by Lydia Davis
Before the 1860 election he was undecided, so hitched up his horse and traveled to Springfield, Illinois. There he waited all afternoon in the outer office while pleaders for appointments made their pitch. Then Lincoln, learning how far he had traveled just to give disinterested thought to his vote, invited him home to spend the evening. At the end of the visit Grandpa stood below his tall host on the porch steps saying goodbye. Looking up at Lincoln he said, according to the story, “I hope you will stand as far above the other presidents in history as you stand above the common man in stature.”
She goes on to comment, “I myself never heard any such eloquence from Grandpa. By the time I knew him he was as economical with his words as with his money.”
The last version comes from the newspaper obituary published at the time of his death. This is perhaps the most dependable version, since the writer was a trained journalist who had interviewed Bent directly. But perhaps it is not, since that interview had taken place a few years before, and the writer was remembering the facts as best he could. The journalist places the meeting with Lincoln before the date that my mother gives, at a time when, according to him, Bent was still living in New York State:
Owing to the death of his father and the poor health of his eldest brother, Clinton DeWitt was early called upon to manage the home farm in New York. During this period he came to Chicago to attend a political convention and went from there to Springfield, Illinois, where he also attended a convention. After the convention he was invited by Mr. Abe Lincoln to go home with him for supper and he was entertained for several hours by Mr. and Mrs. Lincoln. In speaking of this visit a few years ago to the writer, Mr. Bent said that at that time he was greatly impressed by Mr. Lincoln and after enjoying his hospitality for several hours he bade him good bye with words something like this as nearly as he can remember: “Mr. Lincoln I thank you for your kindness and some day this nation is going to hear from you.”
In this version, the rhetorical flourish at the end is reduced to a plain understatement, more in keeping with the character of the man as my mother remembered him. But there is no question of simply “hitching up his horse” to go this distance. In fact, when I imagine it, I wonder that a busy farmer and father of three children would travel from New York State all the way to Illinois to attend a political convention.
I had thought there was a fifth version, but then my own memory is not entirely reliable. I may be imagining a fifth, or it may exist and I may still come across it. In fact, a fifth version is the one produced by my own faulty memory. After only a few months without looking at the other versions, my memory had already worked its own changes, and my story was that Bent had traveled not from New York State, but from his home in Iowa, and that he had looked in on Lincoln in Springfield because he happened to be nearby at a livestock market. Why I supplied a livestock market in place of a political convention I don’t know, unless it seemed more likely—perhaps by then I knew that he had also at one time raised animals, before specializing in fruit.
2.
On the other side of my family there is another chain reaching back to Lincoln, this time via three handclasps and the touch of Lincoln’s hand, not upon an ancestor’s hand but upon his own hat brim as his eyes rested, at least, on the eyes of that admiring ancestor. The ancestor leaves behind two descriptions of what amount to sightings of the president.
Sidney Brooks was my father’s great-great-uncle, or, to give the links of the generations as they more naturally came together, my father’s grandfather’s uncle. He was born in 1813, four years before Grandpa Bent. A tall man with a pleasant face and a more agreeable personality than Grandpa Bent, he was described by friends, in tributes paid after his death, as modest, diffident, cordial, full of intellectual and natural curiosity, entertaining, and a fine and dedicated teacher. Although his family, which lived in the town of Harwich on Cape Cod, was more inclined toward mercantile and banking concerns than education, he himself felt a strong compulsion to go on with his schooling, and his father agreed to support him in his desire, though ready cash for such a thing was scarce. And so, at the age of twenty—not so unusual in those days—Sidney enrolled in Phillips Academy at Andover. To get there from his home in Harwich, he had to go either by fishing boat or by the “Brewster Packet” around the Cape to Boston and then by stagecoach overland. After completing his studies at Andover, he went on to Amherst College, graduating in the class of 1841 at the rather advanced age (by our standards, probably not theirs) of twenty-eight. (The last part of his trip to Amherst, later, was also by stagecoach, in this case from Worcester.)
After he graduated, Sidney returned to the Cape and worked for three years as a schoolteacher, then founded and built his own seminary in Harwich. After twenty successful and fulfilling years directing the school and teaching, he was forced, for financial reasons that have not been explained, to leave the seminary, selling it to the town. With his wife and fellow teacher he went off to take charge of a school ship anchored in Boston Harbor called the George M. Barnard, on which the pupils learned the arts of navigation and the handling of a ship. School ships at the time could function either as reformatories for juvenile delinquents or simply as secure training institutions for poor boys who would otherwise roam the streets. It is not clear which sort Sidney’s ship was. His friends variously refer to the pupils as “rough boys” and “waifs.” Sidney calls them “bad boys,” but we don’t know how seriously he means it. Certainly he misses his seminary and refers to himself as being “imprisoned” in the school ship.
