When Lincoln Returned to Richmond
FERGUSON, ANDREW
When Lincoln Returned to Richmond Dispatches from an unlikely culture war BY ANDREW FERGUSON 1. Tricks Up Their Sleeves Abraham Lincoln, with his son Tad in tow, walked around Richmond,...
...They were also, as it happens, Abraham Lincoln's favorite reading...
...The most significant was Judge John Campbell, the highest ranking civilian left in Richmond, who presented Lincoln with an offer to call the Virginia legislature back to session, whereupon, Judge Campbell said, it would vote to rejoin the Union...
...Each house has a columned front porch and a small square of lawn edged in boxwood...
...Charmin', isn't it...
...He who abuses Lincoln abuses himself," editorialized the Richmond Times-Dispatch in the 1920s, expressing the general view...
...When at last he died, one of his pallbearers bragged that no blacks or Jews were allowed at his funeral...
...We do not climb out on a limb, historiographically, if we conclude that this incident, recorded with stenographic precision, is baloney...
...After lunch the president received callers...
...A hardy band of civic-minded entrepreneurs undertook a bottom-to-top renovation a few years ago, working their way up, story by story, and from what I could see, snooping around, they had decided to catch their breath after the third or fourth floor...
...The audience was eager to learn about the past not for the past's sake, but to better understand what was happening to them and the country today...
...All the left-wingers are...
...People will come from all over to admire this piece...
...Everyone entering the park was required to empty bags and purses—pockets, too, in some cases...
...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...
...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...
...She's a mild, imperturbable woman, and seemed quite resolute...
...Everyone wore a name badge decorated with tiny handprints and silhouettes of somersaulting toddlers...
...But the questions about the war are too large to be forever answered with a sentimental shrug or an averted gaze...
...There were stacks of rare videos and audio tapes...
...I asked him if he meant someone was planning to prevent the statue from going in...
...Recent decades have been unkind, however, and the Marshall stands now at the edge of a vast acreage of empty storefronts and parking lots, enlivened here and there by random glimmers of commercial life—a hot dog stand, a shoe repair shop, a check cashing service...
...What Bowling learned inspired him to join the Sons...
...Her friend nodded and chewed her slice of pizza thoughtfully...
...The Confederates had sown the James with mines and other snares, and one by one the boats ran aground or were abandoned...
...What an event...
...just old photos of Richmond before and after the fire, along with dour images of Jefferson Davis, Robert E. Lee, and John C. Calhoun...
...When he talked about the controversy, Mr...
...Lincoln climbed onto the porch and moved into the cool of the parlor...
...He's bin in my heart fo' long years an' he's cum at las' to free his children from bondage...
...Can't expose the children...
...Out on the street a well-fed fellow in a black T-shirt and low-slung Relaxed Fit jeans was holding a hand-painted placard: "Lincoln = War Criminal...
...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...
...He came as a friend," wrote an early historian, "to alleviate sorrow and suffering—to rebuild what had been destroyed...
...The powers that control the city, they cannot stand diversity," he said...
...Within days of the conflagration in April 1865, downtown was on the mend, and before too long terraced rows of shops and townhous-es were spreading across the hilltops above the James...
...Lincoln haters are touchy on the subject of race...
...He ran his hand over a cream-colored folder from which Lincoln's face stared out, looking unhappy...
...He said the city of his childhood had ceased to exist a generation ago...
...Lincoln had been a distant acquaintance of Pickett before the war...
...By that time Lincoln had been dragooned into causes far more implausible than temperance...
...Unitarians took him as their own, and so 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...
...All so Lincoln and his friends could consolidate their power to tell other people how to live their lives...
...The visit to Richmond should be a big thing in the history of our country...
...That, for me, conveys the whole idea," MacLeod said...
...Then, to recover its money, the society would sell miniatures of the statue, each forged of genuine bronze, weighing 13 pounds, and tagged with the apparently magical (in the collectibles business) words: "limited edition...
...In mid-speech he was drowned out by the sudden appearance of a small propeller plane, circling low overhead...
...Round tables filled the ballroom...
...They have no sense of being rooted in a single place—to them Richmond is just this town they've moved to...
...Lincoln was a man of few and ambiguous religious beliefs...
...They moved the flagpole a while back," Leak said...
...Brilliant sunshine flooded into the food court through a skylight far overhead...
...And these are his friends...
...It lies just far enough west of downtown to have escaped the flames in April 1865...
...Some Sons persuaded a local congressman, Virgil Goode, to ask the park service itself to see whether the society's activity was legitimate...
...The theme of fraudulence, of a comprehensive scam spanning decades, deluding even most contemporary southerners, is the theme of The Real Lincoln, and Thomas DiLorenzo's clean, uncomplicated articulation of it has ensured his place at the head of what the Lincoln haters call "our movement...
...Well, we'll want to withhold some funds for a reserve for future pro-jects—we're always coming up with projects...
...The pickup in the driveway had an old NRA sticker: "Charlton Heston is my President...
...They taught me to think for myself, and that's what I've done...
...Inspired and repulsed, Leak began writing letters to the editor, attended rallies, and eventually joined the Sons in their long-running guerrilla war with the city establishment...
...Leak said he wouldn't be at the counter-demonstration, but planned to be at Tredegar to protest the unveiling as it happened...
...DiLorenzo's book isn't original, but it usefully collects and paraphrases a century's worth of anti-Lincoln arguments in a brief, up-to-date volume...
...At lunchtime sandwiches were laid out for the guests in an adjoining meeting room...
...But it is eerily mild...
...Sad to say," Gamble wrote, "this catalog of errors is only a sampling...
...Right here is the cause of your War Between the States...
...You see old Stonewall standing there," he said...
...He asked that I not use his last name, because he works for the federal government in Washington...
...most of them, in my experience, don't want their Abephobia tied in any way to negrophobia, and in fact they are delighted, for this reason and for reasons of general perversity, to confound expectations by condemning Lincoln as a racist...
...The Real Lincoln Home Study Program" had been designed for home schoolers and college students...
...He had no intellectual interests other than winning legal cases and amassing personal wealth...
...All the Father Abraham stuff—it's a fraud," Robert told me...
...What made the controversy newsworthy was that there should be a controversy at all...
...The despisers see themselves as hard-headed realists, proud to have shaken off the self-serving myths of American history...
...He walked into the White House of the Confederacy and plopped down in Jeff Davis's chair and propped his muddy boots up on Jeff Davis's desk and said, 'Hey, we won!' Some healer...
...That is not right...
...Back beyond the buildings are the tumbledown brick ruins of a water channel, safely fenced off from the tourists, who might hurt themselves if left free to wander near...
...And so on...
...At least to the naked eye...
...Certainly he wasn't interested in slavery...
...They made landfall at Rocketts Landing, on the east end of the charred city, a couple of miles from the Capitol grounds...
...And then any money beyond that we'll give to the Richmond Peace Education Center, a wonderful group of people here in town...
...I said a statue of Lincoln didn't sound to me like it was demonizing anybody...
...I don't know how many of the conference-goers would have agreed with Robert on the specifics, but the thrust of his argument—that the war was about brute economic arrangements and the allocation of political spoils—is a common theme among his fellows...
...History can be such a learning experience," she said...
...Sure, of course, we knew a few die-hards might object here or there...
...Many of them had spent their morning at a "Lincoln in Richmond" symposium, held a couple miles away at the headquarters of the Virginia Historical Society—the same building where, Leak had told me, the word "Confederate" had been covered up from embarrassment...
...He told me he'd seen a sign from the city's Valentine Richmond History Center, sponsoring a "Lincoln Walk...
...The Marshall was put up not long after World War One, and it's still the tallest building in Richmond's old downtown, though of course there's not much competition...
...At each seat was a pad of paper and a pen, for note-taking...
...Grown men wept as it passed...
...Look close...
...Unless it doesn't...
...It was to sit at ground level, and behind it, MacLeod said, a marble half-wall would curve in a semicircle, bearing the phrase from Lincoln's Second Inaugural: "To Bind Up the Nation's Wounds...
...As a national symbol he is unavoidable...
...Where the carriage took them isn't known, though some accounts record a tour of the Capitol, and Lincoln wandering the chambers through drifts of Confederate currency, now worthless...
...Department stores, theaters, candy shops, haberdashers...
...You bet we could have...
...All stages of American history were represented...
...Used to be, everybody here remembered...
...They quickly ran into trouble...
...Those who love him turn him into a sentimental old poop...
...Six hundred thousand dead...
...It's a responsibility you have," he said...
...Said another poster: "What if everything you knew about Lincoln were false...
...Lincoln in Richmond, wrote James McPherson in Battie Cry of Freedom, "produced the most unforgettable scenes of this unforgettable war...
...We drove further down, past the Virginia Historical Society, where the building's original inscription, "Confederate Memorial Institute," has been covered over by a huge banner, and then through Hollywood Cemetery, where more than 10,000 Confederate soldiers are buried, and where, at Jefferson Davis's grave, the Sons were planning to hold a counter-demonstration against the Lincoln statue the next day...
