Another's Civil War

Taking the briefest of breaks from my Lincoln reading, before taking on the newest full biography, A. Lincoln, by Ronald C. White Jr. (to be released January 13th,) I turned to Walt Whitman tonight, and his experience of the War, it's devastation's and losses, personal and public.   A new book, Now the Drum of War: Walt Whitman and His Brothers in the Civil War, by Robert Roper, tells not only of the great poet, but of his family, and in particular two younger brothers who fought in the war.  It is a valuable story, and well told by Roper.

Like most American families, Whitman's was deeply effected by their experience of the War.  Unlike most American families though, the Whitman family had a genius among them.  While the letters, largely unknown to me before, exchanged between the brothers and with their mother and reproduced here, are poignant and very interesting, it is of course to Walt and his poems that one turns to find their experiences, and the experience of our people, memorialized in unforgettable verse.

And Walt Whitman's own experience, nursing and caring for, and genuinely coming to love the soldiers he met in the army hospitals he visited every day, as detailed in an earlier and wonderful book, The Better Angel: Walt Whitman in the Civil War, by Roy Morris Jr., produced in Whitman, our greatest poet, some of his greatest, and most heartfelt work.

So tonight I find myself reading and rereading Whitman's poems.  And one poem, "A Sight in Camp in the Daybreak Gray and Dim," haunts me as I see our soldiers again in war; young, older, even my age, and for the most part never seen but in a formal photograph, in uniform, in the paper when they die.  Here is Whitman's poem:

A Sight in camp in the daybreak gray and dim,

As from my tent I emerge so early sleepless,

As slow I walk in the cool fresh air the path near by the hospital tent,

Three forms I see on stretchers lying, brought out there untended lying,

Over each the blanket spread, ample brownish woolen blanket,

Gray and heavy blanket, folding, covering all.

Curious I halt and silent stand,

Then with light fingers I from the face of the nearest the first just lift the blanket;

Who are you elderly man so gaunt and grim, with well-gray'd hair, and flesh all sunk about the eyes?

Who are you my dear comrade?

Then to the second I step -- and who are you my child and darling?

Who are you sweet boy with cheeks yet blooming?

Then to the third -- a face nor child nor old, very calm, as of beautiful yellow-white ivory;

Young man I think I know you -- I think this face is the face of the Christ himself,

Dead and divine and brother of all, and here he again lies.  

The Most Important Debate

The Lincoln/Douglas debates are justifiably famous, much written about still, and a source of endless interest to scholars and readers alike.  But the Douglas who now towers over our memory of the Civil War, is not "the Little Giant" who fought Lincoln for the Illinois Senate seat.  There is perhaps no more important American thinker and writer of the period, from the modern perspective, save possibly Lincoln himself, then Frederick Douglas.  A former slave, author of a remarkable autobiography that to my knowledge has never since been out of print, an abolitionist, newspaperman, a philosopher, and a champion of his people, and of civilization, Frederick Douglas is among the most inexhaustible subjects for study in our history.

His name is inevitably linked to that of Lincoln.  Now there are two books -- one new and the other from just a year ago -- that make that connection explicit.  John Stauffer's Giants: The Parallel Lives of Frederick Douglas and Abraham Lincoln is the latest, and has, rightly, received a great deal of press.  It is an excellent book; well researched and well told by this young Harvard professor.  Stauffer's equitable division of attention, even as the l

ives of his subjects both grow increasingly complex and eventually intersect, is handled masterfully throughout, never stinting either man. 

The slightly older title, Douglas and Lincoln: How a Revolutionary Black Leader and a Reluctant Liberator Struggled to End Slavery and Save the Union, by Paul and Stephen Kendrick, who are father and son, is more concerned with Douglas and specifically his campaign to free his people, with or without the assistance of the President of the United States.  The perspective is that of Frederick Douglas here and, without the constraints of writing a dual biography, the Kendricks can and do concentrate on Douglas and his amazing achievements, not least of which was hectoring, denouncing, eventually meeting with, and even coming to respect Abraham Lincoln.   The scene of their first actual meeting is electrifying in both tellings, and is, for me, one of the most dramatic moments in our history, though the meeting itself was nothing if not civil on both sides.  Still, at that moment, the United States, was changed.

Having two such richly detailed books about two such remarkable figures is a bonanza for students of American history.  That both are accessible, well researched and well written is a delight and a surprise for readers in this Lincoln Bicentennial Year.

First Among Lincolns

His birthday is still more than a month away, and already the Lincoln books are rolling in like thunder! With what seems to be a new or reissued title coming in almost every day, it's going to be hard for a regular Lincoln reader to choose.

One I already know I'll want to own has finally arrived at the store and... gravely disappointed me. Not the book itself, you understand, it is still a marvelous idea for a book, edited by a very good historian and published by The Library of America, (one of my favorite undertakings in publishing in my lifetime.) But the design of the book jacket -- the thing that most obviously sells a book when there are so many Lincoln books to choose from -- the design of this one is easily among the worst I have ever seen. Ever. Bookseller for more than twenty years, mind you, and I can not remember a worse. Ever.

What am I going on about? The Lincoln Anthology: Great Writers on His Life and Legacy from 1860 to Now, edited by Harold Holzer, published by the Library of America, jacket design by "Doyle Partners," (may they collectively and forever vanish from the face of the Earth. Amen.)

Look at the thing! If you can even see it in the photo. The spine and back covers are a dead white, with the title in black, red and blue. The print otherwise is a fuzzy, eye-straining gray. But all of this, if dull, is surpassed in pure design arrogance by the front cover: a long quote in the unreadable gray with the attribution at the end in blue, in a type so small that I believe it's only other use to date has been on postage stamps. No title, no author, no mention of the name of the man being described -- you know LINCOLN!

This is the kind of idiotic, anti-commercial, amuse-the-darlings-in-graphics design is usually reserved in publishing for the catalogues of performance artists and the like. And here it is on a potentially great anthology about Lincoln.

Still, I'll be buying the book. But, for perhaps the first time ever, I may actually have to throw the dust jacket away, or at least cover it with a brown-paper grocery-bag. Anything would be better than this constant reminder of good books on great subjects undone by marketing -- ahem -- tools.