by Adam Gopnik
This is a darker vision of Providence, and of God, than is quite compatible with any kind of ordinary Protestantism. In a review of James Tackach's Lincoln's Moral Vision, Lucas E. Morel writes, “Lincoln's perplexing piety comprised a fiercely independent admixture of Enlightenment rationalism and Calvinist fatalism.” His faith was rooted mainly in a kind of mystical inner sense of predestination, not so far from that youthful doctrine of necessity. He found no serenity in the idea that he was doing God's work. His point in the second inaugural is not that he is doing God's will but that God's will is going to be done, no matter what Lincoln does. He thought not that God was on his side or the other but that God had determined on this conflict, perhaps as a collective punishment for the sin of slavery, perhaps for reasons permanently mysterious to men.
He came increasingly to believe in Providence, but it was a Providence that acted mercilessly through history, not one that regularly interceded with compassion. That was left to men, and presidents. His idea is unmistakably “spiritual,” the conception of someone who believes in a shaping power, a divine power, but not in an interceding divinity, a good Father. It is Chambers's doctrine of necessity evolved, so to speak, into a form of fatalism— the faith that the universe moves forward turned into a belief that battles make men better.
Lincoln's last position, ironically, is not entirely unlike that of his close watcher and sometime admirer Karl Marx—sublimation of Old Testament fatalism into a new religion of history, where history does the brute, necessary work of nation building through the extended punishment that Jehovah had done before. The proletariat or the Union soldier might be martyred for the good of the cause, racked but made central by history much as the Israelites had suffered for the glory of the nation, suffering but chosen by God. Lincoln's religion is closer to Marx's than to the sunny self- congratulation of his claimed successors now. The difference, a vital one, is that Lincoln did not believe that he was the prophet of that history, standing astride it; he was its witness, acting within it, of course, but also just watching in wonder.
The one place in America where you can get a sense of Lincoln the president at work and at play is in the Soldiers’ Home, on the outskirts of Washington, about three miles from the White House. After the death of Willie, in 1862, Lincoln used a cottage on the grounds as a kind of retreat, a proto–Camp David, and spent summers there from 1862 to 1864. Every other place associated with him either predates the presidential years or has changed so much that it is unrecognizable. But Lincoln's cottage, which has been largely neglected, still resonates with the period. It was an odd location for him: though it was cooler than central Washington in the summer, it was also a soldiers’ retirement home, with a cemetery just alongside, where Union dead were sent to be buried.
Lincoln loved the Soldiers’ Home, preferring it to the stolid White House. Walking through the buildings, one sees that the rooms have a nineteenth- century spaciousness and ease, and one is reminded that, as Richard Carwardine points out, the young Lincoln was avid as much for bourgeois respectability as for riches, or even for fame. It was in these bright but cozy rooms, too, and out on the surrounding lawns, that he and Stanton really took the measure of each other.
The story of Stanton and Lincoln—the reason that, at the very last moment, the deathbed assembly deferred to Stanton to say the final words—is well retold by Doris Kearns Goodwin and, in particular detail, by William Lee Miller. In the 1850s, Stanton had been a prominent litigator, and in 1855 he and Lincoln were thrown together in a complicated patent litigation with an Illinois angle. Lincoln felt that here at last was his opportunity to break into big- time law. He prepared maniacally only to find himself, at the trial in Cincinnati, shuffled off by the senior Stanton and prevented not only from arguing but even from consulting with the senior lawyers. Lincoln didn't hold the incident against Stanton, a Democrat whose contempt for him, even after he was nominated for president, was almost open, and made him secretary of war after his first choice, Simon Cameron, got caught up in a scandal. At the Soldiers’ Home, Lincoln and Stanton became friends. They shared a common tragedy—both had lost a son in the course of the war—and a common nature, outwardly remote, inwardly passionate. (When Stanton's young wife died, he insisted on having a wedding dress made for her to be buried in, and for months he wandered through their house, half mad, crying out for his bride.) Stanton, too, had a cottage at the Soldiers’ Home, and spent summers there with Lincoln. Most people intensely disliked Stanton; one cabinet secretary called him “rude and offensive.” But at the Soldiers’ Home, as Matthew Pinsker shows in his book Lincoln's Sanctuary, another side of his nature became apparent: he played mumblety- peg with a soldier and, on one memorable occasion, spent an evening with Lincoln untangling peacocks. (Small blocks of wood had been tied to the birds’ feet with strings to keep them from flying away, but the lines had got snarled in the trees.) As Stanton came to know Lincoln, he formed an opinion of his intellect so high that he said to one of his fellow lawyers, “No men were ever so deceived as we at Cincinnati.” It was a friendship deep enough, and famous enough, to make everyone in Lincoln's last room wait for Stanton to speak.