...They could rub our noses in it and nobody could be powerful enough to stop them...
...In 1993, the City Council unilaterally decided to place a statue of the tennis star Arthur Ashe, a Richmond native, on Monument Avenue, the miles-long boulevard dotted with memorial statues of Confederate heroes...
...Today there's a different spirit, ready to identify with a gentler Lincoln—a Lincoln who could deal comfortably with ambiguity...
...Early Tuesday morning they loaded onto a flotilla that included the River Queen, the steamer carrying the presidential party of Lincoln, Tad, and his guide, the naval commander David Porter...
...Cynthia MacLeod, supervisor of the park, showed me around...
...Every datum is meticulously extracted from its context and then positioned to reflect as poorly on Lincoln as possible...
...You're right: The 1860s...
...When I first visited Richmond last March, three months after plans for the statue had been announced and one month before its unveiling, I went to see Bragdon Bowling, who had been stoking the controversy like a steam engine...
...A professor at Loyola College in Maryland, DiLorenzo is an economist by training and a libertarian by inclination...
...reproductions of pewter tankards designed by Paul Revere...
...It's a joke," Leak said...
...Of course, that was long before anybody got the bright idea of building a statue of him in the capital of the Confederacy...
...It's a teachers' union, and the members were noisily queuing up at Sbarro's Pizza, Subway, TCBY Yogurt, Taco Bell, Great Steak & Potato Company—America's great groaning board of starch, sugar, fat, and salt...
...Not thine anymore, but the Nation's...
...Historical Society...
...I met him outside the house he shares with his mother...
...Harold Holzer, a specialist in Lin-colniana from the Metropolitan Museum of Art, used to write speeches for Mario Cuomo...
...Leak asked...
...Money...
...Among the tangle of freeway interchanges and office buildings you'll come across an overgrown park or a line of red-brick townhouses, an unlikely old belltower 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...
...William Lee Miller, an ethics professor from the University of Virginia, was a speechwriter for Adlai Stevenson and later worked for Lyndon Johnson...
...In keeping with the way public disputes are played out nowadays, the air was soon thick with motive-mon-gering, personal vituperation, and allegations of criminality...
...The symposium was thrown together in haste, as the city establishment's rebuttal to the "Lincoln Reconsidered" conference, and like the Sons, the society had had to reach far beyond Richmond for its panel of Lincoln experts...
...But they had the best men...
...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...
...From across the James River a northerly wind picked up the flames and carried them beyond the warehouses...
...Dabney thought it was a wonderful idea, too," Mr...
...Did you learn about the greatness of the great man...
...Yet why did he come...
...It was really all Lincoln cared about...
...The same thing'll happen with the statues of Lincoln...
...Kline wouldn't have to unload too many mini-Lincolns to cover his costs...
...It seemed odd to fund a pacifist group with money from the sale of little statues representing America's greatest, and fiercest, wartime president, but before I could say anything, Mr...
...Pickett greeted the president at the door, she said in her account, and Lincoln admired her new baby, even planted it with a kiss, and briefly exchanged pleasantries about friends in common...
...Mere curiosity is a plausible motive...
...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...
...For Lincoln's admirers the visit is further evidence of their man's large-heartedness...
...The council voted to place it on the avenue instead, notwithstanding, or rather because of, the odd juxtaposition—just a few hundred yards down the street from Jefferson Davis, who never in his life would have given a thought to Arthur Ashe or his ancestors, unless he'd been putting in a bid...
...But even they didn't hazard a guess to explain why Lincoln would risk his own safety, and that of his son, in such an excursion...
...These bled into one another, then faded in and out, in the tempo of a dirge...
...The third panelist, Ronald C. White, is dean of the San Francisco Theological Seminary, which is a self-explanatory job title...
...Could we have got something larger, some huge icon sort of thing...
...It's so small...
...At least you got a shot of the prop plane, right...
...Well, here's the plan...
...Had to get it out of public view...
...It's pretty simple: People here remember what he did...
...Baroque accounts of the conspiracy, published on the web and patiently laid out for me by several Sons on condition of anonymity, turned vague at crucial points, thoroughly incomprehensible at others...
...As caretaker of our historical resources, the National Park Service is in the business of presenting a tidy past, tricked out as attractively as possible in the ruthless competition for the tourist dollar...
...He deserves a statue, right...
...It's a won-der"—a wondah—"it's been preserved as well as it has...
...How can they honor a man who did everything in his power to destroy them...
...Creepier still, from beneath the murmured words drift up those doleful tunes, played on creaky violins and pitiful flutes—those manic-depressive melodies that the documentarian Ken Burns, through his PBS TV shows, has now made the official soundtrack of American history...
...On some facts, all accounts agree...
...A first floor conference room, where I waited for my interview with Mr...
...He saw my notepad and said: "Getting kicked around don't piss me off...
...My great grandfather served in the Army of Northern Virginia as private under General Robert E. Lee...
...A giant among the little people...
...Always outnumbered, and frequently suffering from shortages of material goods, they nonetheless maintained enviable morale...
...What pisses me off is when they tell us we're supposed to like it...
...Kline, greeting guests as they arrived for the "Lincoln Reconsidered" conference...
...And this one thing may help you understand other things...
...If someone decided to burn it down again I don't think anybody would mind...
...No one knows whether this is true either...
...Our Lincoln conference took place on the mezzanine, in the old ballroom, site of generations of Richmond cotillions and comings-out...
...Then Bowling introduced himself...
...There are dozens of places where a thing like that would have been suitable...
...The Northern victory was a triumph for a commercial culture, controlled by Big Business, over a Southern culture of farms and small towns that asked only to be let alone...
...Order forms were available for anyone who might want to buy a videotape of the day's conference: "To change the minds of those filled with misinformation," read the come-on, "you must be prepared with the truth...
...When I was a boy people would come from all over to shop here," Leak said...
...Not long after its publication, Richard M. Gamble, a historian at Palm Beach Atlantic University, wrote a blistering notice in the Independent Review, a libertarian journal written, edited, and read by Lincoln skeptics...
...You see a Confederate flag...
...The minute he got shot, however, things began looking up for him...
...when Leak had me stop the car...
...MacLeod, not surprisingly, paraphrases the requirement more delicately: "Congress encouraged us to be more inclusive in our presentation of the causes of the war...
...The mayor was at the microphone, commending his city on hosting the "the second coming of Abraham Lincoln...
...For a paid-up Lincoln despiser, history is a living thing...
...Winning at whatever cost...
...By the time they reached Richmond, Lincoln and his party had transferred to a scow, with fewer than a dozen marines to row them ashore...
...You need to understand one thing about Robert E. Lee," Leak said...
...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...
...And Brag Bowling, also not surprisingly, puts it less delicately: "What we've got now, for the first time in history, is an agency of the federal government decreeing that this one factor, slavery, was the sole, unique cause of the war...
...And while the portrait lacks the richness and complexity of good history it is undoubtedly compelling, as grotesques often are...
...Bowling said he was a native of Virginia—but Northern Virginia, which many native Virginians consider less a part of the commonwealth than a satellite of Washington, D.C., or worse, Maryland, with all its inevitable corruptions...
...We're used to it by now...
...Everything he said was interesting, but his observations were interspersed in a long patter of complaint...
...The important thing is, by putting the statue here, on the avenue, they realized they could trivialize the things we cherish and get away with it...
...He had priced the limited-edition miniatures at $875 apiece, the others at $125 (shipping and handling not included...
...They shared a pedigree common to the breed nowadays...
...6. Jesse Jackson's Revenge "I'll tell you what," Brag Bowling said later that afternoon, as we stood in the lobby of the John Marshall, watching the conference empty out...
...It says, very simply, that we should love each other...
...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, the March through Georgia, and elsewhere...
...By late afternoon, when the shroud was tugged off the statue at the visitor center, the sun had splintered through and Tredegar was bathed in golden light...
...He tapped the diagram with the extrasharp point of his pencil...
...The Lincoln who emerges from this carefully assembled collage is a figure of almost unimaginable depravity...
...I walked several blocks past empty storefronts looking for someplace to eat...
...During breaks in the conference Robert explained some of what he'd most recently learned...
...Dead-dead-dead, he yet speaketh," Beecher said...
...Lincoln steps off the barge at Rocketts and is spotted at once by an "aged Negro...
...And then—then—when his country, Virginia, was invaded by Yankees, he did not hesitate to take up arms to defend her...
...Lincoln shut down hundreds of newspapers that dared to criticize him...
...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...
...Sometimes you end up renting to people who simply do not know how to keep house," he said...
...We want the human connections, the letters home, the voices of real people...
...Nothing...
...And it was— though life-sized, it looked smaller than life, diminutive almost...
...As we drove along, Leak quoted Tocqueville on "democratic consensus," Allen Tate on the character of the southern imagination, and the art critic Robert Hughes on the value of representational, as opposed to abstract, art...