Before occupying his new position, however, he had a brief experience of the Civil War. Being fifty-one years old, he was exempt from military duty but wished to give more personal service in the defense of “our Country’s rights and human emancipation.” He therefore joined, in July 1864, the U.S. Christian Commission, a northern civilian organization of volunteers funded mainly by donations from local church congregations and providing the soldiers with food, clothing, medicines, and bandages as well as spiritual sustenance. Communications being what they were, he and his group of fifteen or twenty journeyed all the way to the Gettysburg area by train and wagon before finding out that not all of them were needed there. Most of the wounded soldiers, besides, were Confederate, and Sidney evidently hoped to have a chance to tend his own townsmen. He therefore joined a contingent that went on, or back, to Washington, D.C., where they were needed. This is where he had the good fortune, as he clearly regarded it, of seeing Lincoln at first hand, though from a distance.
His opinion of Lincoln, and that of most of his fellow townsmen, may be inferred from one of his descriptions, in the memoir he left, of the years leading up to the war:
And now the thrilling events of ’61 drew crowds to the Post Office at every arrival of the mail, and now the newspaper was sought at the close of school and the evenings consumed in reading and telling the news. Then our Sabbath day services and our Fast Day services were more solemn and fervent than usual, then the heaven-directed acts of President Lincoln began to be admired and discussed and his noble qualities to shine forth.
It surely would have appealed to Sidney that Lincoln was a man of simple habits. It would have appealed to both Grandpa Bent and Sidney that the president was a devout Christian and supporter of the cause of temperance, rarely touching alcohol himself—since Sidney, like Bent, was to become a committed advocate of temperance and eventually a prohibitionist.
While in Washington, Sidney wrote home regularly to his wife, sometimes using a barrel head as a desk. His letters would have been of interest to all his family and shared among them—his wife, his older brother, his four sisters, three of whom still lived at home (only one, Sarah, did not approve of Lincoln, whose religious beliefs differed from hers in what she felt were important respects). A series of these letters was also published in the local Harwich Republican. He reported both encounters with Lincoln in the same letter, dated July 25, 1864. (A barouche was a four-wheeled, horse-drawn carriage;
horse cars were streetcars pulled by horses; and the platform on which he stepped out was the open-air platform at the back of the streetcar.)
The first encounter:
July 25. I had been seeking an opportunity to see the President. He goes out to his country residence every night, and the road that he takes is the same by which I go to my hospital. He was sometimes too fast and sometimes too slow for me. He rides in a barouche, escorted by 20 men finely mounted on black horses. Riding home in the horse cars one night some little frolicsome girls in the car exclaimed, “Uncle Abe.” I roused up just in time to see the tail end of his cavalcade. The next time I did better, saw him coming, stepped out upon the rear platform, looked straight into the barouche where were both the President and his wife. He touched his hat to me, but I was so intent on my object that I forgot all propriety and did nothing but gaze. He is as thin as a hatchet, but really a good looking man.
Since Sidney was, to judge from his own narration of his life and from the testimonials offered by friends, conscientious and naturally courteous, his forgetting his manners on this occasion shows the extent to which a famous or prominent figure ceases to be entirely a human being, but is reduced to something of an object, even to a person of sensitivity. Also striking, of course, are Lincoln’s accessibility and the affection of the “frolicsome girls” who call him Uncle Abe.
His accessibility and that of the White House are even more startling in Sidney’s second account, in which he sees the president leave the White House to set off with his cavalcade. Sidney’s word piazzi is one he uses elsewhere, too, eccentrically, for what we call a portico or colonnade. His description of the “negro” should be seen in the following context: he and his fellow Harwich townspeople were generally abolitionist and for the previous nearly twenty years had been holding lively debates about the slavery issue. Sidney himself called slavery a “disgrace” and described enjoying the company of one Mr. Jones, “a colored man of the deepest hue and a noble Christian” who “lectured in the Church and enlightened us much on the cruelties of the system.” He speaks with respect of Mr. Jones, though with high awareness of the unresolved issues of a black man’s acceptance into white society: “Mr. Jones was more than once a guest of ours, nor did my wife object to his sitting at our table and at receiving his benediction.” The black man in the following passage, as he depicts him, is presented as more picturesque. As for the White House, it was an earlier, far more modest version of the present building, and was described by a contemporary journalist, Noah Brooks (no relation to Sidney), as being open to “the multitude, washed or unwashed” for their “free egress and ingress”—in fact, certain members of the public, on visits to the place, were so bold as to snip off bits of curtains, curtain pulls, and even carpet in order to carry them home as souvenirs. Sidney writes:
Last Saturday I took it more leisurely. Leaving my hospital at 4 o’clock I visited the White House. Went into the “East Room” which is always accessible and the “Green Room” which leads out of it. The East Room is very magnificent. Very rich looking paper covers the walls. Eight or ten very large mirrors, three splendid chandeliers and a carpet, patterned expressly for the room, are the prominent features in the picture of it now in my mind’s eye. I was very much pleased with the White House. From the avenue it appears like a plain moderate size mansion. It was not until I had paced it in front that I could form a correct idea of its size. It is 180 feet in the main body. Shrubbery and trees of most graceful form crowd close around the front side which faces a beautiful lawn sloping and undulating to the Potomac.
