Photo of the Day: Honest Abe’s Stovepipe Hat

Few objects are so associated with a single person as the stovepipe hat with Abraham Lincoln. This form of headgear was quite popular in the 19^th century, but, if you’re like me, you’re hard pressed to think of another wearer than America’s 16^th President.

I photographed the one you see here back in June 2021, while in Manchester, VT, for a beloved relative’s wedding. It’s part of the items on display in Hildene, the summer home of Robert Todd Lincoln, the President’s oldest son.

Abe Lincoln wore several such hats in his lifetime, as soon as he was old enough to afford one in adulthood. It certainly afforded convenience (he took to carrying his paperwork in it as a young attorney), but I think it also made him look more imposing. 

Typically seven to eight inches tall, these hats, when topping his 6 ft.-4 in. frame, brought his total height to nearly seven feet tall, making him stand out as much as modern pro basketball centers.

Believe it or not, this hat—black and narrow-brimmed, made from glossy black pile textile that covers a paper card support—is only three of Lincoln’s still in existence. Evidently he bought it at Siger and Nichols, a firm then based on Maiden Lane in New York City.

There are plenty of reasons to visit Vermont, but if you find yourself in the southwestern corner of the state, you should make it a point to visit Hildene.

Robert Todd Lincoln was one of the more consequential offspring of American Presidents, serving variously as Secretary of War, U.S. Ambassador to Great Britain, and president of the Pullman railroad company.

But there is no doubt that all visitors to this 24-room Georgian revival mansion will want to view its historic exhibit associated with Robert’s father, which not only includes this hat but also an oval dressing mirror from the White House and a Bible owned by the President.

Abraham Lincoln’s words and actions still matter to America. But artifacts like this hat at Hildene also have their function: sort of like relics of a man who’s become known, in effect (and probably to his ironic amusement, could he see it), as America’s great secular saint.

Quote of the Day (Abraham Lincoln, on Litigation)

“Discourage litigation. Persuade your neighbors to compromise whenever you can. As a peacemaker the lawyer has superior opportunity of being a good man. There will still be business enough.”—U.S. President—and longtime lawyer—Abraham Lincoln (1809-1865), “Fragment: Notes for a Law Lecture,” July 1, 1850 [?], Collected Works of Abraham Lincoln, Volume 2.

Quote of the Day (Abraham Lincoln, on ‘Faith in the People’)

“I have faith in the people. They will not consent to disunion. The danger is, that they are misled. Let them know the truth and the country is safe.” —President Abraham Lincoln, to the Boston (MA) Journal, July 1864, quoted in “President Lincoln Had a Presentiment of Death,” Sandusky (OH) Register, Apr. 29, 1865

Quote of the Day (Abraham Lincoln, on Success Through Avoiding ‘Personal Contention’)

“Quarrel not at all. No man resolved to make the most of himself can spare time for personal contention.” —President Abraham Lincoln (1809-1865), letter to Capt. James M. Cutts, October 26, 1863, in Collected Works of Abraham Lincoln, Volume 6.

As President during the Civil War, Lincoln could not avoid “contention,” nor could he in his marriage. But his patience towards the difficult Mary Todd Lincoln was extraordinary, and his disagreements with opponents were based on policy—what to do about slavery and secession— rather than personality.

That goes a long way towards explaining how he held together a still-young Republican Party—a coalition founded simply on opposing the extension of slavery into new territories—as well as Northern and border states with fundamental disagreements during the war on what to do with slavery even where it existed.

Lincoln could affect not simply events but people, as seen in how he handled the messy situation that gave rise to the quote above. He appears to have delivered these remarks in person to Captain James Cutts, a brother-in-law of the President’s longtime Illinois political rival, Stephen A. Douglas.

Cutts had been court-martialed for several offenses, including arguing with fellow officers—the “personal contention” to which Lincoln referred.

On appeal, Lincoln approved Cutts’ convictions but reduced the sentences to a written reprimand.

The effect of his shrewd advice to the 26-year-old soldier was profound: Cutts took it to heart enough that he decided to prove his worth on the battlefield rather than through fisticuffs. He would receive the Congressional Medal of Honor for his bravery at the battles of the Wilderness, Spotsylvania and Petersburg.

This Day in Civil War History (Dr. Samuel Mudd, Lincoln Conspiracy Defendant, Dies)

Jan. 10, 1883—Dr. Samuel Mudd, whose medical aid to John Wilkes Booth led to his conviction as a conspirator in the Lincoln assassination plot, died at age 49 of pneumonia in Waldorf, Md., a free man for the past 14 years but still futilely protesting his innocence.

I first became aware of the case of Dr. Mudd about 50 years ago, while watching a 1936 film about the controversy, The Prisoner of Shark Island. Director John Ford and screenwriter Nunnally Johnson compellingly depicted the doctor’s heroism in fighting a yellow-fever outbreak at a maximum security military prison at Fort Jefferson in the Dry Tortugas—an isolated but dangerous facility nicknamed “Shark Island.”