...I looked around for Brag Bowling, but he was nowhere to be seen...
...Power...
...He had the look of someone who didn't know what hit him...
...Lin-colnesque in stature, almost, though his hair is white now and thin as silk...
...I joined Mr...
...That failure has kept us from moral and political maturity...
...You should see the mail," Mr...
...Exhibits at Tredegar are exemplary of the park service's new method for presenting the war to interested (and more to the point, not-so-interested) visitors...
...Myers, Florida, named Robert Lloyd...
...I read intensively, everything I could—not just politically correct history but also other history that's been suppressed...
...Still, simple arithmetic showed that Mr...
...Understanding others...
...Collectibles were mounted on walls, standing in ranks on shelves, covering the tops of bureaus, and resting in piles on the floor...
...Both sides agreed not to interfere in one another's memories...
...Four years ago, O Illinois, we took from your midst an untried man, we return him to you a conqueror...
...When they put that statue in tomorrow, down at Tre-degar, with the mayor and the businessmen there, and the governor probably, when they put in that glorious, expensive statue to Father Abraham, they will have won again, right...
...You go down the hill there, down to Tredegar, you'll see exactly what we're talking about...
...It makes the whole avenue seem like a postmodern installation," I agreed...
...Without their objection, the citizens of the South were able to venerate and remember the heroic actions of their men-at-arms...
...Three times during our interview Bowling was interrupted with phone calls from reporters, seeking comment on one aspect or another of the controversy...
...Already, he said, the statue had cost the society $225,000, and sales thus far had only totaled around $40,000...
...The war wasn't about slavery for Lincoln, either, Bowling explained...
...The first stop on our tour was the Capitol grounds—notable for its statuary, just as the guidebooks say...
...He suspended habeas corpus...
...These got heavy use as the day wore on...
...To worship Lincoln, right here, is an insult to the Confederate soldier," he said...
...When the speeches were over, on toward dusk, the audience gathered around the plaza...
...There are a lot of people upset over this, and they may still have a few tricks up their sleeves...
...We're trying to expand the interpretation beyond the usual who-won, who-lost, who-shot-whom interpretation," MacLeod told me, walking the broad-plank floor of the old foundry...
...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...
...After the symposium I went down to the safe space at Tredegar...
...Kline, serves as a kind of showroom for the society's handiwork...
...After a while I stumbled on an indoor food court, tucked next to the new convention center, recently opened on the outskirts of downtown...
...Kline took me over to a shelf...
...Even for DiLorenzo's philosophical allies, however, the book's weaknesses are hard to ignore...
...Generations of American schoolchildren were taught to be like Lincoln—honest, compassionate, just, resolute...
...White, for his part, said the Richmond statue improved on Daniel Chester French's heroic, awe-inspiring statue of Lincoln at the Lincoln Memorial...
...That night detonation squads spread along the waterfront, torching warehouses filled with tobacco and munitions...
...Despite what Brag Bowling said, no one is demon-ized at Tredegar...
...He answered them all with a patient repetition of well-rehearsed sound bites...
...And we're assuming all the risk, for goodness sake...
...Southerners accepted Jim Crow only with the greatest reluctance, he told me...
...Only someone for whom history is urgent and personal, a matter of the living present as well as the long ago, will find the exhibits gimmicky and shallow and, in a way hard to explain, disrespectful...
...Of course, we lost in the end," Leak said...
...Historical Society does," he said, sweeping his arm across the room with evident pride...
...I hear the voice of Jackson," Lloyd sang, "calling out my name / 'Don't let ole Dixie writhe in shame / Don't let our children go on wonderin' / Did their fathers die in vain?'" The video was filmed in sepia tones, with a herky-jerky handheld camera, the better to suggest antiquity...
...That is an issue on which I have no strong views one way or the other," Leak said...
...But many people do object, it turns out, and they are almost always well-spoken and well-read and, in percentage terms, not very often crazier than the general population that tends to accept Lincoln's greatness as a fact of life...
...At every point in the exhibit you hear, or half-hear, the voices of actors reading old letters and diaries, playing again and again on a tape loop...
...On our way back to the Fan, we drove the length of Monument Avenue again, past Stuart, Lee, Jackson, and the other heroes, so Leak could show me the statue of Arthur Ashe...
...but beneath that tearful, nostalgic heart you will find another, even gruffer interior...
...They don't need to know about my interest in Mr...
...They looked very busy and very happy...
...In Locke's columns Nasby is a Southern sympathizer and all-purpose figure of fun...
...3. The Limited Edition Lincoln Robert Kline works 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...
...Along the route Lincoln stopped at the notorious Libby Prison, emptied at last of the Union officers who had suffered there for half the war...
...They've taught southerners to hate their history...
...Dislodged from their defenses at Petersburg, south of Richmond, Robert E. Lee's ragged troops zigzagged their way west, in a final attempt to twist free of the enemy...
...No one knows for sure whether Lincoln and Tad visitAndrew Ferguson is a senior editor at THE WEEKLY STANDARD...
...And to calm the skittish Stanton, who fretted always for Lincoln's safety, he added: "I will take care of myself...
...Redo everything, make it good as new...
...When it was over, the man sitting next to me shook his head, much moved, and said, "Whoa...
...You could have Frederick Douglass...
...He explained to the audience, as he had to me, how appalled he'd been to learn of the Lincoln statue, and how it had inspired him to organize the conference...
...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...
...Stuck in traffic jams, I'd watch through the windshield as the women in black hoisted signs reading "Jail Bush, Not Saddam" and "Disarm U.S., Not Iraq...
...There's an old sluice gate with a creaky wooden wheel that's set spinning every once in a while, ceremonially...
...But nothing like this . . . this ugliness...
...A nihil obstat from Dabney, under normal circumstances, would go far in indemnifying anyone against charges of carpetbaggery...
...But the Lincoln myth," Wilson said, "fails to make a solid connection with what really happened, to draw a connection between what he did and what his supporters say he did...
...Pepper...
...He buried them together...
...The little plaza outside the visitor center, said White, will create "a safe space for us to talk about those rifts that divide us...
...One episode, first put on paper by Admiral Porter in a memoir published 20 years later, is invariably included in histories that mention the visit, in both plain and enhanced versions...
...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...
...Political enemies who had prayed for his demise suddenly saw a figure of inviolable moral integrity, farseeing competence, unsearchable wisdom...
...This is an ongoing thing...
...But the statue will go in," he said...
...He had left Washington a week before to visit Ulysses S. Grant at City Point, Virginia, a river port 30 miles downstream of the Confederate capital, from which vantage he could watch at close range the final progress of federal forces...
...Professor Miller noted how "unmoralistic" Lincoln was, a specialist in self-criticism who never felt the need, despite constant provocation, to be "judgmental...
...the old man is quoted as saying, kneeling before his savior, sounding suspiciously like a dispatcher for the Amos and Andy cab company...
...When Parson Weems published his fairy tale about George Washington and the cherry tree, he was illustrating a truth for the consumption of children—that Washington's life was motivated by a commitment to telling the truth...
...Dozens of armed guards were assigned to make sure that he did...
...The conference-goers were a studious, earnest group, hungry for information...
...Fine...
...A temporary platform had been set up for a surprisingly large group of speakers: the park supervisor Cynthia MacLeod and Bob Kline, several congressmen, the lieutenant governor, a small army of state legislators...
...The City Council's highhanded decision, and the energetic objections to it, made news around the world, drawing attention to Richmond as a place "where the Civil War was still being fought...
...Just one more example of ethnic cleansing," the man said when he rejoined the other protesters...
...By his own admission, he didn't even make it an issue till 1854...
...As it happened, I'd already run across the peace education center during my time in Richmond...
...On Sunday, April 2, Jefferson Davis ordered the government to evacuate the capital...
...There was just no call for it...
...So quickly and so thoroughly did his countrymen exalt him that causists everywhere found it profitable to enlist his memory...
...Almost every significant battlefield from the war is in park service custody, along with many other sites, like Tredegar, that are dear to the heart of a buff...
...On the introductory placard a visitor reads: "The Confederacy mounted an impressive defense of Richmond and Virginia in the face of enormous obstacles...
...Just such a disequilibrium had developed in the United States in the 1850s...
...This idea first came to me 20 years ago," he said...
...I asked him what he was going to do if he sold so many that he had money left over...
...That it's now used by them to buttress their case for Lincoln's arrogance proves that the joke is still on them—but not only on them...
...A landmark was reached in 1999, when Congress approved a bill, introduced by Rep...
...Several of them, mounted on horseback, had ranged themselves around the hill above the visitor center...
...I went up to the visitor center...
...I stood off to the side with a group of reporters from local television stations...
...You read a chapter of Dr...
...And like 90 percent of the soldiers who fought for and served the South, he never owned a slave...
...It's happened time and again throughout world history, to small countries and big countries and young countries and old countries," he said...
