Lincoln--The Legend

Some legends are true. “The Legend of Davy Crocket” was partly contrived by his political party to make him look like a Man of the People. Lincoln’s legend grew out of a persona forged in brilliant and terrible tragedy—of which he was both victim and maker.
Of some women it is said, “Her face is her fortune”. It’s also true of Abraham Lincoln. His was, as detractors said, an ugly face. Looking at photos of him, without a beard, at the time he was first elected, you are struck by just how ugly.
But go down to the Lincoln Memorial in Washington. See it at night (I used to drive every guest down to see it after dark when I lived there.) Other presidents affect me with strong emotion—Lincoln has, up to this writing, stricken me with a mute awe. Look at the face.
There is the face that has known hatred and war. Of a man who has stood in the trenches inside Washington, D.C. and seen the faces of attacking enemy soldiers. Of a man who lost battle after battle and sent the troops back into what seemed pointless slaughter, over and over again. This is the face of the man who wordlessly walked the streets of burned out Richmond until he stood, alone, before the former home of his enemy, President Jefferson Davis. And stood silent.
This is the man who invented modern total war. He sent his troops and his cavalry to burn, loot and destroy civilian holdings until no food was left for the enemy. When Lee quit, his troops had not eaten for days. (The victorious Yankees, reflecting their Commander-in-Chief, immediately turned up the cooking fires and fed them.) Lincoln ordered that even the Confederate marching song, “Dixie”, be struck up by a Union band and become, again, a Northern marching song.
No wonder the South hated his memory. They did not fully recover from the depredations of Mr. Lincoln’s armies for a century. They experienced the sheer ruthlessness of that face. In battle, that face showed no pity for the enemy. (In peace, complete pity.)
The North sensed it, too. Habeas Corpus was suspended. His Secretary of War could brag to a British ambassador that with a stroke of a telegraph key he could imprison any man in America. “Can your Queen Victoria do that?” he asked.
There is a terrible resolve, masked by sorrow and compassion, in that face. You see it all at night under the lights. The Union troops kept coming, kept coming and kept coming—until in Grant, Sherman and Sheridan, Lincoln found generals as pitiless as he was.
His is a face that knew sorrow. Like Churchill, the black dog of depression followed him all of his life. At one time, as a younger man, his friends had to make sure he had no means at hand for killing himself. It is said he wept as battles were lost by incompetent generals.
(He could be tart. He wrote one general who called himself, “Headquarters in the Saddle” and said his headquarters were where his hind quarters ought to be. They claimed Grant was a drunk. Find his brand, Lincoln said, and send a barrel of it to all my other generals!)
Withal, he was somewhat like Christ in that he could legitimately be called, “a man of sorrows and acquainted with grief”. And, Christ like, the thing you see most in that face is compassion. Deep, deep compassion. This is a man who nearly gave himself writer’s cramp scribbling out pardons for soldiers sentenced to death for derelictions of duty.
In his First Inaugural Address he warned, “In your hands, my dissatisfied fellow-countrymen, and not in mine, is the momentous issue of civil war. The Government will not assail you. You can have no conflict without being yourselves the aggressors. You have no oath registered in heaven to destroy the Government, while I shall have the most solemn one to ‘preserve, protect, and defend it.’”
He piled the cemeteries thick with dead until a terrible poetic justice had been served. As many soldiers died during the war as there had been people enslaved when the Constitution was written. Then, having kept the oath, he concluded his Second Inaugural Address.
“With malice toward none, with charity for all, with firmness in the right as God gives us to see the right, let us strive on to finish the work we are in, to bind up the nation's wounds, to care for him who shall have borne the battle and for his widow and his orphan, to do all which may achieve and cherish a just and lasting peace among ourselves and with all nations.” He makes no distinction between blue and gray.
That’s the inscription on the wall—and that’s the face of the Legend who today stares out across the Mall toward the Capitol Building and toward the statue of his best general. The face has become the Legend.