While I was there the escort of cavalry arrived. The President’s carriage was brought up under the lofty piazzi and quite a crowd of persons with the same object that I had gathered around.
A pleasant episode to the main performance occurred, which, as it shows so plainly the character of President Lincoln I will describe. A very tall and intelligent looking negro[,] very black, with large and dusty feet, supporting himself with a very long walking stick, an excellent model as I thought for a painter or sculptor, walked up the steps, across the spacious area under the piazzi to the door and wished an interview with the President. The porter haughtily turned him off, stating the utter impossibility of his seeing him at that time. Apparently pacified, he sat down in a distant corner. The horsemen were drawn up, the Captain, ready to give the word of command, the President took his seat in the carriage. To the surprise of all, at that instant the tall negro was on the opposite side[,] his arm already around the back of the seat[,] leaning over in the most familiar manner. The President told the driver to hold on, gave the negro a moment of patient attention[,] smiled and replied in a gracious manner. The negro seemed to urge his case, the President began to gesture with one hand as he spoke as if to convince the applicant that he could do nothing in the matter, then he raised both hands and very emphatically but very kindly repeated his gesture with both hands, ordered his man to drive on, saluted the crowd and was off. A burst of admiration arose from the company, [the negro] appeared greatly pleased, and we all retired feeling, I am sure, that another good lesson had been learnt.
It is not perfectly clear what lesson Sidney believed had been learned from this episode—perhaps something more about Lincoln’s patience or evenhandedness. It is interesting that what moved the spectators, evidently, was Lincoln’s manner of refusing a petition and dismissing the petitioner, and that even the disappointed petitioner appeared pleased.
Sidney evidently wrote both descriptions down almost immediately, or at least within a few days. He is so particular about the details that it is hard not to believe they are correct. What they add to our knowledge of Abe Lincoln is another matter.
* * *
The two men from the two sides of the family, Grandpa Bent and Sidney, were both intent on meeting or seeing President Lincoln, but their motives, springing directly from their different characters, were not the same. Grandpa Bent had a certain righteous sense of his own position and power as an informed citizen and voter and wished to interview Lincoln to see whether Lincoln met his standards of probity and integrity. His persistence was rewarded by a visit of several hours in Lincoln’s home, which satisfied him. Sidney was more modest in his sense of himself and his rights and already convinced of Lincoln’s worth; he wished only to lay eyes directly on a man he admired as a leader of strength and conviction whose beliefs coincided with his own. There is always a fascination exerted by the physical person of a prominent political figure, especially a U.S. president, even if he is a mediocre or bad one. In this case the president was a great or at least a good one (except in the opinion of some, including Sidney’s sister Sarah).
2006
“Paring Off the Amphibologisms”:
Jesus Recovered by the Jesus Seminar
The beginning of the path that led me to The Five Gospels is as hard to discover as the beginning of a goat or cow path in a meadow, but somewhere along the way was a reading of Ben Franklin’s Autobiography and then William Cobbett’s utopian descriptions of self-sufficient farming, eventually a videotape in the BBC series Civilisation about the eighteenth century and the Enlightenment, specifically the figure of the inventor, the revolutionary, the independent thinker (including the unaccredited amateur versus the professional and academic), and Thomas Jefferson. There was Monticello, which he designed himself, inspired by a French model, the Hôtel de Salm in Paris, and excited particularly by the idea of the one-story facade concealing two stories. There were the farm implements he modernized (he won a gold medal from the Société d’agriculture du département de la Seine at Paris for his improved mold-board plow). There was his seven-field crop rotation system. His botanical experiments. His design for his bedroom and study suite, with his bed in the middle so that he could get out on either side. What characterized him through most of his projects, much of the time, it would seem, was confidence in his own abilities and independence of thinking, independence from the norm, the accepted, a readiness
to question the received, the conventional. He must have been moved by some dissatisfaction, nonacceptance—dissatisfaction with this conventional desk, with this grand staircase—and also by the pure pleasure in doing the thing himself, in poiein, “making.” His house was always in progress, with piles of wood around, treacherous catwalks, and half-lit narrow stairs. It was this spirit that put him at the center of the declaration of a radical break from England, though it took Thomas Paine’s Common Sense to convince him, among others, to make the move.
It was in the same spirit that he approached the Bible. Dissatisfied with it as it read, he decided to reduce it “to the simple Evangelists” and even from them to select “the very words only of Jesus,” those parts that seemed to him the true teachings of Jesus. He cut passages out of his Bible and pasted them into a blank book to form a coherent work, The Life and Morals of Jesus of Nazareth, for his own use. This project he carried out while he was president, in the evenings before he went to sleep, and worked on further at Monticello. He was pleased with the result, though reluctant to advertise very widely what he had done. (The Federalists already viewed him as irreligious.) He wrote to a friend, “I am … averse to the communication of my religious tenets to the public, because it would countenance the presumption of those who have endeavoured to draw them before that tribunal, and to seduce public opinion to erect itself into that inquest over the rights of conscience, which the laws have so justly proscribed.”