A short essay on the Springfield lawyer by the sage of Baltimore. H.L. Mencken muses on the mysteries of Lincoln.
Some time ago a publisher told me that there are four kinds of books that seldom, if ever, lose money in the United States—first, murder stories; secondly, novels in which the heroine is forcibly overcome by the hero; thirdly, volumes on spiritualism, occultism and other such claptrap, and fourthly, books on Lincoln.
This Washington Post writer seems to be a humorist rather than an editorial writer, but she acquits herself splendidly here, talking about the changing interpretation of Gettysburg’s battle, importance, and even the visitor’s center.
I particularly liked this passage:
This randomness is the part of military history that has always fascinated me. You miss a sunken road on your map, and Waterloo is a defeat instead of a victory. You misplace three cigars with orders wrapped around them, and Antietam suddenly grows more complicated. You shoot at what you take to be an enemy riding in the woods, and you have killed Stonewall Jackson. Hold the heights for an hour longer, for two hours longer, and the course of history shifts.
I wasn’t much of a fan of Lincoln
For the sake of simplicity, the film also makes Thaddeus Stevens the central radical figure organizing the amendment’s passage, even more so than the measure’s sponsor, Ashley. This is not how many historians characterize Stevens’s role. He was an important figure, but probably not the central one in securing passage of the Thirteenth Amendment. Stevens had only four index entries in Doris Kearns Goodwin’s Team of Rivals (2005), a nearly 800-page book from which the screenplay was adapted. Stevens plays a somewhat larger role in Michael Vorenberg’s more compact Final Freedom (2001) with seven index entries but even there he is clearly superseded by other figures such as Ashley and Senator Lyman Trumbull (R, IL), who is not even mentioned in the film. The latest and most comprehensive study of wartime abolition policies –James Oakes’s Freedom National (2012)– contains a mere six index entries for Stevens.
By contrast, Stevens (Tommy Lee Jones) has about 45 speaking parts in the Spielberg film, apparently second only to Abraham Lincoln(Scene 17). He looms large as a counter-weight to the president –Lincoln’s near opposite in both style and policy. Their confrontation in the White House kitchen is one of the movie’s most pivotal scenes and also arguably one of its most historically implausible. Besides the unlikely setting, scriptwriter Tony Kushner seems to be investing many older –and quite hostile– ideas about Stevens into this conversation which contrasts Lincoln’s calculated, pragmatic approach to Stevens’s rigid, ideological worldview. He actually has Stevens / Jones saying at one point, in defense of his sweeping plans for revolutionizing the South, ”Ah, shit on the people and what they want and what they are ready for! I don’t give a goddamn about the people and what they want! This is the face of someone who has fought long and hard for the good of the people without caring much for any of ‘em.”
via Blog Divided » Post Topic » How the “Lincoln” Movie Reconstructed Thaddeus Stevens.
Here’s one of those children of Civil War veterans I mentioned in an article a while back. Fascinating to get a glimpse of the pension process; making sure in 1929 that no oath of allegiance to the Union was sworn in the 1860s.
Lindsey didn’t apply for a state pension from Florida based on his Civil War experience until he was in his 70s because he felt it was his responsibility to provide for his family, Goodspeed said. The process was slow because it was difficult to find witnesses to his brief period of service so long ago.
The official paperwork approved in 1929 required Lindsey to swear he “did not desert nor take the oath of allegiance to the United States before the close of war.”
Lindsey died at the age of 87 in December 1932. The original stipend of $40 per month was important to Minnie, who never remarried and raised her family on Lindsey’s farm. As time passed and the number of survivors decreased, the monthly allocation increased.
On October 19th, I mentioned the anniversary of Whose Father Was He?, the Philadelphia Inquirer’s story about Amos Humiston, whose body was found on the Gettysburg body clutching a photo of his children. Today is the anniversary of Mrs. Humiston’s response to the Inquirer, and for those interested in reading more about the tragedy of Amos Humiston and his children, I present the five-part history written by documentary filmmaker Errol Morris for the New York Times:
It’s Presidents’ Week, so what better time to learn about the 16th President? Regardless of your interest level, there’s something out there for you: This article says there are over 14000 books about Abraham Lincoln
“There are so many Lincoln geeks that buy everything new that comes out,” says Cathy Langer, the lead book buyer at the Tattered Cover Book Store in Denver. She adds that in her years as a buyer, she has rarely turned down a title about the 16th president…
“The Lincoln canon is exhaustive, but it’s inexhaustible,” says Mr. Holzer. “And the amazing thing is that every important book inspires three more in the way of commentary or disagreement or embellishment.”