...Leak is native to the capital, and his accent is deep and rich...
...Jesus," he said...
...Busch made sure that reproductions of Lincoln's license soon hung on the wall of every tavern in America...
...Colleagues and subordinates who had considered him dithering or imperious in life fell into inconsolable and very public mourning at word of his death...
...We were standing in the lobby of the John Marshall Hotel on a Saturday morning a few days after my visit with Mr...
...Behind us, a few of the Sons began singing "Dixie...
...Certainly the consensus could not withstand the withering scrutiny of people for whom the particulars of history are too vital to be glossed over...
...There's not much evidence for or against this proposition...
...Bowling's remarks were followed, unexpectedly, by a musical interlude, the national debut of a music video made just a week before, as a public protest against Lincoln's uninvited return to the capital of the Confederacy...
...And if you have another opinion—like, the war had several important causes...
...It's not so hard to understand, is it...
...The society would pay for the statue—its commission, design, forging, and transportation to Richmond—and give it to the park service free of charge...
...During another break, Robert grabbed a fresh piece of notepaper and diagrammed an econometric model that he had lately unearthed from an academic journal of political economy...
...Lincoln was set to take his place in the pantheon...
...They think he was a wimp," I said...
...Leak nodded at it, then pointed me farther along the Capitol driveway, to a statue of Stonewall Jackson, which sits in a prominent position—right next to a statue of his doctor...
...History...
...They just want to remove the undesirable elements from the population...
...He never joined a church, and when he ran for president every pastor in Springfield pointedly refused to endorse him...
...Winning is what they care about...
...I thumbed through such ethnocentric volumes as The Irish in the Army of Northern Virginia and The Jewish Confederates...
...At the heart of it all was the odd means by which the relevant parties had agreed to finance the statue...
...Amid a clutch of crouching children, Ashe stands knobby-kneed, in short pants and ankle socks...
...Lee had paced the floor in worry over her absent husband and sons, and eight blocks from the White House of the Confederacy, where Lincoln had met with Judge Campbell, and three blocks from the Capitol, where Davis had struggled in vain to staunch his country's bleeding, and just around the corner from the Presbyterian church where Stonewall Jackson himself had once served as an elder, before his martyrdom at Chancellorsville...
...A scuffle broke out at the gate...
...It's a zoo now, but it wasn't so bad then," he said of his hometown of Arlington, across the river from Washington...
...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...
...The newspaper is run by Yankees...
...he told smutty jokes...
...They stand for a lot of things Lincoln stood for...
...To the Sons this sounded like profiteering, but the attorney general, the commonwealth's corporation counsel, and the park service all said they found nothing improper in the arrangement...
...That's the way this learning process often starts...
...It was only with some trouble that I forced myself to get up and walk back to the Marshall, and not merely because the sole of my sneaker was stuck in a puddle of old Dr...
...Occasionally footage of Civil War reenactors filled the screen...
...With a flourish, Mr...
...The displays are interesting almost despite themselves: homey artifacts like pipes and playing cards, old bottles and cakes of soap, set against panels crowded with clouds of explanatory text...
...I said something about how small the bronze figures looked...
...Clearly he had a messiah complex, but he was a messiah with no purpose beyond his own aggrandizement...
...Was the war a successful struggle against slavery or a futile defense of state sovereignty and limited government...
...There were miniatures of World War II submarines, minesweepers, destroyers, and PT boats...
...Solicitations were already being made by direct mail and over the Internet, at the Tredegar gift shop, and through an agreement with the Virginia Historical Society...
...Oh, he stopped there...
...We could have done one-and-a-half, double, triple life-size...
...The lawns are emerald green and neatly trimmed...
...Leak looked away, then back at me...
...He seems too big even to have an opinion about...
...It's about healing...
...The dogwood and azaleas were in full bloom...
...He seemed the very personification of supreme satisfaction," a friend remarked when Lincoln returned to his own White House...
...Pedants might complain that the name is a little misleading...
...They want everyone to live like them, think like them, talk like them, honor their heroes, honor their values...
...It had been freshly painted in a cheerless taupe, and the hotel itself was weirdly quiet...
...But Richmond is that way...
...See, you could still do that in those days...
...Though the Richmond park is one of the world's largest collections of battlefields—an archipelago of well-preserved woods and fields ranged around an 80-mile circuit—there is remarkably little in the exhibits about combat...
...Well, that wouldn't have been appropriate...
...Lincoln's comments in the same debate in favor of black equality, or against slavery, DiLorenzo dismisses as cynical posturing...
...And this," Moran said, "this is the Lincoln we've brought back to Richmond...
...A few years later a representative of the Sons laid a wreath, along with a crossed pair of Confederate flags, at the Lincoln Memorial, as an official tribute...
...The lights came down and in the front of the ballroom a TV screen brightened to a silver glow...
...Tad is next to him, looking up expectantly, presumably waiting for his father to say something...
...I got a sandwich from Subway and took a seat at one of the round metal tables...
...Lincoln rides into Richmond...
...Everyone was ready to give him place...
...When Reconstruction came to an end the movement toward reconciliation commenced," Allen Sullivant, the Sons' chief of heritage defense, wrote recently...
...Santa—Jesus—Chuck Yeager—Elvis—Abe...
...In the late 1940s, when a speaker at a wreath-laying at the Jefferson Davis statue in the U.S...
...And I told him so...
...For the park service, the Lincoln imbroglio was merely a tributary of a much larger, more comprehensive argument about how to present the Civil War to its visitors...
...He turned to his cameraman...
...When you're done with this aspect, you turn to our Real Lincoln home workbook...
...For his detractors it demonstrates a conqueror's arrogance...
...One Richmond official, traveling through Barbados last winter, happened to pick up a newspaper on an excursion plane...
...That hasn't kept later generations from speaking about it with great conviction...
...And my email, oh my...
...The North chose to be magnanimous in victory, content with their success in maintaining the Union...
...I'll join hands with my brothers," Lloyd continued, "And guard this precious land / To you, Mr...
...For a generation after the war, Lincoln was a vague presence in southern mythology, best left undisturbed and unremarked upon, but in time southerners too became reconciled to his greatness...
...They wept...
...Yet no eyewitness account mentions Davis's chair, or Lincoln's sitting in it...
...It's what he built his political career around...
...And here it is," he said, holding up a bronze miniature...
...In their ten-volume biography of Lincoln, his secretaries Nicolay and Hay described the visit in the grandest terms: "Never in the history of the world did the head of a mighty nation enter the chief city of the insurgents in such humbleness...
...but you may rest assured that as long as I live no one shall put a shackle on your limbs, and you shall have all the rights which God has given to every other citizen of this Republic...
...Monument Avenue is Via Dolorosa for southern nostalgics...
...Lincoln sits tilted forward on a bench with a faraway look in his eyes...
...It appeared that no one from the higher ranks of the Sons had bothered to show up...
...And as Lincoln and his party picked their way through the blackened timbers of the business district, word of his presence spread and a crowd gathered around him—jubilant blacks, mostly, freedmen who were now freshly minted citizens of liberated Richmond...
...The social compact of a century began to crack 40 years ago, when the centenary celebrations of the war coincided with the civil rights movement, and the breakdown has only accelerated since...
...The whole point is to make the Confederates look like the bad guys...
...As I marveled at the collection Kline appeared, wearing a sky-blue suit with a wide tie striped in shades of gray...
...For most of its history the park service has reflected an unspoken agreement about the war that has held since the end of Reconstruction...
...The works has been prettified in the park service manner...
...In 1928, the Virginia legislature passed a bill commemorating Lincoln's birthday...
...one of them said...
...The Marshall struggles to keep business up...
...I had already lived here for many years, knew the city well, and loved it...
...He enlisted Thomas DiLoren-zo, author of a new anti-Lincoln book called The Real Lincoln, to help him organize a scholarly conference, with the title "Lincoln Reconsidered," to lay out his case as soberly and comprehensively as possible...
...Kline and the park service people beamed...
...Commerce...
...The agenda was to centralize political and economic power—government subsidies for big business like the railroads and banks, tariffs for favored industries, what we call 'corporate welfare' today...
...My views and his views," he said later on the Senate floor, "are substantially identical...
...Goin' Back to Richmond" is a lament in a minor key, written and recorded by a man from Ft...
...Bress de Lord, dere is the great messiah...
...Though the fact was often repeated in subsequent accounts, this is the only contemporaneous mention of Lincoln's sitting in Davis's chair...
...And then they tried to stop a mural of Robert E. Lee from going up down by the river...
...He made a gesture toward the window...
...That was intentional," Moran said...
...He was a railroad lawyer, a rich one...
...It demonstrated, he told me, an ironclad law of social relations: When disparities in income and productivity levels between one region of a nation and another region grow too great, the inequality becomes unsustainable, and the result, as night follows day, is civil war...
...4. The Muddy Boots No one knows why Lincoln came to Richmond...
...This is it...
