June 25, 2007
Ages and Angels Posted by Alexander Burns at 05:35 PM EST David Rapp’s cleverly titled homepage article today, “Land of Lincoln: How He Belongs to the Ages,” reviews a book by the Weekly Standard editor Andrew Ferguson about Abraham Lincoln’s place in American culture. I say the title of the piece is clever because I assume it refers to the famous words pronounced on Lincoln’s deathbed by War Secretary Edwin Stanton: “Now he belongs to the ages.” A famously short and elegant epitaph for the fallen President. Inan essay published in The New Yorker last month, the writer Adam Gopnik analyzes and complicates the place of Stanton’s words in American historical memory. Using Doris Kearns Goodwin’s Team of Rivals as a touchstone for a wider survey of Lincoln literature, Gopnik notes that there are two schools of thought regarding Stanton’s comments on his President’s death. According to a serious minority of historians, Lincoln’s bearded war minister actually said, “Now he belongs to the angels.” This alternative account comes originally from the records of Cpl. James Tanner, a war veteran and double amputee, who was present at Lincoln’s bedside and took down Stanton’s words as he heard them. This may not seem a very significant factual dispute, but Gopnik reads larger implications, some of them political, into the whole affair. He notes, for example, that the conservative James Swanson uses the word “angels,” whereas Goodwin, “a famous liberal,” sticks with “ages.” As Gopnik presents the disagreement, it’s symptomatic of a wider dispute between those who see Lincoln as a humanist hero, whose greatness comes from the recognition of his fellow men, and those who view the sixteenth President as, first and foremost, a “figure of Christian nobility,” favored and ultimately judged by God. Gopnik’s essay is compelling in composition and wide-ranging in focus. I wonder, though, whether his introductory emphasis on Stanton’s most famous words doesn’t miss the point a little bit. The disagreement among historians about just what, exactly, Stanton said that night is an interesting bit of trivia, and it’s a good case study in how historians use different kinds of historical evidence. I’d contend, though, that it doesn’t necessarily make sense to force Stanton’s hastily chosen words to summarize Lincoln’s place in history. If one sets aside some of the symbolic significance of his language, the difference between “ages” and “angels” is not that dramatic. Whichever noun Stanton chose that morning, his six-word declaration—“Now he belongs to the [insert word here]”—represents a spare, unsatisfying attempt to express comforting sentiments amidst unthinkable grief. When his peers looked to him for emotional leadership, this is the tone and extent of the emotion Stanton was able to express. If the job of historians is to reconstruct and interpret the past, as truthfully and unobtrusively as possible, perhaps it would be best to conclude that this is all we know, and all we need to know.
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