{"id":34379,"date":"2023-11-10T06:29:47","date_gmt":"2023-11-10T11:29:47","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lincolndemocrat.com\/?p=34379"},"modified":"2023-11-10T06:30:40","modified_gmt":"2023-11-10T11:30:40","slug":"the-fall-of-lincoln-less-jumbled-than-the-reader-website","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lincolndemocrat.com\/?p=34379","title":{"rendered":"The Fall of Lincoln &#8211; less jumbled than the Reader website"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><strong>The Fall of Lincoln 4th in a series on a trip To Washington DC.<\/strong><\/p>\n<p><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"https:\/\/duluthreader.com\/uploads\/image\/article\/126\/501\/126501\/header_1080x\/23503_53136974511_af7d9b0249_b.jpg\" alt=\"\" \/><br \/>\n<em>The stack of 10,000 Lincoln books found across the street from Ford\u2019s Theater. Far below Welty peers up at the photographer<\/em><\/p>\n<p>On a walk to the White House from our hotel we passed Ford\u2019s Theater. We had hoped to see a play there but Ford\u2019s wasn\u2019t showing summer productions. I\u2019ve enjoyed watching musicals there twice.<\/p>\n<p>In 1971 I had no idea that the infamous site of Lincoln\u2019s martyrdom was a functioning theater. Secretary of War, Edwin Stanton, intended to close it permanently.  It was confiscated, stripped bare and left a rotting shell. Thus, it remained for decades but it was brought back to life. During my internship I bought tickets to see \u201cYou\u2019re a good man Charlie Brown.\u201d It was an homage to the beloved comic strip Peanuts by Minnesota\u2019s own cartoonist, Charles Schultz.<\/p>\n<p>My grandsons sat below Lincoln\u2019s bunting draped box seats as a National Park ranger told us the theater\u2019s history. When they were little the boys gave me a wind-up walking Lincoln much as I gave my grandfather a copy of Bruce Catton\u2019s Civil War trilogy. Our family has had many fans of Lincoln. In my grandfather\u2019s Era people were proud if they could say, \u201cI shook the hand of man who shook the hand of Lincoln.\u201d Having shaken my grandfather\u2019s hand, I\u2019m three handshakes from Lincoln. <\/p>\n<p>Lincoln\u2019s assassin, actor John Wilkes Booth, had performed for the President and Mrs. Lincoln and had easy access to the theater. He was not the most famous member of his family\u2019s acting clan until the murder. After Lincoln was sworn in for a second term Lincoln delivered his 2nd inaugural address calling for malice towards none. Booth, well into his conspiracy, was in the crowd listening. Booth was enraged to hear the proposal to give 300,000 black union soldiers voting rights. He vowed, \u201cThat is the last speech he will ever make.\u201d Three days later he put his gun to Lincoln\u2019s head but too late to stop Southern armies from laying down their weapons. No doubt Booth\u2019s spirit was doing cartwheels on January 6th, 2021. <\/p>\n<p>Across from the theater at 516 10th Street stands the Peterson House where Abe breathed his last with son Robert at his side. (Robert Lincoln would also be at the sides of our nation\u2019s next two assassinated presidents, James Garfield and William McKinley.) Lincoln\u2019s lanky frame was carried by Union soldiers who strained against anxious crowds mobbing the streets as word of the assassination spread. Now a museum its store holds a colossal stack of 10,000 books by different authors devoted to Lincoln\u2019s hard to summarize life. I own a dozen myself and just listened on Audible to my newest favorite \u201cDiffer we must\u201d by NPR reporter Steve Inskeep.<\/p>\n<p>Another book on my shelves is Doris Kearns Goodwin\u2019s \u201cTeam of Rivals.\u201d It was the template for Steven Spielberg\u2019s magnificent film \u201cLincoln.\u201d Kearns Goodwin begins the book by quoting Leo Tolstoy&#8217;s awestruck praise, \u201cThe greatness of Napoleon, Caesar or Washington is only moonlight by the sun of Lincoln\u2026. He was bigger than his country &#8211; bigger than all the Presidents together\u2026and as a great character he will live as long as the world lives.\u201d Not a bad summary from the man whose War and Peace clocked in at 587,287 words.<\/p>\n<p>I still have the paperback that was my first Lincoln book, \u201cThe Day Lincoln was Shot\u201d by Jim Bishop. I read it not long after I complained to my mother that I was ugly. Rather than argue the point Mom simply told me that Abraham Lincoln was a homely man. Lincoln himself famously joked about it. He\u2019s been my model ever since.<\/p>\n<p>Lincoln\u2019s political career seemed to collapse after his single term in Congress. In 1847 he was out of step with his Illinois voters who were happy with President James Polk\u2019s successful war with Mexico. Lincoln saw it as a move to help Democrats at the expense of Whigs by adding slave state territory to United States. And Abe\u2019s Whig party all but disappeared as slavery spread. But Lincoln\u2019s \u201cambition,\u201d as his law partner James Herndon said, was a little engine that knew no rest.\u201d The same could be said of the South which lost the war but which in many ways won the peace by denying newly freed slaves the guarantees of the 13th, 14th and 15th Amendments. And when in 1965 a Democratic president, of all people, restored black voting rights the white South became Republican.   <\/p>\n<p>I moved to Minnesota before the magnetic polls switched. Having grown up in Kansas I learned how \u201cBleeding Kansas\u201d gave birth to the Civil War, the Republican Party and revived the \u201crail-splitter\u2019s\u201d faltering political career. I was deeply chagrined when Minnesota kids started calling me \u201cReb\u201d because my Kansas accent sounded southern to them. And in my first Minnesota week\u2019s I found myself challenged to a wrestling match like Abe when he moved to New Salem. Google: \u201cYouWannaFight, Snowbizz.com\u201d.<\/p>\n<p>Every serious American historian has pondered what might have happened if Lincoln had lived.  Inskeep\u2019s \u201cDiffer we must\u201d doesn\u2019t go there but it explains how Lincoln dealt with 16 people who strongly disagreed with him over the course of his lifetime. Each episode shows a thoughtfulness all but extinct in the politics of the Fox News Era. It\u2019s as though the spirit Tolstoy described had been martyred anew.<\/p>\n<p><em>Welty keeps Lincoln alive at: www.Lincolndemocrat.com<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>The Fall of Lincoln 4th in a series on a trip To Washington DC. The stack of 10,000 Lincoln books found across the street&#8230;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[9,72,148],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lincolndemocrat.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/34379"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lincolndemocrat.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lincolndemocrat.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lincolndemocrat.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lincolndemocrat.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=34379"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/lincolndemocrat.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/34379\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":34381,"href":"https:\/\/lincolndemocrat.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/34379\/revisions\/34381"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lincolndemocrat.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=34379"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lincolndemocrat.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=34379"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lincolndemocrat.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=34379"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}