FACE TO FACE WITH LINCOLN
Abraham Lincoln never visited Maine—he got as close as Exeter, New Hampshire, where his son Robert went to school—but Maine played a crucial role in the early years of both the Republican Party and the Lincoln presidency. Hannibal Hamlin, an anti-slavery former Democrat from Paris Hill, became Lincoln’s first vice president in a successful gesture of bipartisanship, and Portland’s William Pitt Fessenden was a close ally of the president, first in the Senate, and then as wartime Secretary of the Treasury.
On the other hand, Jefferson Davis had a great time Down East!
Ostensibly traveling for reasons of health, the Mississippi senator “worked” the Maine coast in the summer of 1858, shaking every Democratic hand in sight and affirming the bonds of North-South amity.
We know how that ended up. But this year, as the nation looks back upon the 200th anniversary of Lincoln’s birth and the 144th of his assassination, we once again try to understand why.
The Maine Humanities Council’s contribution to this effort is a March 21 symposium. A group of distinguished scholars will discuss various aspects of Lincoln’s life, times, and enduring afterlife; the audience will have ample opportunity to ask questions and continue the discussions in small break-out groups. A new generation of scholarship on antebellum America—especially the interlocked histories of race, gender, labor, and human bondage—has enriched our understanding of that era in ways that make the Lincoln story even more compelling.
Yet I’m not sure how far this scholarship has traveled. I recently heard a well-known Civil War historian talk about the Emancipation Proclamation. He gave an exhaustively researched account of every legal and political aspect of the process. He analyzed the 19th-century concept of “contraband”; he surveyed the constitutional law of presidential wartime powers. It was a talk that could have been given in 1953. Lincoln’s most defining act as president was treated as if it had no context—least of all, the context of Lincoln’s own contradictory, ever-changing, ever-deepening views on the relationship of white and black. Frederick Douglass was never mentioned.
It was a reminder that we all have our own Lincolns. Mine was shaped by a childhood in the pre-Civil Rights Era South. While Grant was reviled and the word “Sherman” treated as almost indecent, I never heard an unkind word about the Union’s president. It was just assumed that had he lived—had that fool Booth not shot him—Reconstruction would never have happened, and all would have been forgiven. That there was no historical evidence for such a view didn’t matter a hoot.
From college on, I’ve tried to read and think a bit more critically, a bit more historically—most recently, with the help of Doris Kearns Goodwin’s very readable Team of Rivals, a group biography of Lincoln’s cabinet (and a book we have used with great success in our Teaching American History institutes for Maine educators). Goodwin adores Lincoln, but she understands the contingencies that shaped his career, beginning with his election. We might easily have had a President Seward instead.
The other day, I came face to face with the man who was actually elected. He was between Napoleon and Keats, in the basement of the Boston Atheneum. In Chicago in 1860, a sculptor had made a plaster cast of the candidate’s head. There it was—the sunken cheeks, the bold nose and forehead, but without the deep creases of the 1865 photographs. He stared back at me with chalky eyes, inscrutable, infinitely fascinating.
Leadership in a Time of Crisis:
The Abraham Lincoln Bicentennial Symposium
Abromson Community Education Center,
University of Southern Maine, Portland
This day-long symposium will address many aspects of Lincoln’s life and legacy through presentations on The Rise of Abraham Lincoln by Bruce Chadwick, In the Aftermath of the Lincoln Assassination by Elizabeth Leonard, Lincoln’s High Wire Act by Patrick Rael, and The Afterlife of Abraham Lincoln by Thomas Brown.
Breakout group topics will include The “Reel” Civil War with Bruce Chadwick, Who Freed the Slaves? with Patrick Rael, Women in the Civil War with Elizabeth Leonard, Lincoln in American Culture Today with Thomas Brown, The Underground Railroad with Bob Greene, local historian, and Chamberlain and the Civil War: An Exploration of Primary Sources for Educators with Tom Desjardin.
Cost: $45 for the general public, $40 for teachers (CEUs available) and MHS members, $25 for students. (Includes refreshments, lunch, and parking.)
Pre-registration is required. For more details and to register, click here.
Presented by the Maine Humanities Council, in conjunction with the Maine Historical Society and the American and New England Studies Program at USM.