When it comes to portraying American history, Ford’s nonfiction films are better seen as cinematic poetry than as literal fact. That was even more the case with The Prisoner of Shark Island than with better-known classics by the great director such as Young Mr. Lincoln and My Darling Clementine, his western on Wyatt Earp and the shootout at the O.K. Corral.

Prisoner, then, is best appreciated for its aesthetic qualities (including the stunning cinematography by Bert Glennon) and its warning against wartime hysteria. (At the time of its initial release, many in the audience could stall vividly recall anti-German prejudice during WWI and the “Palmer Raids” against subversives right after the conflict’s conclusion.)

As for the actual facts in the case: They were—well, Mudd-y.

In the early morning hours of April 15, 1865—less than 12 hours since Abraham Lincoln had been shot at Ford’s Theatre, and only three hours before the President would die—two young men appeared at Mudd’s farm in Bryantown, Md. The doctor carried one of the pair into an upstairs room, where he set the young man’s fractured leg and let him recuperate.

The two visitors were Booth—who had injured his leg while jumping to the stage at Ford’s Theatre after firing on the President—and his associate in the Lincoln conspiracy, David Herold. After departing the Mudd farm and eluding the most massive manhunt in American history to that time, the pair would be tracked down to a tobacco barn near Bowling Green, Va., where Herold would surrender and Booth would be shot to death.

In the meantime, Federal troops swarming the Maryland countryside had quickly made their way to the Mudd farm, where a boot found upstairs with Booth’s name on it quickly established that the assassin had been there recently.

From then to the end of his life, Dr. Mudd would contend that he had no idea who his visitors were and that he was doing what any doctor would do for a patient in extreme physical distress. But his claim of lack of recognition of his overnight visitors would be easily disproved by witnesses who saw the actor and the doctor—both, incidentally, Confederate sympathizers and severe critics of President Lincoln—on several occasions.

At very least, Mudd was an accessory after the fact, and the military tribunal convened to decide his fate and that of seven other defendants in the Lincoln conspiracy was fully entitled to consider his veracity.

To what extent the prosecution proved beyond a reasonable doubt that he was a conspirator, however, is another matter—and that doubt might have allowed Mudd to escape the hangman’s noose by a single vote (a fate unfortunately not shared by fellow defendant Mary Surratt, the boarding-house owner who was the subject of Robert Redford’s 2010 film, The Conspirator, starring Robin Wright).

Mudd was sentenced to life imprisonment at hard labor in the Dry Tortugas, a small cluster of islands in the Gulf of Mexico, in a prison termed “America’s version of Devil’s Island.” Only a month after his conviction, he tried to escape this perilous environment by stowing away on a ship bringing replacement soldiers to Fort Jefferson, only to be recaptured.

Two years later, even worse circumstances, however, resulted in his release. A yellow-fever outbreak at the fort proved so virulent that the attending doctor came down with it.

Mudd, now working in the prison dispensary, took over as the prison doctor in the emergency. Working tirelessly day and night, insisting on clean bedding and clothes for the sick, Mudd succeeded in limiting the spread of the epidemic, saving dozens of lives.

More than 200 grateful members of the garrison petitioned Andrew Johnson for clemency for the doctor who saved their lives, and Lincoln’s successor granted Mudd a pardon shortly before leaving the White House in 1869.

Mudd lived out his remaining 14 years quietly back home in Maryland. But controversy still clings to him nearly a century and a half after his death.

Since the start of the 20^th century, the doctor’s descendants have unsuccessfully pressed to clear his name. Presidents Jimmy Carter and Ronald Reagan were sympathetic to the family’s pleas, but felt they did not have the authority to reverse the guilty verdict.

On TV and the big screen, Hollywood has largely embraced the cause of Mudd’s innocence. More than four decades after Ford’s depiction of the case, Dennis Weaver portrayed the beleaguered physician in the 1980 TV movie, The Ordeal of Dr. Mudd.

A contrary point of view—one more in accordance with what many historians believe—may be provided in the Apple Original limited series Manhunt, with Matt Walsh (the press secretary on Veep) portraying Mudd. 

If it reflects the viewpoint of James Swanson’s nonfiction narrative from which it’s been adapted, it will show not a doctor in an overnight encounter with an unknown visitor, but someone who knew Booth well enough to become embroiled in his assassination.

Flashback, July 1871: Death of David H. Todd, Lincoln’s Notorious Confederate In-Law

Less than two weeks after Mary Todd Lincoln mourned the death of her 17-year-old son Tad, the widow of Abraham Lincoln had to deal with the loss of another family member.

But the former First Lady felt far more mixed emotions upon learning of the death from tuberculosis at the end of July 1871 of David Humphreys Todd in Huntsville, AL. It wasn’t just that she was not as close to this half-brother 14 years her junior than she was with the third of her sons to die before reaching adulthood.

