A Sense of Belonging

PETER: We’re back with BackStory. I’m Peter Onuf.

ED: I’m Ed Ayers.

BRIAN: And I’m Brian Balogh. Today, on the show, it’s all about the assassination of Abraham Lincoln. 150 years ago this week, he was shot on the evening of April 14th, less than a week after Lee’s surrender at Appomattox, and just over a month into Lincoln’s second term as president.

ED: You know, guys, anybody who’s going to write about the terrible events of April 14th, 1865 has to wrestle with a fundamental problem in the evidence. Here it is. After lying in the bed in a boarding house across the street from Ford’s Theater all night long after he’s shot, Lincoln is finally dying. And his good friend and Secretary of War, Edwin Stanton, who’s been with him throughout the night, who’s been sort of orchestrating things in the room, sees that Lincoln has actually died at 7:20 something in the morning.

He sobs. And then he says now he belongs to the angels. Or he says now he belongs to the ages. And there was a great essay by New Yorker writer Adam Gopnik a few years ago that asks why does it matter, why do we care what Edwin Stanton actually said. Peter, what do you think?

PETER: Well, let’s first of all, set out the scene because I think that’ll help us answer that question, how we have those two different versions. One comes from the efforts that a soldier made, a guy named James Tanner, who had been dragooned to keep notes on the last moments of Lincoln’s life. He was about to write down what Stanton said. He had a pencil, but the pencil failed him at the time of need. It broke as he took it out of his pockets–

BRIAN: It’s that military issued stuff, Peter.

PETER: Yeah, that’s right. Yeah, exactly. So he couldn’t get it down at the time. So he remembered it, and they said, well, it was angels. The other one, that comes from another source. It comes from the first major biography of Lincoln by John Nicolay and John Hay, who spent a lot of time with their boss, Lincoln, during the war. And they were there, and so what they remembered and reported in 1890, long after the fact, but they said it was ages.

So guys, I think the question is what’s the significance of the difference between these two words. What does it tell us? Do we need to establish which one is right? And what does right mean in this case?

BRIAN: Well, Peter and Ed, I think what we need to do is give this the BackStory treatment and figure out what each of these words would have meant to people at the time. I don’t think it really matters in many ways which it was, but I’d love to know what both of them meant to people at the time. What would Lincoln belonged to the angels have meant in 1865?

ED: Well, you know, that’s the phrase that I think that most people would have thought made sense in their own view of the world, right? We need to remember, of course, the enormous amount of death and suffering that have preceded Lincoln’s death. The last four years had just been drenched in blood.

And the main story that people told themselves was framed in terms of the Christian perspective of when you die, you go to heaven surrounded by angels. And even Lincoln and Mrs. Lincoln had communed with spirits, with the death of their son. So it strikes me as not much of a leap. Nobody would have been surprised if Stanton had said now he belongs to the angels.

PETER: Well, in a way, Ed, I think you’re right. The ubiquitousness of death and people’s desperate efforts to connect to their lost loved ones, and that word angel, I think, has a different resonance in this time, Ed. I think it’s not an abstraction, it’s not in some other region. They were there, almost in the air, so that you can make contact with them. Contrast this with George Washington, images of his death in 1799. There, we have him ascending into the heavens in these images.

ED: Here’s another thing to think about though. Stanton was a religious man.

PETER: Yes.

ED: Lincoln was not. He was not associated with a conventional Christian church. He spoke increasingly over time of God and providence moving history, but we don’t have evidence of him using the word angels except in his first inaugural speech. So it’s not a word that he, himself, and so you would think if this good friend Stanton is trying to share a moment with his good friend, that he might have spoken in a shared vocabulary.

PETER: Right.

ED: And so, Brian, it seems to me that angels makes all the sense in the world in the larger culture, but in the specific one of that room, at that time, I’m not so sure.

BRIAN: Then does ages make more sense?

ED: It does to me. If we think about what the media situation is it’s Stanton and Lincoln, who know they’ve been making history over the preceding years. They know that every decision they make is deciding the fate of a nation. And so if you think that Stanton has been kind of gathering his thoughts as Lincoln so slowly and painfully dies, that he might have been thinking about the larger place in history making where this would fit. And the sentence that he says after this, that you don’t usually see quoted, “There lies the most perfect ruler of men the world has ever seen.” To me–

BRIAN: That certainly sounds like the ages.

ED: Yeah, it sounds like a secular framework. So what do you think, Peter?

PETER: Well, Ed, that notion of instant history, and we can place Lincoln in the larger course of events, well, yeah, that makes some sense, and certainly, it made sense in 1890. But it does take us away from the immediate experience of the moment into the memory of a great man. It’s as if Stanton is anticipating how he will remember, and the American people will remember, this lost giant among men. It’s, on the one hand, secular for the ages, but there’s a quasi religious dimension to this infinity of time and memory, and forever for the ages, he will live in our hearts.

You know, in some ways, I think angel and ages say the same thing. I think we could say that. But it anticipates different time frames, different perspectives. And in 1865, I think Tanner gives us a powerful sense that everybody in that room must’ve felt that he was gone, but he can’t be gone. He’s got to be with us. He’s gone, but he’s still one of us.

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