Commendable, reprehensible: two things I've just learned about the Father of the Country and its Savior of the Union, that is George Washington and Abraham Lincoln.
This is the Presidents Day holiday which gives me time to shovel my way out to the street and free my cars. The wind has dropped; the fantastic polished drift shapes--ridges, pinnacles, overhanging lips, layers, mounds, veritable alps--are pretty stable now and waiting to be broken down and relocated or else heaped with debris from other snow structures. Preparatory to the mayhem I intend to inflict, I admire the subtle shapes, the fantastic shadows of the much snow you left behind, Storm Neptune.
You're on every dollar bill I spend, George, tight-lipped and formal, the epitome of the paterfamilias. In your biographies and the histories, you're admired as steadfast champion of the Republic and republican values, or as a stuffed shirt, a cipher the many factions of the nascent nation could agree to let lead, but not, as they say, the sharpest knife in the drawer. Your equestrian statue in the Public Garden, periodically clad in championship team jerseys, remembers your key role in the Revolution, but what did you do after that?
You, Abe, conveniently dead at the end of the effort that stapled the South onto the rest of the nation for once and for all, are the author of great words that ring in the nation's memory, words articulating the mission of the nation hereafter: '...that this nation, of the people, by the people, and for the people, shall not perish from the earth.' But how was this sausage actually made?
It's not that what I know about these, one has to admit, remarkable men is in error but that from time to time my sense of them as tasked expands and deepens; public service, done conscientiously, is hard and morally fraught work. At the end there'll be reason for pride and shame.
Reading recently an old book from the twenties and listening to another, written just a few years ago, on the early days of the new nation, I learn that you, George, pursued a vision for the development of the interior spaces of the continent. Rather than creating new colonies in the vast land beyond the Alleghenies to just serve the original thirteen colonies, now states, of the coast, you envisioned the space organized into sovereign, self-administered states equal to all that had come before, trading freely east to the Atlantic and southwest to the Gulf, a nation of independent units knit by commerce and shared responsibility for the health of the whole. A surveyor by training, and land speculator by business, you saw the development of the west as funded by the sales of federal land in the west. To this end, you got the states to give up their claims to land beyond the mountains, and their rights to negotiate treaties with European nations and Indian tribes, and to cede all that potential to the shared pool from which new peer states would, from time to time, arise.
I hadn't thought about any of that. The history books merely report events and transactions, never the range of options confronting the actors in their situations. Of course, it had to happen as it did because, well, that's the way it's done: a circular argument that explains nothing but serves to satisfy our shallow curiosity. Still, in those early days when ambitious men were planning to set up their own little empires, and the established states sought to exploit for their own benefit the booty of their war of independence, you, George, had to navigate a challenging course of push and fall back and push again to bring about what you wanted for us. I'm newly impressed.
I understand, Abe, that to win the war, you had to coerce and buy off politicians from the border states, but did you have to override again and again the well-documented malfeasances of the corrupt Reuben Hatch just because he was the younger brother of a strategic political friend from Kentucky. As a result, in 1865, thirteen days after your assassination, the steamboat SS Sultana, was loaded--and overloaded--with over 1,800 freed but frail Union prisoners of war leaving Vicksburg on the Mississippi, which may had led to instability which caused the boilers to explode, resulting i the destruction of the boat and the horrible death of over 1,700 people.
You were aware of Hatch's record. Why did you reinstate and promote him time and again over objectsions to a place where he could peculate on the head count of soldiers on the boat. How often did you do favors for your political friends in your pursuit of the war? You were not uninformed about the prior derelictions and embezzlements of Hatch, but perhaps you had to deal all the day with larcenous profiteers, and Hatch was just one more, support for whom could be turned to political benefit.
Still, the worst maritime in American history, and so many men and women, many of them invalids just trying to get home, blown to pieces in the blast, horribly burned, or drowned in the cold, black water as their boat blazed in the night: can this be laid at your feet? Perhaps you would say, add this to all the other deaths and sorrows I've occasioned and for which I am to blame.
The good, the bad are often forgotten in place of the convenient and compelling image: the man on the horse or behind the podium. Still, in the moment, you made your choices and accepted the consequences, for better or worse. So with us--on much smaller scale. Only those apart from the tumult of human affairs can stay pure or avoid risk. We make promises, we do deeds, we seek forgiveness, we act again, encounter after encounter, to the end, even perhaps with resonance beyond.
