WHEN LINCOLN CAME
BACK TO RICHMOND
Abraham Lincoln, with his son Tad in tow, walked around
Richmond, Virginia, one day in April 1865, and if you try
to retrace their steps today you won’t see much that they saw,
which shouldn’t be a surprise, of course. The street grid is the same,
though, and if you’re in the right mood and know what to look for, the
lineaments of the earlier city begin to surface, like the outline of a
scuttled old scow rising through the shallows of a pond. Among the
tangle of freeway interchanges and office buildings you’ll come across
an overgrown park or a line of redbrick town houses, an unlikely old
bell tower or a few churches scattered from block to block, dating to
the decades before the Civil War and still giving off vibrations from
long ago.
Richmond rests on a group of hills above a bend in the James River.
Along the riverbank at the east end of town, where Lincoln began his
tour that day, is a long rank of tobacco warehouses, abandoned now,
and from behind them the land rises steeply through the commercial
district for perhaps half a mile. The Capitol, built from a design by
Thomas Jefferson in the eighteenth century, sits on the crest of the
hill, and back of it, seven blocks away, is a Georgian mansion that
served as the White House of the Confederacy, official residence of
President Jefferson Davis. Walk due west from there, past the parking
lots, through the plaza surrounding the new glass-and-concrete
convention center, and then head south, and before too long you’re
back at the riverbank, at the ruins of the Tredegar Iron Works, where
the cannon and shot were forged that sustained the South through four
years of rebellion.
No one knows for sure whether Lincoln and Tad visited Tredegar,
or whether they passed by the ironworks during a carriage ride they
took later the same day, but they’re there now-so a romantic would
say-in the form of a bronze statue. The statue, showing both father
and son, was installed in April 2003, at the headquarters of the National
Park Service’s Richmond Civil War battlefield park, which is housed
in Tredegar’s surviving buildings. In the months leading to its unveiling,
the statue created a controversy that reached far beyond Richmond,
beyond the United States even, to become an object of international
interest-improbably enough, during that season when the world’s
attention was diverted by another war looming in Iraq. One Richmond
official, traveling through Barbados a few months before the statue
arrived, picked up a newspaper on an excursion plane, LINCOLN COMES
TO CONFEDERATE CAPITAL, read the headline on the back page.
What made the controversy newsworthy was that there should be a
controversy at all. Members of the Richmond establishment-the businessmen,
journalists, politicians, rich people, and other well-wired
doers of public good, who unanimously supported the statue as both a
tourist attraction and a statement of civic virtue-were caught unawares.
It came as a surprise to them, as it had to me, that anyone should
find a tribute to the sixteenth president so objectionable. Who could
object to Lincoln? He seems too big even to have an opinion about. It
would be like objecting to the moon.
Yet many people do object, as Richmond’s big shots discovered, and
these Abephobes, it turns out, are almost always well spoken and well
read and, in percentage terms, not much crazier than the general population
that tends to accept Lincoln’s presence as a fact of life. When I
first visited Richmond, a month before the statue’s unveiling and two
months after I read the story in the Washington Post, I went to see
Bragdon Bowling, who had been stoking the controversy like a steam
engine. Bowling popped up in every story I read. He was gathering
petitions, setting up Web sites, pestering politicians with mail and phone
calls, and encouraging others to do the same. He had enlisted Thomas
DiLorenzo, the author of a recently published anti-Lincoln book called
The Real Lincoln, to help him gather scholars and authors for a public
conference, with the title “Lincoln Reconsidered,” to lay out his case
as soberly and comprehensively as possible.
This was his sworn duty. Bowling is division commander of the
Army of Northern Virginia, Sons of Confederate Veterans, and at those
moments when he decides that the heritage of the South is being abused,
as it was with the placement of a Lincoln statue in the former capital of
the Confederacy, he becomes an agitator ex officio. “It’s a responsibility
you have,” he said. “You’ve got to try to stop it.”
He’s a tall man with a scholarly air, due largely to an unruly shock of
white hair and the wire spectacles that are always slipping down his
nose. I met him in the stripped-down living room of one of the rental
properties he owns, in a working-class suburb north of Richmond. He
had to repaint the place and it was covered in tarps. “Sometimes you
end up renting to people who simply do not know how to keep house,”
he said. He turned a paint tub upside down and sat on it, and gestured
for me to sit on a butt-sprung couch across from him.
Bowling said he was a native of Virginia-but of Arlington, Virginia,
which many native Virginians consider less a part of the commonwealth
than a satellite of Washington, D.C., or worse, liberal Maryland, with
all its inevitable corruptions.
“It’s a zoo now, but it wasn’t so bad then,” he said of his hometown.
“I got a good education. See, you could still do that in those days. I got
taught the usual liberal history, but my teachers were smart people who
had high standards. They taught me to think for myself, and that’s what
I’ve done.
