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Lincoln
Abraham Lincoln, "the prairie-lawyer, master of us all " as the American poet Vachel Lindsay described him, is perhaps one of the most quoted and iconic American presidents. (In 1973, the incoming Vice-President Gerald Ford defined his own limitations by saying, "I am a Ford, not a Lincoln.") His style ranged from the elevated to the blunt. In his first inaugural address he spoke of "the mystic chords of memory" which he thought would once more "swell the chorus of the Union when again touched...by the better angels of our nature." On meeting Harriet Beecher Stowe, author of the influential Uncle Tom's Cabin, he exclaimed, "So you're the little woman who wrote the book that made this great war!" In 1862, concerned at General McClellan's failure to move against the Confederates, he said of the Union forces, "It is called the Army of the Potomac but it is only McClellan's bodyguard...If McClellan is not using the army, I should like to borrow it for a while."
He is remembered now as a great orator, typified by his Gettysburg Address, but not all immediate reactions to the Address were favourable. A review at the time, taken aback by the simplicity and directness of the speech, commented on the President's "silly, flat, dishwatery utterances ". His fellow orator on the same occasion, Edward Everett, had a better idea of the quality of what he had heard. After the public criticism of Lincoln's speech, and praise of his own, he wrote to the President: "I should be glad if I could flatter myself that I came as near the central idea of the occasion in two hours as you did in two minutes." Lincoln must have appreciated the approach, but he was level-headed about praise and blame. He wrote in a letter of 1863, "I have endured a great deal of ridicule without much malice; and have received a great deal of kindness, not quite free from ridicule. I am used to it."
We may today think sadly that universal shock at a public death is a particularly modern phenomenon, but in 1865 the English novelist Elizabeth Gaskell wrote of Lincoln's assassination: "My heart burnt within me with indignation and grief; we could think of nothing else...All night long we had only snatches of sleep, waking up perpetually to the sense of a great shock and grief. Every one is feeling the same. I never knew so universal a feeling." In America, Edwin McMasters Stanton, Lincoln's Secretary of War, said simply, "Now he belongs to the ages."
Elizabeth Knowles
30/12/2002
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