No, David would have reminded her of a deeply painful split that mirrored a larger division in all too many American families. Of the 14 offspring of her father, the prominent Kentucky lawyer, soldier and politician Robert Smith Todd, six had sided with the Union while the others supported the Confederacy that President Lincoln had successfully but bloodily suppressed. In this “brothers’ war,” two male Todd siblings died fighting for the South, while two of the Todd daughters (including Mary) lost their husbands during the conflict.

From the age of 14, when David had run away from home to fight in the Mexican War, he had troubled family members with his impulsiveness. Matters would not improve in adulthood, when his actions in the Civil War gave the enemies of Abraham and Mary Todd Lincoln grist for calumny.

Lack of combat in the Mexican War left David’s appetite for adventure and glory unsatisfied, even as he developed a propensity to drink and gamble. After journeying out to California in 1850 for the gold rush, he went down to Chile the following year to participate in its revolution as “freebooter,” or soldier for hire. The only tangible results of the latter were tattoos he had made. Later in the decade, he worked without making any particular mark for a New Orleans carriage company.

The outbreak of the Civil War put David and his siblings in a quandary. Their plantations and the aristocratic style it supported were unsustainable without slaves.

At the same time, they now had a brother-in-law—previously embraced, through marriage to Mary, as part of the family—who, while willing to permit slavery in states like Kentucky, was committed to halting its expansion into new American territories.

As Stephen Berry noted in his collective biography of the Todds, House of Abraham, these bluegrass bluebloods had, in a sense, become Abraham Lincoln’s surrogate family, filling the void left by an abusive father and a sister who died in childbirth. The fact that he seldom if ever spoke of slaveholders with the blistering rhetoric used by so many abolitionists may have owed something to knowing and cherishing some as in-laws.

That did not mean, however, that he was blind to their faults. One legend had him joking, “God Almighty is perfectly content having one ‘d’ at the end of his name. The Todds insist on having two.” Litigiousness and alcoholism ran as heavily in the family as intelligence and ambition.

As First Lady, Mary was prone to extravagance and outbursts of anger, but her husband’s opponents also engaged in guilt by association in charging her with disloyalty because of some siblings’ support of the Confederacy. The more extreme members of the press even accused her of spying, forcing her husband to appear voluntarily before Congress to deny the rumors.

Negative reports by sensationalistic Northern newspapers—particularly about David, and Mary’s attitude towards him—vexed the Confederate contingent of the family, as seen in this excerpt from a July 1861 letter by Mary’s younger half-sister Elodie:

“I see from today’s paper Mrs. Lincoln is indignant at my Bro. David’s being in the Confederate service and declares ‘that by no word or act of hers should he escape punishment for his treason against her husband’s government should he fall into their hands.’ I do not believe she ever said it and if she did and meant it she is no longer a sister of mine nor deserves to be called a woman of nobleness and truth and God grant my noble and brave-hearted brother will never fall into their hands and have to suffer death twice over, and he could do nothing which could make me prouder of him than he is doing now, fighting for his country. What would she do to me, do you suppose? I have as much to answer for.”

Rushing to the Confederate cause after Fort Sumter, Elodie’s “noble and brave-hearted brother” was assigned to General John H. Winder, commandant of Richmond’s prisons—just as the Confederacy pondered what to do with 1,400 Union prisoners taken at the Battle of Bull Run.

Winder, desiring to move captured Union soldiers away from any campaigns for the Confederate capital, wanted David to transport them to Raleigh, N.C. But before that could happen, these prisoners were ensnared in the propaganda war between North and South.

Separating truth from falsehood was difficult enough while David was alive, but it only grew more so after his death. Records often proved elusive, and the children of family members, recalling events more than half a century later, often compounded the difficulties of historians.

It may very well be that, like Mary, David was more sinner against than sinning. But it is also true that, like her, he was thrust in a situation requiring tact that he didn’t possess.

Before long, David was being accused of cruelty to Northern prisoners at Richmond’s Libby Prison. Although he was not as bad as the notorious Henry Wirz of Andersonville and at least some stories about him appear to have been exaggerated, he angered Union service personnel often: preventing spirits from being brought into the prison, for instance; telling guards in this unventilated, hot converted warehouse to shoot off any part of a body sticking out a window; and, according to Union seaman Lewis Horton, “saber[ing] a poor fellow one day because the prisoner had a small bit of lighted candle in order to see to dress his wound” and executing another for just looking out the window.

By November 1862, David featured prominently in a Harper’s Weekly story on the Confederate ties of Mary’s siblings. The magazine even claimed that Jefferson Davis had fired Mary’s half-brother for inhumane treatment of prisoners after David had been only two months on the job.

