Walt Whitman was a nurse in the Civil War. His brother George was wounded at the Battle of Fredericksburg. The poet rushed from Brooklyn to a Washington, D.C., hospital and found a “new world” of horror and hope.
He wrote a very readable diary about it, “Memoranda During the War,” that includes gut-turning descriptions of piles of amputated limbs and loving portraits of wounded soldiers.
He’d give them chaws of tobacco and pocket money, write their letters home. And, being Walt, check them out in the process. “He looks so handsome as he sleeps.”
That last detail might be creepy. But it’s also interesting and worth noting of the man who once wrote, “What is more beautiful than candor?”
In his travels around Washington, D.C., Whitman sometimes saw Abraham Lincoln — they’d nod to each other in passing.
I admit to noticing Lincoln in my own wanderings around the city — not in the flesh, thank goodness, not yet. But in places associated with him, particularly at Wabash and Lake, the original site of the Wigwam, where Lincoln was nominated for president in 1860.
Though Lincoln wasn’t there; his handlers kept him safely in Springfield so as not to screw up their crude deal-making. Another messy detail.
Lincoln is always here, always relevant, because we’re still fighting the Civil War. There’s no other way to put it. Thousands of books have been written about the 16th president, but my favorite is “Dear Mr. Lincoln: Letters to the President,” edited by Harold Holzer.
Like online comments today, many of the letters are sharp, telegraphic bursts.
“Equal rights & Justice to all white men in the United States forever,” urges John McMahon of Hambrook, Pennsylvania on Aug. 5, 1864. “White men is in class number one & black men in class number two & must be governed by white men forever.”
That sounds like something found on X today. At least McMahon expresses his hateful thoughts directly, as opposed to our current passion for insinuation and cant, such as President Donald Trump’s recent executive order to tamp down government portrayal of the struggle for equal rights in this country under the Orwellian title, “Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History.”
Official websites are scrubbed, museum displays censored, books banned.
All of it is done under the flawed notion that including the difficult, unpleasant aspects of history is dispiriting and must be suppressed. I suppose most of the Civil War could fall into that category, as does Lincoln being assassinated, April 14, 1865, 160 years ago Monday, by a fanatical Southerner — and this is the sort of detail cut out —incensed at the idea that Black people would gain the right to vote. Now their vote is being suppressed more cannily, though the motive is the same. “White men is in class number one.”
The past has to be prettied up because the intention is to drag our nation back there. They pretend to be applying intellectual rigor or healthy skepticism, when what they are actually doing is whitewashing anything that gives away the game they are playing. Holocaust deniers do the same thing: pluck at inconsistencies in the enormous mass of German record-keeping and pretend to raise legitimate doubts.
When in reality they both cleave to hateful ideology and resent the ultimate destination of the road they’re on being demonstrated in a compelling fashion. Sending American residents to inhuman prisons in El Salvador will end with us sending American citizens to inhuman prisons here. History teaches that.
Southerners despised Lincoln, perhaps the most articulate president ever, calling him a low born obscene clown. They had a point — this honest history thing requires you to acknowledge even facts that cross against your general beliefs. Lincoln did joke a lot, introducing himself and his squat wife as “the long and the short of it.”
Lincoln was also a sharp lawyer. He’d come to Chicago to represent railroads. Once, in summation of a trial, Lincoln mentioned the punch line of a popular joke: “They have their facts right, but are drawing the wrong conclusion.”
The full joke went like this:
A farm boy runs to his father and says, “Pa, pa, the hired hand and sis are in the hay loft! She’s a liftin’ up her dress up and he’s a pullin’ down his pants and affixin’ to pee all over the hay.”
The farmer puts his hand on the agitated boy’s shoulder and replies, “Son, you’ve got the facts right but you’re drawing the wrong conclusion.”
Those who suppress history gather limited facts to draw wrong conclusions. History is full of what happens during the tragic periods where such suppression takes hold. We need to learn those lessons now more than ever.