In my podcast, Paying for the War, I made mention of two living Americans who, as the children of Civil War vets, are still getting their fathers’ pensions. I had no idea there were other living children of vets beyond the pensioners. Incredible to think they’re bridging a 150 year gap.
Hugh Tudor, born in 1847, served in the US Army from 1864 through the end of the war. In his seventies, he married and had two daughters. The younger of them, Juanita Tudor Lowrey, was born in 1926. Shes still alive…
via This Womans Father Fought in the American Civil War – Neatorama.
The Atlantic published an excerpt from A Rebel’s Recollections that provides an interesting, rambling take on the Upper South’s (specifically Virginia’s, in this case) reasons for entering the war. In summary, the writer suggests they were bullied into it by the planter states, with some propaganda and misinformation thrown in for emphasis.
Why, then, the reader doubtless asks, if this was the temper of the Virginians, did Virginia secede after all? I answer, because circumstances ultimately so placed the Virginians that they could not, without cowardice and dishonor, do otherwise; and the Virginians are brave men and honorable ones. They believed, as I have said, in the abstract right of any State to secede at will. Indeed, this right was to them as wholly unquestioned and unquestionable as is the right of the States to establish free schools, or to do any other thing pertaining to local self-government. The question of the correctness or incorrectness of the doctrine is not now to the purpose. The Virginians, almost without an exception, believed and had always believed it absolutely, and believing it, they held of necessity that the general government had no right, legal or moral, to coerce a seceding State; and so, when the President called upon Virginia for her quota of troops with which to compel the return of the seceding States, she could not possibly obey without doing that which her people believed to be an outrage upon the rights of sister commonwealths, for which, as they held, there was no warrant in law or equity.
She heartily condemned the secession of South Carolina and the rest as unnecessary, ill-advised, and dangerous; but their secession did not concern her except as a looker-on, and she had not only refused to be a partaker in it, but had also felt a good deal of indignation against the men who were thus endangering the peace of the land. When she was called upon to assist in reducing these States to submission, however, she could no longer remain a spectator. She must furnish the troops, and so assist in doing that which she believed to be utterly wrong, or she must herself withdraw from the Union. The question was thus narrowed down to this: Should Virginia seek safety in dishonor, or should she meet destruction in doing that which she believed to be right? Such a question was not long to be debated. Two days after the proclamation was published Virginia seceded, not because she wanted to secede, – not because she believed it wise, – but because, as she understood the matter, the only other course open to her would have been cowardly and dishonorable.
I have always taken issue with the Southern Cause (capital C) – it’s difficult, as a modern-day moderate, to understand why anyone could offer themselves up to “die of a theory” (stealing a quote from Jefferson Davis). This bitter paragraph, and that brutal last line, is an excellent summation of my own thoughts:
With all its horrors and in spite of the wretchedness it has wrought, this war of ours, in some of its aspects at least, begins to look like a very ridiculous affair, now that we are getting too far away from it to hear the rattle of the musketry; and I have a mind, in this chapter, to review one of its most ridiculous phases, to wit, its beginning. We all remember Mr. Webster’s pithy putting of the case with regard to our forefathers of a hundred years ago: “They went to war against a preamble. They fought seven years against a declaration. They poured out their treasures and their blood like water, in a contest in opposition to an assertion.” Now it seems to me that something very much like this might be said of the Southerners, and particularly of the Virginians, without whose pluck and pith there could have been no war at all worth writing or talking about. They made war upon a catch-word, and fought until they were hopelessly ruined for the sake of an abstraction.
via A Rebel’s Recollections (Part 1) – George Cary Eggleston – The Atlantic.
As explored in Drew Gilpin Faust’s book, This Republic of Suffering, the Civil War brought about a change in American funerary customs. This article puts a morbid little bow on the rise of embalming during the war.
Just as one Springfield citizen introduced the nation to embalming at the start of the Civil War, another Springfield citizen, Abraham Lincoln, became its highest-profile example at the war’s close. In between, approximately 40,000 soldiers underwent this process, which had been all but unknown just five years earlier. Holmes went on to be known as the “father of modern embalming,” and Elmer Ellsworth can rightly be remembered not only as the first Union casualty of the Civil War, but also the man who introduced the nation to embalming.
A connection issue at work is giving me a few minutes to reconnect with my blog. Here’s a fun Disunion article about Civil War undies.
In any case, boiling underwear could get a man into hot water. When Gen. Thomas Lanier Clingman of North Carolina wrote his mother to send drawers, she answered back, “I am certain that your flannel is injured by washing. It should not be put in very hot water or boiled at all,” and it should be washed in “moderately warm water with soap and rinsed in warm soap suds, which will keep it soft and free from shrinking. At least, you can direct your washer to do so.” General Clingman was 50 years old when his mom told him how to wash his underwear.