If the Confederate President did, in fact, relieve him of this command, David may have felt he was being done a favor. By early 1862, David had had enough, and began to look around to where he could be more useful. 

“Having no duty to perform in this Regt, and nothing to which I can be assigned,” he requested a transfer to New Orleans. He got his wish, at a time when Union forces were pressing hard on the city and the Mississippi, the crucial waterway bringing food, supplies and troops to the Southern cause.

By May he was appearing on the regiment rolls as a lieutenant, and in a few more months he had been promoted to captain in the Siege of Vicksburg. He was gaining a reputation as a fighter, though he would surely not have liked a description of him by a female diarist, Julia Le Grand of New Orleans, as “tall, fat and savage against the Yankees.”

After Vicksburg fell to Ulysses S. Grant in July 1863, Captain Todd was paroled. Any hopes for military glory were fading, as the North consolidated its stranglehold on the deep South and David’s health began to worsen.

It was not true, as some later historians wrote, that David had been “mortally wounded” while defending Vicksburg.

But, in an application for retirement from the army, he explained that he had “been permanently disabled in the service of the Confederate States and in the line of duty, by Phthisis Pulmonulis (i.e. tuberculosis) caused by exposure and from which I have suffered during the past two years with frequent attacks of Hemoptysis (i.e. expectoration of blood). I have been absent from my Command unable to perform duty for the past four months.”

In late 1864, David began to court a young widow, Susie Williamson, in Huntsville, AL. They married April 4, 1865—five days before the Confederate surrender at Appomattox, and 10 days before David’s brother-in-law was shot by John Wilkes Booth at Ford’s Theater.

David was listed as a merchant in the 1870 Census, but he had very little time to succeed in the profession. He died of tuberculosis the following year. As for his half-sister: Throughout the remaining 17 years of her troubled widowhood, Mary Todd Lincoln never saw any of her surviving siblings again.

This Day in New York History (Seward Senate Speech Marks Him as Prime Anti-Slavery Foe)

March 11, 1850—In his maiden speech as U.S. Senator, the New York Whig William H. Seward denounced the Compromise of 1850, an omnibus legislative package that eased secessionist sentiment in the decade before the Civil War. 

The phrase he coined—“a higher law than the Constitution”—thrust him to the forefront of opposition to slavery, proved a stumbling block to his Presidential ambitions, and posed an enduring question about the relevance of faith- and morality-driven action in American politics.

I doubt if one out of a thousand people who pass the statue accompanying this entry have stopped for more than a couple of seconds to think about its subject. Now in the midst of Doris Kearns Goodwin’s collective biography of Abraham Lincoln’s wartime cabinet, Team of Rivals, I’ve come to appreciate, maybe for the first time, the opponent-turned-friend of the President, and how much he contributed to the politics of his time, and even of what he means to ours.

As governor of New York in the early 1840s, Seward promoted economic and educational policies meant to open greater opportunities to African-, German- and Irish-Americans who were already forming part of the Democratic coalition. Like John McCain today, he excited a horde of noisome nativists to insane frenzies—in Seward’s case, through a proposal to divert a part of public school funds to parochial schools where Catholic immigrants would not have to worry about Protestant proselytizing. 

(Take note, today’s Republicans: the path to success lies away from fear-mongering about immigrants and the dispossessed. Take note, today’s Democrats: at least some of your “wall of separation” rhetoric about church and state derives from very poisonous roots.)

After a brief hiatus out of office, Seward came back to win a Senate seat, just in time to face the most divisive question of his time: the suddenly real possibility that divisions over slavery could spell the end of the Union.

The Compromise of 1850 was meant to forestall these questions by not giving either North or South entirely what each wanted. The North would get admission of California, almost certain to be a free state, and an end to the slave trade within Washington, D.C. Two other provisions favored the South: the creation of two territories in the Southwest, New Mexico and Utah, with no restrictions on slavery; and strengthening of the Fugitive Slave Law of 1793.

The squall over the Compromise of 1850 is usually remembered as the last hurrah of the Senate’s “Great Triumvirate” of Henry Clay, John C. Calhoun, and Daniel Webster, all of whom would be out of the chamber they dominated, even dead, within three years. Webster’s three-hour March 7 oration in support of the package—an action that revolted his anti-slavery base and doomed his flickering Presidential chances but which also turned the tide toward enactment—was celebrated in John F. Kennedy’s Profiles in Courage, and was long memorized by generations of American schoolchildren.

However, the extensive legislative debate, I would argue, also brought to the fore a new generation of political leaders who dominated the antebellum and Civil War eras. Jefferson Davis assumed the role of Calhoun (so ill that he could not read aloud his fiery speech opposing the bills) as spokesman for the South. Stephen A. Douglas, the “Little Giant” best remembered now for his debates later in the decade with Abraham Lincoln, acted, like Clay, as legislative magician by crafting the legislation and rounding up enough votes to ensure passage.

