Reconsidering the Man From Illinois By EDWARD ROTHSTEIN

December 12, 2008
Exhibition Review | 'One Life: The Mask of Lincoln'
Reconsidering the Man From Illinois By EDWARD ROTHSTEIN

WASHINGTON — Two white plaster masks appear next to each other in a display case at the National Portrait Gallery here. One shows a middle-aged face with a firm, grim look — perhaps because the subject had to control his breathing as the sculptor waited for the substance to harden. The plaster eyes are scooped out, but you can glimpse the interior man in the subtle musculature of the jaw, the high cheekbones, the expansive, smooth brow. He is determined, vigorous and (we know) ambitious.

The other mask is of the same man's face, about five years later. It seems more of a death mask than one taken from life. Those years — between 1860, when this man, Abraham Lincoln, was beginning his campaign for president of the United States, and February 1865, when he was just two months away from being murdered — seem to have carved the flesh from his cheeks, hollowed out the eye sockets more decisively than any sculptor's thumb, and dug lines and pockets in aging, sallow flesh.

This modest exhibition of 30 images of Lincoln at the Portrait Gallery — "One Life: The Mask of Lincoln" — may turn out to be an understated highlight of Lincoln's coming bicentennial year, which promises a full harvest of academic conferences, exhibitions, the reopening of Ford's Theater and scores of new books, many offering revelations from freshly plumbed archives and analyses of figures major and minor. But the juxtaposition of these masks may remain one of the most potent, graphic images of the effects of the crucial years they frame.

They suggest, too, how closely our conceptions of Lincoln's public greatness are connected with our conception of his inner life, his empathy, his personal suffering. It is as if, in resuscitating the Union after the grievous bloodshed of the Civil War, Lincoln had bodily absorbed the nation's suffering — prefiguring the posthumous Christian iconography that developed after Lincoln's assassination on Good Friday.

"This war is eating my life out," Lincoln told a friend. "I have a strong impression that I shall not live to see the end."

In this small show, organized by the curator David C. Ward, images become more powerful than argument. What can be read in Lincoln's features — of his leadership of the Union, his milestone emancipation of slaves, his rededication of American ideals based on the inalienable rights proclaimed by the Declaration of Independence? Could another figure of his age have done the same?

There is some resemblance between Lincoln and Winston Churchill in Britain in 1941, during the blitz of London. Had Churchill not used his rhetorical gifts to strengthen and unite his citizenry and cabinet, defining the character of their island nation and outlining what was at stake, the course of the 20th century might have been different.

And had Lincoln not, with almost ruthless firmness, taken the ideal of the Union as the highest good and defended it with his own rhetorical gifts, had he not believed — as so few others did — that the stakes were worth the war's unprecedented horrors and sufferings, then the world's greatest experiment in self-government would have failed, and questions would have been raised, as Lincoln said, about whether any nation so conceived could long endure.

I have fallen under the spell of Lincoln, which means that for every book read, there are several lifetimes' worth of books to follow. It is a field in which there are so many opinions that no one could ever be lonely. I walk around hearing voices — though not, perhaps, the voices that Mary Todd Lincoln sought in White House séances after her 11-year-old son died.

I have been listening to audio books of recent Lincoln works: Fred Kaplan's "Lincoln: The Biography of a Writer" and Doris Kearns Goodwin's "Team of Rivals." I have even tried audio books of Lincoln's speeches, though I have not heard a speaker do justice to the rhythms and music of those late, condensed orations, like the Gettysburg Address or the Second Inaugural, in which Lincoln strips away all accident and incident, laying out the counterpoint of high principle.

The bicentennial will not allow much silence to intervene for contemplation of this man's open-minded, sad nobility, but no complaints here.

The historian James Oakes, who is a contributor to Eric Foner's valuable new anthology, "Our Lincoln: New Perspectives on Lincoln and His World," has suggested that for a time Lincoln historians paid attention to large, abstract forces, market conditions, abolition movements or other political pressures, but that in recent years attention to Lincoln has again become almost minutely personal.

Mr. Foner's anthology of academic essays strikes a balance between the personal and the abstract, and a daylong conference last month at Mr. Foner's home base, Columbia University, featured the book's contributors and was often exhilarating. But Lincoln the man looms largest and is likely to loom larger still with the inauguration of Barack Obama, who, like Lincoln, was once an Illinois state legislator.

Mr. Obama has so identified himself with Lincoln that he invoked him while announcing his candidacy in Lincoln's onetime political base, Springfield, Ill. He has suggested that his political career has been an extension of the arc of racial progress begun by Lincoln. In Mr. Obama's victory speech he quoted Lincoln's First Inaugural Address. The theme of Mr. Obama's own inauguration will be "A New Birth of Freedom," an allusion to the Gettysburg Address. And the president-elect has admiringly cited Ms. Goodwin's "Team of Rivals," saying he has been influenced by the way Lincoln composed his cabinet.

