Further Adventures in Lincolniana

As happens every year or so, I've been on another Lincoln kick. Last summer I revisited the Lincoln Museum in Springfield, as well as various other places, including his house, his tomb, and the church he attended (which has a fabulous Brombaugh organ I was permitted to play).

Why should one particular historical figure prove so persistently compelling? This post provides sufficient explanation. One gets, in Lincoln, the sense of a truly moral man, perhaps the closest thing to a saint that secular American society has produced.

An aside: though the evidence suggests that Lincoln could not really be considered a Christian in any orthodox sense, his language owes an incalculable debt to the Authorised Version. We, in this age of literary and spiritual decline, are much impoverished for not being a referential culture. (Or, if we have broadly-shared references, they are generally from popular movies and other light entertainment.) Discourse in the nineteenth century was permeated with references to Scripture, and Lincoln's speeches are no exception. In losing any societal sense of a shared literary or religious corpus, we are cut off from the conversation with the dead that must inform real conservatism (in its original and best sense).

I'll recommend here an instructive book: Lincoln in Photographs. In my more optimistic moments, I like to think that Lincoln's face is iconic not merely because it is on our currency, nor because it so strikingly homely, but because we can intuït on it the markings of a great soul — melancholic but confident, resigned but determined, defined by a generous sense of humor and an iron will.

Oh, and spare a thought, kind reader, for Mary Todd Lincoln. Much-maligned, temperamentally unable to perform her prescribed rôle, marked by tragedies both minor and cataclysmic, hers was in many ways an unenviäble life. She went insane, but for very good reasons.