Land of Lincoln by Andrew Ferguson: A Semi-Wised-Up Quasi-Review

Not even Mona could begrudge Andrew Ferguson his gig at The Weekly Standard. Together with Matt Labash, Ferguson keeps me returning to the Neoconservative Magazine of Record despite myself. Them boys can write.

Ferguson recently published Land of Lincoln: Adventures in Abe’s America, a book I heartily recommend despite my general antipathy toward both biography and history. In fact, Land of Lincoln is not so much either history or biography, strictly speaking, as it is the story of Ferguson’s own coming to grips with the Lincoln of both his and our imagination as he road-trips his way from Richmond, Virginia, where a proposed statue of Abe in the Capital of the Confederacy became ‘surprisingly’ controversial, through Springfield, Illinois (home of the Museum of Funeral Customs!) and Gettysburg, Pennsylvania (where you can take the Orphan Tour!), then finally to the National Mall and the foot of the Lincoln Memorial.

I came away from the book with a richer sense of what I brought to it; namely, the notion that Lincoln was a complex and contradictory figure both personally and publicly and that our equally complex and contradictory views of him are as much a mirror, albeit of the funhouse variety, of ourselves as they are of the most important man in American history.

That’s quite a claim, “most important man in American history.” Surely, one could argue that Washington, who historian James Thomas Flexner called "The Indispensable Man,” has a shot at the claim. Maybe a few others do, too. But the Civil War is as much the defining event of the republic that followed it as the Revolutionary War was the defining event of the republic that preceded it. It has been repeated endless times that prior to the Civil War the standard phrase was “the United States are” while afterward it became “the United States is,” but what we are today as a people and what the United States is today as a nation began not at Lexington and Concord but at Fort Sumter.

Be that as it may, as enigmatic and contradictory and ultimately unknowable as Lincoln undoubtedly was, all these things made him, after all, only human. Philosophies of history bore me almost as much as, I am somewhat ashamed to admit, history itself; so don’t expect any “do great men make history or does history make great men” musings from this quarter. Moreover, the logic of counterfactual conditionals, of “If X (where X is false), then Y,” permits any Y, any not logically impossible conclusion at all. But while reading Land of Lincoln, I remembered the first “alternate history” I ever read, one of those “If the South won the Civil War” novels aiming for the history buff / science fiction fan crossover market. I didn’t much care for it and never tried another alternate history novel.

In a sense, though, we are all authors of alternate histories, fitting or forcing together whatever we think we know about the past through the filters of what we want to believe about it. Lincoln towers over our imagination even as his Memorial statue towers over the tourist who cannot help but feel a frisson of awe at its sight or the engraved words of the Gettysburg Address.

I am as “wised up,” to use Ferguson’s phrase, as the next cynic and as critical of Lincoln as any Southerner or libertarian opponent of strong government can be. But arguing the right and wrong of history, like playing “what if Lincoln had failed” is, in the pejorative sense, a merely academic pursuit. The United States is what it is today in no small measure because Lincoln did not fail. The important question is, as always, where do we go from here?