Lincoln Slept Here

...This smaller cottage, which still stands, was the one used by James Buchanan as a summer home...

...And for buffs there could be few banisters with more frisson potential than the one at the cottage at the Soldiers’ Home...

...Among other things, this means that the Emancipation Proclamation might not have been written there, in the bare rooms where the tourists and buffs will now come to feel their frissons, but in the house sitting inconspicuously next door, neglected...

...What we’ll have,” Milligan said, “is the experience of a small group of people sitting around talking in these historic rooms...

...On the other hand, it also means that we can still be sure about that banister— sure that Abraham Lincoln, in the momentous summer of 1864, gripped it with his own hand as he climbed wearily to bed...

...You’ll fi nd it deep in the text of Lincoln’s Sanctuary: Abraham Lincoln and the Soldier’s Home, an original and beautifully written book by Matthew Pinsker (Oxford, 272 pp., $15.95), a historian who’s made the cottage his specialty...

...Pinsker weighs this evidence only to dismiss it...

...And for lots of us, that’s what really counts...

...Some of the rooms have unobtrusive TV monitors to fl ash period images, and the guide can control the simulated gaslight and trigger small speakers that broadcast brief snippets of actors telling stories...

...We’re trying a different approach to interpretation,” said Frank Milligan, the site’s director...

...Instead, visitors enter rooms stripped almost bare...

...In an ingenious bit of curatorial jujitsu, the preservationists at the National Trust have made a virtue of our ignorance, turning this general lack of hard information to their advantage...

...The Lincolns hoped to move there that summer, but several events—the fi ring on Fort Sumter, the battle of Manassas, the usual—upended their plans...

...The same print labels what we now call the “Lincoln cottage” the “Military Governor’s House...

...The cottage and the leafy park that surrounds it is a legendary piece of real estate...

...It’s just the way we are...

...One large dormitorystyle residence (called the Soldiers’ Home) and several generoussized cottages were scattered among the shade trees...

...The emphasis leans, predictably enough, on our contemporary enthusiasms: slavery, emancipation, and Lincoln’s view of equality...

...It’s an audacious idea— and on the part of the National Trust, an act of faith in the patience and good sense of historical tourists...

...The austerity has the odd effect of drawing attention to the mantle pieces, hearthstones, wainscoting, molding, and the window frames with their blurry, leaded panes, almost all of which date from Lincoln’s day (not to mention the stairtreads, the risers, and—be still my heart—the banisters...

...Along around page 130, Pinsker reveals that the Lincoln cottage— the house that the National Trust has so lovingly restored at a cost of $15 million—may not really be the, um, Lincoln cottage...

...In a funny coincidence, it was me who asked that, but if it hadn’t been me, it would have been somebody else in our little group...

...James Buchanan, the Great Procrastinator, had used one of the cottages as a summer home, and on Inauguration Day 1861, he commended the place to his successor...

...Yet there’s one complication that the guides are unlikely to dwell on...

...What precisely transpired there, though, is a question whose answer remains obscure...

...On the present record, we can’t know for sure...

...But whenever I tour a historic house—Mount Vernon, Lincoln’s home in Springfi eld, Madison’s Montpelier—sooner or later there’s a fl ight of stairs to climb and somebody always asks about the banister...

...No attempt has been made to refurnish the house...

...He concludes, rather shakily, that it is still “most likely” that the Lincolns used the Lincoln cottage for all three seasons...

...Now, thanks to the historiographical expertise and fundraising mojo of the National Trust for Historic Preservation, the “Lincoln cottage” has been carefully restored to the condition that Lincoln would have known...

...Some historians surmise that the fi rst draft of the Emancipation Proclamation was written there, and it’s certain that Lincoln received a steady stream of callers at night and on the weekends, for entertainment and recreation as well as for councils of war...

...That’s history for you: All that can be said defi nitively is that the Lincolns stayed in what we call the “Lincoln cottage” during 1864, their last summer at the retreat...

...Here, the curators have somehow resisted the trend, daring to leave a lot to their customers’ imaginations...

...Diaries from the soldiers who guarded the First Family (as it wasn’t called in those republican days) and glancing references in the papers of Lincoln’s aides and friends don’t tell us much: minor anecdotes, mostly, and such homey details as an account of Lincoln padding around in house slippers...

...A trend toward Disneyesque overkill has swamped many modern history museums, in a last, desperate attempt to attract a history-averse public dazed by long hours with the Xbox...

...We want to talk about Lincoln’s ideas...

...A single guide escorts visitors from room to room in small groups of 15 or fewer...

...Historical houses are closing all around the country, because people are sick of standing behind velvet ropes being lectured to...

...No velvet ropes restrict their movements, and they’re invited to sit on period chairs placed here and there...

...Though its historical signifi cance has been recognized since the Civil War, it has been a government facility hidden from public view and placed beyond the sweaty, outstretched hands of history nuts for more than a century...

...Mostly the information comes straight from the tour guides themselves...

...The oral tradition at the Soldier’s Home,” Pinsker writes, has “always assumed that the president lived in the same cottage during each of his three seasons in residence...

...A Civil War-era print of the site labels the smaller cottage the “President’s Villa...

...When it opens to visitors beginning Andrew Ferguson, a senior editor at THE WEEKLY STANDARD, is the author, most recently, of Land of Lincoln: Adventures in Abe’s America...

...We don’t want to talk about furniture, really, or decoration...

...To escape the malarial summer heat and the stink rising from the fetid canal that lay a hundred yards beyond his bedroom window, Abraham Lincoln and his family vacated the White House each spring and traveled three miles into the breezy hilltops above the city, where a retirement home for old soldiers had been built with booty from the Mexican War...

...The reason for the request: “The house heretofore occupied by President Lincoln has, since last summer, been taken by some other person...

...There’s a fair amount of evidence that the Lincolns actually spent the fi rst two summers at a smaller but more sumptuous cottage next door to the one that is now called the Lincoln cottage...

...Altogether, Lincoln spent fully a quarter of his presidency residing in a cottage at the Soldiers’ Home...

...But only a handful of graphic images of the place from the war years survive, and no reliable descriptions are available of what the house’s interior looked liked, how it was decorated, who slept in what bedroom, which parlor Lincoln used for an offi ce, or whether he had an offi ce there at all...

...Yet this is just an assumption...

...And when we learned the answer was yes, the reaction would have been the same: a slight leap of the heart, a lingering hand, a pat of the ancient, fl eshy wood, a stolen glance from buff to buff...

...So I wasn’t surprised recently when, in a preview tour of President Lincoln’s cottage at the Soldiers’ Home, in Washington, D.C., we tramped up to the second fl oor and one of us asked, “So this banister—is it original to the house...

...February 19th, it will instantly take its place as one of the essential sites of presidential history...

...They set up house there the next summer, however, and the two summers following, with Lincoln leaving each morning to work at the White House and returning by nightfall...

...And a congressional letter from early 1864 requests money to refurbish our Lincoln cottage...