“Ten years ago I started to learn about my family. I read intensively,
everything I could-not just politically correct history but also
other history that’s been suppressed. That’s the way this learning
process often starts. My great-grandfather served in the Army of
Northern Virginia as a private under General Robert E. Lee. He was
at Sharpsburg-Yankees call it Antietam-at Chancellorsville, other
places. And like ninety percent of the soldiers who fought for and
served the South, he never owned a slave. So-just to show you how
the thought process works, for people who are still capable of thinking
for themselves-so I thought, well, why is that? If the war is all about
slavery, why’s he fighting so hard? It didn’t fit, you see, with everything
I’d been taught about the Civil War. Like all his comrades, my
great-grandfather gave everything he had. Why? He did it for his country.
The South had bad everything-bad munitions, bad clothing, bad
food. But they had the best men. They gave everything they had. And
they did not do that to defend slavery.”
The war wasn’t about slavery for Lincoln, either, Bowling explained.
He ticked off the particulars of his indictment of Lincoln. With his generals
he invented the concept of Total War, and waged campaigns of
unprecedented savagery against noncombatants and private property in
the Shenandoah Valley, Sherman’s March through Georgia, and elsewhere.
He was the father of Big Government, vastly expanding the reach
of Imperial Washington in ways unthinkable to the country’s founders.
The Northern victory was therefore the triumph of a cosmopolitan, commercial
culture, controlled by Big Business, over a Southern culture of
farms and small towns that asked only to be let alone.
“It was all about power,” he said. “Six hundred thousand dead. All
so Lincoln and his friends could consolidate their power to tell other
people how to live their lives.”
What Bowling learned inspired him to join the Sons of Conferderate
Veterans. He rose through the ranks, and it was in his capacity as division
commander that he received a phone call one winter evening from
a reporter for the Richmond Times-Dispatch.
“This reporter says to me, he wants a comment on the statue of Lincoln
they’re going to put up in Richmond.
“I said, ‘Huh?’
“He said, ‘Yeah, a fellow named Bob Kline has donated a statue of
Lincoln and they’re going to put it up down at the visitor center at
Tredegar. You got a comment?’
“Well, I knew right away what was going on here. And I told him
so. This is the latest move in a scheme to demonize the Confederate
soldier. The Park Service, the politicians, the politically correct historians,
they’ve been doing this all across the country, and now they’re
doing it right here in Richmond.”
I said a statue of Lincoln didn’t sound to me like it was demonizing
anybody.
“To worship Lincoln, right here, is an insult to the Confederate
soldier,” he said. “There are forty thousand graves of Confederate
soldiers in this city and I will defend their honor. You see, unlike the
politicians and these others, I’m a student of history. I know what this
man Lincoln did to this country. I know what the army under his command
did to the South. You ever wonder why there are no statues of
Abraham Lincoln in the entire southern half of the United States? It’s
pretty simple: people here remember what he did. Used to be, everybody
here remembered. Now only some of us do.”
Three times during our interview Bowling was interrupted with
phone calls from reporters, including one from the Times of London,
seeking comment on one aspect or another of the controversy. He answered
them all with a patient repetition of well-rehearsed sound bites.
“It is an insult to the Confederate soldier,” he said. After the third call
I got up to leave and he walked me outside. The pickup in the driveway
had an old NRA sticker peeling from its bumper: CHARLTON HESTON
IS MY PRESIDENT.
“This thing is not over yet,” he said. “There are a lot of people upset
over this, and they may still have a few tricks up their sleeves.”
I asked him if he meant someone was planning to prevent the statue
from going in.
“If there’s anything violent or what have you that happens, the Sons
of Confederate Veterans will have no part in that,” he said. “People do
feel strongly. But the statue will go in,” he said. “Probably.” He laughed.
“Unless it doesn’t.”
While he was alive, Abraham Lincoln was one of the most intensely
hated public figures the country has ever known. The minute he got
shot, however, things began looking up for him. Colleagues and subordinates
who had considered him dithering or imperious in life fell into
inconsolable and very public mourning at word of his death. Political
enemies who had prayed for his demise suddenly saw a figure of inviolable
moral integrity, farseeing competence, unsearchable wisdom.
The historian Merrill Peterson, in his great book Lincoln in American
Memory, cites the instance of Henry Ward Beecher, the abolitionist
preacher in Brooklyn who for four years had lacerated Lincoln from
his pulpit for timidity and hesitation in the face of Southern barbarism.
Then came John Wilkes Booth, and Lincoln was dead, and when the
body passed through New York on its way to the cemetery in Springfield,
Illinois, the old blowhard ascended the same pulpit and became
the martyred president’s foremost eulogist.
“Dead-dead-dead, he yet speaketh,” Beecher said. “Four years ago,
O Illinois, we took from your midst an untried man, we return him to
you a conqueror. Not thine anymore, but the Nation’s; not ours, but
the world’s. Give him place, ye prairies!”
