by Adam Gopnik
After Annie's death, Darwin abandoned the remaining vestiges of Christian faith, the last preference for even Unitarian theology, and became, essentially, a stoic. He believed that the contemplation of the immensity of time, and the repertory of feelings, was all that was left to us. There was no inherent meaning in Annie's dying at ten, except the recognition that mortality was the rule of existence; serenity could be found only in the contemplation of the vast indifference of the universe. It is a stoic's vision of the world and a father's elegy for a favorite child, taken for no reason at all save the world's fatality, defying the world in her happiness, gone for good.
CHAPTER THREE
LINCOLN IN HISTORY
BACK TO THE RUBBER ROOM, WHAT MIGHT THE WORDS MEAN?
WHERE THE ANGELS BEGAN
TANNER, A LIMB-SHORT SHORT-HAND MAN
WHAT WERE THE BETTER ANGELS OF OUR NATURE? WHAT HAD CHANGED? • THE WAR AND A NEW CULT OF MEMORY
IN THE MOURNING STORE; NEW KINDS OF GRIEF
FROM VERTICAL TO HORIZONTAL, HEAVEN TO HISTORY
WILLIE'S DEATH IN 1862; IN THE MIDST OF LOSS WE ARE IN GRIEF
MOST VEXED OF QUESTIONS, LINCOLN'S FAITH
EARLY UNBELIEF, AND THE WAR—TURN TOWARD PROVIDENCE
THE ARGUMENT OF THE SECOND INAUGURAL
A DARKER VISION THAN WE KNOW • GOD'S WILL BE DONE
LINCOLN IN SUMMER, THE SOLDIERS’ HOME LINCOLN, STANTON, AND THE PEACOCKS
TRACKING THE AGES, A SOURCE IN THE PARANOID STYLE
“HELP, ANGELS! MAKE ASSAY!”
THE PROBLEM OF LIBERAL VIOLENCE
A FINAL VISIT TO THE BEDROOM
But what did Edwin Stanton really say at Lincoln's deathbed? Having traveled this far along the road, you can, I hope, begin to get a glimpse of the kinds of worlds of feeling and implication that were at stake—or at least at play—in that anxious and overheard epitaph. Angels orages? Confidence in the eternal life, which most people had believed credible until a few decades before? Or a new esteem for the power of history to make things happen and to act as the sounding board for our actions? These were themes that ran through the time, and marked the beginning of ours.
But it doesn't get us any closer to knowing what was really said. Setting out on the long trail of endnotes and footnotes, one is led to Jay Winik's book on the end of the Civil War, April 1865. His endnotes lead one, eventually, to Twenty Days, by Dorothy Meserve Kunhardt and Philip B. Kunhardt Jr., a well-made book of photographs from the 1860s, which in turn leads the reader directly to the ur- source of the angels. The unorthodox, heretical account of Stanton's words is actually much easier to “source” than the canonical and orthodox and familiar one: it comes from a stenographic record made in the bedroom that night by a young man named James Tanner.
Tanner was a corporal who had had both legs amputated after the Second Battle of Bull Run—he walked on peg legs—and lived in the house next door to the boardinghouse, Petersen's, where Lincoln was taken. Sometime that night, as Stanton was beginning to interrogate witnesses to the shooting, one of his generals appeared on the steps of the Petersen house and called out for someone who could write shorthand. Tanner heard him and hobbled down to take dictation. He spent the rest of the night beside the dying president.
Shorthand is one of the forces that were reducing the intensity of the rhetorical and oratorical society—the society of speaking— that Lincoln had grown up within. The habits of that society— the big political meetings, the multihour addresses, the picnics and the parades climaxed by speechmaking—would linger on for decades, as habits always do. (Nothing has so much stamina as a dated social ritual, as parents of postmodern teens going out on prom night can attest.)