• • •
Though it is easy to track the exact source of the revisionist “angels,” it is much harder to find the source of those “ages.” Like many famous scenes and remarks, it entered memory through a window while no one was looking. When, in 1890, John G. Nicolay and John Hay, Lincoln's two secretaries, wrote what was to be for almost a century the standard life of Lincoln (whom they called the Tycoon, seeing him as a politician of limitless shrewdness rather than as a saint of infinite patience), the entire atmosphere of the death scene had changed and, with it, the words. Their Stanton coolly breaks the silence of death and pronounces his benediction: “Now he belongs to the ages.” Hay was certainly in the room, near the deathbed, and knew the people involved far better than Tanner could have, and his account is crisp and definitive sounding.
But where before then had it been registered? The trail of footnotes leads one eventually to the most thorough account of how Stanton's words entered the American memory, and it occurs, bizarrely in Otto Eisenschiml's 1937 book Why Was Lincoln Murdered?—bizarrely because Eisenschiml, whose book was a best seller in its day, was a conspiracy theorist who believed that Stan-ton had conspired to have Lincoln assassinated. (His motive was supposedly to gain a harder peace for the South than Lincoln would have allowed, though there is no evidence that they disagreed on this point.) Eisenschiml, forgotten now, was an original, a German- born chemist turned amateur historian who helped invent the style and model of a certain kind of American paranoia: the by- now familiar fussing over odd but irrelevant inconsistencies (Stanton seems to have had enough testimony to identify Booth shortly after midnight on the night of the murder, but he didn't release Booth's name until later that morning—because, of course, he wanted Booth to escape, and so on) and the same patterns of sinister coincidence (Oliver Stone claimed that the telephone lines went down in Washington after Kennedy's murder, and sure enough, Eisenschiml believed that the telegraph lines were deliberately cut in Washington on the night of Lincoln's assassination).
Yet paranoid obsession can be a spur to close study, and Eisenschiml took the trouble to find out when “ages” might have entered the imagination. Once again, there is a wildly varying set of memories. Lucius E. Chittenden, who had worked for Lincoln in the government, claimed that what Stanton actually said was “There lies the most perfect ruler of men the world has ever seen!”—although he was not at Lincoln's bedside. One of Stan-ton's clerks, also not present, insisted that he said, “Ah, dear friend! there is none now to do me justice; none to tell the world of the anxious hours we have spent together!” But in the twenty- five years that separated the scene and Hay's version of it, the record is cloudy. None of the newspaper reports in the days following the assassination, though all contain scenes from the deathbed, mention the words. (Eisenschiml imagines that Stanton
's having been reported as saying “angels” would have been a disaster—too selfconsciously pious—and that he spread the “ages” story afterward. “Perhaps he told it to eager- eared hostesses,” Eisenschiml sneers.) Charles Sabin Taft, one of the attending doctors who had been in Ford's Theatre, wrote in notes that he claimed to have made the following day (but did not publish until twenty- eight years later), “When it was announced that the great heart had ceased to beat, Mr. Stanton said in solemn tones, ‘He now belongs to the Ages.’ But Taft's father also kept a diary (it is available online), and in recounting the scene as his son described it to him, he makes mention of neither ages nor angels.
Hay put his stamp on the words as we usually hear them. That was adequate warrant for a century, and perhaps should be still. He was there; he had no plausible motive to lie and no reason to misremember. It is possible that there is an obscure source for the epitaph in the twenty- five years between the event and the biography but the famous words seem remarkably fragile, insecurely sourced and late in arriving, like so many other moments in history that seem sure until they are inspected, and become more uncertain the longer they are sought.