And Seward took on the part that Webster, in his zeal to preserve the Union, had relinquished: champion of “Liberty and Union, now and forever, one and inseparable.” Beginning in a low voice decidedly removed from the great tolling bell that was Webster’s, he soon transfixed the Massachusetts Senator and his colleagues.

He could not support the proposals, he said. Strengthening the Fugitive Slave Law was unworthy of “true Christians or real freemen”; not just the slave trade, but slavery itself should not be permitted in the District of Columbia; and he could not abide the introduction of slavery anywhere in the new territories.

Not only the spirit of the Constitution was incompatible with slavery, Seward claimed, but “there is a higher law than the Constitution, which regulates our authority over the domain, and devotes it to the same purposes. The territory is a part…of the common heritage of mankind, bestowed upon them by the Creator of the universe.”

Even though he lost this legislative battle, Seward became the foremost spokesman for free-soil forces in the Senate. But he had provoked so much fierce opposition in the South that his enemies began to approach his friends in number and vehemence.

Political mentor Thurlow Weed’s confession that Seward’s speech “sent me to bed with a heavy heart” proved all too prescient in 1860. With the Whig Party dead by then, Seward sought the Republican Party nomination for President. But his long public anti-slavery record left such a long public trail that it opened the door to a relative dark-horse candidate: Abraham Lincoln.

Seward’s loyal and able service as Lincoln’s Secretary of State is how posterity fundamentally recalls him, and it’s certainly not a bad claim on our attention. But the “higher law” that this usually affable, conciliatory statesman invoked has, in one fashion or another, convulsed American politics throughout the republic.

In one sense, Seward’s appeal derives from the concept of natural law that has found advocates from Thomas Aquinas to Thomas Jefferson. It also meshes with the theory of civil disobedience formulated by Henry David Thoreau only a year before the Seward speech and perfected as a political tool by Mahatma Gandhi and Martin Luther King Jr. in the 20th century.

But a “higher law” also has the potential of angering people who might not share one’s religious faith or even notions of morality. Applied to certain issues—Prohibition, abortion—it has polarized the American electorate for decades.

And yet, it would be a mistake to call, as some have done in this election year, for the marginalizing of moral calls to action in the political arena. Refusal to appeal to morality produces consequences in the populace that necessarily reflect the Darwinian atmosphere of politics. Does anyone think that the United States would have been a better nation without the backing that the civil rights movement received from African-American ministers or that the unionists gained from the Roman Catholic Church?

Quote of the Day (Abraham Lincoln, on Influencing People Through ‘Kind Unassuming Persuasion’)

“When the conduct of men is designed to be influenced, persuasion, kind unassuming persuasion, should ever be adopted. It is an old and true maxim that 'a drop of honey catches more flies than a gallon of gall.' So with men. If you would win a man to your cause, first convince him that you are his sincere friend. Therein is a drop of honey that catches his heart, which, say what he will, is the great highroad to his reason, and which, once gained, you will find but little trouble in convincing him of the justice of your cause, if indeed that cause is really a good one. On the contrary, assume to dictate to his judgment, or to command his action, or to mark him as one to be shunned and despised, and he will retreat within himself, close all the avenues to his head and his heart; and though your cause be naked truth itself, transformed to the heaviest lance, harder than steel, and sharper than steel can be made, and though you throw it with more than herculean force and precision, you shall be no more able to pierce him than to penetrate the hard shell of a tortoise with a rye straw. Such is man, and so must he be understood by those who would lead him, even to his own best interests.”—Future U.S. President Abraham Lincoln (1809-1865), “Address Before the Springfield Washingtonian Temperance Society,” Feb. 22, 1842, in The Papers and Writings of Abraham Lincoln, Volume One: Constitutional Edition, edited by Arthur Brooks Lapsley (1905)

Unfortunately, this sound advice was ignored by too many of Lincoln’s countrymen in his own time—and, I’m afraid, events are proving, in our own.

Happy Presidents Day!

Quote of the Day (Abraham Lincoln, on the ‘Virtue and Vigilance’ of the American People)

“By the frame of the Government under which we live this same people have wisely given their public servants but little power for mischief, and have with equal wisdom provided for the return of that little to their own hands at very short intervals. While the people retain their virtue and vigilance no Administration by any extreme of wickedness or folly can very seriously injure the Government in the short space of four years.”—President Abraham Lincoln (1809-1865), First Inaugural Address, March 4, 1861

Like many people who have read this relentlessly logical address by Abraham Lincoln, I much prefer his ringing, eloquent conclusion:

“We are not enemies, but friends. We must not be enemies. Though passion may have strained it must not break our bonds of affection. The mystic chords of memory, stretching from every battlefield and patriot grave to every living heart and hearthstone all over this broad land, will yet swell the chorus of the Union, when again touched, as surely they will be, by the better angels of our nature.”