All of this heightens the relevance of the coming flood of Lincolniana. Coming in January is a much anticipated two-volume biography of Lincoln by Michael Burlingame, drawing on the author's discoveries of letters and newspaper writings (as well as a lost 1865 eulogy of Lincoln by Frederick Douglass).

Another new biography is imminent from Ronald C. White Jr. Lincoln's marriage to the manic Mary Todd is the subject of the recent book "The Lincolns" by Daniel Mark Epstein. She is made an even more sympathetic figure in "Mrs. Lincoln" by Catherine Clinton — though Mr. Burlingame's research will make further rehabilitation much more difficult.

Mr. Kaplan's book is a study of Lincoln's development as a writer. James M. McPherson's book is about Lincoln's military prowess, and Harold Holzer's account is of the months between Lincoln's election and his taking office in 1861 — months in which Southern secessions began.

Yet another new book, compiled by Philip B. Kunhardt III, Peter W. Kunhardt and Peter W. Kunhardt Jr. ("Looking for Lincoln: The Making of an American Icon"), is an illustrated history of Lincoln's posthumous image. The Library of America, in "The Lincoln Anthology," is doing something similar in prose: Mr. Holzer compiles almost 150 years of reactions to Lincoln by writers ranging from Horace Greeley and Nathaniel Hawthorne to E. L. Doctorow and Mr. Obama.

Yet for all the detail, the probing and the analysis, something remains uncanny. If Lincoln had died in 1860, we probably wouldn't remember him. He had failed to gain much political power during his one term in Congress beginning in 1847; he lost the 1858 election to the Senate; and while he was a diligent party man and lawyer, his legislative track record was not terribly distinguished. He was last out of four Republicans in line to get the party's nomination in 1860.

He would have a legacy of a few good speeches and some powerful argument in the debates with his rival, Stephen A. Douglas, but it would have been a career far less influential than that of the antislavery politician of the previous generation whom Lincoln most admired, Henry Clay.

So how is it that, within five years, Lincoln ended up worthy of Secretary of War Edwin M. Stanton's comment on his death, "Now he belongs to the ages"? The closer you look, combing through these mountains of material, the more ambiguities appear.

Beginning in the 1960s, for example, Lincoln's stature was knocked down a few notches; he had equivocated about some issues for which he is now most admired. In one debate with Douglas, for instance, he was eager to reassure the audience that he had no intention of urging "political and social equality between the white and the black races."

And at first, ending slavery was not one of Lincoln's goals in the Civil War. In 1862 Lincoln said in a letter to Greeley that his ambition was to save the Union, which he would do "without freeing any slave" or "by freeing all the slaves" or "by freeing some and letting others alone." And his grand scheme for freed slaves? Initially they were to be encouraged to migrate to a special colony in Africa.

As for the elegiac prose of his great speeches, where are they anticipated in the many stiff and uninspiring speeches of his earlier life or in his reputation for off-color joviality? Mr. Holzer points out that The New York Daily News mocked the president-elect as an "inveterate old anecdote monger."

"Is the precious time of Cabinet Councils to be wasted with stories?" the paper asked. "Will he go down to South Carolina and assuage her wrath" with an anecdote? It is almost as if there were no connections between the lawyer in Springfield and the president in Washington.

Of course, that is an exaggeration. Continuities abound. But what happened is still remarkable. Lincoln had a tragic vision of the world; he grew up surrounded by familial death and disregard; his marriage was difficult; two children died; his career was pockmarked by failures. He suffered greatly but acted as if he had a right not to happiness itself, but only to its pursuit.

As in life, so in government. He believed that political compromise was the motor of democratic life. And the biggest compromises at America's founding were those involving slavery. It was only by allowing slavery into the Constitution that the Constitution was made possible; it was only by settling for containment rather than elimination that the better angels of early America could even create a United States.

Lincoln, though, rose to the presidency at the very moment when that tragic compromise failed. So in this respect, the flexible politician became an absolutist. There was, in his mind, a fundamental principle that could not be abandoned: the Union. He cleaved fiercely — almost fanatically — to it because it already was a compromise, though one generated out of an ideal toward which the nation would have to move.

That conviction forced him to refine his thinking and discipline his actions. In a debate with Douglas, Lincoln referred to an "eternal struggle between these two principles — right and wrong — throughout the world." The wrong, he said, was "the divine right of kings." The right was "the common right of humanity." The notion of "divine right" left a stain in the form of American slavery; the notion of "common right" was America's founding principle.

Those inalienable rights of humanity could be guaranteed only by something like the Union, so even when it came to abolishing slavery, Lincoln was cautious and protective, hewing strictly to the Constitution, knowing the wrong could be fully undone only with an amendment, but believing, finally, that he could at least, as commander in chief in time of war, free slaves in the rebellious territories. The Emancipation Proclamation is written in stolid, legalistic prose in which all of Lincoln's rhetorical gifts are shunted aside. That too was done in service to the Union.