The scene in the famous “rubber room”—because, again, in the endless prints and other popular images, the walls of the room expand constantly, pressed by the number of dignitaries who had to be included—was uglier than even the more faithful imagery shows. Lincoln's head wound was bleeding throughout the night, and the doctors had to remember to cover up the blood with fresh towels when Mrs. Lincoln, fallen into a grief from which she never really recovered, wandered in. Lincoln was laid diagonally across the too- short bed, knees up, and naked underneath the mustard plasters that had been placed on his chest.
Stanton took charge, dictating messages and taking evidence, with Tanner pressed into service as his secretary. At last, at 7:22 in the morning, Tanner writes:
The Reverend Dr. Gurley stepped forward and lifting his hands began “Our Father and our God” and I snatched pencil and notebook from my pocket, but my haste defeated my purpose. My pencil point (I had but one) caught in my coat and broke, and the world lost the prayer, a prayer that was only interrupted by the sobs of Stanton as he buried his face in the bedclothes. As “Thy will be done, Amen” in subdued and tremulous tones floated through the little chamber, Mr. Stanton raised his head, the tears streaming down his face. A more agonized expression I never saw on a human countenance as he sobbed out the words: “He belongs to the angels now.”
Note, though, that while Tanner presumably heard all this, he didn't actually claim (as is sometimes implied in the pro- angels literature) to have recorded it in situ, what with the broken pencil. Still, his account, the ur- source of the “angels” quotation, sounds fairly solid.
What would those angels have summoned forth to the “Lincoln men” standing by the president's deathbed? The imagery of angels seems to have entered Lincoln's own rhetoric for the first time when he was revising William Seward's proposals for his first inaugural. Seward, soon to be secretary of state, had, with what must have been maddening condescension, slipped the president- elect a letter detailing what he ought to say to the country. It included a vague, conventional reference to the “guardian angel” of the nation. Lincoln seized on that reference and turned it into one of his most memorable rhetorical inventions, the “better angels of our nature,” which might yet keep the country from war. The force of the rhetoric is such that its meaning can still be a bit obscure: North and South would not go to war, Lincoln was arguing, because of their common sense of a shared past. Lincoln's own angels already belong to history, to the ages.
WhenWashington died, the imagery employed in the outpouring of memorial art was all angels—angels lifting his deathbed to the heavens, over and over, again and again. This imagery was surely understood to be in part just symbolic. But it retained its power. A deist invocation for Washington—“Now he belongs to the deity” or “returns to Nature”—is conceivable. But it is hard to imagine anyone referring Washington's legacy only to the ages, to history, and not to heaven at all.
What had changed things, made history matter so much, was the war. Lincoln's was not the only deathbed in which a man cut down by a bullet in the cause of the North became the subject of a disputed memorial, an argument for an epitaph, an uncertainty in summing up—it was only the most important one. The background to that little room where Lincoln lay dying was the war that had just ended. As the historian Drew Gilpin Faust has shown, disputes over what to do about the dead—what to say, and how to remember them, how to honor and recall them—had been part of the sour cultural fruit of the past four years. The scale of the killing between 1861 and 1865 had forced throughout the country a new cult of memory—a new set of social rituals, some rooted in the Bible but many intensely secular, the rituals of republican mourning. These rituals—the response to the mass killing, from military cemeteries, neatly rowed, to a taste for tight-lipped prose, to the embalming fluid developed at the time by Yankee ingenuity to preserve dead bodies on their way home from the battlefield—still run through our veins.
The war had been expected to be if not a romp, then at least a rout, but turned out to be a bloody war of attrition, in which defensive firepower so overwhelmed the offense that—at Antie -tam and Fredericksburg and the Wilderness—soldiers mostly just stood there and watched each other die. At Shiloh, in 1862, the battle cost something like twenty- four thousand ca
sualties; Gettysburg, in 1863, claimed twenty- three thousand casualties on the Union side alone; the South lost somewhere between twenty-four thousand and twenty- eight thousand. By the spring of 1864, Grant's losses in slightly more than a single month approached fifty thousand.