This spirit of generosity and reconciliation will surely be much on the mind of Joe Biden today as he attempts to close the divisions open for all the world to see in the storming of the Capitol two weeks ago. Let’s hope that some of his countrymen take to heart his Lincolnesque message of unity and a common patriotism.

If not, you can bet that what Gerald Ford called, at his own swearing-in, “our long national nightmare” will be far from over.

I worry about whether Biden’s expected appeal for bipartisanship will be enough at this unusually fearful inauguration. After all, Lincoln’s strenuous forswearing of any attempt to interfere with slavery in the states where it was already established was not enough to prevent southern extremists from pushing secession, instigating calamitous civil war.

Moreover, Lincoln’s confidence that no President could seriously harm the government in a single short term now seems, following the last four years, overly serene.

True, that time limit may be the optimum possible, given the need to allow Presidents the opportunity to look beyond short-term electoral considerations. But an office with so much potential for good possesses equal potential for evil, a negative capability demonstrated most dramatically by the latest outgoing occupant of the White House.

In the 20^th century, historians used a short phrase, often picked up from inaugural addresses, to identify a President’s agenda: the Square Deal, the New Freedom, the New Deal, the Fair Deal, the New Frontier.

Given the lives lost in the COVID-19 pandemic and on January 6, historians might appropriately borrow a phrase from Donald Trump’s single inaugural address to characterization his administration: the American Carnage.

It feels like meager recompense to the nation he devastated that, through his own cupidity and madness, the outgoing President laid waste to "the Trump brand." He left divisions surpassed only by the one confronting Lincoln.

An “extreme of wickedness or folly” occurred over the past two months through patently false but endlessly propagated accusations of electoral fraud—charges now acknowledged to be untrue by the two leading Republicans on Capitol Hill, Mitch McConnell and Kevin McCarthy.

In the two-month interval between the election and the start of a new administration, Trump did nothing to mitigate the spread of COVID-19 across the United States, choosing instead to transmit the virus of falsehood to nearly half of the American electorate.

That recklessness spurred the most serious insurrection on U.S. soil since the Confederacy that Lincoln had to destroy. That riot undercut America as an exemplar of democracy abroad, as the embodiment of what Lincoln called, nearly two years after he took the oath of office, “the last best hope of earth.” 

For whatever reason, far too many ordinary Americans were insufficiently vigilant four years ago in voting for a leader without the slightest electoral or national security experience. In the process, they also elected a man without the virtue that Lincoln mistakenly believed would be possessed by all of his successors.

Because of the vacuum of "virtue and vigilance" in the past four years, I am forced to agree with Garrett Epps’ contention in The Washington Monthly: “Until the nation receives a full accounting, and until criminality pays a suitable price, our institutions will lie open, undefended against those who openly aspire to break them up by force.”

This Day in GOP History (Seward Switch Solidifies New Party)

Oct. 12, 1855—Even as Southern slaveowners and Northern nativists hoped he would be defeated in his re-election bid, Senator William H. Seward of New York threw his lot in with a new political coalition formed from the wreckage of the Whig Party and the alienation of Democrats who wanted to keep slavery out of the new U.S. territories west of the Mississippi.

The following month, victories for Seward and the abolitionist Salmon P. Chase in the Ohio Governor’s race signaled a formidable new political force in the North, if not yet the nation.

Officially, the Republican Party had only formed the year before in Ripon, Ill. But now, growing unrest over race, immigration and religion created conditions that made it possible for major politicians like Seward and Chase to view it as a feasible vehicle for their electoral ambitions.

Anger, tumult, even violence, were breaking out all across America in 1855, fed by native-born whites who felt more and more marginalized. If this sounds eerily similar to what is happening today--well, it was.

In the North, Midwest and West, the lower class feared the loss of jobs and/or income as a result of free slave labor. In the South, slave-owning aristocrats saw a threat of encirclement and decreased political power in the admission of new free states to the Union—and a delegitimization of their “peculiar institution” in bans on their rights to bring slaves into the new territories and to pursue escaped slaves into the North.

With the greatest difficulty, Congress had, with the Compromise of 1850, narrowly avoided unleashing secession over admitting to the Union new territories gained in the Mexican War. Recognizing that Congress could no longer resolve the issue on its own, Illinois Senator Stephen A. Douglas proposed a cure worse than the disease: the Kansas-Nebraska Act, which left the decision of banning slavery to voters in these territories. 

The result: in Kansas, a pitched battle between pro- and anti-slavery forces, with the former group engaging in enough voter intimidation to produce a fraudulently elected legislature.

At the same time, nativist sentiment directed against German and Irish immigrants—particularly virulent toward Roman Catholics—became concentrated in the American (or “Know-Nothing”) Party. At the start of 1855, the Know-Nothings had 10,000 lodges and about 1,000,000 members. Governors from the party took office in Pennsylvania and Massachusetts, and additional gains were made across New England that spring.