Everyone was ready to give him place. So quickly and so thoroughly
did his countrymen exalt him that causists everywhere found it profitable
to enlist his memory. A teetotaler in life, for instance, Lincoln became,
once he was safely dead-dead-dead, an unsilenceable advocate
of national temperance-or so claimed the Drys of the national temperance
movement, which distributed millions of copies of a speech
he had made on the subject early in his career. The Drys pressed their
Lincoln association for decades, until historians employed by Adolphus
Busch, partner of Anheuser and father of Budweiser, discovered a
yellowing liquor license that had been issued in the 1830s to a small
prairie grocer by the name of Abraham Lincoln. Busch made sure that
reproductions of Lincoln’s license soon hung on the wall of every tavern
in America. They stayed there, consoling drinkers, until the tragic
triumph of the Drys in 1919.
By that time Lincoln had been dragooned into causes far more implausible
than temperance. On the centennial of his birth, in 1909, the
nation’s leading white supremacist, a senator from Mississippi named
James K. Vardaman, made an unironical pilgrimage to Springfield and
claimed “the immortal Lincoln” as his inspiration. “My views and his
views,” he said later on the Senate floor, “are substantially identical.”
He would have got an argument, probably, from the American Communist
party, which throughout the 1930s put on an annual Lincoln-Lenin
Day festival and festooned its Harlem headquarters with his
likeness.
Americans laid claim to his spiritual life, too. To his friends, Lincoln
appeared to be a man of few and ambiguous religious beliefs. He quoted
the Bible often but he never joined a church, and when he ran for president
every pastor in Springfield pointedly refused to endorse him. Yet
when his soul took flight it was lassoed by every Protestant denomination
simultaneously. Unitarians took him as their own, and so, later on,
did the Christian Scientists, even though the science of divine healing
was not revealed to Mary Baker Eddy until a year after Lincoln’s death.
In 1891, the famed (at the time) seer Nettie Colburn Maynard published
a long study called Was Abraham Lincoln a Spiritualist? She answered
her question with an emphatic yes, describing dinner parties during the
Civil War at which the president had witnessed a grand piano rising
mysteriously off the floor, with the president himself perched atop it-a
rare treat for a teetotaler. One Christian publicist after another saw
in Lincoln’s life eerie resemblances to the life of Christ: both Jesus and
Lincoln were born of carpenters and rose from lowly beginnings, both
were storytellers, both were killed on Good Friday, both were saviors-of
the world, in one case, of the Union, in the other. And in the days
before his death each made a profound journey of mercy: Jesus to
Jerusalem, Lincoln to Richmond.
Robert Kline was working out of a large house on Richmond’s Main
Street, a brick pile built in the Federal style a decade or two before the
rebellion. It lies just far enough west to have escaped the flames that
leveled the old downtown in April 1865. A brass nameplate next to the
front door identifies it as the headquarters of the United States Historical
Society, the company Kline started thirty years ago, after a career
in public relations and real estate.
Hairsplitters might complain that the name is a little misleading;
Kline’s society does not have members or hold conferences in the
manner of more conventional historical societies. It is instead “a private
nonprofit educational organization,” according to its literature,
“dedicated to fostering increased awareness and appreciation of
America’s culture and history.” It does its fostering by making and
selling “collectibles”-small, heavy things forged of pewter or brass,
mounted on polished strips of cherry or little rectangles of marble-that
bear a strong resemblance to what many in the nonprofit world
call knickknacks.
A first-floor conference room, where I waited for my interview with
Mr. Kline, serves as a kind of showroom for the society’s handiwork.
Collectibles hung from walls and stood in ranks on every available flat
surface. The overflow was gathered in piles on the floor. All stages
of American history were represented. There were miniatures of
World War II submarines, minesweepers, destroyers, and PT boats;
gilt-rimmed plates featuring famous American homes-Monticello,
Graceland-dappled with sunlight in sylvan settings; reproductions
of pewter tankards designed by Paul Revere. President Kennedy was
there as a doll delivering his inaugural address, one hand tucked in his
coat pocket, the other thrust confidently toward the future.
There were replicas of swords-one worn by George Washington
at his inauguration, another surrendered by Cornwallis at Yorktown-and
reproductions of famous pistols, and mounted replicas of “famous
canes,” and tiny cannons adorned with plaques. There was enough
stained glass to fill the windows at Sainte-Chapelle, if it were suddenly
taken over by Wal-Mart: familiar, multicolored scenes from Norman
Rockwell and from the life of Christ, Calvary next to Valley Forge next
to the parting of the Red Sea next to Tom Sawyer and the whitewashed
fence, plus a spookily detailed rendering of the Elvis postage stamp,
Washington on the Delaware, and cozy Christmas scenes. Dolls of
Patrick Henry, FDR, Chuck Yeager, and Clara Barton queued up beside
a three-dimensional tableau of the angels hovering over the stable
at Bethlehem.
(Continues…)
Excerpted from LAND OF LINCOLN
by Andrew Ferguson
Copyright © 2007 by Andrew Ferguson.
Excerpted by permission.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
Atlantic Monthly Press
Copyright © 2007
Andrew Ferguson
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-87113-967-2
