Abe on stage, and curmudgeons

I had the privilege last week (in between bouts of the flu with my students, my kids, and myself, which explains the light blog posting) of attending the Indianapolis Repertory Theater's production of The Heavens are Hung in Black, a play about Abraham Lincoln during the tumultuous year of 1862, when emancipation, the war and in many ways Lincoln's very soul hung in the balance. Afterwards, I sat on a discussion panel with the audience, along with playwright James Still and my friend Bill Bartlelt, author of this excellent book on Lincoln's Indiana years,

I am not often able to attend live theater, so merely the act of doing so was a real treat. I love movies, but there is something just a bit more special about a truly top-notch, live stage production. I'm not sure exactly why. Perhaps the immediacy of the experience, with actual, live actors performing with really no safety net of editing or delayed broadcasts. I actually kind of like the moments in which actors trip just a bit over their lines--it makes the whole experience seem a bit more real.

I enjoyed myself at the IRT; The Heavens are Hung in Black was a wonderful play. It was commissioned for the grand re-opening of Ford's theater earlier this year, premiering on Lincoln's birthday, with President Obama in attendance. I understand the production here in Indy was a bit different, changed from a three-act to a two-act production, but the story was largely the same. The dramatic force of the story is Lincoln's wrestling with the twin issues of emancipation, and the war's terrible death toll, as the casualties steadily mount and the president must confront the meaning of their sacrifice. Still combined recreations of actual events--Lincoln's meeting with members of his cabinet to discuss emancipation, for example--and dream sequences, during which Lincoln argues with the ghosts of John Brown, Stephen Douglas, Dred Scott and others. He also did a fine job portraying the complexities of the Lincoln marriage, and the president's relationships with his sons and his private secretary, John Hay. Even Ward Hill Lamon (one of the more colorful characters from Lincoln's days practicing law on the circuit) makes an appearance.

The play was an impressive work of art, helped along not only by the skill of the playwright, but also the excellent production work of the IRT staff, and some very fine acting by all concerned (Nicholas Hormann in particular did a fine job with Lincoln, delicately balancing the man's sense of humor and tragedy). The segments addressing the Lincoln marriage quite well done, showing Mary's frailty and eccentricities in a sympathetic manner, and highlighting Lincoln's mixture of bemusement, frustration and love for his wife.

So it was a fine performance all the way around. And yet, I must admit, it was sometimes difficult to watch, as all such mixtures of art and history are for me, and no doubt other members of my profession. Historians are, quite frankly, highly trained and sensitive curmudgeons. We instinctively nitpick details, deconstruct fallacies, and (often condescendingly) offer our judgment concerning the ways in which a given work of history-based art (be it a play, a film, or whatever) "gets it right" or not--and let's face it, we usually fall on the side of the "not."

I'm not altogether sure how we get this way. I suspect it has something to do with our training, especially in graduate school. Entering the realm of academic history is rather like seeking admittance to a guild. The established members of that guild, history professors, have a certain set of techniques used to separate the contenders from the pretenders. To do so, the history guild wields "critical thinking."

In the best circumstances and with the best professors, "critical thinking" is a valuable, potent mix of criticism, analysis and deep understanding of a given historian's ideas or works. For most of my own graduate school career, I was fortunate to get the very best sort of education in deep, critical understanding of historical scholarship. But occasionally I ran across another sort: professors who believed that "critical thinking" meant a cynical, unforgiving deconstruction of each and every detail of a given historians' argument, a given work of history or (especially) manifestations of history in popular culture, which usually rated nothing more than a sneer.

I remember one such professor I had the misfortune of encountering while at Rice. He expected a relentless, uncompromising, negative critique of each book he assigned (a fairly perverse philosophy, when you stop to think about it) from each grad student in class. Wo betide anyone who tried to defend the author's thesis, or worse, put forth a thesis of one's own. Heck, wo betide anyone who suggested that American history generally was anything other than a depressing collection of lies, hypocrisy, and darkness.

He once baited the class by asking, "can anyone suggest anything positive that might have arisen from the development of American capitalism during the early decades of the 20th century?" Everyone else in class was smart enough to keep their mouths shut, but (being a totally naive dope) I ventured to observe that the American capitalist system did lay the groundwork for America's victory during the Second World War. He literally came halfway out of his chair, shouting, "Oh yeah, capitalism allowed us to become very efficient babykillers and murderers!" After that, I learned to shut up; if you don't have something nasty to say, don't say it at all.

This guy was the worst professor I ever had--really, the worst teacher I ever had. He created an atmosphere of unrelenting negativity, misery and cynicism, under the guise of "critical thinking." I swore if I ever got my own class room, I'd never do that, and I'd like to think I never have.

