the politics of touch