Then he was freed to define his larger vision. Andrew Delbanco, in Mr. Foner's anthology, argues that the Civil War, for all its trauma, was unlike many other wars in that it did not produce a crisis that left the country without a sense of purpose. That is because, he suggests, Lincoln found "transcendent meaning in the carnage" and affirmed that meaning for both sides. He really became another founding father.

Look finally, in the National Gallery, at the Alexander Gardner photograph taken soon after the late-life mask was made, less than two months before Lincoln's death. A crack shattered the glass plate, its scar running, almost prophetically, across the top of Lincoln's head. The president's left eye is in finely etched focus, gazing off in deep introspection, while the rest of the face softens into a gentle blur. Lincoln's eye, surely, has seen much that haunts him.

But on Lincoln's mouth are the hints of an enigmatic smile, as if in the closing weeks of the war, Lincoln saw, despite the struggles to come, a sign of what might be. The clarity of his gaze and the promise of his smile remain.


http://www.nytimes.com/2008/12/12/arts/design/12linc.html?sq=Rothstein&st=cse&scp=1&pagewanted=print

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A list of resources from around the Web about Abraham Lincoln as selected by researchers and editors of The New York Times.
Other Content

* Abraham Lincoln Speeches
* From AmericanRhetoric.com
* American Presidents: Abraham Lincoln
* Miller Center of Public Affairs at the University of Virginia: essays, speeches, links
* Abraham Lincoln Papers
* From the Library of Congress
* Lincoln Studies Center
* At Knox College
* "The Time of the Lincolns"
* PBS/American Experience
* "The True Lincoln"
* Time magazine. June 26, 2005.

BOOKS

* "Abraham Lincoln: Speeches and Writings" Library of America edition
* By Abraham Lincoln
* "Lincoln: Biography of a Writer" (2008)
* By Fred Kaplan
* "Lincoln's Sword" (2006)
* By Douglas L. Wilson
* "Team of Rivals: The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln" (2005)
* By Doris Kearns Goodwin
* "Honor's Voice: The Transformation of Abraham Lincoln" (1998)
* By Douglas L. Wilson
* "Lincoln" (1995)
* By David Herbert Donald
* "Lincoln in American Memory" (1994)
* By Merrill D. Peterson
* "Lincoln at Gettysburg: The Words That Remade America" (1992)
* By Garry Wills
* "Abraham Lincoln and the Second American Revolution" (1991)
* By James M. McPherson
* "With Malice Toward None: The Life of Abraham Lincoln" (1977)
* Stephen B. Oates
* "Life of Lincoln" (1889)
* By William H. Herndon and Jesse W. Welk

From the Archive
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TimesSelect The First Inauguration Ceremony (Mar. 5, 1861)

TimesSelect Emancipation Proclamation(Jan. 3, 1863)

TimesSelect Gettysburg Address (Nov. 20, 1863)

TimesSelect Second Inauguration (Mar. 5, 1865)

TimesSelect President Lincoln Shot (Apr. 15, 1865)

TimesSelect A Look at Lincoln's Legacy (Feb. 1, 1909)

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With the coming of Abraham Lincoln's bicentennial year in 2009, there will be a flood of academic conferences, exhibitions, the reopening of Ford's Theater and scores of new books, many of them offering revelations from freshly plumbed archives and analyses of figures major and minor.

The historian James Oakes, who is a contributor to Eric Foner's valuable anthology, "Our Lincoln: New Perspectives on Lincoln and His World" (October 2008), has suggested that for a time Lincoln historians paid attention to large, abstract forces, market conditions, abolition movements or other political pressures, but that in recent years attention to Lincoln has again become almost minutely personal.

Lincoln the man is likely to loom larger still with the inauguration of Barack Obama, who, like Lincoln, was once an Illinois state legislator. Mr. Obama has so identified himself with Lincoln that he invoked him while announcing his candidacy in Lincoln's onetime political base, Springfield, Ill. He has suggested that his political career has been an extension of the arc of racial progress begun by Lincoln.

Lincoln, the 16th president of the United States, was born in Hodgenville, Ky., in 1809 in a log cabin and accumulated barely a year of formal education while growing up. Family moves took him to Indiana and then to Illinois by the time he was 21. A failed storekeeper, Lincoln worked at odd jobs while he taught himself law, sometimes walking 20 miles to borrow books.

He was elected to the Illinois state legislature as a Whig in 1834 and to Congress in 1846. He unsuccessfully ran for the Senate in 1858, drawing national attention in debates with Stephen A. Douglas, the nation's leading Democrat. He was rewarded with the Republican Party's nomination for president in 1860, and defeated three opponents to win the general election.

As Southern states left the Union, Lincoln preached conciliation, although he vowed to crush secession. War ensued when South Carolina Confederates bombarded the federal garrison at Fort Sumter. After early reverses in the Civil War, Lincoln decided that slavery had to be abolished to restore the Union, and he issued the Emancipation Proclamation in 1862.

Five days after the war's end, Lincoln was assassinated by John Wilkes Booth, an arch-Confederate. Lincoln's prestige has grown with time, until many have come to regard him as the nation's greatest president.

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