The effort to give shape and meaning to the bleak horrors of the Civil War can be seen in the rituals of mourning, but it can also be seen in the war's literary relics. Emily Dickinson and Ambrose Bierce are not “representative” of anything; if they were, they wouldn't matter. But, as Wilson saw and as Louis Menand has reminded us, there's a sense in which the strange, astringent, skeptical tone that they distilled from the war is revealing of the era's search for ritual and rhetoric. Walt Whitman is the one figure in whom this double movement—toward the war as a noble enterprise, away from all war as horrific slaughter—is conscious and complete. He was writing rote letters of condolence to the families of the dead even as he was working on his great war poems in which the suffering, far from ennobling, simply doesn't end:
The living remain'd and suffer'd, the mother suffer'd,
And the wife and the child, and the musing comrade suffer'd,
And the armies that remain'd suffer'd.
A republic of suffering is made of infinite islands of mourning; we form the archipelago afterward, and only in our minds.
All of these literary changes would happen at the war's end, and in the decades after. But there was already available for Lincoln and his circle a tragic rhetoric, a heartbreaking set of words, a style of persuasion and self- understanding richer than the others. For there's another rhetorical style that runs like the Mississippi right down the middle of the mid- nineteenth- century American mind, shaping phrases and supervising thoughts, flowing as strong as the classical, the biblical, and the lawyerly and that is the Shakespearean. Lincoln's love of Shakespeare is familiar but is usually treated as a delightful character trait, like his fondness for ice cream or the comedy of Artemus Ward.
The influence of Shakespeare's rhetoric and rhythms on Lincoln might have been already the secret to his practice of summary in monosyllables. It is a Shakespearean habit—almost, as Barry Edelstein has written, a Shakespearean mode. In Lincoln's favorite Macbeth alone we can find, at or near the end of speeches: “nothing is but what is not,” “false face must hide what the false heart doth know,” and “I go, and it is done,” all of them culminating short-footed gestures.
But Lincoln's taste in Shakespeare was narrow, significant, and almost obsessive. He didn't love A Midsummer Night's Dream and As You Like It; it was the histories and three of the tragedies that held him. In 1863, he repeatedly went to see Henry IV when James H. Hackett was playing Falstaff, with all the Falstaffian black comedy against conscription and the cult of honor. He took volumes of Shakespeare out of the Library of Congress, went to a Washington theater to see the famous E. L. Davenport in Hamlet, attended private recitations of Shakespeare, sought out a production of Othello, watched Edwin Booth, John Wilkes's brother, in Richard III, and the greatest American Shakespearean, Edwin Forrest, in King Lear, at Ford's. Just five days before the assassination, on April 9, 1865, steaming up the Potomac in the presidential yacht, he spent “several hours” reading aloud from Shakespeare to those on board. Reciting from his favorite plays was a weakness of his; on August 22, 1863, Hay records in his diary that he fell asleep at the Soldiers’ Home while listening to Lincoln recite Shakespeare.
In a letter to Hackett, Lincoln admitted, “Some of Shakespeare's plays I have never read; while others I have gone over perhaps as frequently as any unprofessional reader. Among the latter are ‘Lear,’ ‘Richard III,’ ‘Henry VIII,’ ‘Hamlet,’ and especially ‘Macbeth.’ I think nothing equals ‘Macbeth.’ ” These are all dramas of unexpected murder, of ambition turned into evil. Many writers have commented on how strange and naked it is that Lincoln, who, as his partner Herndon wrote, ran relentlessly on the “little engine” of his own ambition, should have embraced a tragedy about ambition. He was plainly haunted by the imagery of fallen and ruined leaders, and sensed how fine a line separates a king and a usurper, or a Lincoln and a Davis.
But even stranger and more striking is Lincoln's identification or, at the very least, fascination with the figure of Claudius. In that same letter to Hackett, Lincoln insisted that Claudius's soliloquy beginning “O, my offence is rank” was superior to any of Hamlet's, and we know that he committed it to memory, and would recite it at length even to acquaintances—an artist who had come to paint his portrait, for instance. Lincoln's evaluation was as unorthodox then as it is now. And what is the burden of Claudius's speech? It is about guilt and ambition, and about the fraternal blood dealing that that produces. As Kenneth Tynan pointed out, Claudius's tragedy is that he is clearly the most able man in Denmark, but he has got his throne through blood and cannot be free of the taint. (No one, except Hamlet, criticizes his conduct as king.) His speech runs through the difference between his conduct as seen on earth and in heaven and ends with an image of his soul as a “limed” bird, caught in a sticky trap, that gets more stuck as it struggles:
“Forgive me my foul murder”?