Still, the seeds of curmudgeonliness (is that a word?) were planted, in this and other, less drastic experiences during grad school. So when I encounter something like The Heavens are Hung in Black, I can't help but have that little voice go off inside my head: "Lincoln and Davis never actually met, you know (the play suggested otherwise)"; "Lincoln never really had a cabinet meeting like that"; "he surely never talked to ghosts," etc.

Fortunately, such "voices" didn't ruin the experience. The play is a work of art, and thank God for artists like playwright James Still, who both did his homework (the play is actually very accurate) and knew when to depart from the sometimes staid rules of "accurate history" to give us a Lincoln that transcended the mere recitation of facts. And I'm glad for my own professors, most of whom were excellent teachers--they helped me still those negative voices in my head, and enjoy myself at the theater.

Lincoln and justice II: honor and justice

Lincoln historians and fans are familiar with the story of how as a young man he acquired a copy of Parson Weems' famous biography of George Washington (the biography that, among other things, introduced the world to the myth of Lincoln and his father's cherry tree). Around 1829 he borrowed the book from a local Indiana farmer named Josiah Crawford, but unfortunately put it on a small shelf near a leaky window in the family cabin, where it was water stained from a rainstorm. Crawford made Lincoln "pull blades" and perform other farming chores on his place to repay the damages to his book.

Less well known perhaps is Lincoln's apparent resentment concerning what he thought was an excessively harsh price exacted by Crawford in exchange for the book. One neighbor remembered that Lincoln would "laugh about stripping all the corn blade off of six or eight acres of corn to pay about a twenty-fice cent damage to a book," while another recalled that Abe didn't actually find the affair very funny at all--or at least, not at the time. In fact, he resented it, and retaliated by mercilessly lampooning Crawford--who was blessed (or cursed) with an enormous blue nose--poking fun at the farmer and calling him "Nosey" behind his back.

There is imbedded within this little incident a telling illustration of Lincoln's rough sense of justice as a young man, a sense that functioned on a twofold level: first, his own inner sense of the proper value Crawford should extract for the loss of his book, and second, a rough sense of just retribution in his poing fun at "Nosey" Crawford to get even.

Nothing terribly special or Lincolnian here: I would imagine that most other frontier boys in that time and place would have held a roughly similiar set of values. The context of just how Lincoln evened matters up with "Nosey" is a bit unique--somebody else might have vandalized his house, or something along those lines. Lincoln cracked a joke. Now, that is Lincolnian.

As he became a young man, Lincoln really didn't say much about justice--or at least, nothing very original or profound. In his first political document, "A Communication to the People of Sangamo County" in March 1832 he does briefly reference local estray laws, and declares rather vaguely that "I should feel it both a privilege and a duty to take that stand, which in my view, might tend most to the advancement of justice." He also from time to time referenced justice as a lofty and very vague sense of right and wrong, using this more as a rhetorical flourish in his political speeches than in any serious or systematic fashion. In a speech before the Illinois legislature in 1840, for example, he fought (in vain) to persuade the legislature to keep funding the Whig-backed program of internal improvements, declaring that "it might be a returning sense of justice, [that] would induce this House to acknowledge, upon this last opportunity, that at least some portion of our Internal Improvements should be carried on."

He also used the term as a way of referring to a person or persons safeguarding his or her own individual rights, and those things a person deserves by the measure of some inarticulated sense of what was their proper due. in his Lyceum speech of 1838, for example, he declared that "the task of gratitude to our [Founding] fathers, justice to ourselves, duty to posterity, and love for our species in general, all imperatively require us faithfully to" defend the nation against any iminent threat. And in a letter to a man named Thomas Bohanon written a year later, Lincoln in his capacity as an attorney representing several clients seeking payment on some promissory notes, threatened a lawsuit and wrote that "we shall need all the means at our command, [and] will not, in justice to ourselves, permit us to authorize you to draw upon us as you suggest."

In this sense, "justice" was something akin to Lincoln's personal honor. And here perhaps we can see the way Lincoln likely understood the concept in his early years: as a value by which a person protected his or her reputation and general sense of being wronged. Bertram Wyatt-Brown and others who have written on the subject of honor point out that this idea of each gentleman of honor possessing a sort of inner gyro of right and wrong, an inner sense of whether or not he had been dealt with fairly, was an intrinsic part of the honor code that animated so much of early American society.