The killing was horrifying in its suddenness: eighteen- year-olds were ripped apart at close quarters by minié balls, or shot down in the middle of normal drill by tree- infesting snipers. There is no pleasant way to die in battle, but presumably a Byzantine ax bearer or an Anglo- Norman longbowman in Henry V's train would have had some belief that his individual courage or resourcefulness could help him control the outcome. The Civil War battlefield was pure Russian, or Virginian, roulette; you walked out and prayed that your bullet didn't come up. S.H.M. Byers of Iowa remembered one terrible battle where “lines of blue and gray” stood “close together and fire[d] into each other's faces for an hour and a half.”
Organized massacre—men advancing to their deaths through close rifle fire—was the rule of battle, chaotic massacre the rule of its aftermath. The war had not been a neat epic of blue and gray but four years of terror and cruelty and violence. (With all the gallantry of an Einsatzgruppe on the eastern front, the gentlemen of the South set about killing black soldiers indiscriminately. “Private Harry Bird reported that Confederates after the Battle of the Crater in 1864 quieted wounded black soldiers begging for water ‘by a bayonet thrust.’ … Bird welcomed the subsequent order ‘to kill them all’; it was a command ‘well and willingly … obeyed.’ General Robert E. Lee, only a few hundred yards away, did nothing to intervene.”) After Antietam, a Union surgeon reported, “The dead were almost wholly unburied [and] stretched along, in one straight line, ready for interment, at least a thousand blackened, bloated corpses with blood and gas protruding from every orifice, and maggots holding high carnival over their heads.” The rotting dead turned blue, then black. “Not a purplish discoloration, such as I had imagined in reading of the ‘blackened corpses,’ so often mentioned in descriptions of battlegrounds, but a deep bluish black, giving to a corpse with black hair the appearance of a negro,” a Gettysburg veteran observed.
To deal with these horrors, a new set of social rituals, designed not so much to “blind” survivors to the reality as to make them believe that the reality was necessary and noble, had come into being. The work of mourning became the business of capitalism, merchandised throughout a society. In the spring of 1863, Lord andTaylor in New York, down on Ladies’ Mile, opened a “mourning store,” where the new widows of the Civil War could dress their grief in suitable fashion. Some idea of what they shopped for is apparent from the inventory advertised by Besson and Son, in Philadelphia, a mourning store of the same period: “Black Crape Grenadines—Black Balzerines—Black Baryadere Bareges—Black Bareges.” The national mourning store included, of course, inspirational poems and high rhetoric, along with that new practice of embalming with zinc chloride, which “marbleizes” flesh and allowed some of the dead, at least, to travel home for burial in recognizable shape. (There was a secondary market in icebox coffins, for the same purpose. An advertisement was inserted in the Gettysburg paper soon after the battle for “transportation cases”: “Preserves the Body in a natural and perfect condition … for any distance or length of time.”)
Amplifying the new rituals, and democratizing them, were the recent inventions of the telegraph and the photograph. The telegraph meant that news of a battle, with the terrifying “lists,” was available in a timely way. One hadn't consigned one's son or husband to a hades on earth from which he might or might not emerge years later; one would know, and soon. For the soldier, there were new kinds of photographs—tintype, daguerreotype, ambrotype—that made those left behind more real and constant; many soldiers died clutching photographs of their families. One of the most storied deaths of the war was that of Amos Humiston, a Yankee soldier felled at Gettysburg, who was found with an ambrotype of three children in his hands but no other identification. “The ultimately successful effort to identify him created a sensation, with magazine and newspaper articles, poems, and songs celebrating the devoted father, who perished with his eyes and heart focused on eight- year- old Franklin, six- year- old Alice, and four- year- old Frederick,” as Drew Faust writes. In an irony that the postmodernists would appreciate, Humiston was most famously commemorated, clutching that photograph, in a Frank Leslie's Illustrated woodcut.