That cannot be; since I am still possess'd
Of those effects for which I did the murder,
My crown, mine own ambition, and my queen.
May one be pardon'd and retain the offence?
In the corrupted currents of this world
Offence's gilded hand may shove by justice,
And oft 'tis seen the wicked prize itself
Buys out the law: but 'tis not so above;
There is no shuffling, there the action lies
In his true nature; and we ourselves compell'd,
Even to the teeth and forehead of our faults,
To give in evidence.
What then? what rests?
Try what repentance can: what can it not?
Yet what can it when one can not repent?
O wretched state! O bosom black as death!
O limed soul, that, struggling to be free,
Art more engaged! Help, angels! Make assay!
There's no reason to believe that Lincoln “identified” with Claudius, or thought his own conduct evil. But he shuddered to think what his ambition, together with his principles, had helped make happen. He recognized and understood the pain of one who, believing himself to be essentially good and capable of salvation, as Claudius does, knows that he is covered with blood—one who, having chosen to take on the weight and worry of the world, knows that he has done it and, like Macbeth, too, cannot be free of its guilt: Help, angels! Make assay!
What makes Lincoln still seem noble, to use an old- fashioned word, is that he had not a guilty sense of remorse but a tragic sense of responsibility. He believed that what he was doing was right; he knew that what he was doing was dealing death to the undeserving (knowledge that must have been doubled at the Soldiers’ Home as the bodies were brought to be buried week after week). If Lincoln truly has something in common with Jesus, it is that he is the model of a charismatic ethical intelligence who was also a cal
m dealer of punishment on a vast scale: Some to my right and some to my left …
Lincoln exemplifies the problem of liberal violence: the disjunction between the purity of our motives (as they appear to the liberal) and the force of our violence (as it is experienced by the victim). The reality of his faith in his beloved rule of reason, and the constant presence of his magnanimous and winning character, doesn't preclude his engagement in mass killing—the corrupted currents of the world. (That other autodidact midwesterner, Harry Truman, also turned to Hamlet to find words to expiate his blood-guilt, underlining at the end of a book about the atomic bomb a long quotation from the last act that begins, “Let me speak to the yet unknowing world / How these things came about: So shall you hear / Of carnal, bloody, and unnatural acts, / Of accidental judgments, casual slaughters, / Of deaths put on by cunning and forced cause / And, in this upshot, purposes mistook / Fall'n on the inventors’ heads.”)
Lincoln's spiritual state by the end of the war was very much like that of a Shakespearean tragic hero: resigned to a deadly fate that he did not will but would not avoid. Shakespeare's continuing appeal to liberal societies, despite his feudal settings, is in many ways strange. Shakespeare's beliefs are wide, but they always turn on questions of hierarchy, degree, legitimacy, and on medieval virtues, too: charity, mercy, laughter—all of the things that redeem and lubricate and soften a hierarchical system. He is a skeptic, like Montaigne. But he is not in any sense modern; skepticism is the liberalism of the powerless. It gives one the right to doubt the perfection of the king without doubting his necessity.
But there's another sense in which Shakespeare's people and their poetry anticipated the modern condition. His stories are of ordinary ambition, admirable in itself, turned in against itself after being bathed in blood. Bolingbroke is a better man for king than Richard II, but Richard's killing leads Henry to his long night; even Othello, innocent victim of the malignant Iago, and Lear, innocent victim of his own cruel children, have put themselves into false positions, raised above their place or abdicating too soon. The little engines of ambition in Shakespeare almost always crash, and when they find their way to their destination, as Henry IV does, they end up crashing anyway. Shakespeare's people pass from ambition to amorality to evil in one long gradient of gray; only a moral idiot would be sure that his gray days were not part of the same sad declining curve. Part of Shakespeare's genius lies in his ability to create characters who intend no harm and end up covered with blood. And so Shakespeare suits liberal violence, with its corrupted currents, admirable ambition, and casual slaughters— and what makes Lincoln and Truman admirable, if not heroic, is that they knew it.