"The Man Who Made Us Whole" Hitchens on Lincoln

[dcsmart]

Lincoln, himself, was paradoxical—as is the way we see him now. To really know the 16th president, look past the ways in which we remember him.

Here's the view from the White House as the new president gazes gloomily out of its windows in 1861. The Washington Monument is an abandoned stump, surrounded by scattered blocks of stone. The Capitol has no dome. Slaves toil in the stinking heat, and the Potomac is an open sewer. The Union itself is dissolving like sugar in water. Furious men of god make violent speeches on both sides of the case. In correspondence and in conversation, the big, awkward, provincial politician sometimes observes that he always thought that the idea of a democratic republic would have to survive some kind of cruel ordeal before it could be proven.

To be remembered—to be really and truly and historically remembered and unforgettable—is to be terse and necessarily, sometimes, to be bleak: "And the war came …," "If slavery is not wrong, nothing is wrong," "Half slave and half free …," "Of the people, by the people, for the people." The last excerpt is taken from a speech so masterfully brief and understated that the photographer who hoped to record the speaker for the ages did not have enough time to set up his equipment. The two greatest Lincolnian addresses can each fit on one panel of a memorial in Washington that contains a brooding seated sculpture built much less modestly and more to the Ceausescu scale. What does this contrast say?Text

FULL ARTICLE:
http://www.newsweek.com/id/178859

if you like Lincoln and/or Hitchens, this is a must read.