A significant number of these also voted in New York State, where they considered what to do about Seward. His support in 1839 as New York Governor for equal educational funding for all state children, including in Catholic-run parochial schools, had left many biding their time, weighing whether to terminate his career.

With all of these ideological, ethnic and religious divisions, the two-party system that held steady through the Age of Jackson—the Democrats and Whigs—had splintered. The issue that unified the Republicans—keeping slavery out of the territories—made several ambitious Whigs curious about the new organization but, until the fall of 1855, unsure about its potential. One, former Congressman Abraham Lincoln, contemplating a return to politics after tending to his law practice for six years, wrote longtime friend Joshua Speed, “I think I am a Whig but others say there are no Whigs and I’m an abolitionist. I do no more than oppose extension of slavery.”

It was in this uncertain environment that Seward looked for political daylight in the fall of 1855. In September, he followed a maneuver suggested by his mentor, Albany political boss Thurlow Weed. As narrated by Doris Kearns Goodwin in Team of Rivals: The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln (2009):           

“Two state conventions, one Whig, one Republican, were convened in Syracuse in late September 1855. When Seward was asked by a friend which to attend, he replied that it didn’t matter. Delegates would enter through two doors, but exit through one. The Whig delegates assembled first and adopted a strong antislavery platform. Then, led by Weed, they marched into the adjoining hall, where the Republicans greeted them with thunderous applause.  From the remnants of dissolving parties, a new Republican Party had been born in the state of New York.”

By mid-October, Seward was ready to formally announce his new affiliation and explain the reason for his move, in a speech in Albany. The “privileged class” of slaveowners, he avowed, represented only “one-fifteenth part of the American people,” and could be countered at the ballot box. All that was wanting, he believed, was “organization.” But which one?

Not the Know-Nothing Party, he warned, because of “its false and prevaricating rituals, its unlawful and in Christian oaths, its clandestine councils and its dark conspiracies, its mobs and its murders.” Not the Democrats, who either actively pursued pro-slavery policies or weakly abetted a Presidential administration that would not stop them. Not the Whigs, who because of the slavery issue were no longer the “united and consolidated” party they had been even in the 1852 Presidential election.

That left the Republicans, with their “new, sound and liberal platform,” with principles broad enough to be supported by “true Whigs” and “true Democrats.”

Seward’s move was greeted ecstatically by his anti-slavery colleagues in Congress, including in a letter from Sen. Charles Sumner of Massachusetts:

“I have devoured your speech with admiration & delight. The latter half I read aloud to the Longfellows who enjoyed it with me. It is very finely thought and composed. I am so happy that you and I are at last on the same platform and in the same political pew. I feel stronger.”

The victories for Seward and Chase went a long way toward answering that concern, and thrust these two politicians into the vacuum left in the last five years by the deaths of the “Great Triumvirate”: Senators Henry Clay, Daniel Webster and John C. Calhoun. 

They would vie for the GOP Presidential nod in 1860, continuing their jockeying for position and influence in the Cabinet of the surprise nominee of their party that year, Lincoln. All the while, they would cooperate just enough to help bring down the slave power they despised.

This Day in Art History (Daniel Chester French, Sculptor of Lincoln and Minute Man Memorials, Born)

Apr. 20, 1850—Daniel Chester French, who created sculptures that symbolized American resolve and righteousness for a reunited, more self-confident nation—most famously, statues of “The Minute Man”: in Concord, Mass., and Abraham Lincoln in Washington, D.C.—was born in Exeter, N.H.

Previously, I have posted on two of his works, The Lincoln Memorial and the George Westinghouse Memorial in Pittsburgh. But these are only two commissions for bronze and marble statues and monuments that he executed in his lifetime. French’s career as a whole is worth celebrating.

A combined studio-museum commemorating French’s grand achievement is located in Stockbridge, Mass., the same town where Norman Rockwell created illustrations that likewise imprinted themselves on the American imagination. 

French, earning his money primarily through public commissions, molded larger-than-life figures who flourished in extraordinary circumstances. Rockwell, working in the heyday of mass commercial art, caught the man on the street in his everyday world—at work, at home, at play. 

The emotions they evoked—heroism, patriotism, sentimentality—often appear to be relics of a bygone era. Yet the sight of these works summon forth more than a glimmer of recognition; they also induce stabs of wistful nostalgia and dreams of a more innocent, more reverend time. “I fear my inclination,” French confessed to a friend in 1919, “is to ignore too much the gloom and emphasize the beauty and joy of life—leaving out the snake which alas! was devised with Paradise.”

Together, the lives of French and Rockwell spanned a century and a quarter. They shared several common traits, besides their unabashed attachment to America and to Stockbridge;

*Both were born in New York City but came to Stockbridge in middle age when they were already well established in their careers. 

*Both became famous while still only in their 20s and remained famous and productive into their 70s. 