...More than one Christian publicist saw in Lincoln's life eerie resemblances to the life of Christ...
...Much of their elation was traceable to the wine and spirits cellar they had discovered below the house...
...Next to this stack was a poster for another Lincoln book: "You think our problems began in the Sixties...
...Their specialty is conflict resolution...
...A little girl hopped into Lincoln's lap and pounded the crown of his head, while her brother knotted his little fingers around the statue's throat, and her sister, letting out a girlish "Eeeewwww," slipped her pinky into the great man's nose...
...The war was in its final hours...
...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...
...Kline's enthusiasm seeped away...
...Kline announced plans for the statue at a press conference last December...
...Some evidence—Mary Todd's accelerating mental deterioration, for example— suggested he might have given his wife syphilis...
...Sometimes I can't believe it's really about to happen—if we can just get through the next few weeks...
...I said I could guess...
...What do people believe in now...
...He fell silent, and Moran, who is much the more voluble of the two, began extolling the statue's significance...
...In the same way, it is important for them to assert that the war Lincoln won was not about slavery...
...This sunny afternoon he was dressed casually, as he usually is, in baggy khakis, a purple polo shirt, and, both as a sporty touch and a shield from the sun, a wide-brimmed Panama hat...
...Meanwhile they do everything they can to eliminate ours...
...Who could object to Lincoln...
...Ever the teetotaler, he asked for a glass of water...
...Back outside the foundry, MacLeod showed me where the statue would be placed two weeks later...
...They always win...
...Those statues, erected by the Communists, worked against the Communists, because it illustrated the lies the whole system was based on...
...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 knick-knacks...
...None drew more than twenty demonstrators, according to news accounts...
...Service historians and curators have imbibed deeply of "social history," valuing the everyday experience of ordinary people at the expense of the heroic, the martial, or the exciting...
...You know why Southern legislators enacted Jim Crow laws after the war...
...Give him place, ye prairies...
...And what would we have had then...
...I said, lamely, that Lee did indeed seem like a great man...
...in fact, to tell the truth, the book is a bit of a hatchet job...
...There were replicas of swords—one fashioned after the one George Washington wore at his inauguration, another like the one Cornwallis surrendered at Yorktown—and reproductions of famous pistols, and tiny cannons adorned with plaques...
...I didn't see a flag...
...In certain respects, people who really, really hate Abraham Lincoln get a bad rap...
...Sitting in the Marshall we were only two blocks from Robert E. Lee's townhouse, where Mrs...
...As he spoke a mother tried to settle her three kids for a photograph...
...From City Point the next evening, Lincoln telegraphed Edwin Stanton, his secretary of war: "It is certain now that Richmond is in our hands...
...The president's bodyguard—the dozen blue-coated marines from the barge—walked with him in a phalanx, alert to sniperfire or violence from the crowd...
...I'll tell you how...
...I guess they lost their nerve...
...The chronicles of Nasby were published in Republican newspapers throughout the North...
...The sinking sun gilded the statue in outline...
...Lincoln always had a fascination with military maneuvers, and the prospect of seeing the vanquished capital might have proved too much to resist...
...He was at Sharpsburg—Yan-kees call it Antietam—at Chancellorsville, other places...
...I got a good education...
...I said I was in Richmond writing an article about history, and the odd ways Americans react to it and use it, and they did their best to look interested...
...I asked MacLeod whether she was surprised by the volume and vehemence of the objections to the Lincoln statue...
...He ticked off the particulars of his indictment of Lincoln...
...The statue looked puny and absurd...
...It is the rest of the country that has succumbed to sentimental delusions, specifically the syrupy legend of Father Abraham, kindly hero to the downtrodden, emancipator of the enslaved...
...What a symbol...
...Together with city and park service officials, Mr...
...We looked up at the statue as cars circled by...
...A printed sign read: "No Coolers, Glass, Signs, Flags or Banners...
...Only here and there can you see, as if it were an oversight, some relic suggesting genuine decrepitude and ancient use...
...There's a lot of political correctness up there," he said...
...Tells you all you need to know...
...one of them said...
...Leak is in his late fifties, stout and balding, a banjo-picker by trade...
...For our final stop, Leak had me pull over to the far lane of another traffic circle, in the center of which General Lee sat impossibly high and erect on his mount, Traveler...
...National myths, said Wilson, are a necessary part of history and its instruction...
...Every southern gentleman now agrees with Lincoln," said the sponsor of the bill, which provoked little dissent...
...Kline went on...
...There was an implicit pact to let bygones be bygones," says Harold Holzer, a Lincoln historian who helped bring the Lincoln statue to Richmond...
...Mario Cuomo...
...When he reached the White House just beyond the hill where the Capitol sits, the president found a crowd of Union officers spilling out from the mansion onto the front porch and into the back garden...
...Carl Sandburg, in his biography of Lincoln, tells of a Kentucky father who lost two sons in the war, one fighting for the South, the other for the North...
...A brass nameplate next to the front door identifies it as the headquarters of the United States Historical Society, the company Kline started 30 years ago, after a career in public relations and real estate...
...For an event so freighted with history, whose symbolic importance was grasped by its witnesses even as it happened, we know for certain remarkably little about Lincoln's time in Richmond...
...The site chosen for the Lincoln statue lies almost in the trestle's shadow, at the entrance to the National Battlefield Park Civil War Visitor Center, which is housed in one of a handful of mill buildings to have survived since the foundry's shuttering in 1957...
...Look at it now...
...In the face of so many facts, we cannot allow this myth to continue...
...They're gonna start on a renovation of this place real soon...
...I drove back down to Richmond the day before to meet up with David Leak, a Son who had attended the Lincoln conference at the Marshall...
...But it was Campbell, not Lincoln, who requested the meeting, and Lincoln did little to follow through on its implications...
...Drive around here," he said, and I pulled the car up at an odd angle where we could peer into a copse of trees—and sure enough, tucked behind a towering pine that almost precisely blocked it from the street was a Confederate battle flag, hanging limp from a gold-trim pole...
...comments the same men may have made to the contrary, or in mitigation, go unmentioned...
...And after the history is gone, after their respect for their ancestors is gone, there's nothing to replace it with...
...He laughed...
...They fired their long-guns, scampered in mock panic across open fields, and pretended to get shot, crumpling horribly before the camera and rolling their eyes heavenward...
...His voice, though frail, still conveys his unmistakable enthusiasm...
...After the third call I got up to leave, and he walked me outside...
...Oh no...
...When Lincoln himself is quoted disparaging blacks, as in the Lincoln-Douglas debate in Charleston, Illinois, DiLorenzo takes him at his word...
...Putting the statue in Richmond, he said, reminded him of stories he'd heard about Russia in the 1980s, just before the collapse of the Soviet Union...
...You see, unlike the politicians and these others, I'm a student of history...
...They stayed there, consoling drinkers, until the tragic triumph of the Drys in 1919...
...Right at this moment the meaning of the statue is quite clear, don't you think...
...This in turn generated hundreds of letters to Virginia newspapers, and then to the commonwealth attorney general demanding an investigation for possible fraud...
...Kline and Cynthia MacLeod yanked the cover off...
...Before long it became clear that he, like every other Son I've spoken to, had read deeply, if not widely, in the nearly limitless literature of the Civil War and its aftermath...
...The brick buildings, long since swept clean of their rusting debris, have been sand-blasted to a rosy brilliance, their windows weatherized, the trim painted a creamy white, and where the beams are exposed they've been lacquered till they gleam...
...You know who's a big Lincoln buff...
...So of course it was just the beginning...
...Other memorable episodes from the war are more packed with incident, more gripping in their violence or pathos...
...His method of gathering evidence is highly selective...
...And now here we are...
...Right now they're down there at the visitor center patting themselves on the back for demonizing the Confederate soldier...
...They won...
...With the establishment of the national battlefield parks system, parks chose to present the events which took place on those hallowed grounds in a military context which honored the valor of both sides and did not advance (or denigrate) the political or social position of either...
...He told me he had never been politically inclined until 10 years ago or so...
...But we're going to start to correct the record right here, right now...
...Kline off to one side, where he stood with his partner, Martin Moran, the president of the U.S...
...Isn't that fascinating...
...It was an arrangement that Kline told me had worked for the society and its business partners on many other occasions...
...Don't kneel to me," Lincoln is said to have said...
...But what we've really wanted is for Lincoln to be like us, whoever we are...
...He was the father of Big Government, vastly expanding the reach of Imperial Washington in ways unthinkable to the country's founders...
...What could be less American than dwelling on the past...
...The country turned into something they don't like, and they think Lincoln's responsible, and they'll never forgive him for it...
...Preparation requires study and repetitive ingestion of the facts as presented today...
...The workbook is where you test and hone your knowledge, with questions prepared especially for that purpose," the man went on...
...7. On the Avenue The unveiling was set for April 5, a Saturday...
...Five Generals and a Tennis Player.'" In the car I said: "You have to admit Ashe is a great local hero...