All of this was taking place within the larger tide whose force we've seen already in the lives of both Lincoln and Darwin, a changing belief in the centrality of family life—the same social forces that had led the Lincoln family, over one generation, from log cabin to big bourgeois house. Unlike the European practice of war, where peasant and proletarian infantrymen—largely detached from their families, who had long since given them up to the army and its institutions—and a tiny cadre of professional officers fought professional battles with a professional code of soldiering, in the American Civil War the soldier was often embedded in an ongoing family life. He hadn't enlisted as a teenager and then been lost to the Continent and the empire. He had gone to fight in Virginia for Ohio or Pennsylvania. His parents and siblings were waiting for him. The Civil War took place in a time, and in a country, where “modern” feelings of attachment to the immediate family were not just ascendant but aggressively honored, more, perhaps, than anywhere else. The ancient facts of battlefield death had to be parsed not as the medieval vestige they in some sense remained in Europe but within the grammar of the bourgeois life that surrounded them. In Vanity Fair, the Battle of Waterloo is both a social event and an aristocratic game, played for high stakes; when Amelia's husband dies, it is a risk taken in a risky life. By contrast, in Little Women, that matchless novel of home front life in the North, the March girls regard their father's war service not as a gamble but as a sacrifice.
The discontinuous nature of the Civil War in relation to all the other imperial bloodletting of the time—the extraordinarily high cost of the war and, at the same time, its extraordinarily high stakes—was apparent even to distant observers. Charles Darwin himself wrote to his American friend Asa Gray in 1862, speculating that the war might be better settled than fought. Gray had sent Darwin a newspaper article on the war, which, Darwin said, “we read aloud in Family conclave. Our verdict was, that the N. was fully justified in going to war with the S.; but that as soon as it was plain that there was no majority in the S. for ReUnion, you ought, after your victories in Kentucky & Tennessee, to have made peace & agreed to a divorce.”
Yet Darwin also understood clearly the cost of not fighting the South. Slavery in his mind was such a “hopeless curse” that, if the war could mean an absolute end to slavery—by no means an entirely clear end or ambition of the North's in 1862—“I would then run the risk of your seizing Canada (I wish with all my heart it was an independent country) and declaring war against us” (that is, against the British). And no one put the real stakes of the war more clearly: “I can see already it [the Civil War, and the North's ill success] has produced wide spread feeling in favour of aristocracy & Monarchism: no one in England will speak for years in favour of the people governing themselves.” What was at stake was the continuance of liberal democracy, the popular will tempered by law as a working ideal, a practical goal.
A true fault line in modern consciousness exists in those years, and can be found beneath Lincoln's deathbed, as it can be found beneath so many other beds. For in these years—for the first time, and despite much conventional religious piety—there's a nascent sense throughout the liberal world that the deaths of young men in war will never be justified in the eyes of a good God, and never compensated for by a meeting in another world. Their deaths can be made meaningful only through a vague idea of Providence and through the persistence of a living ideal.
Part of our sense of Lincoln's moral grandeur lies in our belief that Lincoln understood this. Lincoln was an executioner, and nothing we can say can diminish his resp
onsibility for death and killing on a massive scale. At the same time, while Lincoln grasped the “awful arithmetic,” in his famous phrase—the scale of the killing, and the brutal reality that the North could lose men and keep on fighting and the South could not—he also grasped the scale of dying, the scale of the national grief. That's when we see him wandering through the White House, hands clasped behind his back, saying, “What will the country say?”
Lincoln's speeches as the war goes on echo the general transformation in the country: from a neat punitive morality to a search for a historical point in the slaughter. That is the change marked in his words at Gettysburg, where the self- sacrificing soldiers are martyrs not to religion but to a new birth of freedom. For the first time, fewer people found comfort in the promise of eternal life; more found it in the idea of a new world worth making. It was here that the real shift, exemplified in our little dualism of the As, is felt. It wasn't a small shift. For most of history, ordinary people lived their lives vertically, with reference to a heaven above and a hell below. Now we live our lives horizontally, with reference to future generations for whom our sacrifices and examples may make a better life. (We live horizontally, too, in the knowledge of sex and death as shaping principles.)