This is the Presidents Day holiday which gives me time to shovel my way out to the street and free my cars. The wind has dropped; the fantastic polished drift shapes--ridges, pinnacles, overhanging lips, layers, mounds, veritable alps--are pretty stable now and waiting to be broken down and relocated or else heaped with debris from other snow structures. Preparatory to the mayhem I intend to inflict, I admire the subtle shapes, the fantastic shadows of the much snow you left behind, Storm Neptune.
You're on every dollar bill I spend, George, tight-lipped and formal, the epitome of the paterfamilias. In your biographies and the histories, you're admired as steadfast champion of the Republic and republican values, or as a stuffed shirt, a cipher the many factions of the nascent nation could agree to let lead, but not, as they say, the sharpest knife in the drawer. Your equestrian statue in the Public Garden, periodically clad in championship team jerseys, remembers your key role in the Revolution, but what did you do after that?
You, Abe, conveniently dead at the end of the effort that stapled the South onto the rest of the nation for once and for all, are the author of great words that ring in the nation's memory, words articulating the mission of the nation hereafter: '...that this nation, of the people, by the people, and for the people, shall not perish from the earth.' But how was this sausage actually made?
It's not that what I know about these, one has to admit, remarkable men is in error but that from time to time my sense of them as tasked expands and deepens; public service, done conscientiously, is hard and morally fraught work. At the end there'll be reason for pride and shame.
Reading recently an old book from the twenties and listening to another, written just a few years ago, on the early days of the new nation, I learn that you, George, pursued a vision for the development of the interior spaces of the continent. Rather than creating new colonies in the vast land beyond the Alleghenies to just serve the original thirteen colonies, now states, of the coast, you envisioned the space organized into sovereign, self-administered states equal to all that had come before, trading freely east to the Atlantic and southwest to the Gulf, a nation of independent units knit by commerce and shared responsibility for the health of the whole. A surveyor by training, and land speculator by business, you saw the development of the west as funded by the sales of federal land in the west. To this end, you got the states to give up their claims to land beyond the mountains, and their rights to negotiate treaties with European nations and Indian tribes, and to cede all that potential to the shared pool from which new peer states would, from time to time, arise.
I hadn't thought about any of that. The history books merely report events and transactions, never the range of options confronting the actors in their situations. Of course, it had to happen as it did because, well, that's the way it's done: a circular argument that explains nothing but serves to satisfy our shallow curiosity. Still, in those early days when ambitious men were planning to set up their own little empires, and the established states sought to exploit for their own benefit the booty of their war of independence, you, George, had to navigate a challenging course of push and fall back and push again to bring about what you wanted for us. I'm newly impressed.
I understand, Abe, that to win the war, you had to coerce and buy off politicians from the border states, but did you have to override again and again the well-documented malfeasances of the corrupt Reuben Hatch just because he was the younger brother of a strategic political friend from Kentucky. As a result, in 1865, thirteen days after your assassination, the steamboat SS Sultana, was loaded--and overloaded--with over 1,800 freed but frail Union prisoners of war leaving Vicksburg on the Mississippi, which may had led to instability which caused the boilers to explode, resulting i the destruction of the boat and the horrible death of over 1,700 people.
You were aware of Hatch's record. Why did you reinstate and promote him time and again over objectsions to a place where he could peculate on the head count of soldiers on the boat. How often did you do favors for your political friends in your pursuit of the war? You were not uninformed about the prior derelictions and embezzlements of Hatch, but perhaps you had to deal all the day with larcenous profiteers, and Hatch was just one more, support for whom could be turned to political benefit.
Still, the worst maritime in American history, and so many men and women, many of them invalids just trying to get home, blown to pieces in the blast, horribly burned, or drowned in the cold, black water as their boat blazed in the night: can this be laid at your feet? Perhaps you would say, add this to all the other deaths and sorrows I've occasioned and for which I am to blame.
The good, the bad are often forgotten in place of the convenient and compelling image: the man on the horse or behind the podium. Still, in the moment, you made your choices and accepted the consequences, for better or worse. So with us--on much smaller scale. Only those apart from the tumult of human affairs can stay pure or avoid risk. We make promises, we do deeds, we seek forgiveness, we act again, encounter after encounter, to the end, even perhaps with resonance beyond.
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