So I think that, insofar as Lincoln possessed any sense of "justice" prior to the late 1840s--and I am not suggesting that this was all very well thought-out or systematic in Lincoln's mind--he did so on an individual level, with justice being roughly equivalent to honorable behavior among individual people, from debtors and creditors to "Nosey" Crawford. I don't think that, at this point in his life, he gave much serious thought to social justice, the greater good, or any other sort of theory concerning how a just society might be promoted.

This makes sense. Prior to the late 1840s, Lincoln was an ambitious man-on-the-make, a lawyer and upwardly mobile politician with ambition that was a "little engine that knew no rest." He was deeply suspicious of highly moralistic reformers like the abolitionists and temperance activists (people who would be given to formulating abstract theories of justice and the good society) and he tended to think in economic terms about his own politics--Whig internal improvements programs and the like--which in turn would cause him to think about the economic gain of individual citizens. And certainly his law practice, which focused so often on debt collection for individual entrepeneurs, would simply have reinforced the point. Moreover, Lincoln was not much given to metaphysics or abstraction as a general thing.

But then came the War with Mexico.

Abe on my mind...er, throat

One of my students sent along the above pic (from this story) of an NBA player who tatooed Abraham Lincoln across his neck and adam's apple. Across his adam's apple. Seriously.

Un-freakin'-believable. How on earth do you tatoo your adam's apple? I'm not a prude about such things, but...your adam's apple? Wouldn't that hurt? Isn't it even a bit dangerous?

My student speculated that this guy was actually tatooing a five dollar bill across his neck, with Abe's face sort of coincidental to the enterprise. Maybe so. Still...

Lincoln and Justice I

Last week I spoke to an audience at Wright College in Chicago, along with John Lupton from the Papers of Abraham Lincoln, on "Lincoln, Character and the Pursuit of Justice." The experience was very pleasant, with a large and courteous audience (including members of the Illinois Academy of Criminology). Many thanks to Ed Mogul for the invitation.

I focused on the general features of Lincoln's law practice, and how I thought his legal career might have molded his character, basically summarizing the main points of my book, Lincoln the Lawyer. I actually didn't do much with the second subject on the program, Lincoln and the pursuit of justice.

But I did mull this subject over quite a bit on the drive home. I wonder: can we fairly say that Abraham Lincoln had a theory of justice?

Brief tangent number one: you know how people on the coasts refer to the Midwest as "fly-over country"? Well, the drive from Chicago to Indianapolis may fairly be labeled "mull-over country." There is nothing, and I mean absolutely nothing, to distract one from one's own thoughts, especially at night, except perhaps Chicago sports talk radio--which is less a distraction and more of a calamity.

A heavy and complicated subject, certainly, probably better suited to a book than a blog. But one of the purposes of this blog is to give me a place to sketch out rough ideas. And let me emphasize that this is very much a sketch (or rather, sketches; I'm sure I'll be at this for multiple posts), a set of preliminary thoughts. I'm not in a position right now to do really heavy research on the subject, though I may decide to do so at a later date. I'm just sort of thinking out loud right now.

Before diving right in, let me suggest that it is possible there really is no such thing as a coherent Lincoln theory on justice; or at least, nothing more sophisticated or developed than the instinctive sense of justice that pretty much everybody carries around in their heads. We all have an innate sense of what is fair, or whether we've been wronged, or properly rewarded. Lincoln was no exception. But it is entirely possible that there's nothing more to it than this, and that Lincoln's ideas about justice should be relegated more to mere personality traits than anything else.

Brief Tangent Number Two: one of the unfortunate byproducts of Lincoln's apotheosis in American life is our tendency assume that his life and legacy is applicable to each and every basic American value. We relate him to everything: equality, liberty, freedom, you name it. Granted, most of the time this is entirely appropriate--but isn't it possible that there are some big American subjects to which Lincoln simply does not speak? I think to believe this is so is to impose much-needed (and very human) boundaries on the man. So I'm really not just being disingenuous; maybe Lincoln truly doesn't have a lot that is interesting and/or original to say on the subject of justice. We'll see.

To start the ball rolling: what exactly do I mean by "justice"? I could easily spend an entire blog post (or five) on the matter of definition, alone. But in the interests of brevity and practicality, I'll define the term in the following ways: 1) a sense of fair distribution of resources in society, i.e., "social justice", 2) retributive justice, or the notion that some measure of punishment must be meted out to those in society who badly err, 3) an abstract ideal of a good society, and how that society might be created, and 4) a sense of individual justice, or what a person does or does not deserve. I realize this is not a very sophisticated or original set of definitions, but they make for an adequate starting point.

Next up: applying this sense of justice to Lincoln's early years. What did he say, if anything, about "justice" prior to the early 1850s?