...He did it for his country...
...Kline told me...
...They can say what they want...
...There were mounted replicas of "famous canes," and more stained glass than the Sainte Chapelle: 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...
...A long row of protesters had formed along the driveway leading to the iron gates of the parking lot...
...People would walk by all the huge statues of Lenin every day," he said, "and the statues just reminded them of what a lie it all was...
...ed Tredegar, or whether they passed by the Works 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...
...Their lunchhour had followed a morning of breakout sessions, workshops, and seminars, with titles like "Banning Superhero Play: Fiddlesticks or Chopsticks," and "Being a Guide by the Side, Not a Sage on the Stage...
...Now whole busloads of schoolchildren will be able to tour their state Capitol and take a piss on the hero of Chancellorsville, all in the same day...
...DiLorenzo goes over the key points and expands his discussion in new and surprising ways...
...And they call the Southerners racist...
...not ours, but the world's...
...So I brought the concept to Virginius Dabney...
...The more DiLorenzo learned about Lincoln—and discovered, for example, that Lincoln was never an abolitionist, and that he was skeptical of enfranchising freed slaves, and that he had in fact advocated colonization of blacks to Central America or to the remotest territories of the American Southwest—the more he realized "there's this huge con job at the heart of our history...
...This is the latest move in a scheme to demon-ize the Confederate soldier...
...But when this man took the field he was not fighting for slavery...
...I didn't want to go back because I was thinking, "Those guys say they don't like Lincoln, and they don't, but this is what they really hate, this right here...
...The controversy began at once, with the first phone call placed by the first reporter to Brag Bowling and other Sons seeking comment...
...I've had historians tell me that this is the most important statue of Lincoln anywhere in the world," he said...
...2. The Uses of Lincoln While he was alive, Abraham Lincoln was one of the least popular presidents the country has ever known, as most Lincoln scholars acknowledge...
...And they did not do that to defend slavery...
...We sat down at a conference table...
...It's a system," he said, "and we do grant discounts for multiple orders...
...Not really," she said...
...It stands for peace, for reconciliation, all those things that we need more of...
...Even I don't think he was a wimp...
...He had at least 18,000 Americans—the estimates vary—he had them thrown into jail on the flimsiest pretexts, or with no pretext at all...
...As common property, he has become whatever we say he is, and shame on the nitpicker who dares to argue over discrepancies in our diverse accounts...
...Kline was much moved...
...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...
...They were getting up some kind of tourist destination down there, a river walk, and Lee's was just one portrait in a gallery—a perfectly politically correct gallery of women, blacks, liberals, everyone else...
...We're in a new era," White said...
...One of the purposes of a conference like this," he said, "is to explain how we got to where we are today...
...Especially on a Saturday morning, downtown gives off a defeated air...
...It's as though a handful of your fellow tourists have finally gone mad and are following you around, repeating themselves endlessly and refusing to shut up...
...I know what this man Lincoln did to this country...
...We drove back through old downtown, past doorways heaped in trash...
...Lincoln Comes to Confederate Capital," read the headline on the back page...
...As it stands, The Real Lincoln is a travesty of historical method and documentation: exasperating, maddening, and deeply disappointing...
...They had Lincoln, of course...
...Now only some of us do...
...The wife of George Pickett, the major general who had led his men in the charge at Gettysburg two years before, later wrote that Lincoln interrupted his tour to stop at her townhouse...
...Lincoln liked the idea but nothing ever came of it, since Lee's surrender a few days later made it moot...
...And it became clear to me how deeply Lincoln was involved in the Whig economic program of the early 19th century...
...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...
...They always do...
...From the speakers came Lloyd's baritone, trembling with anger and regret...
...I gave up...
...An anonymous website appeared, accusing Kline of exploiting public assets—the Tredegar Visitor Center— for financial gain...
...A year or so ago I went to our lieutenant governor, Tim Kaine, and he suggested the park service might be interested in a memorial to Lincoln's visit...
...Locke's audience took Nasby's every pronouncement ironically, as a mockery of the rebels...
...When the city council first approved the statue, a year after Ashe's death in 1989, civic groups from all over the city vied to have it placed in their neighborhoods...
...So I turned to Dr...
...Rainbow arcs of balloons had been set out, left to sway in the breeze from the air conditioning vents, lending color to the commotion...
...For four years Henry Ward Beecher, the abolitionist preacher in Brooklyn, had lacerated Lincoln from his pulpit for timidity and hesitation in the face of Southern barbarism...
...And it started to dawn on me, the whole Whig platform, all these centralized policies that they hadn't been able to implement by democratic means in the first 70 years of our history—they were all implemented within the first six months of the war...
...Downtown was deserted...
...The Richmond City Council had declared April 5, 2003, "Lincoln in Richmond Day," and an hour after dawn the day was still dark, with slate-gray thunder-heads rolling up from Petersburg in a line along the river...
...This was his duty, he felt...
...I'd read a lot of economic history, of course, and I started to read a lot about Lincoln as sort of a hobby," he told me...
...If Lincoln had been born 125 years later, he could have been Bill Moyers...
...We ask your aid, oh Heavenly Father," he said, in a buttery voice, "in prevailing over the liberal historians who would distort our history and destroy our heritage...
...The next day they sailed down to City Point, and from there to Washington...
...The list of horribles rooted in the 1860s was very long: urbanization and the death of agrarian communities, the income tax, the erosion of local authority in the face of federal power, the dissolution of family ties, affirmative action—these are for starters...
...DiLorenzo's groundbreaking book," the man at the booth said, "then you watch this video in which Dr...
...With their marches and paid advertisements, the Sons campaigned loudly against the city fathers, in a prototype of the campaign they now waged against the Lincoln statue...
...The statue itself hadn't yet arrived, but already workmen were paving a little plaza with old stones dug from a nearby canal...
...But the downpour never came...
...8. Down Here Among the People We're a forward-looking country...
...When Lincoln Returned to Richmond Dispatches from an unlikely culture war BY ANDREW FERGUSON 1. Tricks Up Their Sleeves Abraham Lincoln, with his son Tad in tow, walked around Richmond, Virginia, one day 138 years ago, 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...
...As a final instance of history's endless refractions, I tried to trace the origin of something Brag Bowling had told me—a colorful quote he repeated for many reporters: "Lincoln didn't come as a healer...
...damn...
...His signs showed the professional Kinko's touch: "No Honor for War Criminals," and "Jefferson Davis was Our President...
...And then, once the war began, it was about consolidating and using that power...
...A man in a dark suit, grinning mysteriously, handed me a card that read: "Who Killed James Forrestal...
...For even with modernity's depredations downtown Richmond is hallowed ground, rich beyond price with associations from the sacred past...
...A Illinois rail-splitter, a buffoon, a ape, a goriller, a smutty-joker, sets himself down in President Davis's cheer...
...Slavery was a sin against God, he said...
...Only women and children and the elderly were left among the city's white residents, and they stayed shuttered in their houses, watching Lincoln pass from behind parted curtains...
...Calling DiLorenzo "an author of evident courage and ability," Gamble went on to list, in the course of a few paragraphs, more than 20 errors of fact and citation in the book...
...If the war is all about slavery, why's he fighting so hard...
...The South had bad everything—bad munitions, bad clothing, bad food...
...This is what U.S...
...The particulars of the accusations against Kline, the park service, and local officials—all of whom were supposedly acting in self-dealing collusion—were never made completely clear...
...Americans are morally deficient for never having considered the evil of launching the bloodiest war of the 19th century merely to preserve Northern political and economic domination of the continent," he said...
...In Richmond there are few weightier names to drop than that of Dabney, now deceased but for 40 years a Southern historian of note and, as editor of the Times-Dispatch, a legendary defender of the honor of the Confederacy...
...In most full-dress histories, however, Lincoln's visit to Richmond stands as the perfect punctuation at the close of the grand narrative, a lingering grace note in the coda of the war, a final eloquent gesture made by the martyr before he leaves the stage...
...We watched the visitors elbowing one another, patting Lincoln's shoulders and hair, mugging for snapshots...
...They're just falling all over themselves to commemorate the great man's visit...
...The long arm of multiculturalism had extended its reach even into Confederate ranks...
...After his meetings, the president and Tad embarked on a carriage ride around town, then returned to spend the night in a boat at anchor in the James...
...and "The Great Centralizer: Lincoln's Economic Legacy...
...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— unheard of for a teetotaler...
...The veneration of Lincoln, in North and South, was part of the deal, too...
...The Yankees wouldn't have anything to do with the black man...
...a comment famous among the Sons and their compatriots, less frequently quoted elsewhere...
...To many people, including 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 resolve—it came as a surprise that anyone should find a tribute to the sixteenth president objectionable...
...I found Leak in the line of protesters along the driveway, dressed festively in a top hat and a cutaway morning coat over his polo shirt and khakis...
...And how was the love-in at the Historical Society...
...But not Lee...