*Both achieved their enormous success through a fierce work ethic and a Yankee sense of thrift.

Today, only three-quarters of a mile from each other, two museums honoring these artists have become major tourist attractions in Stockbridge. Chesterwood, the summer home, studio and garden of French, is a historic home museum of the National Trust for Historic Preservation. The Norman Rockwell Museum opened in 1993, the successor to a smaller museum on the town’s Main Street that even years ago could no longer accommodate the flood of tourists making their way here. 

I have visited Chesterwood twice, most recently in 2017. Walking through it while looking about at the nearby Berkshire Mountains, I felt as enthralled as French did a century ago. I also felt it a great opportunity to reflect on the values that, more than clay, provided the binding agent for his greatest work.

French: Sculptor of a Nation Ascendant

As creative as he was, French was also a practical businessman, equally adept at securing clients, balancing the books, and bringing the work to fruition. 

In his youth, two neighbors in Concord, Massachusetts, Abigail May Alcott (sister of novelist Louisa May, and an artist in her own right) and Ralph Waldo Emerson, lent him material support and promoted his work. Later, Berkshire neighbors and artist friends continued to provide him with an excellent network of clients when he moved to Stockbridge in 1897. 

You begin to appreciate how important these visitors were when you see the reception room just off the studio in Chesterwood. The fact that he would make time for visitors, whether they were clients or just fellow artists who could provide feedback, is reinforced by their proximity to his work.

Nevertheless, French was careful to separate the creative and the social sides of his work. He always kept careful track of his business, down to the most copious notes on expenditures (a practice that proved a godsend to the estate’s staff in recent years as they sought to catalogue their holdings). 

Equally important was French’s self-discipline—an iron commitment to, and passion for, his work. “I’d like to live to be two thousand years old and sculpt all the time!” he once exulted to his son-in-law, William Penn Cresson. (As it happened, French worked all the way to the end of his life—Andromeda, left unfinished at the time of his death in 1931, is on display in the studio.)

Chesterwood's studio, residence, barn gallery, and collections gallery contain almost 500 statues, 23 oil paintings, and 13 portrait pastels by French—including an early version, in the garden, of his Standing Lincoln, on display in the Nebraska State House. (A detail of this is in the photo I took accompanying this post.)

These creations responded to—and, in turn, helped shape—a grandiose style of public urban art. It was no accident that even in its own day, the late 19th and early 20th century became known as the American Renaissance in the art world. The Industrial Revolution swelled the population of many American cities, feeding their desire to become the new Athens, Rome, or Florence. Public squares, municipal parks, and sweeping boulevards proliferated. 

The event that ensured public statuary for these civic improvements was the Civil War. Veterans’ groups and civic commissions felt the need to pay tribute to departed heroes of the conflict, to ensure that they had not died in vain. By this time, too, a generation of American-born sculptors had gained valuable training in Italy and Paris, increasing their versatility with bronze as well as marble. 

Thus, a confluence of available money, a deeply appreciative public, and more skilled sculptors produced a golden age of American public monuments, generally agreed as stretching from Saint-Gaudens’ David Farragut Memorial in New York in 1881 to French’s Abraham Lincoln in 1922.

As passionately dedicated as he was to his work, French still found time for other pursuits at Chesterwood. After living in the farmhouse for four years, French and his wife had a villa built by his friend Henry Bacon, an architect who worked with French on a number of projects throughout his career, including the Lincoln Memorial. 

When not sculpting from nine to five, French enjoyed painting, planting fields, tending gardens, and holding parties and relaxing with his wife and daughter Margaret.

Margaret, herself an artist, remained committed to her father’s memory throughout her life. Before she died at age 84 in 1973, she bequeathed the estate to the National Trust for Historic Preservation, along with its art collection and an archive of more than 100,000 items.

Quote of the Day (Richard Brookhiser, on How Lincoln Cleared ‘The Mist’ of His Time)

“Life is all a mist for most of us. We believe a mixture of traditions, lessons, and current opinions: what we have grown up with, what we have been taught, and what we have heard in the street. These are not always the best guides to action….Lincoln, of all men, wanted not to live in a mist. In his worst moods he believed he was damned; at all times his mind taught him (wrongly probably) that he was doomed, predetermined, caught in a mesh of causes. But he always wanted to see, know, and understand. [Law partner William] Herndon noted the comprehensiveness of his curiosity, extending to clocks and omnibuses, but his greatest curiosity was about the great things. He wanted to know what America was, what men were, what God wanted. As he did when he was a boy, he would repeat the lessons of the founding fathers and God the Father until he knew them. What he learned was that all men are created free and equal, and that all men (the people) must understand and defend those truths. Then, because he was a politician, ambitious to lead, he did what he could to clear the mist.”—Historian Richard Brookhiser, Founders' Son: A Life of Abraham Lincoln (2014)