Spring Reading

According to BrainyQuote—which, I realize, offers no guarantee of authenticity—Abraham Lincoln once said, “The things I want to know are in books; my best friend is the man who’ll get me a book I ain’t read.” Whether Honest Abe actually said that or not—he was, after all, eminently quotable—doesn’t matter. I nonetheless just finished reading one of my favorite books of all-time, Lincoln and His Generals by T. Harry Williams. I’ve read it on multiple occasions through the years because—for me at least—it reads like a gripping novel. In this instance, a compelling historical one with a colorful cast of characters like no other.

Personally, I’ve always found books on the American Civil War somewhat more engaging than ones on the American Revolution. The very bloody conflict of the former somehow resonates in a way that the latter—defining as it was—doesn’t on the printed page. Perhaps it’s the images we’ve all seen—from photography’s infancy and Matthew Brady’s prying lenses—that makes the difference. Washington, after all, crossed the Delaware unimpeded by photographers. His freezing men at Valley Forge weren’t asked to strike a pose for posterity. Also, the men and women in the Civil War era more closely resembled—in overall appearance and manner—us. No powdered wigs, cravats, and knee breeches. Shave off a few of those straggly beards and—voilà—modern man has arrived.  

This literary stroll down memory line prompted me to re-watch The Civil War by Ken Burns. I was initially struck that the documentary was made some thirty years ago—time really does fly—and that many of the individuals who supplied voice-overs for the intriguing ensemble from General Ulysses S. Grant to George Templeton Strong to Mary Chestnut are no longer among the living. When it originally aired on a local PBS station, I remember watching it over and over. I even purchased the companion book and eventually the VHS box set, which I subsequently sold on eBay. Wow, so much has happened in the past thirty years. For one, VHS tapes and their players are obsolete. Still, all these years later, I’d like to think that General William Tecumseh Sherman sounded just like playwright Arthur Miller. With a face like his he deserved a voice like that.

Sherman, by the way, said of Abraham Lincoln in his memoirs: “Of all the men I have ever met, he seemed to possess more of the elements of greatness, combined with goodness, than any other.” Envision this: Lincoln walking daily—unescorted and often unnoticed—to the telegraph office at the War Department to receive war dispatches. That was about as technologically advanced as the Information Age was in those days. No smartphones, Facebook, or Twitter accounts. The sixteenth president didn’t have the luxury to nastily tweet about his predecessor, James Buchanan, or about his legions of incompetent generals, starting with George McClellan. But, then, Abraham Lincoln wouldn’t have taken that low road because he was at once great and good. At this point in American history, I’d settle for a little good and worry about greatness another time.

(Photos from the personal collection of Nicholas Nigro)