...He lives in what Rich-monders call the Fan, a picturesque district of Victorian row houses, all red brick with white trim, set along wide boulevards that angle out from downtown and run westward for 30 blocks or more...
...He gathered petitions, promoted websites, pestered politicians with mail and phone calls and encouraged others to do the same...
...Anyone who tries to stand up for tradition, for the past, when we do that, they call us 'alienated.' Well, yes, I guess I am alienated from this...
...They want the citizens of Richmond to follow in the footsteps of the American Caesar, to ooh and aah: Oh, he walked here...
...He sat back and folded his arms, case closed...
...Anytime a businessman sees the word 'Impropriety' and his own name in a headline—even if it says 'Cleared of Improprieties'—well, it's just not good, is it...
...The statue sat hunkered under a tarp...
...It was the gratuitous-ness of it that bothered me," he said...
...Got a bunch of signs being printed up at Kinko's even as we're standing here talking," he said...
...Nasby sputtered in illiterate outrage...
...She meant "voices" literally...
...I saw before too long he was taking me on a grievance tour— perhaps the only way he could see his hometown, now that it had suffered so many indignities...
...After newspapers boomed word of the president's visit to Richmond, Locke wrote an account in which his character was appalled by the news...
...You got a comment?' "Well, I knew right away what was going on here...
...We're going to be out of pocket a considerable sum," Mr...
...They've been everywhere, and they're from nowhere...
...Lee inherited slaves from his wife's father...
...Yet when his soul took flight he was claimed by most Protestant denominations simultaneously...
...he said...
...Lincoln, we take our stand / You're still not welcome, now or ever / At least to this loyal Southern man...
...There was neither...
...In addition, Kline's society would hawk smaller "resin bronze" miniatures, in an unlimited edition...
...Objective historians," he told me, now realized that racism had played a much smaller role in Southern history than previously thought...
...Two accounts suggest he gave a speech to the freedmen on the Capitol grounds, at the foot of a statue of Washington on horseback, though if he did no one reported what he said...
...It's no surprise, then, that the Lincoln who emerged from their discussion was a cross between Adlai Stevenson and Mario Cuomo, if both had gone to San Francisco Theological Seminary...
...Hundreds of onlookers cheered, the bronze of the statue glowed, and the mayor and Mr...
...A lot of the big things change, a lot of the little ones never do...
...Here you've got the oldest, most revered museum in this city...
...The general view of them—when they are acknowledged at all—is of grizzled hillbillies, a few steps out from the hills and hollers, chewing straw and chain-smoking 'boro Reds...
...There are 40,000 graves of Confederate soldiers in this city, and I will defend their honor...
...That Saturday, I quickly discovered, the convention center was playing host to the annual meeting of the Virginia Association for Early Childhood Education...
...Probably...
...Folding tables had been set out in the lobby, a long one for registration, many others covered in white linen and heaped with stuff for sale...
...The conference was its only activity...
...Ten years ago I started to learn about my family...
...Very impressive, isn't he...
...I complimented him on the neighborhood...
...The real story of Lincoln's life, Wilson said, was "shabby and tawdry...
...We could have put it on a pedestal...
...He was a holdover from larger demonstrations that had been held outside the society's headquarters in previous weeks...
...It is a vivid detail that you find often in narratives sympathetic to the South, presented as proof of Lincoln's contempt for his adversaries, a symbol of his desire for their humiliation...
...And now, of course, it's reached the newspaper...
...Accusing me of everything they can think of...
...You're out of luck...
...His voice is soft and so is his handshake...
...They're inescapable, floating out from miniature speakers skillfully hidden from view...
...The same can be said of several other episodes reported then and later in the Yankee newspapers...
...Their accounts differ in specifics and vary in plausibility...
...This thing is not over yet," he said...
...I met him in the stripped-down living room of one of the rental properties he owns, in a working class suburb north of town...
...What we know of this momentous visit is laced with such empty spaces, and into them later generations poured their own views of the great warrior-statesman who had spent a handful of hours in the capital of his vanquished enemy...
...The South desperately needed their commerce," Robert explained, "but the Yankees wouldn't do any business down here unless the African Americans were kept segregated...
...There were no slithery dancers in it, as in other music videos, no preening guitar players...
...His first name was Robert...
...Different Americans laid claim to his spiritual life, too...
...It didn't fit, you see, with everything I'd been taught about the Civil War...
...Kline and his nonprofit U.S...
...In the ballroom, during breaks, admirers formed queues to grab a word with him...
...Well," he said with a friendly smile, "you'd be wrong...
...He gave me a high-wattage smile...
...Cultural Marxists control all the major institutions...
...Forget Stevenson and Cuomo...
...People do feel strongly...
...Peace...
...Rising up the hill from the wharves, acre after acre of the city still guttered and smoked...
...And in the days before his death each made a profound journey of mercy, Jesus to Jerusalem, Lincoln to Richmond...
...I am but God's humble instrument...
...How could anyone object to healing...
...No photographs were taken of Lincoln in Richmond, and no sketches made from life by the magazine artists who sometimes appeared serendipitously at key moments of the Civil War, and the most complete eyewitness accounts are from the embellishing and unreliable pens of Northern newspapermen, like Merriam, who followed the Union troops into the Confederate capital...
...Couldn't have Lee...
...Four score and . . . and what...
...I got taught the usual liberal history, but my teachers were smart people who had high standards...
...You've got to try to stop it...
...Prepare for the fireworks on April 5,'" one of the reporters said...
...The statue was installed last spring, at the headquarters of the National Park Service's Richmond Civil War battlefield park, which is housed in Tredegar's surviving buildings...
...In this social compact the gallantry of the fighting men of both sides was universally stipulated to, while touchier questions about the war's origin and larger meaning were passed over or left to the disputations of historians and hobbyists...
...Better to dwell on the human cost, which all could agree was more than the country should ever have borne...
...In the days leading up to the war in Iraq they had taken to the streets downtown in peace demonstrations they called "Women in Black...
...He's a tall man, with a prominent nose, and very slender...
...Kline went on...
...As Jonathan T. Hobson pointed out in his treatise The Master and His Servant, 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...
...Where's the action...
...They're very cosmopolitan, these people...
...He sought office primarily to reward political cronies and Big Business clients...
...He pointed me down North Boulevard, another grand thoroughfare, past Battle Abbey, the bunkerlike headquarters of the United Daughters of the Confederacy...
...Like all his comrades, my great-grandfather gave everything he had...
...Cops were everywhere...
...I scanned the marble face of the building and its complicated foliage...
...Historical Society...
...He had agreed to show me around town—"to see some of the important sights," he said—and help me kill time before the ceremonies began Saturday morning...
...It's there...
...Got to have Lincoln...
...They say they love it, but really they cannot tolerate it...
...gilt-rimmed plates featuring famous American homes—Monticello, Graceland—sun-dappled in sylvan settings...
...He rose through the ranks, and it was in his present capacity, as division commander, that he received a phone call last December from a reporter for the Richmond Times-Dispatch...
...Radical abolitionists, southern racists, political rivals—all are accepted as authoritative sources on Lincoln, so long as their comments are sufficiently hostile...
...The detail was first recorded by someone who wasn't there: the humorist David Locke, who wrote a satirical version of Lincoln's visit in the voice of his character Petroleum V. Nasby...
...Tom DiLorenzo, the author of The Real Lincoln, had said something oddly similar a few weeks before...
...Even at the headquarters of the United Daughters of the Confederacy...
...By contrast, it's just a simple fact that at the funerals of the Confederacy's vice president, Alexander Stephens, and of the great Southern general Nathan Bedford Forrest, hundreds of blacks were welcomed . . . The ventilation in the ballroom was very poor...
...Unlike most journalists' predictions, this one proved to be almost accurate...
...The tables filled up quickly, and two women asked if they could join me...
...This reporter says he wants a comment on the statue of Lincoln they're going to put up in Richmond...
...he said...
...This is inaccurate, in the main...
...Bowling told me that roughly 300 people had registered for the conference, drawn from more than a dozen states, and none seemed to mind the drowsy, languid air of the setting...
...In keeping with the interlocking fiduciary opportunities that so appalled the Sons, the society was hawking miniatures of the Lincoln statue to its members, splitting the money with Mr...
...the piece of real estate he occupies in the American imagination is immeasurably vast...
...Politely as I could I turned aside Robert's invitation to eat with him and went out to get some air...
...A friend next to him held another sign: "Your Hero Killed Five of My Ancestors...
...Over their graves he placed a marble slab incised with the words: "God knows which was right...
...In 1891, the famed (at the time) seer Nettie Colburn Maynard published a long study called Was Abraham Lincoln a Spiritualist...
...The new statue gives us a mild, contemplative Lincoln, in marked contrast to French...
...He freed them at once...
...Nearly all of them were women, and they formed a near-perfect racial mix, a demographer's dream, an ethnic rainbow, a gorgeous mosaic—whatever the going metaphor is...