Abe and higher ed

I received an email from the Lincoln Bicentennial Commission recently concerning an upcoming conference entitled “Lincoln and the Morrill Act: The Unfinished Work of Public Universities.” The conference will take place on October 23-24 at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

The conference organizers describe the event thus:

"This conference will explore the historical significance of the Morrill Act, and how it is applicable to current issues of higher education. Conference speakers will include Jim Leach, Chairman of the National Endowment for the Humanities, Martha Kanter, U.S. Undersecretary of Education, and Peter McPherson, President of the Association of Public and Land-grant Universities, among many others. Speakers will discuss the important role land-grant colleges can play in developing the work force of the future and create life-long learners in a global society."

If you are interested in attending, the conference website (with RSVP info) is http://www.morrillact.illinois.edu/. They also have Facebook and Twitter links at http://www.facebook.com/home.php#/Abraham.Lincoln.Bicentennial.Commission?ref=ts and http://twitter.com/lincoln200yrs.

After the Bicentennial: now what?

One big Lincoln bicentennial date remains on the 2009 calendar: November 19, the upcoming anniversary of the Gettysburg Address. Of course, technically it isn't the bicentennial of the address itself (it will be the 146th anniversary of the speech, to be exact). But there will be bigger-than-usual celebrations and commentary concerning the address, because of the bicentennial year of Lincoln's birth. According to this story, Gettysburg College on November 19th will display the flag used to cradle Lincoln's head on the evening of his assassination. I don't know if this is a bicentennial observation, persay, but it does seem to be a bit more special than usual.

After that, the Lincoln Bicentennial will be winding down. There may be a few more celebrations related to Lincoln's 200th birthday anniversary here and there, but the really big events are over.

It has been quite a year for all of us involved in Lincoln studies. I've lost count of the the speeches, panel discussions and various other events in which I've been involved: everything from a seminar for teachers in southern Indiana, to a panel on Lincoln and race at Harvard. I've met quite a few people, re-connected with old friends, and generally had a very fun time.

Still, I can't help but wonder, here at the end of 2009, about the larger meaning of it all. Where are we, and where have we progressed in our understanding of Abraham Lincoln during 2009? Do we know more about him now than we did a year ago? Is the scholarship on Lincoln richer and more advanced? Do Americans as a whole have a better and deeper appreciation of Lincoln?

The answers to all of these questions could be yes, or no, or perhaps: I'm not myself too sure. I do think the bicentennial was worthwhile. On a scholarly level, it has provided the impetus for numerous valuable books, articles and symposia of every stripe. And on a more general level, it is a good thing for Americans to pause and reflect upon the meaning of Lincoln's life and legacy.

In fact, I think you could argue that such commemorations are vitally necessary; in a diverse nation like ours, such events provide the vital glue that binds us together as Americans. We may not all agree on who Lincoln was, or what his legacy means, but we have at least all been engaged in generally the same conversation about him for the last year, and this a very good thing.

But it behooves us to assess events like the Lincoln Bicentennial with a critical eye. So, I'll ask two open-ended questions, and invite response before I chime in with my own two-cents worth. First, do we now have a better understanding of Lincoln than we did before the bicentennial, on a purely scholarly level? And second, is the national community, as a whole, stronger for having paused and engaged in this year-long act of celebrating Lincoln's life and career?

dancing with the Abes

Review here of a new dance/theatrical show, based on Lincoln's career. Called "Fondly Do We Hope," the show seems to be--st least according to this review--quite the extravaganza: a loiitle bit of dance, a little bit of theater, some poetry, some music, and even a look at life 100 years into the future. Wow.

I can't help but wonder: does this show have an actual dancing Abe? That would be amusing, given Lincoln's rather interesting history in that regard. Legend has it that, when he first met Mary at a Springfield ball, he stammered to her that he wanted to dance with her "in the worst way," and after their dance she is supposed to have told him that he did indeed dance "in the worst way."

So does this new show have a skilled dancer, dressed as Abe and busting moves right and left? That would be a real hoot.

One last movie post

Sorry to keep harping on the various Lincoln Hollywood projects so much, lately, but I can't resist one last post before moving on to something else.

I ran across an article here which describes Spielberg and Redford in a "Lincoln War" because the two directors are "set to go head-to-head at the box office with separate movies about Abraham Lincoln."

Pretty much all the posts I saw in the last few days on Redford and/or Spielberg run in that same channel--the suggestion that these are dueling films on the same topic. But are they? Can we really describe a film about the trial of Mary Surratt as a "Lincoln movie"? Seems to me the two films are actually quite different in conception, subject, and approach.

I'll say this much...whichever actor is cast to play Lincoln in the Redford film will, I should think, have a very small role.