...And they were not disappointed...
...The tone of the text isn't didactic, certainly not propagandistic...
...This is a day that will go down in history...
...And I thought: Lincoln in Richmond...
...He was a small man and very friendly, with thinning, mouse-colored hair and a neatly trimmed mustache and a quick, energetic manner...
...Half a dozen others manned a checkpoint at the gate...
...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 Tre-degar Iron Works, where the cannon and shot were forged that sustained the South through four years of rebellion...
...The center's displays are fastidiously inoffensive—history from which the drama has been pressed out, history planed down and smoothed over, made to keep the attention, if at all possible, of people who really don't care much for history...
...I know what the army under his command did to the South...
...The visit with Judge Campbell is taken as the primary evidence that Lincoln traveled to Richmond to hasten the end of the war...
...He holds both hands aloft, raising his racquet high in the air as though he's trying to keep it away from the brats at his feet...
...In a few years, Americans are going to look at that statue down there, and they're going to wonder, 'What did this man really stand for?'" DiLorenzo is almost certainly wrong, of course, but I'm pretty sure Moran is wrong, too—and they're wrong precisely at the point where they agree: Both have high hopes for the statue, both believe their countrymen will see it as a thing of great consequence, full of meaning, because Lincoln is a figure of such consequence...
...Their cameramen milled about, looking bored...
...One correspondent told his readers he'd seen Lincoln linger at the building with "tears pouring down his cheeks," though he must have been the only witness, since no other account mentions this moving detail...
...They disagree even on what time of day Lincoln came ashore...
...Capitol blamed the war on Lincoln's depravity, a spokesman for the Sons, who had sponsored the ceremony, made sure to repudiate the remarks publicly...
...said a lady next to me...
...Together they bowed their heads when, only a few minutes behind schedule, an Anglican priest rose to give the invocation...
...You may like it, you may not like it—but they believed in it...
...It was a fancy detail, a bit of comic invention, meant to mock the Lincoln haters...
...We had a nice chat...
...You'd think they'd have some kind of Confederate flag flying, wouldn't you...
...So it is fitting that when modern Americans dwell on Lincoln—who is, after all, the inventor of modern America—we botch the job...
...The conference-goers gathered at the Marshall were almost exclusively male, of course, and white, but with their affable demeanor and dress—the suburban weekender's uniform of expensive sneakers, pastel polo shirts stretched smooth across the belly, khaki trousers pleated in front and cut generously at the rear— they could have been airlifted from the clubhouse of any community golf course in America...
...indeed, it would have been difficult to bring together a panel of Lincoln obsessives more perfectly opposite to the group assembled by Brag Bowling at the John Marshall Hotel...
...Fine...
...However, there will be a shortage of toilet facilities for those visiting the Capitol...
...From there I went to elected officials, off and on over the years...
...5. Among the Lincoln Haters Victors write the history," Brag Bowling was telling me, "and when you've got a dumbed-down country like we do now, it's not so hard to make this man appear to be something he clearly wasn't...
...On April 4, 1865, the correspondent from the New York Heraid, William Merriam, filed a report with a Richmond dateline...
...What's left of the Tredegar Iron Works, "Mother Arsenal of the South," sits in a park on the banks of the James, at the foot of downtown, alongside a railroad trestle built long ago to carry numberless tons of ordnance from Tredegar to all points of the Confederacy...
...Jesse Jackson Jr., requiring the park service "to encourage Civil War battle sites to recognize and include in all their public displays . . . the unique role that the institution of slavery played in causing the Civil War...
...Richmond rests on a group of hills above a bend in the James River...
...They told me they were "educators," which is, of course, the new word for "teachers...
...The businessmen are spineless...
...The effect is supposed to be contemplative, but really it looks as if son has caught dad puzzling through a senior moment...
...No incident of all this drama"—he meant the four years of civil war—"will so attract and fix the attention of the American people and the civilized world as the appearance to-day in the city of Richmond—erased capital of the infernal traitors—of Abraham Lincoln...
...By daybreak, when Union troops arrived to extinguish the blaze, more than half the business district was gone...
...Glory, Hallelujah...
...His friends in Richmond were kinder...
...Lincoln's response is a mouthful, but it's worth quoting entire, if only to show how quickly the unlikely congeals into fact, when circumstances are right, and then fact into myth...
...Its 10 chapters carry such titles as "Lincoln's Opposition to Racial Equality," "Was Lincoln a Dictator...
...Looking at them bustling from one counter to the other you might have thought they'd stepped out of a Benetton ad...
...so common indeed that it should lay to rest another misconception about the Lincoln haters—that they are romantics, pie-eyed with nostalgia for the lost agrarian South...
...It's true that under the gruff exterior of many a Son beats a heart softened by imagined memories of moonbeams and magnolias...
...four score and . . . ") The bronze bench on which they sit extends on either side, leaving space for tourists to pose for pictures, and soon the statue was engulfed by the crowd, as everyone jostled to get close...
...For two months I'm getting emails—'We're going to stop this thing by any means necessary...
...Robert E. Lee is of course the beau ideal of Southern manhood," he said, "a gentleman whose character was as close to perfection as Southerners have dared imagine...
...Those who hate him turn him into a monster out of all proportion...
...Segregation was a response to demands from Northern businessmen following the Civil War...
...I know dat I am free, for I seen Father Abraham...
...So honest to God, they've announced they're going to line the portapotties up right along here in front of this statue so no young innocent will have to be exposed to the horrible sight of Stonewall Jackson...
...If there's anything violent or what have you that happens, the Sons of Confederate Veterans will have no part in that," he said...
...You ever wonder why there are no statues of Abraham Lincoln in the entire southern half of the United States...
...One booklet ("Arm Yourself with the Truth") had conveniently assembled in a single, at-the-ready volume all of Lincoln's least attractive remarks on the subject of race, such as his outburst in the Lincoln-Douglas debates: "Negro equality, fudge...
...You must kneel to God only, and thank Him for the liberty you will hereafter enjoy...
...he asked...
...Still, twenty good old boys doing the rebel yell outside your window can be unsettling...
...DiLorenzo and asked for his help in taking an objective look at Abraham Lincoln," he said...
...We wanted Lincoln down here among the people, something more human, more approachable, something everyone could relate to...
...Kline's society does not have members or hold conferences in the manner of more conventional historical societies...
...Even in the South this has long been true—even in Richmond, even among the Sons of the Confederacy, as the historian Merrill Peterson demonstrated in his great book, Lincoln in American Memory...
...It would be like objecting to the moon...
...The illegitimate son of a servant girl and a shiftless, no-account father whom he despised, Lincoln grew up to be a terrible father himself, spoiling his children and ignoring their mother...
...This man was not the saint I was taught about when I was going to public school in western Pennsylvania," he said...
...It was all about power," he said...
...Trains still rumble by several times a day, hauling less spectacular cargo...
...The people who paid for these beautiful statues, who built them and honored them and maintained them, they believed in something...
...They gave everything they had...
...And indeed they were very enthusiastic...
...Something like this is happening lots of places...
...I think I will go there tomorrow...
...Then you return to the book, then the video lecture, and back to the workbook...
...He had to repaint the place and it was covered in tarps...
...Clyde Wilson, another star of the movement and a professor of history at the University of South Carolina, worked in an ad hominem mode...
...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...
...I was saying, "They built a statue of Stonewall Jackson's doctor...
...Ten days later he belonged to the ages...
...It is a delicate responsibility...
...The Real Lincoln was one of the top-selling selections of the Conservative Book Club over the last ten years—which is more impressive than it sounds, since this club does know how to move units...
...The magnificent equestrian statue of Washington, where Lincoln may or may not have made his lost address to the freedmen, still towers over the lawn where it drops away toward the river...
...Donald Livingston, a professor of philosophy at Emory University and a well-known scholar in the work of David Hume, gave a dazzling presentation tracing Lincoln's corrosive effects through our history...
...We got out and Leak removed his hat...
...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...
...It trailed a big banner: "Sic Semper Tyrannis"—"Thus always to tyrants"— the motto of the Commonwealth of Virginia, and the words John Wilkes Booth sang out as he fell to the stage of Ford's Theater, having put a bullet in Lincoln's brain...
...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...
...It is an insult to the Confederate soldier," he said...
...No flags," a cop said loudly...
...Normally I don't like crowds and noise but for the moment I didn't mind...
...Oh my, wouldn't that be nice...
...But you think anyone's going to weep...
...One of the Sons had tried to enter wearing a T-shirt bearing the Stars and Bars...
...No military escort or even a carriage greeted Lincoln at Rocketts—it's unclear why—and so he set off by foot, with his son in hand, on a two mile trek to the White House of the Confederacy, which now served as Occupation Headquarters but had also, only 36 hours before, been Davis's home...
...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...
...When they brought the statue to Richmond, there were ceremonies to mark its progress as they pulled it through the streets...
Vol. 9 • December 2003 • No. 16
